Why did Chiapas revolt?

In Mexico's state of Chiapas, the resistance to economic development without social development has found a popular voice. It is the voice of a Mayan peasant force, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which appeared in San Cristobal de las Casas and a handful of other places in Chiapas on January 1, 1994. In their Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle, which accompanied their appearance, the EZLN wrote:

We are the product of 500 years of struggle: first against

slavery, in the war of independence against Spain, then

to escape being absorbed by North American expansion....

we have nothing to lose, absolutely nothing, no decent

roof over our heads, no land, no work, poor health, no

food, no education, no right to freely and democratically

choose our leaders, no independence from foreign interests,

and no justice for ourselves or our children.

But we say it is enough! We are the descendants of

those who truly build this nation. We are the millions of

dispossessed, and we call upon all of ourbrethren to join

our crusade, the only option to avoid dying of starvation!

In their declaration, and in their subsequent communications, the EZLN rejected a system of development where two of every three people in a population of over 3 million never complete primary school. It said "no" to electrification in which the rivers of Chiapas supply power to Mexico City, but a third of Chiapans are without electricity. It rejected a distribution of wealth in which 0.2 percent of the population--billionaires owning supermarket chains and speculators in telephone stock--are richer than half the people of Mexico combined, while half the people in Chiapas have houses with dirt floors. It deplored an economy in which 20 families in Chiapas monopolize the best land, exporting cattle to the United States, while 1,032,000 Indigenas possess 823,000 hectares, less than a hectare a person. It denounced a pay scale in which 80 percent of agricultural workers cam less than the minimum salary per day, under five dollars, resulting in 88 percent of indigenous children having growth retardation from malnourishment.

According to Major Sergio of the EZLN, "We want our children to study, to be able to leave, and go to the university." But in his part of the Selva Lacandon, the schools are closed eight out of ten months for lack of teachers. "The government was not going to respect us, and so the armed force began to grow. They obliged us to take the position we take. To meet our needs we must sell our land. And who will buy it? Those who have money. Our children are going to have to return to the slavery of the finca and the patrones who pay them only two pesos a day."

What has been the process of modernization in Chiapas?

Chiapas does not have a bucolic history. It is part of a region which was depopulated through recurrent plagues of European diseases from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, a tragedy made worse by the encomienda system which granted Indian land to the Spanish and concentrated the indigenous population in villages obliged to pay taxes in crops and forced labor. In this roadless and mountainous terrain, both harvest and ladino landowners were carried on the backs of Indian porters, people being cheaper transportation than horses.

Nonetheless, the colonial period, whose racial caste system was unaltered by Mexican independence, left two positive results. The first was the identification of the Catholic church with the suffering of the indigenous population. The second was a solidarity among Indians which identified life with the continuity of community and culture, linking both to the fields which made life possible. Today, this syncretism can be seen in the Mayan crosses on Lacandon hills, a Christian cross with pine branches added as a reference to the four directions of Mayan cosmology. Such crosses, twenty and thirty feet high, are symbolic trees linking the earth to both an underworld and a spirit world, acting as an axis mundi around which nature and morality turn. And syncretism can be seen today in Catholic churches, such as the one at San Juan Chamula, where the images of saints take on a double identity as Mayan gods, becoming the object of indigenous as well as Christian ritual.

While the 1910 revolution did not alter economic and political domination by ladinos in Chiapas, it did reinforce Indian communal ownership of land through the ejido system, which made land ineligible for private sale. At present there are 1,714 communal agrarian communities in Chiapas, controlling 41 percent of the land. But they work their land without much capital or credit. Only 28 percent have farming structures, usually for pigs or chickens, and only 18.6 percent have tractors.

The post-World War II period brought a nationalist economic agenda to Mexico based on tariff protection of Mexican industry and an import-substitution program. Where development competed with rural land redistribution, the former took priority. In Chiapas, rivers were dammed for hydropower transmitted elsewhere. The dam at Angostura created Mexico's largest fresh water lake on land Indians considered to be among their most fertile.

At the same time, the internationalization of agricultural markets accelerated, with coffee and cattle coming to dominate export crops and providing an incentive for land consolidation in Chiapas. By 1980, about a hundred growers--0.16 percent of the 74,000 coffee producers owned 12 percent of the land. Using impoverished migrant laborers from Guatemala, the large coffee producers have kept wages well below the Mexican legal minimum. Overall, 6,000 families own half the arable land in the state, using it largely for cattle production which produces few jobs.

Beneath these statistics lies a state political process tied to the ruling agricultural elite. This class, controlling the state organization of the near-monopolistic Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI), has systematically evaded the anti-latifundia laws, nominally dividing their estate lands into separate entitlements held in the names of others acting as fronts. For the past twenty years, the Chiapan state government has failed to prosecute ladino ranchers who illegally appropriate Indian lands, and who meet Indian resistance with violence. Instead, the state criminal justice system is used to repress Indians protesting the seizure of their lands. The absence of the rule of law has permitted the erosion of ejido lands, the growth of a labor surplus, and the maintenance of low rural wages.

As the fertile lower hills of Chiapas were converted to cattle ranches and coffee estates, unsustainable logging practices reduced the Lacandon rainforest to one-tenth its nineteenth-century size. Remaining forest land became the site of colonization, as the government sought to relieve the pressure for land by the poor without redistributing the land of the wealthy.

However inadequate and environmentally destructive this colonization process, even it ended by 1990, when Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari declared that the process begun in the 1910 revolution--the redistribution of land to the poor--had ended. Peasants, many of whom had waited decades for action on their petitions, now had no hope that the political process would end their landlessness. At the same time, the Salinas government eliminated the constitutional protection against the private purchase of ejido lands, permitting foreign investors to own and establish the market prices for Mexican land. In such a "free market" in land, a Mexican concession to the process of integrating markets and capital flows capped by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Chiapan poor had no hope of a place.

As a voice calling for social development rather than inequitable economic growth, the Catholic church in Chiapas has played an important role. In the tradition of Bartolome de las Casas, Samuel Ruiz, the current bishop of San Cristobal, facilitated an important meeting in 1974, the Indigenous Congress, which gave Indians a forum for their grievances. Employing the moral perspective of liberation theology, participants subsequently developed a variety of indigenous organizations. By 1980, three organizations merged to form the Union of Unions of Ejidos and Campesino Groups, whose 4,500 heads of families sought autonomy through alternative models of development. This "development from below" included establishing credit unions; utilizing their own processing, trucking, and marketing system to export organic coffee; and buying a commercial farm where they established a university. Other groups sought to organize coffee and cattle-ranch labor, and others led land invasions along the Chiapas coast. The success of indigenous organizing in the 1970s and , 80s brought a backlash. Land takings, or retakings, were resisted by cattle ranchers in bloody confrontations. By the ,80s, ranchers had organized a private security force, "white guards," to terrorize peasants. In 1988, the leaders of two indigenous peasant organizations were assassinated.

The underlying debate in Indian communities during the 1980s was over the tactics to be used to reclaim lands. These communities considered their inheritance from the ancient and sometimes recent past, and they discussed organizational forms for promoting Indian economic self-determination and for escaping from the day-labor system. One faction followed a strategy of autonomous economic development. But with the reluctance of the government to break up illegal agricultural estates, the jailing of land invaders, and the increase in "white guard" violence, a faction arguing the need for an armed resistance grew. This faction, rooted in the history of the land struggles of the indigenous communities, became the incipient EZLN.

The pressure on land increased in the 1 990s as federal restrictions were placed on the remaining forest lands, much of it ejido property, prohibiting the ancient but sustainable practice of burning brush to clear and fertilize fields. According to La Jornada (January 14, 1994), by 1990 15,000 indigenous people were in prison on charges related to land conflicts, and in the last ten years over thirty peasant leaders have been assassinated. Conflicts between peasants and ranchers intensified near Ocosingo and Altamirano in early 1993, leading to the military occupation of several Indian communities. According to EZLN spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, this was a decisive moment, with the Indians dedicating what they could from their 1993 harvest income to buy guns.

The January 1994 occupation of the towns of Ocozingo, San Cristobal, |and smaller communities was an act of "armed propaganda." Government buildings were taken over and federal food stores opened up for the poor. In openly displaying weapons, and what was to become their symbolic black ski mask, or pasamontana, the EZLN asserted that the indigenous communities were already suffering from violence--disease, malnutrition, political exclusion, and economic exploitation--that was as real as and more pervasive than the sudden violence of war. While they did attack the military base of Nuevo Rancho and defended themselves fiercely against a government assault at Ocozingo, their appearance was essentially a dramatic gesture, aimed at redefining the direction of modernization. In placing themselves in a position to be killed by the far larger and better equipped Mexican army, they declared that since they already faced the extinction of the Indian community they had nothing to lose.

The Mexican government, initially unprepared, responded with the commitment of tanks and aircraft, bombed populated parts of San Cristobal indiscriminately, and retook Ocozingo. The EZLN fell back to the forest where it defends a liberated zone of indigenous communities. Having regained control of the highway system and larger towns, the army set up road blocks and sweeps designed to deny the rebels outside aid. At a point where it appeared the army was waiting only for sufficient reinforcements to carry out a scorched earth policy, the church stepped in to prevent a massacre. Bishop Ruiz agreed to facilitate peace talks between the federal government and the EZLN. With pressure from Washington to downplay the Chiapas events as a regional disturbance unrelated to NAFTA-whose implementation began the day of the EZLN uprising and was explicitly cited in their list of grievances--the Mexican government decided to engage in peace talks with Ruiz as mediator. Following a second round of talks in April, the army has continued to hold itself more or less in place.

The situation, however, has not been static. Peasants, emboldened by the EZLN, s armed posture and the legitimacy that the successful public relations campaign of Subcomandante Marcos gave to Indian grievances, seized an opportunity that might never be repeated to negotiate land redistribution from a position of possession. They initiated hundreds of land retakings throughout Chiapas, many far from the liberated zone of the Lacandon Selva. Their occupations were echoed by smaller occupations in other states. These repossessions are always community undertakings, usually involving lands petitioned for over many decades, sometimes to regain land seized by ladinos in the early nineteenth century. By early March, the peasant group CEIOC asserted that between 200,000 to 300,000 hectares had been occupied since the beginning of the year. Ranchers retaliated by assassinating peasant leaders and calling on the federal government to remove all foreign priests, close the Catholic hospital for Indians at Altamirano, and suspend Catholic church services in Chiapas until Bishop Ruiz was replaced.

There are those in the Mexican government, and in our own, who argue that the armed revolt of the Indian poor in Chiapas is a commentary, however unfortunate, on the lack of modernization in this part of Mexico. What is needed, they say, is more private enterprise: A swift opening of the repatriation of profits, state support of private business through public works, and job training. This is the standard neoliberal prescription for growth advocated by the World Bank and proposed by President Salinas. But with Mexico, s poor exceeding half the population, a free market of land, resources, food, and labor is likely to bring disaster. Guatemala is clamoring to join NAFTA, adding to the pool of impoverished, surplus labor. There appears to be no floor to regional wage competition. Among the marginalized poor, one can only predict an increasingly desperate scramble for survival.

The revolt in Chiapas, we would argue, has presented a counter-definition of governmental responsibility. It is one based on cooperative responsibility among the members of grassroots communities, and it is based on the desire of these communities to sustain their integrity and cultures. That rebellion in Chiapas could be crushed militarily, and that Indian culture itself can be pulverized by conventional "development" is quite clear. Only the existence of heightened international scrutiny has prevented the first from taking place; only genuine self-determination for the region, a result not-at-all certain to come out of the peace negotiations, can prevent the second. What is less clear but just as critical is what the destruction of the indigenous perspective on place, time, and community would mean for Western society.