LEADERSHIP TRANSFORMATION AND THE EXERCISE OF POWER: POLITICAL DIVISIONS IN SAN JERÓNIMO TULIJÁ, CHIAPAS

Abstract

This article presents an ethnographic analysis of three indigenous leadership types and their formation in contemporary Chiapas. In their interaction with state institutions—and with its policies for political organization and economic development, these cases show the leadership strategies they use to benefit their communities and to help understand local definitions of power. In San Jerónimo Tulijá, the area under study, the regional state formation process is the historical framework where local practices and beliefs are shaped and reshaped during daily interactions. This paper shows how some communitarian factions were formed in the context of commercial interactions introduced by development projects brought into the state; these evolved into political divisions that are still recognizable in the context of the low intensity warfare experienced in this region. Therefore, an anthropological-historical perspective is needed to grasp how fighting in or against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) is closely linked to historic local struggles and disputes.

Key Words:

• indigenous leadership
• state culture
• political division
• factionalism
• intra-communitarian violence
• counterinsurgency

I thank Consejo Nacional para Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) for financing research undertaken between July 2001 and April 2003. I also thank Dra. Regina Martínez for her comments on a preliminary version of this document. This article develops ideas first worked in my Ph.D. thesis that also were enriched during the discussion seminars for guest postgraduates students affiliated with the Centre for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS-Sureste).

Notes

1. All names have been changed to protect the identities of the participants.

2. Following the deployment of federal soldiers in 1995, CIEPAC has been publishing useful figures of the militarization and paramilitary activity in Chiapas. For further details refer to their bulletins, especially their no. 49, accessible on line at http://www.ciepac.org/boletines/index.php. Paramilitary activity in Chiapas reached its hottest point 22 December 1997, when sixty men massacred forty-six indigenous refugees. Las Abejas (the Bees) denounced that the intellectual authors of the crime are still free and that the government has refused to recognise that, instead of a confrontation between “brothers,” what really took place on 21 December 1997, was a “state crime” (La Jornada, 21 December 2005, accessible on-line at http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2004/dic04/041222/016n2pol.php).

3. Xi'Nich' is an independent organization of Chol, Tzeltal, and Tzotzil indigenous peoples. In 1992 its members walked from Chiapas to Mexico City with the explicit objective of speaking with the President. They refused governmental development programs for being insufficient and badly planned. This march put their agenda in the media, but they returned home without being able to meet President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

4. By “preexisting intimate culture”, Lomnitz-Adler refers to communities politically organized in concrete and unique contexts shaped according to the types of interactions and class domination to which they had been subjected historically at the local level (Lomnitz-Adler 1992: 113–114). The author's emphasis focuses on the identification of culture in relation to the social space where it is reproduced. In analyzing a “regional culture”, the author calls our attention to its hierarchical integration through the exercise of power. Therefore, in identifying a regional culture “we must analyze the regional frame of cultural interactions (communication), defining the kinds of interaction in the context of frames that characterize different sorts of places (…)and that “regional cultures are built upon different kinds of social interactions [that] map out in regional space” (1992: 19).

5. “Force field” is a concept that Monique Nuijten (1998) develops from Norman Long's definition of a social field as “an arena of social life defined in relation to certain types of actions” (Long 1968: 9), rather than focusing on the process-oriented notion of force field developed in the Manchester school of anthropology (Turner 1974; Kapferer 1972; Mitchell 1969) that defines it as the “dynamics of social action and interpretation in which norms are subject to manipulation and negotiation” (Nuijten 1998:17). Long's understanding of social field is not defined in relation to the notion of value, but in terms of action, and states that “individuals and groups do not operate in clearly defined institutional frameworks but rather construct fields of action that often cross-cut formal organizational boundaries and normative systems” (Long 1989: 252). Building on Long's definition of social field, Nuijten's notion of force field as a field of power (Nuijten 1998: 17) emphasizes the importance of organizing practices and the influence that “struggle and power differences between different sets of social actors” have in them (Nuijten 1998). As a consequence, forms of ordering and patterns of organizing processes are a result of forces playing within certain fields (1998: 19).

6. Collective works include many types of productive projects. In Scenes of Resistance (Navarro-Smith 2000) I showed collective maize plots whose produce was used to feed the widows of those killed during the first days of the war in 1994, as well as the ill or the disabled. Other collective works included the construction of “non-smoking stoves” to prevent eye and respiratory illnesses among women, dry-latrines to reduce gastrointestinal illnesses, and to produce organic fertilizer for their vegetable gardens; vegetable gardens; women and men in local stores that helped their members to run and organize them and to decide where to expend their profits. I also had the chance to visit collectives making boots and wooden furniture.

7. Paradoxically, social organizations supporting the construction of autonomous governments in Chiapas published in their web pages a comuniqué from the authorities of the Autonomous Municipality Ricardo Flores Magón, in which Don Julio is identified as a paramilitary. This is a problematic issue for well-intentioned backing up groups concerned with the violation of human rights and which struggle to help indigenous people to have their right for autonomy and self-determination recognized and respected. In these cases it may be the case that the autonomous authorities have attached a different meaning to the word “paramilitary” than the one that outsiders do. I myself have come across this problem while editing the film and within this context and have come to the conclusion that “paramilitary” is used to define someone who disagrees with the Zapatista's viewpoint and/or political strategies and not necessarily someone who is actively working in an armed group planning attacks against the support bases of the EZLN (see the reports published by the Centro De Análisis Político e Investigaciones Sociales y Económicas (CAPISE), the International Commission of Human Rights Observers, and the web page that followed the Zapatista Caravan to Mexico City in 2000, respectively, on-line at http://www.ciepac.org/otras%20temas/monteazul/infmazul.htm http://www.zapata.com/site/cciodh3/article-cciodh3-117.html and http://www.laneta.apc.org/consultaEZLN/autonomo/000618rf.htm).