Rural democratisation in Mexico's deep south: grassroots right-to-know campaigns in Guerrero

Abstract

In Mexico's southern state of Guerrero, rural social and civic movements are increasingly claiming their right to information as a tool to hold the state publicly accountable, as part of their ongoing issue-specific social, economic, and civic struggles. This study reviews the historical, social and political landscape that grounds campaigns for rural democratisation in Guerrero, including Mexico's recent information access reforms and then compares two different regional social movements that have claimed the ‘right to know’. For some movements, the demand for information rights is part of a sustained strategy, for others it is a tactic, but the claim bridges both more resistance-oriented and more negotiation-oriented social and civic movements.

Keywords:

• rural democratisation
• transparency
• accountability
• Oportunidades
• Guerrero
• Mexico

Notes

This study is part of an international comparative research project on new politics and rural democratisation, sponsored by the Transnational Institute. Thanks very much to Jenny Franco, Alessandra Galie, Daniel Gomez, Jun Borras, Mauricio Sánchez and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier versions. The Guerrero field research team, sponsored by the Peasant University of the South, also includes Susana Oviedo Bautista, Marcos Méndez and Lourdes Rodríguez. Background field research and two information rights forums in Guerrero were supported by a grant to the University of California, Santa Cruz from the Hewlett Foundation.

¹For links to national, state and local human rights groups' reports, see the National Network of Civil Human Rights Organizations at http://www.redtdt.org.mx. Comprehensive, comparable data on long-term trends is not available, however.

²Guerrero's four main indigenous peoples are Nahua, Mixteco, Amuzgo, and Tlapaneco (also known as the Me'phaa). In addition, Afro-Mexican communities live along the coast. For official demographic data on ethnicity, see http://www.cdi.gob.mx.

³On Guerrero's rural guerrilla movements in the late 1960 and early 1970, see Mayo (1984), Bartra (1996), and Doyle (2003), among others.

⁴Note that many of Mexico's states have followed their own distinctive pathways to political change. In some states, alternation in power through multi-party electoral competition in governor's races preceded the change in the party in power at the national level in 2000, while other states still have yet to cross a minimalist democratic threshold, as in the case of Oaxaca. The first Mexican states to make this breakthrough were in the north, which fit the widely-held assumption that the social foundations of political democracy depend on urbanisation and the rise of the middle class. Guerrero's historical trajectory suggests, in contrast, that the impulse for political democracy can be grounded in peasant and indigenous movements, and the difference in outcomes depends heavily on whether the state responds with repression or political opening. In Mexico in the late 1980 and early 1990, the regime recognised state level electoral victories that came from the right, while denying those that came from the left. This pattern was known as ‘selective democratisation’. On the role of ‘subnational politics’ in Mexican democratisation, see Cornelius et al. (1999).

⁵In contrast to the neighbouring states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, Guerrero has very few non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with any rural presence, and the Catholic church has not been a leading force for democratisation and social change – with the notable exception of support from the Tlapa diocese for the ‘Tlachinollan’ Human Rights Center (www.tlachinollan.org). For an overview of NGO-grassroots movement relations in Mexico before electoral democratisation, see Fox and Hernández (1992). Yaworsky's (2002) study addresses the contradictions involved in NGO development activities in Guerrero, though most of the organisations he considers under that label are membership organisations.

⁶For more on the Federal Institute for Public Information Access (IFAI), see www.ifai.gob.mx.

⁷On the years of grassroots mass organisation that preceded the national law, see Jenkins and Goetz (1999), Singh (2007), and Kidambi (2008) among others. On the Indian right-to-know experience more generally, see the work of the leading national campaign at www.righttoinformation.info and Baviskar (2007).

⁸For a discussion of action-research dilemmas, see Fox (2006).

⁹Only one third of rural households in the state of Guerrero are landholders (Espinosa and Meza Castillo 2000, 79). Yet Guerrero did experience a significant degree of land reform, especially in the 1940 (Salazar Adame 1987). Three-quarters of the state's land is in the agrarian reform sector, where ejidatarios have access to an average of 7.8 hectares per family of arable rainfed land (Espinosa and Meza Castillo 2000, 80). Yet these averages hide a high degree of polarization among landholders, since approximately two thirds of both ejidatarios and private owners are considered ‘sub-subsistence producers’, and another 15 percent are considered subsistence producers. At the same time, as in much of rural Mexico, agrarian polarisation is partly mediated by a layer of ‘transitional’ small-scale producers that produce commercial crops (e.g., coffee). In Guerrero they account for just over 10 percent of producers. This typology, developed by the UN Economic Commission on Latin America, defines sub-subsistence producers as families with less than four hectares of a nationally standardised unit of arable rainfed land, subsistence producers have four to eight hectares, stationary producers have eight to twelve hectares, and surplus-producers have access to more than twelve hectares. Transitional producers are defined as those who employ between 25 and 500 days of wage labour per year. Commercial producers employ more than 500 days of wage labour per year. Though dated, this study of land tenure remains Mexico's most conceptually and methodologically rigorous (CEPAL 1982, 109–10, 278–9).

¹⁰For details, see http://www.policiacomunitaria.org, García Jiménez (2000a), Johnson (2005, 2007), Reyes Salinas and Castro Guzmán (2008), and Rowland (2005), among others. For discussion in the context of campaigns for rural municipal democratisation, see Fox (2007a, 2007c).

¹¹For most of the twentieth century, Mexican governors were chosen from above, by the president, and then nominally elected.

¹² Ejidos are communal land holdings, established by the post-revolutionary state and ostensibly governed by membership assemblies. Ejido unions are formal associations of members of different ejidos who join forces to work collectively on economic development projects. Because ejido unions hold legal status, they can apply for credit and government support for projects. While many of the ejido unions formed during this period were induced from above, a substantial number did represent their members (Fox 1992, 2007a). The most dynamic Uniones de Ejidos in the early 1980, which eventually organised a state-level network, were the Alfredo V. Bonfil (coffee, in the Costa Grande and Montaña), Communities of the Costa Chica (hibiscus), Ejidos of the Costa Chica (corn and honey), Vicente Guerrero (sesame and corn), Adrián Castrejón (corn), Encarnación Díaz (peanuts and corn), Emiliano Zapata (corn), and the Hermenegildo Galeana (community forestry). See Bartra (1996), Espinosa (1998), García Jiménez (2000a, 2000b) and Meza Castillo (2000), among others.

¹³This move was part of a broader trend in which the Mexican state reconfigured the nature of its intervention in rural society, rather than withdrawing, as is widely claimed. Seen from afar, it looked like the Mexican state had fully withdrawn from markets, but seen from below, state governments often occupied the space left by those that withdrew, while new national agrarian, welfare and marketing agencies intervened even more deeply than their predecessors (Fox 1995, Snyder 2001).

¹⁴This paragraph draws on a detailed human rights report (PRODH 1995).

¹⁵Closed-door negotiations facilitate government attempts to buy off social leaders by offering short-term material concessions or ‘support’, so that they set aside their larger strategic demands and stop working with other organisations. This practice is popularly referred to as ‘maiceo’ (which refers to the practice of scattering corn on the ground to feed pigs and chickens).

¹⁶For further discussion of the government's many different kinds of regional councils, see Fox (2007a).

¹⁷These councils were originally designed by reformist federal policymakers to be grassroots pro-accountability watchdogs, and they quietly hired hundreds of radical community organisers to launch them. This accountability strategy used the old-fashioned kind of transparency as a tool – regular, direct inspection of warehouse stocks and store deliveries. See Fox (1992, 2007a).

¹⁸Government repression of a teachers' union protest in Oaxaca had triggered a broad civic uprising against a governor widely seen as illegitimate, leading to a ‘dual power’ situation that involved months of mass street demonstrations, city-wide barricades, and government torture. See, among others, Esteva (2007).

¹⁹Another rural civil society response by activists and educators was to invest in grassroots leadership development. In 2004, they launched the Peasant University of the South (Universidad Campesina del Sur, or Unicam). This project seeks to legitimise the knowledge of local producers and communities, as well as to provide training and education to groups traditionally excluded from the formal education system.

²⁰ Figure 1 draws on the experience of Carlos García Jiménez, as a direct participant or observer. See also García Jiménez (2000a, 2000b).

²¹Note the February 2009 assassinations of two leaders of the Organization for the Future of the Mixteco People (Habana and Ocampo 2009).

²²This section draws on Fox et al. (2007), which includes detailed discussion of debates over information rights for specific issue-based public interest campaigns (i.e., human rights, environment, health rights, etc.).

²³For links to international comparative discussions, see www.foiadvocates.net and www.freedominfo.org.

²⁴This is consistent with the comparative literature on transparency institutions, which finds that targeted approaches that are oriented to specific user groups generate the most demand (Fung et al. 2007).

²⁵In 2006, for example, the Oportunidades social programme received more than 87,000 formal ‘citizen demands’ for information (including complaints), in spite of possible fears of reprisals. These women's concerns were registered mainly by phone and in writing – in sharp contrast to the 60,000 IFAI information requests that were directed to many dozens of national agencies, primarily from urban men with high levels of formal education (Fox and Haight 2007, Fox 2007a).

²⁶Six autonomous, community-based and grassroots support organisations convened the information rights forum (PADS; Sociedad de Producción Rural ‘Sinecio Adame’; Centro de Capacitación, Investigación, y Estudios Estratégicos; Tadeco; Centro Operacional para el Fortalecimiento de Iniciativas Sociales; and the Universidad Campesina del Sur). See Fox et al. (2007, 300).

²⁷For case studies of regional and local rural democratisation movements in Guerrero, see Canabal (2002) and Dehouve (2001).

²⁸See Emanuelli (2006) and Martínez Esponda (2007a, 2007b).

²⁹See case details at http://www.cemda.org.mx/artman2/publish/Litigio_Ambiental_3/Resumen_del_Caso.php [Accessed 2 March 2009].

³⁰The information politics dimension of the conflict was underscored by two of the United Nations' special rapporteurs for human rights, whose site visit report diplomatically reminded the Mexican government of its commitments to international treaties and national laws, under which it is obliged to ‘guarantee freedom of information, consultation and free, prior and informed consent’ for people threatened with displacement (Stavenhagen and Kothari 2007). Stavenhagen and Kothari are UN special rapporteurs for indigenous and housing rights, respectively. They noted in particular the lack of public access to the environmental impact assessment and the lack of a social impact assessment, as well as the community divisions aggravated by lack of adequate information. In response, Mexican government pressures led the country office of the UNDP to come out in favour of the dam (Ramírez Bravo 2009).

³¹See CEMDA/AIDA (2007).

³²See Ramírez Bravo (2009) and information request 1816400178008, accessible via Infomex at http://www.ifai.gob.mx [Accessed 8 March 2009].

³³Co-authors García Jiménez and Haight participated directly in this campaign as advisors, together with Susana Oviedo, Lourdes Rodríguez and Louise Ashton.

³⁴For extensive official evaluations carried out by universities and research centers, see www.oportunidades.gob.mx.

³⁵For further discussion of this issue and Oportunidades more generally, see Fox (2007a), among others.

³⁶An early critique by Mexico's National Network of Rural Women's Organizers was an exception, focusing on the programme's divisive impact on pre-existing cooperatives (Red Nacional 2000).

³⁷Additionally, Oportunidades beneficiaries report that in Ejido Viejo, the government power company charged the health center at the commercial rate, as though it were a private store.

³⁸Indigenous women in the Tlapa region came together to express similar concerns at the same time (González Benicio 2008).

³⁹For details, see the Norma Oficial Mexicana NOM-178-SSA1-1998, Guerrero State Health Ministry guidelines available at http://www.guerrero.gob.mx/?P=tramitedetalle&key=185, the Federal Health Ministry's General Law for Health and the Social Protection of Health at http:///www.seguro-popular.salud.gob.mx/descargas/marco_juridico/07_02_rlgsmpss.pdf, and specific health agreements and rules established by the Federal Health Ministry at http://www.salud.gob.mx/unidades/cdi/nom/compi/ac24dic.html [Accessed 2 May 2008].

⁴⁰ Oportunidades Rules of Operation, 2008, No. 4.2.2, 6.8.1 and 6.8.4.

⁴¹ Oportunidades Rules of Operation, 2008, No. 6.8.1.

⁴²For background on the decentralisation of health policy in Mexico, see Homede and Ugalde (2006).