Why Is There An EZLN? pt 3

    So how did the latest, well-organized armed uprising come to pass? Why do some of the region’s Tzotzil-speaking peasant communities herd sheep and sell trinkets, while others wear ski masks and carry rifles? Maybe the question to ask is, outside of a handful of rebellions, why was Chiapas so calm for most of its history?
  
Collier offers 1974, the date of a nationwide conference on Indian self-determination, as year zero for the radicalization of indigenous groups. In coalition with a team of government anthropoligists and social workers, a commitee of Chiapanecan Indians drafted a long list of grievances, which became a flashpoint later as commitee heads began to get involved in the time-honored system of corruption and patronage, and began to clash with radical interlopers from nationwide peasant alliances and workers’ unions. By the late eighties there was a critical mass of educated rejectionists in the countryside, and many of them had already experienced bloody turf battles with enemy peasant factions and with ranchers and their enforcers. Under the leadership of some charismatic metropolitan intellectuals, this peasant army went undergound and started gathering maps and weapons. In May of 1993, the Mexican army raided an EZLN garrison in a remote outpost called Corralchen in the eastern Chiapanecan wilderness, and the government was forced to play down rumors that a sophisticated guerrilla headquarters had been captured, complete with scale models of towns and army bases. The president was afraid any homegrown terrorism would scotch the looming NAFTA treaty, which at that very moment his American counterpart was working so hard to get the US Congress to ratify.
   
    Although the Zapatista leadership chose January 1, 1994, the date NAFTA took effect, to become a full-fledged militant uprising, this coincidence has been understood as a “p.r.” decison. The movement’s critical catalyst had actually come in 1992: the quasi-legal suspension, under President Salinas, of the ongoing process of land reform called for in Mexico’s constitutionally-enshrined Agrarian Code. This bitter decision was a reaction to the debt crisis Mexico was facing in the wake of its oil bust. The international banking community, that shadowy archvillain, demanded that the Mexico Congress ram an austerity program through which would cut off the subsidies and price controls that peasant farmers had depended on. This was the moment at which the Zapatista army decided that all their training and plotting, under the dark cover of the jungle canopy, had gone on long enough.

    Land reform, which is very hard to understand and, let’s be honest, kind of boring to read about, had been on the books for a long time, and worked well enough, for enough of the populace, that it outflanked peasant uprisings elsewhere. But owing to the unique development history of the state of Chiapas, there were some major fuck-ups here in the land reform area. The struggle to get land claims acknowledged by the government was drawn-out, bureaucratic, and arbitrary, and ended up alienating a lot of farmers with nowhere else to turn. And the issue goes back a long time.

    Just like we’ve seen in these last couple years, the world financial crash of 1929 scared capital out of developing countries, and Mexico was suddenly drained of a lot of foreign investment. The federal government, under Lazaro Cardenas, had to change its development strategy in order to focus on nationalizing industry, and to emphasize agrarian reform. Now, instead of exporting food, Mexico was going to produce tons of it for cheap domestic consumption. All the under-used commercial estates would be turned over to large-scale peasant collectives called ‘ejidos’, which would turn out cheap food for the urban workers, thus keeping wages low enough to encourage the growth of industry AND building a market for industrial goods out of a population of former subsistence farmers.

    Throughout its history as an independent republic, Mexico has made a lot of fuss over land reform. The right to land is one of the pillars of the constitution and a cherished legacy of the Revolution, and land grants have been one of the main sources of peasant support for Mexico’s long stretch of one-party rule. The state and its agencies have always been torn between giving land to the poor to farm, and trying to make this same land as productive as possible. Historically the federal government has rejected the indigenous peasant’s style of farming: leisurely growing food for one family or one village over a tremendous amount of acreage, with none of the bone-scraping efficiencies of scale or the costly technical expertise that characterize modern agribusiness.

    Cardenas’s reforms worked well for several decades. By the end of his term, a big chunk of Chiapas had been given over to ejidos.Nationally, a power base had been created for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, who with broad peasant support continued to govern Mexico into the ‘90s. You  still see their stickers on certain pickup trucks and Range Rovers. Land grants were one of the reasons the federal government decided to annex the states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo once and for all, and now they’re home to thousands of resettled farmers.

    So when the United States entered World War II, Mexico became a breadbasket again. American demand and commercial investment put the country back on track exporting produce and textiles on a big-business level. Land reform stopped and in some places regressed. But now to keep wages down and industry booming, Mexicans’ meals had to stay cheap. That was a problem for farmers, who had become accustomed to buying factory-made plowshares, which were rising in price faster than food, and the farmers started moonlighting as low-wage commercial farmhands when they were done subsistence farming.

    To integrate the far-flung Indian growing regions into Mexico’s agricultural economy, the federal government drew on its newly-established National Indianist Institute. The INI trained indigenous leaders to act as community leaders, in charge of implementing all the clinics and sanitation networks these regions needed, as well as managing innovations in farming and telling the ejidos what crops to grow. These leaders became local power brokers. They were also the front line of a government campaign to emphasize the Indian identity of these communities, which ended up dividing Indians from the other peasants who shared their ‘class interests’. And as each community tried to maintain ties with the federal authority to get their land claims recognized, they were forced to compete with other communities in the same region.

    Although peasants now control much of the land in eastern Chiapas, haven’t historically controlled the local government. That was down to the ranchers and plantation directors. Unlike in the central highlands, where the Indian townships were awarded patronage, representation, and self-determination for their political loyalty, as well as land grants, in the rough-and-tumble east it was the crooked ranchers who controlled elections.

    The rich in these towns have been getting richer, through a variety of means. And with the concentration of wealth and power come opportunities for entrenchment: land can be hard to come by if you cross the wrong people. The agrarian reform authority can give you and your group brand-new land to farm, if you meet certain conditions. However, this land is sometimes occupied by ranchers or landlords in a position to dispute the reassignment of their hectares. The ranchers often have a ‘buffer’ of friendly peons on the fringes of their property: small-time farmers loyal to the rancher and grateful for the land he’s already sold them. After an initial spasm of violence of 1994, when the newly-militant Zapatista guerillas, “lightly-armed”, as they’re invariably described, managed to occupy San Cristobal and five other towns for a day or two, the EZLN retreated to their far-flung pockets of isolated autonomy in the rugged hills and in the inhospitable Lacandon rainforest, to live by the sweat of their brow.

    In the highland Tzotzil communities that remain loyal to the federal government, life seems pretty nice. Men and women have their distinct roles, religion is very strong, if highly idiosyncratic-- to the point of attracting international tourism. (The Catholic church considers these groups “traditionalist”, and abandoned them around the time anthropologists were moving in to study them as living exemplars of Maya religious practice.) Once a month, the women queue up in the town square, where a couple of government workers guarded by armed soldiers sit behind a makeshift desk and pass out a bright little pile of Mexican currency to each woman, in exchange for her thumbprint on a distribution record. It’s like something out of the occupation of Afghanistan. The men farm or work jobs in the cities, the women weave and cook and make crafts. The food is lean and organic and the pace of life is pleasantly slow and punctuated by feasts and rituals. The life expectancy in these areas is 75 for women, 71 for men.

    While the highland Tzotzil manage to buck the government and the civilization it represents in a variety of poetic ways--for example, not observing daylight savings time, or the sacrament of marriage--these communities stand more or less safely integrated into the modern Mexican polity.Tribute by peonage is replaced with tribute by ballot box, with the rewards of free cash and public works replacing the ancient blessing of absolution and holy communion.