Rural democratization and decentralization at the state/society interface: What counts as ‘local’ government in the mexican countryside?

Abstract

Rural local government in Mexico is contested terrain, sometimes representing the state to society, sometimes representing society to the state. In Mexico's federal system, the municipality is widely considered to be the ‘most local’ level of government, but authoritarian centralization is often reproduced within municipalities, subordinating smaller, outlying villages politically, economically and socially. Grassroots civic movements throughout rural Mexico have mobilized for community self-governance, leading to a widespread, largely invisible and ongoing ‘regime transition’ at the sub-municipal level. This study analyzes this unresolved process of political contestation in the largely rural, low-income states of Guerrero, Hidalgo, Oaxaca and Chiapas.

Notes

1 On ‘invited spaces,’ see Cornwall 2002, 2004, and Cornwall and Schattan Coelho 2007. For comparative empirical analyses of varying degrees of autonomy and participation in such programs in rural Mexico, see, among others, Fox 1994a, 1996, 2007. On recent debates over official participation reforms, see Cooke and Kothari 2001 and Hickey and Mohan 2004.

2 For background information about rural democratization, see Fox 1990.

3 It is safe to say that the now enormous literature on decentralization retains a distinct urban bias, with the partial exception of the body of research on India's Panchayats, whose vast experience cannot be done justice here. For broad comparative overviews, see Crook and Manor 1998 and Ribot and Larson 2005. For recent studies that specifically focus on the democratization of a level of rural government that is closer to the village than most, the barangay in the Philippines, see Estella and Iszatt 2004. On accountability dynamics in Chinese village government, see Tsai 2007. For development studies of rural municipalities in Latin America, see Cameron 2005, Fox and Moguel 1995, Fox and Aranda 1996, Pallares 2002, Rowland 2001 and Tendler 1997. On decentralization and participation issues in Mexico more generally, see Selee and Santín del Río 2006.

4 In parts of rural Africa, for example, what appear to be forms of customary rule and therefore societal representation often turn out to be legacies of colonial indirect rule, state-regulated forms of top-down governance that end up competing with territorial forms of citizenship-based representation [Ribot, 2004.

5 Olmedo 1999 is one of the few specialists in Mexican municipal governance to refer explicitly to the ‘fourth level of the state’.

6 Note that the majority of rural producers in Mexico, even before the recent acceleration of social inequality, have long been sub-subsistence producers – that is, semi-proletarian. According to the most rigorous class analysis of rural Mexico, based on a reinterpretation of 1975 census data through Chayanovian categories, 63% of ejido members produced less than enough for subsistence. Of the total producer population, 86.6% were peasants, included 56% at sub-subsistence and another 16% at subsistence levels, accounting for 56% of the arable land in standardized rainfed hectares. For details, see CEPAL 1982: 114, 123].

7 Ejidos are government-regulated agrarian reform communities; most were created between the 1930s and 1970s, and they account for approximately one half of arable land.

8 Note that there was little peasant protest against the reforms of the constitution's agrarian provisions at the time, in part because national leaders were promised that their members' specific agrarian problems would be resolved [Fox, 1994b Note also that in many ejidos, internally unequal land distribution and lack of leadership accountability led many members to welcome the increased certainty associated with individual land titles. For initial overviews of the impacts of the ejido reforms, see Cornelius and Myhre 1998 and Randall 1996.

9 Personal email communication, Javier Salinas, La Jornada correspondent, 22 May 2006.

10 Note that in Mexican political discourse the term ‘pueblo’ means both ‘community’ and ‘people.’

11 For background on Mexican municipalities, see the government's Institute for Federalism and Municipal Development at http://www.e-local.gob.mx/wb2/INAFED/INAF_Inicio and the Network of Researchers on Mexican Local Government at http://www.iglom.iteso.mx/

12 On the Centro de Servicios Municipales ‘Heriberto Jara,’ founded in 1990, see http://www.cesemheribertojara.org.mx/

13 Only a small fraction of local demands for new municipalities are approved, hence the focus here on the issue of sub-municipal autonomy. Because the creation of new municipalities requires the approval of the state congress, approval is unlikely in cases where the town center that would ‘lose’ subordinate territory is ruled by the same party.

14 See the photo of Altamirano in La Jornada, 4 January 1994, as well as Burguete 1998.

15 The Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI (Partido Revolucionaro Institucional) exercised political power in Mexico for much of the twentieth century.

16 Some of the ideas in this section were discussed in Fox 2002.

17 See Añaya Muñoz, 2005, Díaz Montes 2002, EDUCA 2005, Flores Cruz 2002, Hernández Navarro 1999, Recondo [2002] and Velásquez 2000a, 2000b. For a comparison with other states, see Assies, Ramírez Sevilla and Ventura Patiño 2006.

18 López and Robles Camacho [2005] and personal email communication with Oaxacan municipal development specialist Fernando Melo, 15 May 2006.

19 Personal email communication, 10 April 2006 with Fernando Melo.

20 Inter-village land conflicts in Oaxaca have a long history of provoking bloody conflicts. Historians and agrarian experts stress the responsibility of federal authorities in either ignoring or exacerbating these conflicts [e.g., Dennis, 1987.

21 For context, however, it is worth noting that while the percentage of female mayors in Oaxaca's indigenous municipalities is very low, it is also low throughout Mexico. A recent UN study found that only 3.5% of Mexico's municipalities are governed by women, one of the lowest rates in Latin America [Anzar, 2005.

22 On the changing roles of migrants in indigenous community governance, see Kearney and Besserer 2004 and Robles Camacho 1994.

23 For further discussion of the impacts of municipal social funds on local democratization, based on a representative sample of rural municipalities in the state of Oaxaca, see Fox and Aranda 1996. This study also addresses the role of World Bank projects in Mexico's rural municipal policy process. For broader context on the World Bank in rural Mexico during the 1990s, see Fox 1997, 2000.

24 On Guerrero's rural social organizations, see Bartra 1996, 2000, Dehouve 2001, Espinosa Damian 1998, Hébert 2003, Johnson 2005 and Yaworsky 2005. For the results of a detailed study of local governance in Guerrero, see the series of articles in the journal Autogestión, published in the state capital by the Programa de Autogestión para el Desarrollo Social, a grassroots training NGO (Self-Management Programme for Social Development). See PADS 2004.http://www.pads.com.mx/

25 See ‘Ley Orgánica del Municipio Libre del Estado de Guerrero,’ Arts. 198, 203B. accessible at www.pads.com.mx

26 See demographic data in Tlachinollan 2004.

27 The municipality includes 87 villages and the population numbers over 20,000, of which 68% non-Spanish speaking and 65% is illiterate [Tlachinollan, 2004: 21]. For a gender analysis of this local democratic struggle, see Rodríguez Cabrera 2005.

28 For details, see Cruz Rueda 2006, Habana de los Santos 2003a, Johnson 2005, 2007, Rojas 2005, Rowland 2003 and Tlachinollan 2004, among others. For a detailed ethnography of municipal governance in part of the region, see DeHouve 2001.]

29 The state government appeared tolerant at first, but quickly became unsupportive. For example, in one case the state police jailed community police for jailing someone who had made death threats against a relative, and only freed them in response to a mass protest [Habana, 2002.

30 In San Luis Acatlán, the decision of the municipal authorities to put some community police leaders on the payroll provoked others to occupy the town hall in protest, to defend the principle of unpaid community service [Habana de los Santos, 2003b.

31 Cited in Bellinghausen 2006b. He also quotes local leaders who note that ‘the maa'phaa do not like to be called “tlapanecos,” because it means “dirty face.” They also deplore that the soldiers have raped their daughters, sisters and wives ‘as revenge because we are building popular power.’

32 Personal email communication, 6 April 2006.

33 For a comprehensive account, see Schryer 1990.

34 See the ‘Ley Organica Municipal del Estado de Hidalgo,’ Articles 75 and 76, at http://www.e-local.gob.mx/wb2/ELOCAL/ELOC_Ley_Organica_Municipal_del_Estado_de_Hidalgo.

35 This account is from Juan Cisneros, a rural development practitioner with two decades of public sector and NGO experience in Hidalgo (interviews, Mexico City, April and August, 2001).

36 As one autonomous municipal leader put it: ‘indigenous pueblos and civil society named authorities to be able to deal with the most urgent problems in the zone … The main goal is to show the government that with or without resources [from the state] we can promote sustainable development [and to] demonstrate to the government how to administer justice, taking into account the voice of the people, and that it be the communities themselves that can make decisions on development and the mandate of their authorities’[cited in Rodríguez Castillo, [n.d.].

37 The former position was associated with indigenous rights experiences in Oaxaca, while the latter position was associated with a non-Zapatista political formation, the ANIPA, which promoted the formation of Autonomous Multi-Ethnic Regions in their areas of influence in Chiapas, such as the Tojola'bal region.

38 See Hernández and Vera 1998: 80–86] also cited in López Monjardin and Rebolledo Millán, 1999. For a broad overview of post-San Andrés Accords political conflicts over indigenous rights reforms, including the beginning of the Fox administration, see Hernández Castillo, et al. 2004

39 For detailed descriptions of government hostilities, from the point of view of Zapatista municipal leaders, see the communiqués at www.laneta.apc.org/enlacecivil.

40 The EZLN is the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional).

41 Personal communication, Araceli Burguete, 10 April 2006. On formal elections in this region, see Viquiera and Sonnleitner 2000.

42 For a detailed study of this process in north-central municipalities of Chilón and Sitalá, in the context of broader racial and class conflict, see Bobrow-Strain 2007.

43 See Chiapas Media Project [2004].

44 Personal communication, Araceli Burguete, 10 April 10, 2006.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Fox

This article is a revised and abridged version of a chapter entitled ‘Decentralizing Decentralization: Mexico's Invisible Fourth Level of the State,’ from Fox (2007). The author is grateful for input from two reviewers, as well as the following Mexican activists and analysts Xóchitl Bada (Michoacán), Araceli Burguete (Chiapas), Juan Cisneros (Hidalgo, San Luis Potosí), Matoui Domínguez Escobedo (Veracruz), Carlos García (Guerrero), Flavio Lazos (Querétaro) and Fernando Melo (Oaxaca). Thanks also to Raju Das, Tom Brass, Jennifer Franco, Kent Eaton, Xóchitl Leyva and Jennifer Johnson for comments on earlier versions. All translations from Spanish are by the author.