The Zapatista National Liberation Army emerged from the New Year's uprising as a national political force. Chiapas' recent history explains how an oppressed and impoverished peasantry came to view armed struggle as their best optionand were able to pull off an insurrection. On January 1st, the day the North Am- erican Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, a previously unknown guerrilla group in the Mexican state of Chia- pas burst onto the national scene by capturing a half dozen towns by force of arms. The army took four days to drive them back into the mountains at the cost of a hundred lives. As the badly shaken Mexican government tries to negoti- ate a settlement, the rebelsled by the elo- quent, green-eyed Coman- the rebel/ion. dante Marcos are gath- ering sympathy around the country. The Zapatista National Libera- tion Army (EZLN) emerged from the New Year's uprising as a national political force. The Zap- atistas' claim to a following in other parts of the country and their threat to spread the war elsewhere are both entirely credible. But Chia- pas is their home base, and to explain how an oppressed and Lu/s Hernndez, the author of several books on agrarian politics, is an advisor to a national coffee-growers' organiza- tion and a regular contributor to the Mexico City daily, La Jornada. Translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried. impoverished peasantry came to view armed struggle as their best optionand were able to pull off an insurrectionwe must examine the particular experience of Chia- pas' recent history. This peasant war, the current incarnation of a tradition of cyclic Indian revolts, grew out of nearly 20 years of political agitation in the countryside, primarily over land. The agrarian reform that in some states practically eradicated the large latifundios of pre-revolution- ary Mexico was never fully imple- mented in Chiapas. The state is the principal source of the nation's coffee, and just over a hundred people (0.16% of all cof- fee farmers) control 12% of all coffee lands. Land tenure is actually more skewed than these figures suggest, since some prop- erties are registered in the names of third persons in order to evade constitu- tional restrictions on max- imum size. These large farms have the best land, most of the credit, and the best infrastructure. Yet the real problem isn't in coffee, it's in cat- tle. According to 1980 fig- ures (the most recent available), some 6,000 families hold more than three million hectares of pasture- land, equivalent to nearly half the territory of all Chiapas' rural land- holdings. Many of these vast cattle ranches were created through vio- lent and illegal invasions of ejido (community-held) or national land. In the Ocosingo Lions Club, as recently as 1971, there hung a sign that was the ranchers' motto: "In the Law of the Jungle it is willed! that Indians and blackbirds must be killed." Threats, jailings and killings of peasantssometimes at the hands of the ranchers' private armies, other times the result of the army or a judge acting on the ranchers' behalffill the pages of 6 NICLA REPORTON THE AMERICAS Government tanks move into Chiapas in January to put down 0 0 0UPDATE I MEXICO Chiapas' tabloid press. Several international human rights organi- zations, among them Amnesty International and Americas Watch, have documented these attacks. The concentration of land and natural resources in a few hands also facilitated the takeover of all elective offices by a small inter- locking network known as the "Chiapas Family." With a few notable exceptions, the Family is made up of the big ranchers, coffee magnates and lumber barons who have traditionally fed at the public trough. This is the case not only in state and local government, but also in the powerful mass organizations dominated by the ruling Rev- olutionary Institutional Party (PRI). Local political bosses, known as caciques, exer- cise great personal power in Chiapas, like elsewhere in Mexico. A good exam- ple is Jorge Felino Mon- tesinos Melgar, strongman of the town of Motozintla and until recently state leader of the National Peasant Council (CNC), one of the PRI's organiza- tions. Among other things, this representative of Chi- apas' peasants controls all transport in the area of Motozintla, where he was elected mayor three times, and is currently a federal congressman. His wife heads up the regional Civil Registry; his compadre Hermelindo Jan Robiero is the tax collector; his brother-in- law is the mayor of Siltepec; his nephew is the mayor of La Grandeza; another compadre is the mayor of El Porvenir... In the highlands a relatively large number of political bosses are Indians, many of them bilin- gual teachers. These caciques usu- ally control the marketing of liquor, soft drinks, flowers, candles and fireworks. Needless to say, they benefit from the practice of traditional rituals in which these products are consumed. They often control transportation and land rentals as well; and of course, they control the PRI and CNC municipal committees. Not sur- prisingly, political dissidence is frequently expressed as religious differences which question the mechanisms by which the caciques accumulate wealth. For example, Protestants who refuse to partici- pate in funding fiestas for the patron saints are sometimes expelled from the community and their lands confiscated. These local political bosses Indian and non-Indian alikehave used demands for regional autono- my to block the federal govern- ment' s efforts to modernize tradi- tional modes of domination. "Chiapas para los chiapanecos" may be an appealing slogan in a country as overly centralized as Mexico, but it has been employed to keep democratic grassroots movements from allying with pro- gressive federal officials. Similar- ly, when war erupted in nearby Central America, the Chiapas Fam- ily moved quickly to convince the federal government that the state's stability depended on strengthen- ing, rather than weakening, their stranglehold on political and eco- nomic power. To fight this oppres- sive system, the peasants of Chia- pas have founded some of the country's most important regional organizations. Chiapas' small cof- fee producers were the first to chal- lenge the state coffee company, and to set up self-managed coffee farms. They were the second group in the country to found a rural credit union. They were pioneers in the production of organic coffee along with farmers in neighboring Oaxacaand in the development of alternative marketing channels. T he growth of peasant struggle throughout the state after 1974 was influenced by a num- ber of factors. The influx of 15,000 to 30,000 Guatemalan temporary workers to the large coffee farms, undercutting the pay of migrants from the Chiapas highlands, prompted agricultural workers to organize. Growing population and unemployment increased the pressure on land and drove many to petition for agrarian reform. This was further complicated by the arrival in the early 1980s of nearly 80,000 Guatemalan refugees flee- ing the dirty war in their country. Unplanned colonization of the jun- gle caused ecological disaster by 1985, and brought the agricultural frontier to a close. Peasants were also assisted by "outside" organizers. Liberation theology-inspired Catholic clergy began to do politically oriented pastoral work. Several new politi- cal parties started doing grassroots organizing, among them Proletari- an Line, People United, the Independent Organization of Agri- cultural Workers and Peasants- Mexican Communist Party People presumed to be linked to the EZLN are massacred on the road to Ocosingo, Chiapas on January 5. Vol XXVII, No 5 MAR/APRIL 1994 7UPDATE / MEXICO (CIOAC-PCM), and the Socialist Workers Party. And in 1979 a broad-based democratic union movement emerged among the state's teachers, some of whom began organizing peasants. Three key organizations from the mid-1970s still exist today. The Union of Ejido Unions works pri- marily in the Lacandn Jungle, the northern part of the state, and the Sierra Madre Mountains. It seeks to win peasant control over the productive process by pressuring the state through mobilization, but it prefers negotiation over direct Attacks by ranchers not only united the peasants of the jungle but fed their sense of collective identity as victims of abuse by the wealthy. confrontation. The second organi- zation, CIOAC, focuses on orga- nizing the seasonal and permanent workers on coffee farms and cattle ranches in the towns of Simojovel, Huitiupn and El Bosque. It has sought to link the union struggle to the electoral and programmatic activities of the old Communist Party, and later to its successor, the Unified Socialist Party. The third main group, the Emil- iano Zapata Peasant Organization (OCEZ), grew out of the communi- ty of Venustiano Cananza. It strug- gles for land and against repres- sion, primarily by confronting the state through direct action. In addi- tion to these three, a number of local organizing efforts resulted in land takeovers and bloody con- frontations with local bosses, but all of them suffered repression and internal divisions. The widespread insurgence among the state's primary and sec- ondary school teachers for better pay and the democratization of their union had a great impact on broader social struggles. Beginning in 1979, thousands of teachers held strikes, work-stoppages, sit-ins and marches to Mexico City. In the process they sought the solidarity of parents, the majority of whom were peasants. These, in turn, viewed the teachers' struggle as an object lesson in how to achieve their own demands. Once the democratic teachers' movement managed to win control over the state union, it became an interlocutor with the state govem- ment on behalf of the peasant movement, and encouraged teach- ers to "link up with the people." In 1986, teachers took up the struggle of com farmers for an increase in the guaranteed price of coru, land- ing seven of their leaders in jail. By August, 1989, the teachers had organized five teacher-peasant conferences, in which some 400 community representatives partici- pated. The organization that emerged from this process, Peas- ant-Teacher Solidarity, was quite successful in promoting democracy in the countryside. They won con- trol of many municipal committees of the PRI, as well as several may- orships in Indian towns. At the beginning of the administration of Governor Patrocinio Gonzalez Garrido in 1989, the movement controlled 14 municipal govern- ments. But by the time his term ended last year, several of the movement's mayors were in jail for conuptionsome for good rea- sons, others on trumped-up chargesand one had been assas- sinated on the orders of the local political boss. A new cycle of struggle began on October 12, 1992 at an astound- ing demonstration in San Cristobal de las Casas to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of indigenous and popular resistance. Thousands of peasants from differ- ent ethnic groups took over the narrow streets of the colonial capi- tal of the Chiapas highlands and vented their rage on the symbol of white dominationbreaking into bits the statue of conquistador Diego de Mazazriegos. According to some of the participants, that moment marked a tuming point, a catharsis of collective anger which brought into people's conscious- ness what many already felt: that armed struggle was the only path to achieve Indian demands. The people who preached the need to take up arms had been doing careful grassroots organizing for some time in the Lancandon Jungle and several highland com- munities in the area. Their move- ment remained underground and grew by recruiting key cadre from the legal organizations operating in the region. They persuasively argued that armed struggle was justified by the explosive combina- tion of unresolved land claims, lack of social services, institutional atrophy, authoritarian political bosses, monstrous deformations in the justice system, and the general lack of democracy. A lthough the colonization of the Lancandon Jungle was initially promoted by the large lumber companies who need- ed workers to cut the trees, it inten- sified as a result of the failure of agrarian reform in Chiapas and elsewhere. From the 1940s onward, the people who came to live in the jungle were those who had lost the struggle for land at home. Some were sent to this fron- tier by an agrarian bureaucracy unwilling to challenge the large landowners, while others were simply pushed off their lands and had nowhere else to go. 8 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASUPDATE / MEXICO In their efforts to build commu- nities and lives in the uninhabited jungle, they relied on the presence and accompaniment of the Catholic Church, which in this region was particularly respectful of people's traditional customsand on the notable absence of governmental institutions. Religion became the glue that held these new communi- ties together. Catechists not only taught people the "word of God" but, literate and mobile, many of them able to speak Spanish, they became key links to the outside world. A second element that gave cohesion to these communities was the struggle for title to their land. In 1972, President Luis EcheverrIa gave 66 Lacandn Indian families title to 614,321 hectares, and denied all rights to the 26 indige- nous communities of other ethnic groups. The signing of the Joint Accord for the Protection of the Lacandn Jungle in March, 1987 opened a process of negotiation which culminated in January, 1989 when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed a presidential decree to title the properties of the 26 communities. Behind these negotiations and accords lay a lot of hard work on the part of the region's peasant organizations. In the process, peas- ants came into increasingly bitter conflict with large ranchers who were expanding into the jungle, violently expelling people from their lands, and accusing them of promoting land takeovers. Attacks by ranchers not only united the peasants of the jungle but fed their sense of collective identity as vic- tims of abuse by the wealthy. Two strategies were always pre- sent in these struggles. On the one hand were those who encouraged the formation of democratic resis- tance organizations and the promo- tion of peasant self-government. On the other were those who believed this was necessary but insufficient, that only changing the system through armed struggle could provide a real solution. The first vision gave rise to organiza- tions such as the Union of Ejido Unions; the second to what today is known as the Zapatista National Liberation Army. For years the path of peasant self-government was considered primary, despite the closed attitude of local and state officials. Only in the past three years has this position lost influence among the region's inhabitants. One basic reason is the continued conflict with ranchers and their hired guns. Although the ranchers lost title to much of the jungle, they maintained con- trol of most of the natural and cultivated pas- tureland and of the cattle that graze there. Ac c u sto med to quick and easy profits from cheap land A cam pesino farmer and cheap labor, Chiapas. ranchers blamed peasants for falling profits caused by their own lack of investment, and proceeded to throw more peas- ants off their land. Any peasant organization that requested land through the agrarian reform became a target of rancher vio- lence, supported and often carried out by local officials. The insurrection also grew out of the economic crisis. The prices of the region's major products wood, coffee, cattle and corn have all deteriorated drastically. The 1989 moratorium on wood- cutting (a step back from the accord signed in 1987) denied peasants an important source of income. The fall of the internation- al price of coffee from U.S.$120- 140 per hundredweight in 1989 to an average of $60-70 today, as well as federal economic policies, led to a 65% drop in income for coffee producers over the past five years. What's more, the disman- tling of the federal coffee compa- ny, Inmecaf, deprived peasants of marketing mechanisms and a source of technical assistance. The region was hurt by the falling profitability of cattle ranch- ing. Corn farming, too, lost pro- ductivity due to population growth and the consequent reduction of 30-year slash-and-burn cycles to passes the Mayan ruins of Pa/en que in two-year ones. With a few miser- able handouts, Salinas' much-tout- ed National Solidarity Program (PRONASOL) was barely able to soften the blows of falling income and fewer jobs. Despite their inno- vative efforts, the new self-man- aged enterprises grouped in the National Coordinator of Coffee- Growers' Organizations were also unable to stop the increase in impoverishment. The third factor behind the turn to arms is the government's inca- pacity to resolve the underlying political problem, which would involve dismantling the web of economic and political interests on which the untenable status quo depends. Along with the Church, Vo XXVII, No 5 MAR/APRIL 1994 gUPDATE I MEXICO non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and democratic peasant organizations, certain federal development agencies, particularly the National Indigenist Institute, have worked to "civilize" the struggle between ranchers and peasants. But for 20 years, state officials have blocked nearly all attempts at reform promoted by the federal government, many of which were based on the erroneous assumption that local elites would actually take up its progressive initiatives and run with them. To make matters worse, current federal policies to streamline government have left democratic organizations with even fewer institutional mecha- nisms to defend their interests. The state judiciary has been par- ticularly effective in shutting out the peasantry. The state penal code authorizes the punishment of the intellectual authors of supposed crimes, and outlaws the occupation of public squares. The judicial police have earned a well-deserved reputation for abuse and violations of human rights. Likewise, the penitentiary system holds people for months without trial, which drove one prisoner in Cerro Hueco jail to set himself on fire in protest in 1992. Nearly every democratic peasant organization active in Chi- apas has members in jail. Lest we forget, electoral fraud is choking Chiapas along with the rest of the country. The 1991 elec- tion results were blatantly fraudu- lentshowing municipalities rife with conflict to have cast 100% of their votes for the PRI. The conviction that all avenues of legal struggle had been exhaust- ed was brought to a head by the harsh policies adopted by the state government in 1990, when the leaders of the "Xi' Nich" move- ment in Palenque and the parish priest of Simojovel, Joel Padrn, were jailed for supporting land claims. Although a broad regional mobilization, national protests, and Church intervention won their free- dom, the experience was viewed as a watershed. If the achievement of such small victories in local con- flicts required nationwide protests, people reasoned, then the only way to resolve the state's many prob- lems would be by democratizing the entire country. The final straw came when Presi- dent Salinaswho had begun his administration with some encour- aging signals (freeing prisoners and settling longstanding land claims)backed the governor's The state judiciary has shut out the peasantry. Nearly every democratic organization active in Chiapas has members in jail. iron hand and proceeded to impose the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution, ending legal protec- tion for community ejido lands. G iven these material condi- tions, it's not surprising that the disciplined and tenacious efforts of political-mili- tary organizations to promote the option of armed struggle found fer- tile ground. Their cadre are not for- eigners or outsiders, but local peo- ple familiar with the culture and rhythms of indigenous communi- ties and well-known by broad sec- tors of the population. Add to this their evident military and ideologi- cal preparation, and it's not hard to grasp how they were able to launch the rebellion which shook the nation on New Year's Day. The uprising was a mix of des- peration born of a bitter present and an uncertain future, and rage at past defeats and constant humiliation by the powerful. But it was also driven by the dream of recovering the great Indian nation that once was, and the incredible self-assurance people attained from having suc- cessfully conquered the jungle. Many of the radical measures required to resolve the conflict in Chiapas are needed throughout Mexico: an agrarian reform that destroys the power of corrupt local elites; regional economic develop- ment programs led by grassroots organizations; a complete overhaul of the judicial system including purging the security forces of human rights violators; and democ- ratic reform of the political system to end the PRI's monopoly control of public offices and mass organi- zations. Not everyone in the Chiapas countryside believes now is the time to adopt the strategy and tac- tics of peasant warfare. Neither do all of the organizations that work in the zone of conflict wish to be considered belligerent forces. The uprising does, however, have sym- pathizers. People have long memo- ries, and many see this as an opportunity to get back at their oppressors; but caciques and ranchers also bear many grudges, and know they need only call their enemies Zapatistas to exact revenge. The peasant war in Chiapas has opened up issues that the national elites had hoped would be forgot- ten. It bared to the world a side of Mexico that was not taken into account when Congress voted by acclamation "to join the First World." It is time to bring the political system in line with the overall maturity of Mexican soci- ety. The new Mayan war is a signal that the hour of real political reform has arrivedand there is no turning back.
