Chiapas in one of the poorest states of the Republic and has the highest concentration of indigenous people and the lowest literacy rate. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived, they had to make do with what they found: no gold or silver, only timber and farmland. The timber regions and the farmland regions went on to experience very different fortunes. All of what follows I learned from reading Basta! Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas, by the anthropologist George Collier. I read the first edition, from Food First Books, published 1995.
The charming mountain city of San Cristobal was founded in 1528 by one of Cortes’s generals, a guy called Mazariegos. Using Indian slave labor, Mazariegos and his lieutenants constructed San Cristobal as the region’s colonial center of power. The plan was to grow cotton and sugar in the lowland jungles, farm European livestock in the temperate foothills, and produce crafts in the urban highland. But the lowland Indians (Collier calls them Indians) got smallpox and measles and died, and the Spanish decided to bring more people to the towns and ranches, and so went around press-ganging more Indians. The Indians and mestizos who worked trades in the towns were integrated into colonial society, but the Indians who worked for the ranchers were still slaves.
The Spaniards divided up the people and resources of their empire according to a system they called encomienda, which laid the groundwork for modern politics all over Latin America. Under encomienda, one well-connected encomendero gets a royal concession to use a parcel of land along with the labor of a group of peasants tied to it, and in return is supposed to make sure the peasants live as Christians.
The Indians and the ranchers of Chiapas have a long and colorful shared history, passing through many iterations of what was always a peon vs. patriarch dynamic. There have been uprisings.There was a statue of Mazariegos in the courtyard of the main church until 1992, the anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of everybody here, when a crowd of indigenous demonstrators tore it down and dragged it through the streets.
By the 1700s San Cristobal was a humming colony, with farmers, laborers and artisans all paying ‘tribute’ to the Crown in the form of goods or labor. Each of the Indian townships around the city had its assigned specialization: sheep, leather, gunpowder. But the Indians in the towns became bourgeouis and distinct from the Indians who did plantation work. And rebellion brewed in the encomiendas. In 1712, a Tzeltal community called Cancuc mounted the region’s first Indian uprising, mostly directed against the abuses of the creepy Spanish priests. The colonial authorities summoned troops from Guatemala and put it down.
In the wake of the Spanish empire, North American and European firms swept in to re-monopolize native assets. Think of all the fancy finery the Western world enjoyed in the nineteenth century: in particular, the mania for mahogany furniture and for coffee, two important Chiapanecan products, as well as all the arithmetically-increasing commercial farmland that fed the world’s exploding populations. In 1824, three years after Mexican and Guatemalan independence, the state of Chiapas was annexed to Mexico. But Chiapas hadn’t been developed to the same degree as the rest of Mexico, and remained a mysterious, inaccessible backwater full of romance and ruins.
Geography remains to this day a fundamental socioeconomic divide in Chiapas: in the western part of the state, the development of commercial plantations kept pace with economic and infrastructural development, and produced a lot of rich landowners and a nuanced social fabric. In the eastern part, towards Guatemala, the rainforests were strip-mined by foreign developers who kept Indians as slaves in their logging camps, never bothering to build any of the roads, schools, or hospitals that plantation owners counted as a cost of doing business.
In the 1860s, the ascendant Liberals started selling poor Indians’ land to private ranchers. Indians had to work on the ranches to live. Under Porfirio Diaz, who ruled Mexico almost continuously from 1877 to 1911, this trend accelerated. The Liberals were in favor of business and modernization and attracting foreign investment in order to expand the Mexican economy. Maybe they thought it was a shame that the Indians had to lose the rights to what had once been their land, but they figured this was the way to bring them into the future and secure for them the benefits of modernity. And this is still a major point of contention for the EZLN: not all indigenous communities have equal access to modern conveniences. In their 1994 agenda for negotiations, besides land, schools and hospitals the Zapatistas demanded televisions, stoves, refrigerators, washing machines.
Then in the 1890s, Guatemala decided to build a cross-country railway to connect its coasts and facilitate its coffee exports. The Mexican government worried that the coffee growers of coastal Chiapas would try to secede, so they built a Pacific railway so all they and all the ranchers in northwestern and central Chiapas could send goods back and forth to central Mexico. (I found it helpful to look at a map at this point.) Eastern Chiapas was forgotten and remains mostly undeveloped to this day. It’s where the EZLN are the strongest.
There are exceptions: the forest-dwelling Lacandon people, one of the last Mexican tribes to be brought into the matrix of modernity, continue to occupy mostly undeveloped rainforest preserves, set aside by the government, where they live off the land, make crafts out of seeds and feathers, and nurture a growing eco-tourism industry. We took a tour of their forest, and we loved it, but even at its edge you’re several hours from modern conveniences.The soil sucks here and so do the diseases. Nevertheless: a lot of peasants were happy just to get some land of their own. The government relocated a lot of farmers to claims in this area, and a lot more came to wait for the formal claim process, while doing what they could to farm the land in the meantime. All found serious obstacles: ranchers, other peasants, a daunting scarcity of cities, roads, public services. By way of example, to get to the fabulous ruined city of Yaxchilan, you have to take a two-and-a-half hour ride from the nearest large town and then a motorboat up the Usumacinta river: fun for a tourist looking for jungle wilderness, but an unforgiving land for the small farmer. This is where the Zapatistas recruit, and also the evangelicals and the various political affiliations.
Like Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Jefferson, and Antonin Scalia, the Zapatistas are constitutionalists. They believe the abstract promises of the Mexican Constitution of 1917, like agrarian reform and television for all, will never be upheld under the present system of government, and they call for a new constitutional convention.
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