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Understanding The Chiapas Revolt In Mexico
Chiapas Analysis - Part I By Peter Rosset with Shea Cunningham
This analysis of the EZLN uprising in Chiapas comes by way of Third World Network Features, whose address is given at the top of the post
The recent revolt by the Zapatista guerrillas in the Mexican state of Chiapas appeared like a bolt out of the blue. However, as the following analysis reveals, there were deep underlying causes for this revolt, the historic roots of which can be traced back to the Spanish conquest of the Americas some 500 years ago. (First of a two-part article)By Peter Rosset with Shea Cunningham
'The state of Chiapas is a world divided by racism and by rich and poor. A majority of the Mayan Indians here live in wood slat and mud houses with dirt floors. Eight to 10 people sleep together in one room on three or four beds. Most have access only to dirty water from a nearby stream for cooking, cleaning and drinking, and for dumping their own waste. Children readily die of diarrhoea and dehydration, of tuberculosis, or of some other preventable or curable disease that stalks their malnourished bodies.' - - Jenna, who works on an organic farm project in Chiapas, in a fax to the author.
'We have nothing to lose, absolutely nothing, no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, poor health, no food, no education, no right to freely and democratically choose our leaders, no independence from foreign interests, and no justice for ourselves or our children. But we say enough is enough! We are the descendants of those who truly built this nation, we are the millions of dispossessed, and we call upon all of our brethren to join our crusade, the only option to avoid dying of starvation!' -- Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, 1993.
On New Year's Eve, 1993, the Mexican state of Chiapas was thrust upon the international scene as the Zapatista guerrilla army simultaneously seized control of the colonial city of San Crist"bal de las Casas and five towns in the surrounding Chiapas highlands. Though this immediately calls to mind the recent conflicts of neighbouring Central America, the Zapatistas showed a much greater degree of organisation and military strength in their first action than had the FSLN in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, or the URNG in Guatemala. And unlike most of the Central American guerrilla organisations, their rank and file are composed almost exclusively of teenagers and young adults from the ethnic Mayan groups of the highlands.
What at second glance appears to be another ethnic conflict in a decade of ethnic strife around the world, is both that and more. The roots of the struggle do indeed spring from the history of marginalisation and racism to which the Mayan Indians have been subject, but their Declaration of War and other statements clearly reach out to the poor of all ethnic groups across the length and breadth of greater Mexico. With a greater understanding of the cultural and social nuances of Chiapas this and other paradoxes begin to make sense.
Roots of the Conflict: 500 Years Since the Conquest
Geographically the state of Chiapas is part of Central America, the volcanic isthmus where we find the southernmost frontier of the indigenous cultures of North America. The central region is a high elevation plateau composed of steep rugged terrain, known as the Chiapas highlands. To the southwest are the fertile Pacific lowlands, to the east is the Lacandon jungle, and to the southeast lies Guatemala.
Originally part of the Captaincy of Guatemala during the time of the Spanish Colony, Chiapas was annexed by Mexico following independence. Nevertheless the highlands can be thought of culturally as the northern extension of the Altiplano of Guatemala, inhabited by closely related Mayan peoples. Today Chiapas is one of the two poorest states of Mexico.
The historical roots of today's conflict go back to the pre- conquest era when the Pacific lowland areas served as the breadbasket of the indigenous civilisations. The arrival of the Spanish, however, ushered in a period of 500 years during which indigenous peoples were progressively pushed off those lands by the expansion of plantations owned by Spanish-speaking Ladinos (people of mixed Spanish and Indian descent). By the turn of the century the fertile lands of the region were mostly occupied by cattle ranches and sugar, coffee and cotton plantations, while the indigenous people of Chiapas were forced to farm the thin, rocky soils found on the steep slopes of the highlands.
Not only did the original inhabitants of the region lose their lands, but they have also been subject to centuries of fierce racism and discrimination on the part of the dominant Ladino society, which continues virtually unabated to this day. Yet the last 40 years have probably contributed as much to the current situation as did the 500 years since the Conquest.
The Past 40 Years
In the 1950s the shrinking plots of land in the highlands could no longer support the Indian population and the poorest began to migrate toward the last frontier, the sparsely populated Lacandon jungle area to the east. There these colonists cleared tracts of rainforest land and exposed red clay soils that lose their fertility within one to three crop cycles. They were soon joined by Spanish- speaking peasants fleeing poverty in many other areas of Mexico, many of them with experiences in local peasant revolts.
Meanwhile those who remained behind in the Chiapas highlands saw a dramatic redrawing of social configurations within the indigenous villages during the 1970s and 1980s. In the late 1970s the oil boom in bordering states initiated a cycle of social polarisation in the highlands that was accelerated by the debt crisis of the early 1980s. Class lines were accentuated within the communities, with the increasing alignment of local, indigenous elites or caciques with the governing party and the emergence of a burgeoning underclass of the newly dispossessed. These latter families once again initiated a cycle of migration and colonisation of still unexploited lands in nearby lower elevation areas.
Together with the indigenous peoples of the neighbouring state of Oaxaca, the lowland colonists and the destitute in the highlands were the poorest, most desperate people in Mexico. As if that were not already enough, the conditions faced by most of them have worsened substantially during the past 10 years, as successive Mexican presidents have implemented structural adjustment and free trade policies that have eroded fully 40% of the purchasing power of the Mexican poor. Finally, Mexican President Carlos Salinas' controversial Solidarity anti-poverty programme never reached the Lacandon area to any significant extent. Thus it should come as no surprise that the lower elevation Lacandon settlements of highland colonists should be the incubators for armed rebellion.
Conventional wisdom among anthropologists and others has long assumed that such communities are relatively insular units, with little relationship or integration into the larger, non-indigenous or non-peasant society.
According to such reasoning they engage primarily in farming activities, and only relate to the nation state through a defensive or reactive posture. If we believe this we are forced into a sort of black and white form of thinking; either we romanticise their lifestyle, imagining it to be pristine, unaffected by and better than modern life, or we assume that they are backward and inefficient, an obstacle to modernisation. These polarised viewpoints have cut across the political spectrum, with indigenous rights activists and many traditional conservatives tending toward the first view, and socialist state planners and neo-liberals agreeing upon the latter. None of these positions have been translated into effective policy however -- witness rural development debacles across the world -- and it is clear that we are now in desperate need of a more nuanced understanding of peasant societies.
A recently completed study of highland Chiapas by Stanford University anthropologist George Collier is a good first step toward such an understanding. By focusing on the oil boom and the subsequent debt crisis he has found a much more subtle and far-reaching degree of connectedness than previously thought between apparently 'insular' Mayan communities and the national economy of Mexico.
Labour Exodus
The boom in the nearby oil fields and the employment that was generated in related construction, transport and development activities, exerted a pull that drew able-bodied men out of the highlands and into remunerated wage labour, in some cases quite well remunerated, for periods of up to several years. This labour exodus led to a collapse of highland agriculture. Conventional views of peasant societies would have predicted that once this process had occurred it would be irreversible -- that peasant agriculture would never recover. Yet Collier found that when employment opportunities in the lowlands evaporated during Mexico's 1982 debt crisis, Mayans returned en masse to the highlands and in fact revitalised their farming activities. This revitalised peasant agriculture was, however, very different from the traditional agriculture that existed before the oil boom. Farmers had not previously used chemical fertilisers and pesticides, instead growing corn with shifting cultivation in which the lengthy fallow period allowed the notoriously poor soils to recover some degree of fertility before being planted again. The key productive input was labour, for clearing and preparation of fields but especially for weeding during the growing season.
A Landscape of Poverty
When the men returned to their villages after the oil boom they brought with them two things: the money some of them had saved and a taste for modern technology. They capitalised their agricultural production via the introduction of fertilisers and herbicides, which are now ubiquitous in the highlands. This change in agricultural practices has contributed to two profound transformations, changing both the highland landscape and social relations within indigenous communities.
Aerial photographs show quite dramatically the change in the landscape surrounding Apas, a highland community for which Collier has assembled three decades of data. The area in crops dropped substantially during the oil boom, but later rebounded to cover an area much greater than ever before -- a consequence of the decline of shifting cultivation. Fertilisers are now used to provide soil fertility in place of the fallow cycle, and herbicides allow continuous use of land that would once have been left fallow for several years. From a landscape that was dominated by second growth and forest it has been transformed to one dominated by annual crops.
This has had an important environmental consequence: a dramatic increase in soil erosion as the heavy rains wash away the earth that is barely protected by annual crops. This degradation of the land and associated loss of soil fertility lowers the ability of the land to sustain human populations, contributing to the tendency toward outward migration. -- Third World Network Features/Food First
About the writers: Peter Rosset is the Executive Director of Food First. In 1992-93 he was the Executive Director of the Stanford University Regional Center in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. He has a PhD in Agricultural Ecology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
Shea Cunningham is a research assistant at Food First.