Combating Coca-Cola and the global conquistadores: following a tradition of resistance that goes back to pre-Columbian days, indigenous youth organizers in southern Mexico take on transnationals and the free-trade invasion. (Action).

On Indigenous Peoples' Day, October 12, 2002, an other-earthly growl rose from the center of Juchitan, in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. More than 500 people--most in their teens and early 20s, nearly all indigenous--marched out of the zocalo, or city center. The demonstrators dragged thousands of plastic bottles, tied into long chains, across the mile of pavement to Juchitan's Coca-Cola bottling facility. Their hand-painted banners addressed Coca-Cola and the corporate world it represents: "Transnationals = hunger and destruction" and "If you globalize the world, we [will globalize] the resistance!"

Shrill chants replaced the bottles' loud rumble as the crowd arrived at Coca-Cola's locked entrance. The protestors rattled the metal bars, but no one came to open the gate. They heaved the plastic garlands over the wall--a mass bottle-returning action. The long strings snagged on the gate. As darkness fell and the street lights glinted off the bottles, the plant's facade came to resemble a suburban house at the holidays.

Omar Angel Perez, an indigenous Zapotec lawyer who is 25, yelled into a megaphone, reminding everyone they were protecting their homeland. "We inherited this land from our parents and grandparents!"

Deep-Rooted Rebelliousness

Juchitan a city of 85,000, is located in southern Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The isthmus--where only 120 miles separate the Pacific Ocean from the Gulf of Mexico--has long been a transit point between Europe, North America, and Asia. It is home to a deeply-rooted movement against globalization. But without a charismatic spokesperson like the Zapatistas' Subcomandante Marcos, or the sort of local amenities that beckon international tourists, the isthmus movement has progressed outside of the limelight. In contrast to the United States, where racism and classism plague the anti-globalization movement, rural and poor people lead the organizing south of the border. In a country where most identify themselves as mestiza, Mexico's anti-globalization movement draws much of its energy from indigenous communities.

Most of the people who live in the region around Juchitan are indigenous. The Zapotecs are the largest group, comprising more than 90 percent of Juchitans urban population. Unlike many of Mexico's indigenous communities, they have successfully defended their culture against the homogenizing force of Mexican mestizaje--at least 85 percent of Juchitan's residents speak their indigenous language.

"Juchitan is a branch of the great tree that is the Zapotec race," writes Zapotec editor and publisher Macario Matus of his home city, "and as such inherits rebelliousness and detests subjection. That is to say, the Zapotec race has always been free."

While grassroots organizing in Mexico tends to be class-based, the isthmus has a long history of organizing around ethnic identity. Most isthmus residents are economically poor, but many have become nationally recognized politicians, lawyers, writers, and artists. Mexico's most famous living painter, Francisco Toledo, is a Juchitan Zapotec. In the isthmus, class and ethnicity are presented together, two sides of the same coin, both essential to people's identity. In a country where government rhetoric long praised peasants (while its actions undermined them), and ignored indigenous people (while its policies exterminated them), publicly claiming one's indigenous identity remains a daring act.

Indigenous Huave activist Leonel Gomez Cruz organized a busload of teenagers to go to the Coca-Cola rally from his hometown--an indigenous Huave village three hours away from Juchitan. He says of the October 12 action, "It marks a new era, with new actors and a new perspective of the struggle, because it focused on the role of transnationals in environmental destruction.

Cola-Cola is a powerful symbol of growing corporate dominance, and not just because of its ubiquitous plastic trash. The average Mexican downs more than 38 gallons of soda each year. The country is second only to the U.S. in per capita consumption of the sugar and fizz peddled by Coca-Cola. Not coincidentally, Mexico has one of the highest rates of adult-onset diabetes in the world.

Leonel Gomez, who is 29, is one of the founding members of the Red de Organizaciones Juveniles Indigenas del Istmo de Tehuantepec (Indigenous Youth Organizations' Network of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, or ROJIT). The network includes 10 rural and urban youth organizations, representing six indigenous groups. Founded less than two years ago, ROJIT exemplifies the region's long and impressive history of community organizing. Even its youngest members can recount the 479-year history of local resistance to globalization, starting when Spanish invader Hernan Cortes sent troops to the region. There was the 1660 local rebellion against taxes imposed by Spain, the 1840s revolt to protect the local salt industry, and in 1911, the uprising in support of the Mexican Revolution.

In 1971, 30 years ahead of the rest of the country, Juchitan became one of Mexico's first cities to vote the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) out of office. When Mexico as a whole finally followed suit in 2000, it elected a former Coca-Cola executive, right-wing Vicente Fox, as president.

A progressive Zapotec political party controlled Juchitan through much of the 1980s and '90s. In 1985, indigenous Mixe communities north of Juchitan founded one of the region's first indigenous rights organizations: the Union de Commidades Indigenas de la Zona Norte del Istmo (Association of Indigenous Communities in the Northern Zone of the Isthmus, or UCIZONI).

In a country where class, co-optation, and corruption dominate electoral politics, the isthmus has been something of an anomaly--though not totally immune to these pitfalls. Several ROJIT founding members are the children and grandchildren of UCIZONI and Zapotec party activists. Alienated by the inevitable infighting that has come to characterize Juchitan's Zapotec political party, ROJIT stays out of electoral politics. When word got out about the Coca-Cola action, a Zapotec party leader offered money to a ROJIT member group in exchange for canceling the event. Though they live in Mexico's poorest state, and their organizations are chronically underfunded, ROJIT activists refused the offer.

Isthmus organizations maintain strong ties to the Zapatistas in Chiapas and have supported that struggle since it first became public on January 1, 1994. In 2001, the Zapatistas traveled from Chiapas to Mexico City to address the nation's congress. A delegation from UCIZONI traveled with the Zapatistas, part of a caravan of several thousand supporters. Although the Zapatistas have become the best-known part of Mexico's broad indigenous rights movement, communities in Oxaca--and especially the isthmus--were among the movement's founders. When the Zapatista caravan stopped in Oaxaca's state capital, Subcomandante Marcos told the crowd, "We have marveled at your organizing capacity, your combativeness, your sincere pride in the roots that give both name and color to these lands." Nearly one quarter of Mexico's 10 million indigenous people live in Oaxaca--the only state that legally recognizes indigenous governance, based on consensus.

Invaders by Land and Sea

The Zapotecs arrived in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec 650 years ago. Four indigenous groups, including the Mixes and Huaves, already lived there. Talking about the history of the Mixe people, UCIZONI activist Zoila Jose Juan says, "We have always been invaded." Juan, a 47-year-old grandmother who led the UCIZONI delegation in the Zapatista caravan, says the Spanish were actually the third group to invade Mixe lands. The Aztecs arrived about 100 years after the Zapotecs did. The Aztecs eventually left, but the Zapotecs stayed, gaining control of much of the region's economy. These days, Huave and Mixe people often refer to "Zapotec imperialism." Given this history; inter-ethnic organizing is no simple task.

Ethnic organizations in the isthmus frequently collaborate with one another, though a single ethnicity dominates most groups. The new generation of youth activists has begun to change this dynamic, as ROJIT demonstrates. ROJIT has made a conscious effort to share power and ensure that no single ethnicity dominates its network. Perhaps ironically, another reason for the network's success is the alienation some isthmus youth feel in their hometowns.

Until recently, isthmus communities were composed of children, adults, and elders. The very concept of "youth"--people in their teens and 20s not yet raising families of their own--is a relatively new one. Traditionally, people married and had children in their teen years. ROJIT founding member Lucia Antonio, who at 28 is unmarried and has no children, says of others in her Mixe village, "Sometimes, they don't see us as a new generation, but a degeneration." Generally though, she finds strength in the diverse community of the isthmus's indigenous peoples. "As indigenous communities, we have a single root, and that is what has survived in spite of so many invasions. Having an indigenous perspective is a form of resistance."

These invasions continue to the present day. The British arrived almost a century ago to build the railroad that slices across the isthmus, linking the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Until the Panama Canal was finished in 1914, the Mexican isthmus was a key transit point between Europe and Asia. In the 1950s, a winding, two-lane highway was built across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, as well. The Mexican government announced plans for a new high-speed railroad and four-lane highway in 1996, making it easier to export the region's rich forest, mineral, and oil reserves.

Local indigenous organizations and workers' unions delayed the new railroad and highway construction for six years. This effort, like ROJIT's pressure on Coca-Cola, reflects the region's long success resisting corporate takeover of indigenous lands. As ROJIT's founding declaration puts it, "As young people, we are the heirs to the ancestral knowledge of our grandmothers and grandfathers, of all the different ethnicities of the isthmus region, ...and [are] the legitimate owners of the natural resources found in it."

Although work on the new isthmus highway started several months ago, activists still hope to stop it permanently. ROJIT members were among the first on the scene when the construction crews showed up. Using resources donated by U.S. and European foundations, they took photos, shot video, and interviewed workers. They immediately circulated the information in their communities.

The planned highway would be a toll road, in a region where many people earn $2 a day, or less. The toll for crossing the isthmus could easily be a week's salary for a campesino. Zoila Jose Juan views the highway with wry humor, saying, "Are the indigenous people really going to go back and forth in their cars? What cars do we have? We only have our animals to carry our corn."

The new highway would serve U.S. consumers, not isthmus residents. President Bush, like Clinton before him, plans to expand the North American Free Trade Agreement all the way to the southern tip of Argentina, creating the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). New highways and railroads in the isthmus--and throughout Latin America--would literally pave the way for this continental free trade zone.

ROJIT connects local and global, organizing against both the isthmus highway and the FTAA. When they marched to the Coca-Cola plant on October 12, several teens carried a huge papier-mache caravel they had built. Caraveis were the fast-sailing ships the Spanish used when they invaded the Americas. Still a powerful symbol of foreign invasion, this paper-and-wire caravel bore the initials "AICA"--FTAA in Spanish. At the end of their bottle-returning protest, ROJIT members burned the caravel in effigy.

Leonel Gomez calls this kind of action "a mobilization for territorial resistance." ROJIT's members must continue to fight for the land their families have lived on for hundreds--if not thousands--of years. Gomez makes a distinction between social change organizing in Mexico's indigenous and mestizo communities. "The mestizo movement is more a struggle for the inclusion of many classes in a bureaucratic system they don't fit in. I think the indigenous movement in Mexico is a demand--for respect of a different form of social organization and a different vision of the world."

This alternative vision is central to their work. The isthmus is home to a dozen ethnic communities with different histories and beliefs, whose indigenous people share the sense that collective survival is more important than individual rights. This shared assumption mightily threatens those who would rule the world. In December 2000, the CIA released a report that was widely covered in the Mexican media. The report stated that indigenous peoples' movements were a "key threat" to "political stability" and would "trigger new tensions." By "political stability," the CIA means the ability to build new highways, impose new trade agreements, and ignore communities of color.

ROJIT activist Lucia Antonio tries to keep the big picture in mind, as she fights the new highway and other elements of economic globalization. "In these difficult times, the majority of people are looking for something new," she says. "We've had it with exploitation, war, and discrimination. We want to live decently. As for the minority, I hope they will realize that riches based on human exploitation will kill us."

Wendy Call ([e-mail]) is a freelance writer working on a book entitled No Word for Welcome: Mexican Villages Face the Future.