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Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
THE CHIAPAS UPRISING
AND THE FUTURE OF CLASS STRUGGLE
IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER
by Harry Cleaver, University of Texas at Austin
hmcleave@utxvm.cc.utexas.edu
for
RIFF-RAFF
(Padova, Italy)
February 1994
If you have come here to help me,
You are wasting your time ...
But if you have come because
Your liberation is bound up with mine,
Then let us work together.
-- Aboriginal Woman
Is the armed uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in
the Mexican state of Chiapas just another protest by the wretched
of the earth in a 500 year history of resistance? Is it just
another foredoomed repetition of earlier, failed Leninist attempts
to organize the peasantry to join the party and smash the state.
Or, are there things about the uprising which are going to have
profound effects and can teach us something about how to struggle
in the present period? The answer, I think, is that the actions
of Mayan Indians in Chiapas and the way they have circulated in
Mexico, to North America and around the world do indeed have some
vital lessons for all of us.
The Electronic Fabric of Struggle
The most striking thing about the sequence of events set in motion
on January 1, 1944 has been the speed with which news of the
struggle circulated and the rapidity of the mobilization of
support which resulted. In the first instance, from the very
first day the EZLN has been able to effectively publicize its
actions through the faxing of its declarations, and subsequent
communiqus, directly to a wide variety of news media. In the
second instance, the circulation of its actions and demands
through the mass media --effective because they were totally
unexpected and on enough of a scale to constitute "news"-- has
been complemented and reinforced by a spontaneous and equally
rapid diffusion of its demands and reports on its actions through
computer communication networks which connect vast numbers of
people interested in events there both inside and outside of
Mexico.
This diffusion, which flashed into conferences and lists on
networks such as Peacenet, the Internet and Usenet, was then
collected, sorted, compiled and sometimes synthesized and
rediffused by particularly interested parties in the nets. For
example, the Latin American Data Base at the University of New Mexico
in Albuquerque began to issue a regular compendium of Chiapas News.
The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy began to issue
Chiapas Digest. The Mexican Rural Development discussion group of
the Applied Anthropology Computer Network began to compile news
and analysis and make it available through an easily accessible
gopher site: Chiapas-Zapatista News. The Institute of Latin
American Studies at the University of Texas has duplicated those
files at its own Lanic gopher site. Information about the
existence and paths of access to these sources were passed from
those in the know (Mexican specialists) to those who wanted to
know (anyone interested in the uprising).
As EZLN documents and news reports circulated they generated and
were quickly acompanied by discussion, additional information from
those with an intimate knowledge of Chiapas (e.g., academics who
had done research in the area, human rights advocates concerned
with its long history of abuse) and rapidly multiplying analyses
of the developing situation and its background. All of this
electronically circulated information and analysis fed into more
traditional means of circulating news of working class struggle:
militant newspapers, magazines and radio stations.
The Anti-NAFTA Background
The rapidity of this diffusion has been due, to a considerable
degree, not only to the technical capacity of such networks but to
their political responsiveness and militancy. Basic to this rapid
circulation of news and analysis of the uprising in Chiapas, has
been the experience of the struggle against the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Over the last few years the fight against NAFTA took the form of
growing coalitions of grassroot groups in Canada, the United
States and Mexico. In each country a broad coalition, such as the
Mexican Action Network on Free Trade, was constituted by knitting
together several hundred groups opposed to the new trade pact.
That knitting together was accomplished partly through joint
discussions and actions and partly through the sharing of
information and analysis about the meaning and implications of the
agreement. Increasingly, computer communications became a basic
political tool for the extremely rapid sharing among groups and
individuals. The same processes of communication linked the
coalitions in each country in a manner never before seen in the
Western Hemisphere. The Anti-NAFTA campaign as a whole has
sometimes been called an "unholy alliance" because alongside the
grassroots networks which make up the bulk of the movement a
variety of conservatives added their voices to the condemnation of
NAFTA, including the leadership of the AFL-CIO and politicians
like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot. Such political manoeuvres to
co-opt or recoup an autonomous movement are typical of American
politics (whether in the U.S., Canada or Mexico) but these efforts
have failed and the character and organization of the movement as
a whole survives. Although the anti-NAFTA movement was unable to
block ratification of the agreement, efforts to monitor the impact
of NAFTA in order to facilitate struggle against it are ongoing
and the goal is clearly its cancellation.
A New Organizational Form
Beyond the particular issue of the agreement, the process of
alliance building has created a new organizational form --a
multiplicity of rhizomatically connecteded autonomous groups--
that is connecting all kinds of struggles throughout North America
that have previously been disconnected and separate.
The responsiveness of this organizational form to the EZLN
declaration of war derives from its compostion. From the
beginning, the building of alliances to oppose NAFTA involved not
only the obviously concerned (U.S. workers threatened with losing
their jobs as plants were relocated to Mexico, Mexicans concerned
with the invasion of U.S. capital) but a wide variety of others
who could see the indirect threats in this capitalist
reorganization of trade relations, e.g., ecological activitists,
women's groups, human rights organizations and yes, organizations
of indigenous groups throughout the continent. Through the years
of struggle against NAFTA position papers circulated, studies were
undertaken, discussion raged about the interconnections of the
concerns of all these groups. The anti-NAFTA struggle proved to
be both a catalyst and a vehicle for overcoming the separateness
and isolation which had previously weakened all of its component
groups.
So, when the Zapatista National Liberation Army marched into San
Cristbal and the other towns of Chiapas not only did those
already concerned with the struggles of indigenous peoples react
quickly, but so did the much more extensive organizational
connections of the anti-NAFTA struggles. Already in place, and
tapped daily by a broad assortment of groups were the computer
conferences and lists of the anti-NAFTA alliances. Therefore,
for a great many of those who would subsequently mobilize in
support of the EZLN the first information on their struggles came
in the regular postings of the NAFTA Monitor on "trade.news" or
"trade.strategy" either on Peacenet or through the Internet. Even
if EZLN spokespeople had not explicitly damned NAFTA and timed
their offensive to coincide with the first day of its operation in
Mexico, the connections would have been made and understood
throughout the anti-NAFTA network.
>From Communicative to Physical Action
This same pre-existing fabric of connections helps explain why the
incrediably rapid circulation of news and information was followed
not only by analysis and written declarations of support, but by a
wide variety of physical actions as well. What was surprising
from the early days of January right through on into February, was
not the widespread and heartfelt demonstrations of support by tiny
groups of leftists with traditions of international solidarity
work, but the much more important rapid mobilization of other
groups who not only took to the the streets, e.g., the huge
demonstrations in Mexico and smaller ones scattered through the
U.S. and Canada (usually at Mexican embassies or consulates), but
who immediately dispatched representatives to Chiapas to limit
government repression by subjecting its actions to critical
scutiny, documenting its crimes and publically denouncing them.
There can be no doubt that their actions -- and the subsequent
rapid circulation of their findings and declarations-- contributed
to blunting the states' military counter-offensive, helping
(along with all the other forms of protest in Mexico and without)
force it to deemphasize military repression, accept mediation and
undertake negotiations with an armed enemy it quite clearly would
have perfered to squash (if it could, which is by no means
obvious).
Autonomous Indigenous Movement
Particularly important in these actions were not only groups
concerned with human rights, both religious (e.g. the Catholic
Bishops of Chiapas, the Canadian Inter-Church Committee on Human
Rights in Latin America) and secular (Amnesty International, Human
Rights Watch, the Mexican National Network of Civil Human Rights
Organizations) --who have been increasing their capacity for such
intervention in recent years-- but also the movement of indigenous
peoples which has been organizing itself locally and on an
increasingly international scale for some time now.
Within Mexico, over the last several years, Indian and peasant
groups and communities have been developing networks of
cooperation to fight for the things they need: things like
schools, clean water, the return of their lands, freedom from
state repression (police and army torture, jailings and murders),
and so on. Given the fierce autonomy of the participating
communities --sometimes based on traditional ethic culture and
language-- these networks have been shaped like the electronic web
described above: in a horizontal, non- hierarchial manner.
Indeed, one term often used by the participants in preference to
"networks" --whose term "net" evokes being caught-- is "hammock,"
the name of a widely used, suspended sleeping device made from
loosely woven string that reforms itself according to the needs
(i.e., body shapes) of each user. These networks that have been
developed to interlink peasant and indigenous communities not only
connect villages in the countryside but also reach into the cities
where neighborhoods created by rural-urban migrants retain
connections to their rural points of origin.
Many indigenous groups with clearly defined Indian culture and
languages have not only organized themselves as such in
self-defense but have reached out to each other across space to
form regional and international alliances. This process has been
going on in an accelerating fashion for several years, not only in
Mexico but throughout much of Americas and beyond. Spurred into
new efforts by the example of the Black Civil Rights Movement in
North America as early as the mid 1960s (e.g., the rise of the
American Indian Movement) and forced into action by state backed
assaults on their land in South and Central America (e.g., the
enclosure of the Amazon), indigneous peoples have been overcoming
the spacial and political divisions which have isolated and
weakened them through alliance and mutual aid.
In 1990 a First Continental Encounter of Indigenous Peoples was
organized in Quito, Ecuador. Delegates from over 200 indigenous
nations attended from throughout the hemisphere and launched a
collaborative movement to achieve continental unity. To sustain
the process a Continental Coordinating Commission of Indigenous
Nations and Organizations (CONIC) was formed at a subsequent
meeting in Panama in 1991. The central symbol and metaphor of the
effort is the Mayan image of the Eagle and Condor with entertwined
necks. Tradition has it that the Eagle represents the peoples of
North America and the Condor those of the Southern continent. The
unity sought is not the unity of the political party or trade
union --solidified and perpetuated through a central controlling
body-- but rather a unity of communication and mutual aid among
autonomous nations and peoples.
A second Continental Encounter was organized in October of 1993
at Temoaya, Mexico. One of the hosting groups at that meeting was
the Frente Independiente de Pueblos Indios (FIPI) and one of the
members of FIPI was COLPUMALI from San Cristbal, Chiapas, one of
the towns where the EZLN offensive began. COLPULMALI stands for
Coordinadora de Organizaciones en Lucha del Pueblo Maya para su
Liberacion, or Coordinating Committee of Organizations of the
Mayan People in Struggle for Liberation. COLPULMALI is reportedly
composed of 11 Mayan organizations from the three regions of
Chiapas that have see the most violent fighting since January 1st.
Faced with the violence of the Mexican military's
counter-offensive, FIPI sent out a call to CONIC requesting that
other Indians in the network come to Chiapas as observers to help
constrain the state violence. CONIC responded immediately by
organizing international delegations which travelled to the battle
zones. When they arrived in Chiapas they were received by the
local offices of the Consejo Estatal de Organizaciones Indigenas y
Campesinas -- made up of 280 indigenous and peasant organizations
throughout the state. This kind of international publicity and
pressure forced Mexican President Salinas to meet with 42
representatives of the Consejo on January 25th, a meeting which
bypassed official political channels of mediation and legitimized
(much to the chagrin of the state) the autonomous political
organization of the Indians. (Not only has the EZLN rejected
government agencies but it has also explicitly rejected any
mediation by representatives of any political parties. In a
January 13th communique, the EZLN stated: mediators "must not
belong to any political party. We don't want our struggle to be
used by the various parties to obtain electoral benefits nor do we
want the heart that is behind our struggle to be misinterpreted.")
As a result of such international organization and action the
positions of both the EZLN and the Indians of Chiapas more
generally have been dramatically strengthened in their current
struggles. It is that strength which has forced the government
the bargaining table.
The Roots of Organization: Self-valorization
These new organizational forms have not been created ex nihilo but
have emerged on the material grounds of the self-activity of
indigenous peoples. In a period in which affirmations of national
and ethnic identity have acquired dramatically negative
associations in Europe because of the murderous brutalities being
perpetuated in ex-Yugoslavia and in parts of the former Soviet
Union, the formation of regional and international regroupings of
indigenous peoples in America working together in mutual support
provides a striking contrast.
Strictly at the ideological level of national and ethnic identity,
the situations in Central Europe and in America have superficial
similarities --the affirmation of the right to self-determination
within geographically defined spaces. The Bosnians, Serbs,
Croates, Azeris, Georgians etc. all assert the right to their own
land, languages and cultures, just like the indigenous groups in
America.
But at a deeper level of the substance of the social relations
embodied in those cultures, languages and relationships to the
land there seem to be fundamental differences. Whatever their
differences, the desires and goals of the contestants in Central
Europe appear to be inextricable (within the present poltical
configuration) from the inherited structures of capital
accumulation understood as structures of social command organized
through the subordination of life to endless work. The
post-communist politicos who have whipped national and ethnic
differences into antagonism, hatred and violence show no sign of
any social project beyond enlarging their share of social command.
That such command should today take the form of mass slaughter,
humiliation (systematic rape) and the destruction of communities,
while tomorrow it may take the form of factory work, office work
and mindless ideology is quite consistent with the experience of
the last few hundred years of capitalism. To date, there is no
evidence of any fundamental reorientation of the socio- economic
order of Central Europe beyond a political reorganization and an
enlarged use of market mechanisms to achieve accumulation.
Certainly, fundamental questioning does exist among Central
European peoples; there are individuals and groups with deeper
visions struggling against the current holocaust. Unfortunately,
their power is so limited as to make their voices largely
inaudible in a region dominated by the sounds of war and hatred.
Among the Indian nations and peoples of the Americas, on the other
hand, the affirmation of national identity, of cultural uniqueness
and of linguistic and political autonomy is rooted in not only an
extensive critique of the various forms of Western Culture and
capitalist organization which were imposed on them through
conquest, colonialism and genocide, but also in the affirmation of
a wide variety of renewed and reinvented practices that include
both social relations and the relationship between human
communities and the rest of nature. The struggles of the Indians
in Chiapas are not only against their exploitation, against the
disrespect with which they have traditionally been treated,
against the brutality of their repression by private thugs, police
and the Mexican military, against the theft of their lands and its
resources, but they are also aimed at expanding the space, time
and resources available to them for the elaboration of their own
ways of being, their own cultures, religions, and so on. They are
not fighting for a bigger piece of the pie, but for real autonomy
from a social system which they understand very well has always
enslaved them and sought to destroy their ways of life, a positive
autonomy within which they can self-valorize, i.e., invent and
develop their own ways of being. (This is not a process free of
conflicts. See the discussion below about indigenous women's
struggles.)
Such self-valorization has often been represented by outside
observers, and sometimes by those involved directly, in terms of
the preservation of tradition, of traditional ways and practices.
As a result, indigenous peoples have often been seen as
fundamentally reactionary, backward looking folks with static
mentalities, conservative survivals of pre-capitalist times. The
actual processes of social life within such indigenous
communities, however, is much more complex and dynamic than is
commonly recognized. From orthodox Marxists who have seen only
the "idiocy" of rural life and debated how to convert Indians and
peasants into good proletarians to the mainstream political
scientists and economists of the post-World War II era who saw
only "irrationality" and debated how to modernize rural areas and
make agriculture more efficient, it is not an exageration to say
that urban intellectuals from all points on the political spectrum
have misunderstood --unintentionally or because it served their
purposes-- the lives and desires of peasant and indigneous
peoples.
Yet, in the last 20 years or so peasants and Indians have
succeeded in making themselves heard above the tittering of
ideologs and planners. This has happened partly because of their
own self-activity, the self-organization described above, and
partly because of fundamental shifts in the overall class
composition which has made many much more willing to listen. Not
only have the struggles of all kinds of "minorities" led to
greater interaction and cooperation among them, but the
qualitative critique of capitalism has led all kinds of people to
seek out alternative sources of meaning that they may want to use
in their own processes of self-regeneration and self-valorization.
On the one hand, indigenous peoples themselves have organized
around issues with a wider audience, forming such groups as the
Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) -- one of those groups
which has protested state repression in Chiapas. On the other
hand, a seemingly endless assortment of individuals and groups
from New Age romantics to militant ecologists have drawn on Indian
ideas and practices to reshape their lives.
Nowhere has this been more obvious than in the ecological movement
where many have explored indigenous attitudes and practices for
inspiration in restructuring human relationships with nature. As
a result it should come as no surprise to many that at the center
of the conflicts in Chiapas today is land, just as in the days of
the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata from which the EZLN took
its name. Not only were the Indians of Chiapas mostly excluded
from the land reforms that began in 1934 under the presidency of
Lazaro Cardenas, but in the years since, local landlords have
repeatedly used both legal and illegal means to grab more and more
land away from the Indians. The process of orignal accumulation
long ago became permanent and the processes of enclosure have been
a endless torture for Indians in Chiapas.
Moreover, the explicit link between the EZLN declaration of war
and NAFTA derived, in part, from the latter's contribution to
enclosure of Indian lands. Using NAFTA (and an International
Monetary Fund "structural adjustment program") as an excuse, the
Mexican government changed Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution
that protected communal land from enclosure and by so doing made
legal its selling and its concentration in the hands of local
agribusiness and multinational corporations. Already the
Banrural, the government's rural development bank, is pushing
forward with massive foreclosures against indebted farmers. The
sale of foreclosed land to foreign agribusiness will help generate
the foreign exchange to continue paying Mexico's foreign debt.
This is what the Indians have seen and this is what the EZLN has
pointed out to the world. In late January, inspired by the EZLN's
successes, thousands of peasants blocked entrances to a dozen
banks in Tapachula, a Chiapan town near the Guatemala border.
Their demands? the cancelation of debts and the halting of land
foreclosures.
This on-going history of the expropriation of indigenous and
peasant lands (which is accelerating the expulsion of people from
the countryside into already horribly over crowded and polluted
cities) is why the EZLN has labelled NAFTA a "death sentence" to
the indigenous population. A death sentence not only because
individuals will be killed (many will be murdered and starved as
they fight or retreat) but because ways of life are being killed.
This is the history of capitalism which American Indians have
suffered and resisted for 500 years. The valorization of capital
has always meant the devaluation and destruction of non-capitalist
ways of life, both those which preceeded it and those which have
sprung up seeking to go beyond it. It has come to be fairly
widely recognized that among the vast extinctions caused by the
ravages of capitalism have been not only animal and plant species
but thousands of human cultures. The Indians in Chiapas, and
those supporting them throughout the hemisphere are fighting to
preserve a human diversity which is as valuable to all of us as it
is to them.
The Refusal of Development
It is the concreteness of the diverse projects of
self-valorization which founds the Indians' struggle for autonomy,
not only from the ideological and political fabric of domination
in Mexico, but also from the broader capitalist processes of
accumulation- as-imposition-of-work --which, in the South, goes by
the name of "development". In the North we come accross the use
of this term but rarely, usually in regard to plans to restructure
the relationships between poor communities and the larger economy,
e.g., community development, urban development. But in the South
"development" has been not only the ideology of capitalist
domination and of socialist promises but also a strategy of choice
ever since the defeat of overt colonialism.
Since the beginning of the EZLN offensive, considerable commentary
from both the state and a variety of independent writers have used
the language of "two nations" to talk about the situation in
Chiapas --a term made commonplace by the Conservative British
writer and statesman Benjamin Disraeli over a century ago. The
two nations, of course, are that Mexico whose development will be
spurred by NAFTA and "el otro Mexico" which is backward and left
behind. The ultimate solution proposed, as always, is
"development". Not surprisingly, within less than a month of the
opening of the EZLN offensive, and following the defeat of the
military counter-attack, the Mexican government announced that it
was creating a "National Commission for Integral Development and
Social Justice for Indigenous People" and promised more
development aid to the area to expand those investments already
made through its previous development project called Solidaridad.
On January 27th it was also announced that these regional
development efforts (and others in similar "backward" states)
would be buttressed by World Bank loans of some $400 million
--loans which will increase the already staggering international
debt which has been at the heart of class struggle in Mexico since
the early 1980s.
The EZLN's published responses to these proposals have articulated
the long standing attitudes of many of Mexico's peasant and
indigenous populations --they have denounced these development
plans as just another step in their cultural assimilation and
economic annihilation. They point out that there have never been
"two nations"; Chiapans have already suffered 500 hundred years of
the capitalist imposition of work --they have simply been held at
the bottom of the wage/income hierarchy. Significantly, in their
initial declaration of war, the EZLN wrote "We use black and red
in our uniform as our symbol of our working people on strike."
(Not surprisingly, the states' negotiator Camacho Solis has called
not only for an end to hostilities but for a "return to work".)
The Indians also know that further "development" does not mean the
return of their land or of their autonomy. It means a
continuation of their expulsion where they are reduce to
impoverished wage earners or to a role well known to Indians in
the U.S.: attactions within the tourist industry --a favorite
"development project" for areas with "primitive" peoples. The
government, one EZLN spokesperson wrote, sees Indians "as nothing
more than anthropological objects, turistic curiostities, or part
of a 'Jurassic Park'." Of government development programs? The
people of Chiapas know them well: "The program to improve the
conditions of poverty, this small stain of social democracy which
the Mexican state throws about and which with Salinas de Gortari
carries the name Pronasol [a so-called "social development fund"]
is a joke which costs tears of blood to those who live under the
rain and sun." In a statement issued on January 31st, the
Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee -- General Command
(CCRI-CG) of the EZLN pointed out that "The federal government is
lying when it talks about us.... There is no greater rupture
in communities than the contemptible death that federal economic
programs offer us."
But the free trade pact will open U.S. markets to Mexican
exports, Salinas and Clinton have promised; Mexico will develop
faster. This too the EZLN understands all too well. Chiapas is
already an export oriented economy; it always has been: "the
southeast continues to export primary materials, just as they did
500 years agao, and continues to export capitalism's principal
production: death and misery." Is this just rhetoric? The EZLN
knows the facts in excruciating detail: "The state's natural
wealth doesn't only leave by way of roads. Chiapas loses blood
through many veins: through oil and gas ducts, electric lines,
train cars, bank accounts, trucks and vans, boats and planes,
through clandestine paths, gaps and forest trails. This land
continues paying tribute to the imperialists: petroleum, electric
energy, cattle, money, coffee, banana, honey, corn, cacao,
tobacco, sugar, soy, melon, sorghum, mamey, mango, tamarind,
avocado and Chiapan blood flows as a result of the thousand some
teeth sunk into the throat of southeastern Mexico." Do Clinton and
Salinas really think they can sell export oriented development to
Indians who are already all too painfully familiar with the
draining away of the wealth of their land?
NAFTA also opens Mexico to U.S. exports and from the Indians'
point of view the most threatening of these is corn, the basic
food crop of the indigenous population and an important source of
cash income. Although their rejection of cheap food imports has
not received the same media coverage as that of rice farmers in
Japan or French farmers in Europe (against the GATT), the story is
the same: a recognition that a flood of cheap food produced with
highly capital (including chemical) intensive methods in the U.S.
will drive down prices and drive them from the land. Already they
are suffering from low prices for coffee, another cash crop, due
to a withdrawal of government support from that production, so
their antagonism springs not from speculation but from bitter
experience. (The economic impact from low coffee prices has been
deepened by the disruption of the current harvest caused by the
states' military counteroffensive. While the government has
apparently promised some US$11 million in emergency aid, the
Banrural has also said that it would not change its plans to
foreclose on endebted farmers.)
The Indians also know that development means ecological
destruction. The following passage from an EZLN document is sadly
reminiscent of Karl Marx's earliest economic writings on new laws
in Germany that made it a crime for peasants to gather wood in the
forest. "They take the petroleum and gas away and leave the stamp
of capitalism as change: ecological destruction, agricultural
scraps, hyperinflation, alcoholism, prostitution and poverty. The
beast is not satisfied and extends its tentacles to the Lacandon
Forest: eight petroleum deposits are under exploration.... The
trees fall and dynamite explodes on land where peasants are not
allowed to cut down trees to cultivate the land. Every tree that
is cut down costs them a fine of 10 minimum wages and a jail
sentence. The poor cannot cut down trees while the petroleum
beast, every day more in foreign hands, can. The peasants cuts
them to survive, the beast to plunder.... In spite of the trend
of ecological awareness, the extraction of wood continues in
Chiapas' forests. Between 1981 and 1989 2,44,777 meters cubed of
precious woods, conifers and tropical tree types, were taken out
of Chiapas.... In 1988 wood exports brought a revenue of
23,900,000,000 pesos, 6,000% more than in 1980.... Capitalism
is in debt for everything that it takes away."
The EZLN program would restore the land to its peoples. It would
abolish the debts of farmers and demand repayment of the debt owed
by those who have exploited the people and their land. The
Indians of Chiapas would forget about "development" and begin the
reconstruction of their world. They would not do it in one way,
through a plan drawn up by a central committee; they would do it
many ways, according to their diverse understandings, worked out
and coordinated through cooperative efforts.
The Autonomous Demands of Women
Within the Indian Movement
This refusal of development has grown to include the rejection not
only of government sponsored, top-down development plans and
projects, but also the reinforcement and strengthening of old
injustices in Chiapan societies and culture. Alongside the
struggle against land concentration, the exploitation of wage
labor and political repression, there has also grown up a critique
of racism (discrimination of latinos/mestizos against Indians) and
of gender roles and the consignment of women to the bottom of
society. The patriarchal character of Mexican society is well
known; that of the Indian communities less recognized but often no
less real. The struggle for the "survival" of Indian culture has
also involved the struggle for its transformation --from within.
In this case, as usual, those who have suffered most have been at
the forefront of the fight for change.
In traditional Indian society, when the good land was theirs,
before they were pushed into poor forest lands often far away from
good water sources, life was not so hard. Their agricultural
practices were often land intensive rather than labor intensive
and they were able to reap an abundant and diverse harvest. But
as their land was stolen from them and it became harder and harder
to survive on fewer and fewer resources; life became increasingly
difficult, especially for women. Some of their traditional tasks,
such as food preparation and cleaning, have always involved a lot
of work, but the situation worsened. For example, it is generally
Indian women who must be up at the crack of dawn to grind corn for
the day's bread: tortillas. It is generally Indian women who must
haul water for cooking, drinking, cleaning and bathing. It is
generally Indian women who cut firewood (now illegal) and haul it
home for cooking. It is generally Indian women who do the
cooking, and take care of the children, and of the sick. But hard
work makes strong women --if it doesn't kill them-- and such women
have challenged their traditional roles.
This challenge found support in the EZLN and acceptance from its
leaders. Not only were women encouraged to join the EZLN but they
have been, according to all accounts, treated as equals to the
point that many women have officer status and men and women are
expected to carry the burdens of work and fighting equally. When
Indian women organized in dozens of communities to produce a code
of women's rights, the EZLN leadership composed of Mayan leaders
--the CCRI-CG-- adopted the code unanimously. The "Women's Law"
included the rights of all women, "regardless of race, creed,
color or political affiliation", "to participate in the struggle
in any way that their desire and capacity determine", the right to
"work and receive a just salary", the right to "decide the number
of children they have and care for", the right "to participate in
the matters of the community and have charge if they are freely
and democratically elected", the right (along with children) "to
Primary Attention in their health and nutrition", the right "to
choose their partner and are not obliged to enter into marriage",
the right "to be free of violence from both relatives and
strangers. Rape and attempted rape will be severely punished",
the right to "occupy positions of leadership in the organization
[EZLN] and hold military ranks in the revolutionary armed forces",
and finally "all the rights and obligations which revolutionary
laws and regulations give". According to one report, when one of
the male committee members quipped "The good part is that my wife
doesn't understand Spanish", an EZLN officer told him: "You've
screwed yourself, because we're going to translate it into all the
[Mayan] languages." Clearly, the passage of this Bill of Rights
reflects both the problems and ongoing struggles of women within
the diverse Indian cultures of Chiapas. What is unusual and
exciting about these developments is how those struggles are not
being marginalized or subordinated to "class interests" but are
being accepted as integral parts of the revolutionary project.
Conclusion?
I began this brief discussion with a question about whether the
revolt in Chiapas is just one more local revolt, or something
more. I think it is much more. Once we understand its sources,
motivations and methods, I think we can learn a great deal. It
does not offer a formula to be immitated; its new organizational
forms are not a substitute for old formulas --Leninist or social
democratic. It provides something different: an inspiring example
of how a workable solution to the post-socialist problem of
revolutionary organization and struggle can be sought. The
struggles of the Indians in Chiapas, like the anti-NAFTA movement
which laid the groundwork for their circulation, demonstrate how
organization can proceed locally, regionally and internationally
through a diversity of forms which can be effective precisely to
the degree that they weave a fabric of cooperation to achieve the
(often quite different) concrete material projects of the
participants. We have know for some time that a particular
organization can only be substituted for the processes of
organization at great peril. It is a lesson we have learned the
hard way in struggle for, and then against ,trade unions, social
democratic and revolutionary parties.
What we see today is the emergence of just such a fabric of
cooperation among the most diverse kinds of people, linking
sectors of the working class throughout the international wage and
income hierarchy. That fabric has not appeared suddenly, out of
the blue; it has been woven. And in its weaving many threads have
broken, and been retied, or new knots have been designed to
replace those which could not hold. It is not easy to construct a
hammock, to use the Mexican word, but we see that it is possible.
In many ways the revolt in Chiapas is an old story, 500 years old.
But it is also a very new, and exciting story. The EZLN offensive
has taken place within and been supported by an international
movement of indigenous peoples. That movement itself has
established many connections with other kinds of people, other
sectors of the working class, from blue collar factory workers
fearing job loss, to white collar intellect workers using the most
advanced technological means of communication and organization
available. Ever since the rise of capitalism imposed working
class status on most of the world's people, they have struggled.
In those struggles isolation has meant weakness and defeat,
connection has meant strength. Connection comes with mutual
recognition and the understanding that struggles can be
complementary and mutually reinforcing. As long as workers in the
U.S. and Canada saw Mexicans as alien others, parts of the unknown
Third World, capital could play the later off against the former.
But struggles throughout the continent have forced a degree of
integration that such blindness is becoming easier and easier to
overcome. Part of the work of the anti-NAFTA movement involved
the assessment of dangers and the discussion of alternative
approaches in the light of diverse situations and needs. Part of
the work involved circulating the results of that research and
those consultations to a wider audience. The result has been the
beginning of a transformation in the consciousness and
understanding of the North American working class and a consequent
growth in the ability to cooperate in struggle.
Today, the uprising in Chiapas results in continent-wide
mobilization. But this is not the only such mobilization.
Mexican factories which could once repress militant workers with
impunity are now subject to observation and sanction by workers
from the U.S. and Canada who are increasingly intervening to
constrain repression just as indigenous militants and human rights
activists have intervened to help the EZLN. Multinational
corporations who could pay off Mexican officials and dump toxic
wastes into communities along the border are today subjected to
increased scrutiny and sanction by workers and ecologists. When
the EZLN demands, as it has, that Chiapan workers be paid wages
equal to those North of the border, it is a demand heard,
understood and supported by increasing numbers of those Northern
workers whose wages are being driven downward by "competition"
from the South. When the Indian communities of Chiapas fight for
their land, it is increasingly understood by those elsewhere not
as reactionary but as the equivalent of the struggles of waged
workers for more money, less work and more opportunity to develop
alternatives to capitalism.
Today, the social equivalent of an earthquake triggered by the
EZLN on January 1st is rumbling through Mexican society. Every
day brings reports of people moving beyond amazement and concern
to action. Peasants and Indians completly independent of the EZLN
are taking up its battle cries and occupying municipal government
buildings, blocading banks and demanding their lands and their
rights. Students and workers are being inspired not just to
"support the campesinos" but to launch their own strikes against
domination and exploitation throughout the social factory. How
far these aftershocks will reach and how much they will change the
world will depend not just on the EZLN or on the Indians of
Chiapas, but on the rest of us.
Austin, Texas
February 14, 1994
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