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Abstract
This introduction examines the historical background and political consequences of the 1994 armed uprising by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in the Mexican state of Chiapas. It begins by presenting a chronology of events, and charting some of the impacts of the uprising on democratization and the rights of indigenous peoples and women in Mexico. This is followed by an examination of the debate concerning the origins and nature of the EZLN itself. Also considered are the agrarian reform, state formation, economic crisis and political and religious change in Chiapas over the period 1920–2004. The final section looks briefly at some of the consequences of the rebellion of 1994, which reignited and intensified many of the pre-existing social and political conflicts in the state.
Notes
1 NAFTA was portrayed by the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as evidence for the success of the ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or the Institutional Revolutionary Party) programme of pro-market reforms. For a list of all the acronyms used in this volume, see the composite list (Glossary and Acronyms) which precedes this introduction.
2 The four municipalities were Ocosingo, Las Maragritas, Altamirano, and San Cristóbal de Las Casas, stretching from the eastern lowlands to the central highlands of Chiapas.
3 In 1968, the year that Mexico hosted the Olympic Games, the Mexican government clamped down sharply on the student movement, which was calling for greater civil and political rights, infamously massacring 300 protesters in Tlateloco on 2 October. The movement was subsequently driven underground and a number of urban and rural armed guerrilla groups emerged in the 1970s, which the state fought through a programme of counter-insurgency that became known as Mexico's ‘dirty war’.
4 Former President Plutarco Calles established the PRI in 1929 as the National Revolutionary Party (PNR). In 1938 it was renamed the Mexican Revolutionary Party, and in 1946 it acquired its present name. During the rest of the century all Mexican presidents and most officials belonged to the PRI, which was often accused of corruption and electoral fraud. Its victory margins decreased in the 1980s and 1990s, and it lost some state elections to its opponents, but the party still remained Mexico's dominant political group.
5 According to Jan Rus, these para-military groups were an evolution of the private armies used by landowners and the state to control the rural population in Chiapas after 1940. He contends that: ‘As the “traditional” controls of indigenous people represented by the guardias blancas and expulsions [private rural armies and the exile of political and religious dissidents] have been increasingly challenged by the rise of opposition groups within indigenous communities since … 1994 … , the state political apparatus has encouraged the formation of extra-official grupos armados, or paramilitares, made up of [indigenous] government loyalists within each community, to restore order.’ These semi-clandestine groups, armed and paid through local officials of the state PRI, have conducted a campaign of violence and intimidation throughout indigenous regions of state – particularly in central highlands and north [Rus, Citation2004a: 219].
6 These were the Union of Ejidal Unions and United Peasant Groups of Chiapas (UU) in the Lacandón forest and the central highlands, the Independent Confederation of Agricultural Workers and Peasants (CIOAC) in Simojovel and the Emiliano Zapata Peasant Organization (OCEZ), principally in the municipality of Venustiano Carranza [Harvey, Citation1998: 36].
7 According to Pitarch, the voices of non-Zapatista indigenous people from Chiapas or other parts of Mexico were not heard in the press [Pitarch, Citation2004a: 105–8]. Furthermore, EZLN propaganda rested on an inversion of the negative stereotype of the Indian, which was just as misleading, and which Indians were required to play along with if they wished to gain political influence [Pitarch, Citation2004a: 118]. The reactions and perspectives of indigenous people to the uprising were complex and varied. For a view of the 1994 uprising from the perspective of an urban Tzotzil Indian from San Cristóbal de las Casas see Marián Peres Tsu [Citation2002].
8 Such as the creation of an independent indigenous radio station, access to bilingual education, respect for indigenous culture and tradition, an end to discrimination, the granting of indigenous autonomy, and curbs on the power of government-backed caciques [Harvey, Citation1998: 203].
9 The ‘demographic revolution’ became evident in Chiapas in 1990, ten years later than in the rest of Mexico. The birth rate began to fall around 1970 and the decline accelerated rapidly after 1994: in 1990 on average each woman gave birth to 4.5 children; in 2000 the figure was 2.94 (compared to 2.4 in the rest of Mexico). This drop was not due to later marriage, but because more women started using contraceptives. Nevertheless, because of high birth rates and falling mortality rates after 1950, the current economically active population is relatively large and due to grow 70 per cent between 2000 and 2030, therefore putting severe strain on the labour market [Viqueira, Citation2004].
10 According to Guillermo de la Peña [Citation1986], in rural Mexico the post-revolutionary state's corporate institutions operated through informal networks of local and regional power. Political power was thus both centralized and dispersed. He characterizes the Mexican political system under the PRI as a ‘hierarchical patronage network’, in which regional brokers were subordinate to the central government and the party but were empowered by that relationship in the local context. As a result, there was an overlap between clientelism and corporatism throughout rural Mexico, and both clientelism and violence were integral to institutional power at the regional level and as a means of achieving centralization [Harvey, Citation1998: 55]. For a detailed study of how the PRI penetrated the institutional structure of one indigenous community in Chiapas, and the operation of the resulting system of caciquismo, see Rus [Citation1994].
11 The CNC was the official peasant organization that operated within the power structure: by contrast independent peasant organizations were denied legitimacy and resources and subject to co-option or repression [Harvey, 1998: 55].
12 Between 1981 and 1987 some 800 peasants were killed in land-related conflicts in Mexico, and many people were imprisoned for political activity in support of landless groups. Most violence was perpetrated against peasant organizations not affiliated to the PRI [Harvey, Citation1998: 26].
13 People in this group could be costumbristas (whose religion is a syncretic mix of native and Catholic beliefs), Mormons or Jehovah's witnesses, and those who have recently changed religion.
14 This could involve the redistribution of private property expropriated from landlords, or, as was often the case in Chiapas, the distribution of public lands (known as ‘national lands’) to peasants. According to María Eugenia Reyes Ramos [Citation1992: 31], throughout Mexico agrarian reform was used as a political weapon by the state and by diverse political and regional groups to define their position and mark out spheres of influence after the Mexican Revolution.
15 See Jan Rus [Citation2004b] and Neil Harvey [Citation1998: 52–54].
16 For example, after 1940 successive state governments legally authorized rural landowners to hire Mounted Rural Police Corps, also known as guardias blancas, to defend their interests. Although officially designated merely to protect livestock from rustlers, they were primarily used to suppress peasant organizing and protest. Guardias blancas, which were particularly prevalent in the municipalities of Simojovel, the valley of Venustiano Carranza, and much of the central valley region, were implicated in the murder of most of the 132 peasant leaders and activists documented as having been murdered in Chiapas over the 1974–87 period. They were also involved in the repression of members of opposition parties, independent peasant organizations and NGO co-operatives. After 1994 they often evolved into para-military groups, linked to the PRI, which have been used to evict peasant squatters and suppress political dissent in the countryside [Rus, Citation2004a: 218].
17 For more about INI and the state liquor monopoly, see Lewis [1994].
18 Despite legal prohibitions, debt peonage continued in several remote parts of Chiapas, notably Simojovel and Ocosingo, until the 1970s and 1980s.
19 As Rus points out, although indigenous communities in Chiapas, above all those in the central highlands, were idealized in much early anthropological literature as isolated and stagnant societies, their inhabitants had always participated in wider social, political and economic structures. This they have done not just as ‘traditional’ peasants, but also as migrant labourers, managed by ladino landowners, labour contractors and the state authorities [Rus, Citation2004a: 199–200].
20 For example, in the period 1960–84, 83 new population centres were created in Chiapas covering 219,334 hectares and affecting 6,154 beneficiaries, many of whom came from other municipalities and even other states [Reyes Ramos, Citation1992: 94].
21 In 1988 virtually the entire ejidal sector was dependent on rain fed agriculture, and of the 3 million hectares held by 200,000 ejidatarios (approximately one million people, if their families are included), only 41 per cent was classified as good for agriculture. On those lands maize was the most important crop, followed by coffee. In that same year only 10% of ejidos had paved roads, 50% had electricity and 35% had piped water [Harvey, Citation1998: 173–5]. After 1988, the fall in international coffee prices combined with structural adjustment in the rural sector had a negative impact on productivity, output, incomes and the environment in Chiapas [Harvey, Citation1998: 176–9]. Harvey considers that there was a lack of commitment by the state to help colonists, and ejidatarios in general, make their land more productive, and to allow them to retain enough profits to reinvest in improving their social and economic conditions [Harvey, Citation1998: 192].
22 This was the case in the municipality of Venustiano Carranza, located in the eastern lowlands of Chiapas, where the Organización Campesina Emiliano Zapata (OCEZ) was formed in 1982 out of a local Indian peasant organization that had developed in the 1970s to recover 50,000 hectares of land that had been granted by presidential decree in 1965. OCEZ later became affiliated to the EZLN [Harvey, Citation1998: 59–61, 99–108, 116, 126, 132–9].
23 The cañadas of the Lacandón rainforest can be divided into two subregions: the cañadas of Ocosingo and Altamirano; and the cañadas of Las Margaritas. In the former Tzeltal and Chol Indians predominate and the presence of Dominican and Jesuit missionaries has been significant. In the latter context, Tojolba'les are the majority, and priests from the diocese of San Cristóbal and Marists were more common [Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco, Citation1996: 21–2].
24 The regions in which the EZLN has had greatest influence since 1994 are either those in which coercive debt peonage increased during the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) – for more on this topic see Washbrook [Citation2005] – or areas that received migrants from such regions in the post-revolutionary period.
25 In 1990 settlers (colonos) from the states of Campeche, Tabasco, Quintana Roo, Yucatán, Veracruz and Puebla made up 5% of the population of Las Cañadas and the adjacent region of Palenque, and 7% were from Guatemala [Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco, Citation1996: 51].
26 For example, from the 1960s Tzeltal migrants, the majority of whom had left nearby haciendas, were accompanied by Catholic pastoral agents, who sought to establish a new Christian community in the Lacandón jungle. The Tzltales began interpreting the process of colonization as a form of exodus that was destined to establish new kind of community in the ‘promised land’ [de Vos, Citation2004: 219–22].
27 According to Gemma van der Haar (this volume), by 1974 there were ten times more catechists than schoolteachers in the adjacent Tojolobal highlands.
28 Priistas are members of the PRI.
29 As documented by Sonia Toledo [Citation1996: 106–40], the struggle between peasants and landlords in Simojovel during the 1980s was bitter. Backed by the state government, landlords used hired gunmen (pistoleros), public security agents, guardias blancas, para-militaries and the federal army to repress, intimidate and dislodge organized peasants and union leaders. Human rights were routinely flouted and a number of peasant leaders were murdered.
30 As Pitarch notes, ‘tradition’ has become increasingly powerful and attractive as a political strategy, and discussions about ‘tradition’ and ‘change’ have become a key aspect of political discourse among Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas alike. Yet, ‘tradition’ in itself is an empty, complex and paradoxical category that can be used either to delegitimize and repress political dissent or as a means of resistance against state penetration and manipulation [Pitarch, Citation2004a: 105–8; 2004b]. For a different and less optimistic view about the political role of ‘tradition’, see Tom Brass (this volume).
31 The discourse of women's rights evolved through the process of grassroots organizing by the Church and peasant institutions that took place in Chiapas from the 1970s onwards. After 1994, the Zapatistas provided the space for indigenous women to demand equal participation in their homes, communities, organizations and in Mexico as a whole. However, as Harvey notes, even though the peasant organizations that supported the EZLN began to construct a discourse and agenda regarding women's rights in 1994, the Zapatista response to its own initiative has been weak (see Harvey [Citation1998: 223–6] and Oliveira, this volume).
32 For a discussion of the wider implications of political autonomy, and the link between this and the formation of indigenous nationalism and ‘peasant nations’, see Tom Brass (this volume).
33 According to Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor, the struggle for administrative and political autonomy is a reaction against state corporatism, which has its antecedents in earlier struggles for municipal control by the peasant movement of the 1970s and the counter-celebrations in 1992 marking the quincentenary of the conquest [Burguete Cal y Mayor, Citation2003: 195]. In Chiapas earlier conflicts gave rise to social and political fragmentation and polarization as one group became allied to governmental institutions or the ruling party, and the other group, which was excluded from the social benefits provided by the state, became affiliated to church denominations, opposition political parties, social organizations and NGOs. Thus, before 1994 most communities were already highly fragmented, but ‘the demand for autonomy was eclipsed by peasant organizations that prioritized the agrarian struggle and producer organizations that emphasised the process of production’ [Burguete Cal y Mayor, Citation2003: 194–9]. After 1994, as the EZLN and a number of indianist organizations throughout Mexico furthered the development of a discourse of indigenous rights (see Leyva Solano, this volume), autonomy became an increasingly attractive proposal in many divided municipalities. Neil Harvey maintains that support for indigenous autonomy can be seen as ‘a response to the crisis of the institutional sphere and the continuing absence of democratic guarantees in Chiapas’ [Harvey, Citation1998: 234].
34 According to Leyva Solano, there has also been the consolidation of Zapatista rule and the resolution of conflicts between Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas living in same space [Xóchitl Leyva Solano, Citation2004].