Zapatistas: The Chiapas Revolt and What It Means For Radical Politics
224
Zapatistas: The Chiapas Revolt and What It Means For Radical Politics
224Paperback(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745324869 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 06/20/2006 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.60(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Zapatista Chronicle
The problem with globalisation in neo-liberalism is that the globes burst.
Subcomandante Marcos, 1996, Don Durito de la Lacandona
It is essential to the purpose of this book, and perhaps to any attempt to understand the Chiapas revolt, that Zapatista political activity and the Zapatista project are presented and analysed in their chronological unfolding through the years of struggle and resistance since the first appearance of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN) in 1994. We need, in other words, an historical account of the deployment of the Zapatista 'war against oblivion' that will not merely descriptively plod through the events but, on the contrary, will bring the movement to life for the reader, grasping and opening up to discussion the most important aspects and processes of its trajectory so far. Drawing on a variety of sources, ranging from journalistic accounts to anecdotes, I will first present a short account of what can be called the Zapatista pre-history, in order to shed light on decades of political processes and activity that preceded Marcos' declaration 'this is a revolution', and the Zapatistas' ya basta ('enough is enough'). Then, in the main body of this chronicle, I will follow the movement from the EZLN's taking of San Cristóbal in 1994 to the 'taking' of Mexico City by the Zapatista caravan in 2001, and the failure of the Zapatista commanders to persuade the Mexican Senate to vote in favour of the 'Indigenous Law'.
This historical account has two interrelated aims. The first is to contribute to a history of the Zapatista revolt from the point of view of the revolutionary project. Capital writes its own history; we write our own. The second aim, related to the unfolding of this thesis, is to situate in space and time the various political readings, critical analysis and discussion of the movement that follow in the subsequent chapters. It should be made clear that this is not intended to be an historical account encompassing the entirety of the movement's activity with a detailed analysis of both the national and international context within which it emerged, operated and still operates. As I have already mentioned, my aim is to bring the movement to life by stressing nodal points in its trajectory, and always in relation to the main focuses of this book.
THE EARLY YEARS: THE PRE-HISTORY OF THE EZLN
One thing is certain, and most analysts (e.g. De La Grange and Rico, 1997) seem to agree with this, the birth of the main Mexican revolutionary groups of the last 40 years is to be found sometime in the late 1960s and more specifically on 2 October 1968, the date of the Tlatelolco massacre. Ignoring the authorities' ban, the students had decided to gather that day in Tlatelolco, in the heart of Mexico City, in order to protest against the repression, the government's reaction to the growing protest and widespread questioning of its legitimacy among several sectors of Mexican society (Montemayor, 1997). The first volley of bullets, coming from buildings where several government snipers had been positioned, were aimed at the military forces surrounding the square of Las Tres Culturas, where the demonstrators had gathered. The provocation ended in a slaughter. The authorities acknowledged 27 deaths. The unofficial numbers did not fall below 300. The Mexican government decided to block any investigation and declared the documents concerning the massacre 'classified'. Ten days later, the Olympic Games opened in Mexico.
The Tlatelolco massacre consolidated the formation of revolutionary groups, which, inspired by the Cuban revolution, aimed at overthrowing the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (hereafter: PRI); In 1969, a year after the killings in Tlatelolco, a group of university students founded a revolutionary group: Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (hereafter: FLN), a group whose aim was to establish in Mexico of a people's republic with a socialist system. The principal leader of the FLN was Cesar German Yanez. His brother Fernando Yanez, also a member of the FLN, would later be the main founder of the EZLN, and he is today the intermediary between the Zapatistas and the government, identified by the latter as Comandante German, and known among the Zapatistas as 'El arquitecto'. The FLN decided to introduce its first focos de guerrilla in the jungle of Chiapas, an area it was believed had an enormous revolutionary potential due to the presence there of all the preconditions for the spread of revolutionary ideas, as well as to its geographical position and topography which favoured guerrilla tactics. After organising the necessary infrastructure in Mexico City and other cities of the north, the FLN set up its first guerrilla camp in the Lacandona jungle in 1972 (De La Grange and Rico, 1997).
In 1970, Luis Echeverria became President of Mexico. He had been Minister of the Interior at the time of the Tlatelolco massacre and was accused of direct complicity in the massacre and other atrocities. After a second massacre of students occurred during Echeverria's administration in 1971, the resulting outrage forced him to try to clean up his image. The federal government policies in the 1970s aimed to pacify the discontent of workers, farmers and students, and in the countryside attention was given to promoting campesino organisations, rural development programmes, and encouraging the creation of new ejido associations (land collectively owned, which can be inherited but not sold). The government's policies, however, did not bring about any intrinsic change since they left intact the economic and political interests of the powerful rural elite. As a result of the inadequacy of these policies to improve the life conditions of people in the countryside, but also due to the populist policies of Echeverria, activism and new campesino movements flourished throughout that decade (Ortiz, 2001).
In Chiapas, the 1970s and 1980s were characterised by the emergence of a number of campesino organisations as well as minor armed groups, and the intense political activity in the area started crystallising by the late 1980s in the formation of the Zapatistas. One of the biggest organisations formed in the Lacandona jungle was the K'ip Tic Talekumtasel (Quiptic) (Tzeltal for 'We unite our forces to progress') in 1975. Quiptic, a fusion of cultural, economic, social and religious components which gave the organisation, according to Marcos, a fundamentalist character (Le Bot, 1997), emerged from a nation-wide meeting of the Indigenous Congress organised by the Bishop of San Cristóbal, and enthusiast of 'Liberation Theology', Samuel Ruiz in 1974. Other organisations that emerged in that period were the Union de Ejidos Tierra y Libertad and the Brigada Revolucionaria Emiliano Zapata. In fact, a number of organisations of various political affiliations from the broader left (Maoists, Trotskyists, Guevarists, Leninists, etc.) installed themselves in that period in Chiapas in an attempt to organise the local population. The basic demands of all these groups were 'land and freedom'. The role of the Catholic Church was catalytic for the political organisation of the campesinos given the strong position the Church enjoyed within the indigenous communities. Since the early 1970s, Legorreta (1996, cited in De La Grange and Rico, 1997) argues, the Church was producing the ideological conditions for bringing people to struggle, but it was not giving them the means to do so. Indeed, the indigenous catechists trained by the dioceses to spread Liberation Theology in the communities lacked both the experience and political background for carrying out such a task. Maoist advisers invited by the dioceses undertook to carry out the task, and soon started organising the population according to the tactics of the Guerra Popular Prolongada.
Protests from workers and indigenous campesinos in Chiapas during the 1970s were subjected to violent military repression, and the local powerful landowners, with the support of the government, formed paramilitary groups to control indigenous resistance by violence. Assassinations and disappearances of indigenous campesinos became routine. At the beginning of the 1980s there was nothing to suggest that the situation would improver. In July 1980 the army attacked the township of Wololchan and killed twelve farmers. New peasant movements emerged throughout the state (Bajo Palabra, 2001). The most influential of those was the Union de Uniones, which in 1988 would transform itself into the 'Rural Association of Collective Interest' (hereafter: ARIC). By 1982 the militants of the FLN and allied organisations had already come into contact with people from organisations and communities outside the jungle in the mountains of Chiapas, co-operating with a newly created Catholic organisation named Slop (Tzeltal for 'root'), whose primary aim was the organisation of indigenous resistance. In 1983, in a climate of repression and terror carried out by the police, federal army and paramilitary groups (e.g. Las quardias blancas), which aimed to maintain the interests of the finqueros (large landowners), and after another group of militants had arrived from the city to join the guerrilla group, the FLN, following a period of internal changes, and now including a number of recruited indigenous guerrilleros, was renamed Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN).
The years to come were preparation for the new organisation, which, having a defensive doctrine, preferred not to take direct action and continued with the internal organisation of its military and civil bases in the indigenous communities. Within a few years the EZLN, from being a small guerrilla group, had been transformed into an indigenous army of some thousands of men and women, and supported by a growing number of communities in the jungle and mountains of Chiapas. Meanwhile a crisis had arisen in Quiptic when some of the Maoists organisers tried to take control of the group and were accused of being government agents (some of these same Maoists worked openly for the government in later administrations) (Montemayor, 1998). Eventually, in 1988, after the Maoist advisers had left Chiapas, Quiptic merged with ARIC, and could now count on the support of 6,000 families. The Zapatistas managed to infiltrate the organisation and eventually took control of it, sparking the development of two tendencies within the group, a reformist one and a revolutionary one. Some years later, following the suppression of the revolutionary fraction from the leadership of the group, which was developing in favour of 'legalist' policies, the Zapatistas formed a rival organisation, the Alianza Nacional Campesina Independiente Emiliano Zapata (ANCIEZ), which would soon come to be the political front of the EZLN (De La Grange and Rico, 1997; Ortiz, 2001).
In the summer of 1988 Mexico was in a state of political volatility. Carlos Salinas had been elected president of the republic, but his election had been denounced as a fraud by the left and right opposition, which organised massive demonstrations across the country demanding a recount of the votes. The new president, however, had already been recognised by the United States, many European countries and Cuba. Salinas promised economic stability, a welfare state and democratisation. The National Solidarity Programme (PRONASOL), created in 1992, was one of Salinas's welfare policies, with funds from the World Bank, aiming to create an infrastructure and modernise Mexico's poor areas, including Chiapas. The money, however, was controlled by the PRI and was used as a source of funds for party bosses to purchase loyalty, as well as modernising projects such as building new jails. The same year the PRI government amended the constitution to eliminate communally owned land, the ejidos, which formed the basis for subsistence for many indigenous communities (Neill et al., n.d., late 1990s).
Despite the fact that the Guatemalan intelligence agencies had long since informed their Mexican counterparts about the existence of a guerrilla group in the Lacandona jungle, the group was believed to be small, consisting of lightly armed peasants, and therefore was assumed not to pose any serious threat. But the discovery in May 1993 of a guerrilla camp in the middle of the jungle made it clear that the group was better organised and equipped than previously thought (De La Grange and Rico, 1997). The political situation at that time, however, did not call for action to be taken against the guerrillas. Mexico was preparing to join NAFTA and, at the same time, the 'First World', which Salinas had prompted as the solution to the country's economic problems. Furthermore, during his election campaign Salinas had promised a better relationship with Mexico's indigenous populations. A military operation in the Lacandona jungle, in an area inhabited almost exclusively by indigenous people, as well as the mere admission of the existence of a guerrilla organisation in Chiapas could complicate negotiations with the United Sates and have disastrous economic consequences for the government. Thus, some months after the incident in the jungle, Salinas reassured his readers in an interview that 'there is a stable social climate across the country' (quoted in Montemayor, 1997, p. 50; my translation). Even at this stage nobody could imagine the size of the guerrilla organisation and what was to follow. On 1 August 1993 the Minister of Interior, and former governor of Chiapas, Patrocinio González, gave public reassurances that there were no guerrillas in Chiapas and that rumours were putting in risk the economic development of the area by deterring foreign and national investment (De La Grange and Rico, 1997; Levario Turcott, 1999).
A year before the discovery of the guerrilla camp in the jungle, the indigenous communities were engaged in a process of meetings and discussions to decide the future of their organisation. The discussions concluded with a collective decision whereby the majority voted in favour of declaring war on the Mexican state and authorised Subcomandante Marcos, the mestizo leader of the EZLN and after 1994 spokesperson of the Zapatistas, to make all the necessary preparations for war. Later that year, on 12 October, the country was celebrating the 500th anniversary of 'the meeting of two worlds', the government's eloquent formulation of the Spanish conquista. The same day some 10,000 indigenous (half of whom were members of ANCIEZ) demonstrated in San Cristóbal commemorating in their own way what they called 'the cultural lie of the meeting of two worlds'. After knocking down the statue of the Spanish conquistador and founder of the city, Diego de Mazariegos, which stood in one of the city's squares, the crowd withdrew to the jungle and mountains of Chiapas. Without anybody realising it, the Zapatistas had made their first public appearance. Fifteen months after this simulation of war, the Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Choles, Tojolabales, Zoques and Ma'ames of Chiapas would reappear, this time masked and armed, in the streets of San Cristóbal to declare war on the Mexican government (Monsivais, 1999).
Although the above is a very condensed chronicle of the years preceding the Zapatista insurrection, we should see its construction as a site of political contestation. Authors from the centre and right have normally constructed the Zapatista pre-history as a political means of neutralising and often blackening the movement's past and, consequently, its present, challenging the hypostasis of its discourse, and belittling its significance and democratic horizon. Some authors engage in a purely journalistic analysis and construction of Zapatista pre-history (e.g. De La Grange and Rico, 1997), while others offer more theoretically nuanced accounts, which are nothing more than a selective reproduction of the same anti-Zapatista journalistic accounts in the garb of theoretical analysis.
Discussing Zapatista pre-history, for instance, Guerrero-Chiprés (2004) constructs his version of the Zapatista origins within Laclau's (1990) framework of 'ignobility'. The author's argument, following Laclau, is that in the struggle to establish itself as the source of all good, any force that wants to achieve political hegemony must erase its 'ignoble' beginnings. Guerrero-Chiprés uses mainly anti-Zapatista sources, and selectively chooses those elements that fit his theoretical framework, and produce an image of the EZLN's past as being 'ignoble'. In his account, the social and political context is completely absent. The violence of the state, the atrocities committed by the paramilitary groups, the violent suppression of campesino protests and of their political demands, and the disappearances and murders of activists, are all omitted or treated as irrelevant. Eliminating the political and social context within which FLN and EZLN emerged presents the Zapatista origins as ignoble, for the Zapatista political activity that led to the insurrection of 1994 exists in a vacuum and appears irrational. Having constructed the movement's origins as 'ignoble', Guerrero-Chiprés makes another step, and pathologises the origins of the movement and, to a certain extent, the present movement, by attributing to the EZLN a 'military drive'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Zapatistas"
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Copyright © 2006 Mihalis Mentinis.
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Table of Contents
Preface
1. Zapatista Chronicle
1.1 The Early Years: Prehistory of the EZLN
1.2 Zapatista Chronicle 1994-2001
1.3 'Check'!... but not 'Mate'
2. Theories and Perspectives on the Zapatista Insurrection
2.1 Gramscian Approach
2.2 Laclau and Mouffe's Theory of Discourse
2.3 Academic Autonomist Marxist Approach
2.4 Non-Academic Radical Left Perspectives
2.5 Problems and Limitations of the Readings of the Zapatistas
3. The Project of Autonomy, Constituent Power and Empire
3.1 Ontological Thes