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The Chiapas Rebellion
The Struggle for Land and Democracy
By Neil Harvey Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9830-1
CHAPTER 1
THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS
Solutions to our problems depend on the strength we achieve. The answer lies with the people, for that is where history is made. —Member of Emiliano Zapata Peasant Organization (OCEZ), Chiapas, September 1987
The men and women of the EZLN, the faceless ones, the ones who walk in the night and who belong to the mountains, have sought words that other men and women could understand. And so they say: First. — We demand that there be free and democratic elections. — Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena-Comandancia General (CCRICG), Zapatista Army of National Liberation EZLN, Chiapas, February 1994 (EZLN 1994:177)
[We call for the formation of] a political force that does not aim to take power, a force that is not a political party.... A political force that can organize the demands and proposals of the citizens so that those who govern, govern by obeying. — EZLN, Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Forest, Chiapas, January 1996
Why do the Zapatistas wear ski masks? This was the question that one journalist posed on New Year's Day 1994 to the man who presented himself as subcomandante Marcos. On that day, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Ocosingo, Las Margaritas, Altamirano, Chanal, Oxchuc, and Huixtán, seven towns located in the highlands of Chiapas, had been occupied by an army of over 3,000 indigenous people demanding land, jobs, housing, food, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace (map 1.1). Marcos responded to the question by invoking the novelty of the Zapatistas:
The main reason is that we have to be careful that nobody tries to be the main leader. The masks are meant to prevent this from happening. It is about being anonymous, not because we fear for ourselves, but rather to avoid being corrupted. Nobody can then appear all the time and demand attention. Our leadership is a collective leadership and we must respect that. Even though you are listening to me now, elsewhere there are others who are masked and are also talking. So, the masked person here today is called "Marcos" and tomorrow it might be "Pedro" in Las Margaritas, or "Josue" in Ocosingo, or "Alfredo" in Altamirano, or whatever he is called.
So, the one who speaks is a more collective heart, not a single leader, or caudillo. That is what I want you to understand, not a caudillo in the old style and image. The only image that you will have is that those who have made this rebellion wear ski-masks. And the time will come when the people will realize that it is enough to have dignity and put on a mask and say that they too can do this. (Autonomedia 1994:62-63)
In Mexico, the term caudillo traditionally refers to a type of leader who exercises undisputed control within popular movements. The caudillo commands attention and promotes unconditional allegiance among his followers. The fact that the Zapatistas have sought to transcend caudillismo is, in itself, a significant development in Mexico's long history of peasant struggles. It has also revealed the potential for new forms of political organization. This book seeks to explain how it became possible to think and act in new ways. On this basis, we can better evaluate the significance of the rebellion for political life in Mexico.
The Causes of the Rebellion
Many scholars and commentators have debated the causes of the rebellion. For anthropologists with long experience in the field, the uprising resulted from a combination of ecological crisis, lack of available productive land, the drying up of nonagricultural sources of income, the political and religious reorganization of indigenous communities since the 1960s, and the rearticulation of ethnic identities with emancipatory political discourses (Collier and Quaratiello 1994; Nash 1995). Rural society was seen as finally breaking under the impact of economic crisis and neoliberal reforms. Constitutional reforms affecting the status of agrarian reform and the signing of NAFTA were considered to have exacerbated long-standing grievances over unequal land distribution and rural poverty (Barry 1995; Harvey 1994; Hernández 1994a; Ross 1995; Russell 1995). The Zapatistas' communiqués tended to confirm these findings and assured that land tenure, indigenous rights, and democratization would form the central points around which their political struggle would evolve in the following two years (EZLN 1994,1995).
Other authors were less convinced that social grievances alone were responsible for the rebellion. In an attempt to deny the authenticity of the EZLN as an indigenous rebellion, several writers argued that outside political activists, with roots in the Marxist Left of the 1970s, were manipulating the Indians for their own political objectives. They pointed to the fact that the Zapatistas' charismatic spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, was a university-educated, middle-class mestizo (Pazos 1994; Warman 1994). Although recognizing the existence of grave poverty and social injustice in Chiapas, Arturo Warman and other government officials argued that the situation was improving and that there was less racism toward Indians now than in the past. In this analysis, channels for negotiation did exist and the decision to take up arms was therefore unjustified and motivated solely by the political ambitions of outsiders, or, in words of then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, "professionals of violence."
The most complete version of this argument was provided by Carlos Tello (1995). In his book, Tello detailed the arrival of various leftist currents in Chiapas in the 1970s and their association with different groups of pastoral workers of the Catholic diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. In this account, theEZLN was formed on the back of the prior organizing efforts of the diocese and its bishop, Samuel Ruiz Garcia. For Tello, the socialist origins of Marcos and other Zapatista leaders overshadow their current political discourse of democracy and freedom. The shift from revolution to democracy is portrayed by Tello as nothing more than an opportunistic reaction to the collapse of socialism in the East and the demise of Guerrilla movements (and the Sandinista government) in Central America. The EZLN avoided a similar fate by "discovering" the political purchase of democracy, especially when it could be linked to a condemnation of the very real material injustices faced by indigenous communities in Chiapas.
Tello's book appeared precisely at the same time that the Zedillo government launched a new military offensive against the EZLN. On February 9, 1995, under pressure from foreign investors to resolve the Chiapas crisis once and for all, arrest orders were issued for dozens of alleged EZLN leaders around the country. Among the accused was Marcos, identified by the Attorney General's Office (PGR) as Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a former university professor from Tampico and member of an urban guerrilla organization, the National Liberation Forces (FLN), which had been inactive since its main cells were broken up in the mid-1970s. This official version coincided with Tello's book, which appears to have relied on confidential police and military files, interspersed with selective interviews of advisers of peasant organizations in the canyons of the Lacandon forest (Las Cañadas) who were opposed to the EZLN.
If it is true (as many critics suggested) that the timing of the book's appearance was meant to justify the armed offensive and discredit the EZLN, then it failed dramatically. Large-scale demonstrations in Mexico City demanded a peaceful solution, the reopening of peace talks, and an end to the witch-hunt of Zapatista sympathizers. Protesters marched on the Zócalo declaring "Todos Somos Marcos" in clear repudiation of the government's use of the supposed identity of the subcomandante for its military offensive. When peace talks eventually resumed in April, the EZLN demanded recognition as a political force. Agreeing to negotiate with the EZLN made it increasingly difficult for the government to uphold charges of terrorism against members of an organization they had in essence acknowledged as legitimate. Gradually, in the face of constant pressure from the EZLN representatives and human rights organizations, most of those detained during 1995 were released due to lack of evidence.
Whether the PGR files are true or not, they clearly did not determine the political significance of theEZLN to the extent Tello and others supposed. Although other authors also noted the novelty of a democratic guerrilla movement, they emphasized the validity and timeliness of the new zapatismo. Carlos Fuentes wrote of the first "postmodern" revolution, one that escaped the ideological confines of the cold war and which pointed toward a more pluralistic future (Fuentes 1995). Jorge Castañeda, who had recendy completed a major study of the decline of the Left in Latin America, saw the Zapatistas as "armed reformists." Their goal was not to take over state power, but to get basic demands met. The arms were simply necessary to gain attention and shake the complacency of a political establishment that had long ignored the social injustices faced by indigenous people (Castañeda 1993, 1994). Some academics in the United States also celebrated the postmodern qualities of the uprising, particularly the break with old forms of organization and strategy and the effective use of media exposure and new communications technologies such as the Internet (Burbach 1994; Halleck 1994).
Although these analyses are useful in exploring the causes and possible meanings of the rebellion, I believe that insufficient attention has been given to the complexity of relationships between structure and agency. Although it is true that neoliberal reforms have altered previous modes of capital accumulation and social order, their precise impact cannot be deduced from their own internal logic. Similarly, the interests of the Zapatistas are not reducible to a predetermined essence, nor to their simple manipulation by political entrepreneurs. Instead, we need to pay much closer attention to the interactive process of Identity formation, political organization, and engagement with the state.
A similar set of concerns lies at the heart of recent attempts to build a "political process" model for understanding social movements (McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996; Tarrow 1994; McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly 1997). By highlighting how movements interact with changing political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and cultural framings, this approach offers a more complete view of popular mobilization than those constrained by a sole focus on movements and the participants themselves. The approach in this book shares these same concerns but adopts a different methodology. This is due to the nature of the central research question that has driven my analysis of peasant movements and the Zapatistas. The main problem the book addresses is not, therefore, how to identify the factors that facilitate or hinder popular mobilization in Mexico and other authoritarian states. Instead, its aim is to try and grasp the political significance of popular struggle in such contexts. That is, how have peasants contested the terms under which the political system has constituted them as subordinate? More precisely, how do oppressed groups create spaces for not only contesting their material conditions but also the political and cultural discourses that reproduce their subordination? This question does not obviate the need for detailed analysis of the interactions between diverse actors and structures, but it does fix our attention on a deeper and older problem, one by no means limited to Chiapas.
This problem concerns the conditions for the exercise of effective Citizenship. In twentieth-century Mexico, it can be argued that a form of "corporatist citizenship" has existed, in which the state has sought to determine and regulate acceptable forms of political behavior. This model has been partly transformed by die electoral reforms of the past two decades and the shift to a discourse enshrined in liberal constitutionalism. However, the Chiapas rebellion can be seen not only as a clear break with the corporatist citizenship of the Mexican state but also as a critique of narrow versions of democratic citizenship. The Zapatistas not only exposed the gaps between liberal ideals and daily reality for most Mexicans; they opened up the possibility for a more radical understanding of citizenship and democracy.
By making the construction of citizenship the central question for analysis, the methodology cannot emerge from some pregiven universal definition of what citizenship entails. Instead, it must trace the linkages people attempt to establish between particular claims and their broader validity. In this regard, I am in agreement with the general thrust of poststructuralist thought on Identity formation and seek to advance a nonessentialist view of categories such as class and ethnicity, peasant and Indian, state and citizenship. However, I do not accept the relativist claim that all identities can be understood solely on their own terms. While rejecting the possibility of some uncontestable ground of universal truth, I also argue that no identity exists in isolation from other identities. In other words, in affirming their particularity, popular movements are unavoidably drawn into a relative universalization. As Laclau has stated, "the impossibility of a universal ground does not eliminate its need; it just transforms the ground into an empty space which can be partially filled in a variety of ways (the strategies of this filling is what politics is about)" (Laclau 1995:164). This approach challenges the idea that the definition of citizenship is dependent on some ultimate source of authority. Instead, it allows us to assume and demand responsibility for the political world that we alone create. My goal in this book is not therefore to explain a causal chain of events leading to a predetermined outcome, but, on the contrary, to stress the political construction of citizenship from the fragments of multiple struggles against oppression. This chapter attempts a theoretical justification for adopting this approach by discussing some of the main contributions to recent debates on the definition, novelty, and significance of popular movements in Mexico and Latin America.
Political Nature of Popular Movements
What is a social, or popular, movement? Do agricultural cooperatives or communal kitchens constitute Social movements? Or, are social movements only those movements that challenge the central institutions and values of a political system? David Slater's volume New Social Movements and the State in Latin America was one of the first attempts to reconceptualize popular protest in Latin America (Slater 1985b). Slater identified a diverse array of movements and argued that they are defined by the ways they break with traditional practices and theories of collective action. He therefore took issue with the influential work of Alain Touraine, who reserved the category of social movements to those struggles over historicity, or "the set of cultural models that rule social practices" (Touraine 1988:8). Touraine based his theory on the experience of postindustrial societies of Western Europe. In this context social movements are simply "the work that society performs on itself," that is, the struggle over cultural meanings, identities, and difference. Material demands and class divisions no longer occupy the center of social conflict. In their place we find the critiques of modernity itself posed by pacifists, feminists, environmentalists, ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and cultural movements. Consequently, for Touraine, much of the activity that passes as "social movements" in Latin America can best be described as "collective defensive behavior." This category refers to actions directed toward the state that seek solutions for particularistic demands. For example, a local peasant movement that demands access to land or credit does not challenge the state and its mode of operation, much less the ideas and values that underpin government policy or modernity. Some movements, however, may develop the potential to modify decisions or even whole systems of decision making. Touraine defined these movements as "social struggles." In this category we might find movements that are able to transform government policies through their mobilization and pressure. Finally, there are "social movements" per se. In Touraine's view these are largely absent in Latin America because the dominant modes of historicity are established by the state and the most integrated political actors, rather than by autonomous social actors of civil society. Popular organizations must direct their demands to the state if they are to achieve solutions. They are forced to play by the state's rules and are therefore unable to challenge the "cultural models that rule social practices."
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Excerpted from The Chiapas Rebellion by Neil Harvey. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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