Indigenous Autonomy, Delinquent States, and the Limits of Resistance

† The research on which this paper is based forms part of a larger project carried out with the aid of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, entitled “Security for All in the Age of Securitization?”

Abstract

This paper focuses on struggles by Mexican indigenous communities to defend their patrimony and guarantee their own security in an environment dominated by the parallel power of organized crime, paramilitary violence, impunity, and a neo-extractivist economy. After reviewing the relationships between the radicalization of indigenous autonomy demands and transformations of the Mexican state, analysis focuses on recent developments involving a Nahua community on the Pacific coast of Michoacán state that has a long history of successful defence of its communal lands, alongside a Purépecha community in the central highlands that has been its longstanding ally. The violence of external actors reflects the penetration of all levels of government by organized crime, but violence is not a new historical experience in this region. What has changed is that the capacity of these communities to resist has been affected by their internal disarticulation by the same forces.

Keywords:

• Indigenous Autonomy
• Resistance
• Impunity
• Organized Crime
• Mexico

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust and also want to acknowledge the valuable contribution to data collection made by a Mexican research assistant who must remain anonymous for reasons of personal security, but emphasize that I alone am responsible for the arguments and analysis that the paper offers. I originally carried out fieldwork in Ostula, complemented by archival research, over two years in 2002–2003. Leverhulme funding enabled me to collect updated ethnographic data in 2011–2012, including new interviews with local actors.

Notes

† The research on which this paper is based forms part of a larger project carried out with the aid of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, entitled “Security for All in the Age of Securitization?”

1 An example from outside Michoacán of which I have some direct knowledge is the conflict between the Canadian Blackfire mining corporation and the inhabitants of Chicomuselo, Chiapas, a non-indigenous municipality close to the Guatemala border in which the leader of the campaign against the mine was assassinated. There has been violent repression of protest movements against casino and up-market tourism projects that displace fishermen and farmers along the length of Mexico's Pacific Coast. Similar concerns motivated recent protests in Oaxaca state against a wind-farm project funded by Spanish capital.

2 The Cristero rebellion was prompted by the government's closing of Catholic churches, a move that also prompted peaceful forms of “resistance” among middle-class groups in urban areas, although it was the extensive participation of rural villagers that turned the rebellion into a major problem for the post-revolutionary state.

3 To give two spectacular examples from 2012, Federal Police, often presented as the solution to the problem of the regular co-optation of municipal and state police by organized crime, attacked a vehicle carrying agents of the US Drug Enforcement Agency accompanied by an officer of the Mexican Marines, and two bands of their own officers engaged in a shootout in the domestic terminal of Mexico City airport.

4 Indigenous communal land could not be privatized directly, although it was possible to advance towards privatization by transforming an indigenous communal property regime into an ejido and some indigenous communities already held their lands under the ejido or private co-property forms of tenure rather than as communal property.

5 The COCOPA draft was based on the agreements reached between the EZLN and the previous PRI government headed by Ernesto Zedillo in San Andrés Larráinzar in 1996. The agreements remained unfulfilled by Zedillo and the two succeeding PAN administrations, but the new PRI government that won power in the 2012 elections promised to revisit the matter, appointing Jaime Martínez Veloz, a member of the old COCOPA, to head a new Commission for Dialogue with the Indigenous Peoples, focusing on ensuring equality of access of all citizens, indigenous and non-indigenous, to “justice, education, health care and infrastructure”. The EZLN was invited to participate in this new process, but this gesture appeared more propagandistic than substantive, since it was clear that “too radical” autonomy demands remained off the table and that there was ample scope for playing off one set of indigenous interlocutors against another.

6 The Spanish colonial regime was based on a system of indirect rule. The original reference to usos y costumbres in New Spain relates to the approval of self-government and use of indigenous customary law in the “Republic of Indians”. Contemporary uses and customs government is based on selection of community officials through consensus in communal assemblies and the revival of institutions such as councils of elders that were part of the “traditional” governance structures of indigenous communities, although some of these alternative forms of local government are, on closer inspection, invented traditions, or reflect the resignification of forms of organization that previously regulated religious life for secular purposes.

7 A figure of 57,449 deaths is widely accepted as a minimum by the Mexican press. There are innumerable methodological deficiencies in the way the Mexican government distinguishes homicides relating to the actions of organized crime and the security forces from other kinds of homicides, and many independent organizations place the death toll considerably higher than this figure. Another problem in accounting the costs of Mexico's public security policies is the lack of government efforts to measure internal displacement of population, though analyses have been made on the basis of official figures published by INEGI, the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. For further details and discussion, see Molloy (2013) and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (2012).

8 I have borrowed the concept of “delinquent states” in the title of this paper from Brazilian social historian Gaio (2006). The concept emphasizes the role of the state in fostering the development of organized crime, a perspective also advocated in the Mexican case by Campbell (2009).

9 Literally commoners: members of the indigenous community sharing in its collective property.

10 This is an officially recognized administrative sub-division of a municipality.

11 No body was recovered. Revered as a saint in his home community, there were persistent, and as it turned out well founded, rumours that he was not actually dead.

12 The original indigenous community of Aquila was extinguished in the nineteenth-century drive to end corporate property, but reconstituted under the post-revolutionary agrarian reform laws in 1981.

13 Although people from the indigenous communities have been directly involved in marijuana cultivation, the main actors involved in the trafficking of cocaine and methamphetamines are mestizos located in La Placita and Aquila. As we will see in the final section of the paper, more members of the Ostula community have been drawn into involvement in drug trafficking as well as consumption, sometimes through personal or political patronage ties, but the controlling figures remain outside the indigenous community.

14 In 2006, this included refusal to enter into the official Programme for Certification of Communal Land Rights, another artefact of the neoliberal counter-agrarian reform.