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REPORTS: MEXICO |
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Wednesday 3
September 2003
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Indigenous
Reorganization
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Dramatic changes in Zapatista structure.
John Ross, LatinAmerica Press
As the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) approaches the tenth anniversary of its historic Jan. 1, 1994, uprising, the largely Maya rebels have declared dramatic changes in the internal and external organization of their civil forces.
In a series of nine communiqués published between July 22 and Aug. 1, the Zapatistas’ charismatic if elusive spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, laid out innovations designed to strengthen the autonomous structure the EZLN is building in the jungle and highlands of southeastern Chiapas. The changes, which come in defiance of Congress mutilation in 2001 of an indigenous rights law signed by the rebels and representatives of then-President Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) in 1996 that would have granted limited autonomy to the nation’s 57 distinct Indian peoples (LP, May 28 and Aug. 6, 2001), involve the restructuring of the autonomous territories, now grouped together in the Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities (MAREZ).
The subcomandante’s epistolary outburst represents a rare talkative moment for the rebels, who broke off all communication with the government of President Vicente Fox in April 2001 following the gutting of the indigenous rights law. Although largely displaced from public attention by international events like the war on terror and US President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the EZLN continues to galvanize interest, particularly among young people who were in their early teens when the rebellion exploded in the first hour of the North American Free Trade Agreement 10 years ago.
To this effect, several thousand members of what the EZLN terms "civil society" braved the mountain rains and mud to journey to Oventic above San Cristobal de las Casas, Aug. 8-10 (the birth date of EZLN namesake Emiliano Zapata) to celebrate what Marcos described as a "funeral" for the system of the "Aguascalientes" — cultural centers in the Zapatista zones of influence at La Realidad, the Ejido Morelia, Roberto Barrios, La Garrucha, and Oventic.
Oventic is perhaps the most prosperous of the centers and now features a clinic, a secondary school, a library, a tortilla factory, a well-stocked general store and a new church. Many of the public works have been built with seed grants and the labor of national and international non-governmental organizations. The EZLN refuses to accept money from the "bad government."
Now, explains Subcomandante Marcos, the Aguascalientes will be transformed into "caracoles." In Mesoamerica, the caracol is a powerful icon of the renewal of life — caracoles are also conch shells utilized for millenniums in indigenous communities as a trumpet to call the villagers together.
The reorganization is as practical as it is conceptual. In a real sense, the success of the Aguascalientes spelled their demise. Because the five centers were closer to roads and more accessible to non-governmental organizations and civil society volunteers, they flourished — often at the expense of more remote, but no less Zapatista, autonomous municipalities.
The inequalities between the center and the periphery have long been at the core of the Zapatista struggle, both discrepancies between an all-powerful federal government in far-off Mexico City and rural Chiapas, and differences between the larger cities in the state and the indigenous countryside. Mexican states are organized into municipalities, or districts, and the main cities or cabeceras traditionally dominate the satellite communities where the EZLN has always had strength. Significantly, the EZLN attacked five of these cities on Jan. 1, 1994, to launch its rebellion. Within the Zapatista context, the Aguascalientes were at risk of becoming new cabeceras.
Under jeopardy of biting the hand that feeds the insurgency, Subcomandante Marcos severely chastised non-governmental organizations and civil society volunteers who continue to treat the indigenous people as objects of charity. He charged "outsiders" with dictating what the Zapatista communities needed without consulting the locals. "They give us a library where we don’t have drinkable water ... or an herb garden before we have a school," said Marcos, who also complained that clothes donated to the Zapatista communities are so "extravagant they can only be used in stage plays." Subcomandante Marcos says he carried a single donated rose-colored high heel shoe in his pack to contemplate such "humiliation."
To establish a more equitable distribution of goods and services, each zone is to establish a Good Government Committee where representatives of the region’s autonomous councils will meet to hash out differences. Now, when non-governmental organizations propose projects for specific communities, the committees first must approve them, and 10 percent of the seed money must be deducted for projects in less-favored areas.
The committees are responsible only to the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRI), the EZLN’s highest decision-making body, and represent a regional (rather than municipal) authority for the first time in the rebels’ 10-year history.
Indeed, the changes in EZLN structure represent a qualitative step forward in the consolidation of regional autonomy as contemplated in the rejected indigenous rights accords and come in defiance of Congress, the government and the political parties.
The announcement of the committees’ establishment was frowned upon as much by the administration of Fox, of the National Action Party (PAN), as the Zapatista project was by his predecessors in the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Fox’s Interior Secretary Santiago Creel warned the rebels of the consequences of establishing parallel authorities, and San Cristobal Bishop Felipe Arizmendi barred his priests from attending the rebel celebration at Oventic, considering it "too political."
In response, Chiapas Gov. Pablo Salazar, a former PRI member, defended the new Zapatista project. "No way of governing that seeks to improve the lives of the indigenous people of the jungle and the highlands can be illegitimate," he said.
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