New Socialist Magazine, As the Struggle for the Zapatista Dream Continues, How Close is the Reality?

As the Struggle for the Zapatista Dream Continues, How Close is the Reality?

by Sheila Wilmot

"El mundo que queremos es uno en donde quepan muchos mundos". This is the essence of the Zapatista dream: the world they want is one in which many worlds would have a place. After their seven years of original and inspirational resistance, with the Zapatour behind them and the Indigenous Rights and Culture Bill before Congress, now's a good time to have a look at where the Zapatista struggle is at and where it might be going. This is a brief attempt to do so by examining where the struggle finds itself in current Mexican political dynamics, including the implications of the possible fates of the Bill. As a result of all this, we may have more questions than answers.

On July 2, 2000 the era of the dominance of the "Prinosaurs" came to an end. While President Vicente Fox and his PAN (National Action Party) represent that same ruling class interests and neoliberal agenda of his PRI predecessors, Fox's populist style and promise of peace in Chiapas "in 15 minutes" encouraged a voting population sick to death of the PRI's (Institutional Revolutionary Party) 71 year vice-like and corrupt control of all aspects of Mexican life to bring them to power.

Now that he's there, the former Coca-Cola executive has big corporate plans for Mexico. With the implementation of his prized "Puebla-Panama Plan," President Fox would see roadways, ports, railway lines and more maquiladoras spring up from Puebla (just south of Mexico City) all the way down to Panama. In the Mexican south-east, he would deal with a great preoccupation of Mexican and international elites: while 45% of the region's contribution to the GDP comes through mining, oil, hydro, water, and gas industries, greater profits are hindered by "legalities" that prevent further privatization. That is, the oil and other resource-rich land of the south need to be more accessible to national and international capitalist interests.

As elites are also compelled to do, the PAN does express concern over the disproportionate poverty of the region. Not at all coincidentally, the area also has the highest percentage of Indigenous people in the Republic. Fox and his allies want to tackle this problem with further racist and class-based exploitation in the form of grueling low-waged temporary work for rural people on railway and highway construction which will then lead to more precarious, unsafe, poorly paid maquiladora jobs. That, in a nutshell, is "The Plan".

Fox's apparent concern for Mexican poverty has its limits of course: he has stated that there is to be no increase in the abysmal 21 peso per day minimum wage (an approximate figure since it varies regionally) and he is vowing to extend the 15% GST to food, medicine, books and tuition. Here's a snap-shot of what this will mean for the already difficult lives of most Mexicans these days: to have the buying power it had before the economic crash of December 1994, the minimum wage would now have to increase by about 260%. As well, since 1994 the cost of hydro has gone up by 640%, tortillas by 394%, beans by 239% and the list goes on. Yet Fox would use the GST to have the Mexican poor pay for a Plan currently estimated to cost 36 billion pesos of public money over the next 6 years. That is a glimpse of the social-political stage the Zapatistas entered with the February-March 2001 "Zapatour", the most recent of the numerous events authored by the Zapatistas in the years since the uprising. Through them all the Zapatistas have continued their political and strategic evolution. From the start, their foundation has been a unique combination of the struggle for recognition of Indigenous rights to land and self-determination, and the Marxism of a handful of urbanites who came to the Lacandon jungle in the early 80s. This rich political stew has informed not only how they construct their platform but also what is often a confusing strategy for those of us on the outside. "Why did they agree to a cease fire so early? why don't they form a party? why don't they want political power?" are common questions about the EZLN on the left internationally. Given how perplexed we are at times, it's tempting to categorically pronounce the Zapatistas as "armed reformists", "centrists" or the like. Yet as P. Jenkins wrote in a 1999 email correspondence:

"Trying to explain this organisation by analogy with classical categories seems to me pointless....especially since none of them grasps the originality of this movement. I think it's evolution is unfinished, and a lot will depend on how the class struggle pans out generally."

Since December 31, 1993 their struggle has been for work, land, shelter, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and a peace with dignity. The base of the struggle, the necessary starting point, is the recognition of the Indigenous right to self-determination, not just in Chiapas, but in all of Mexico. It is necessary because of the colonial-based, racist conditions of exploitation the Zapatistas and other Indigenous Mexicans live under. It is also a fundamental starting point because, like in the Americas as a whole, their oppression and exploitation is a central part of the backbone of a system that generates alarming wealth for Mexican elites and international investors.

So, while the approval of the Indigenous Rights and Culture Bill on the table in the Mexican Congress is a crucial next step, there is much more to do on many levels. As Marcos said in 1997 in the book by the French sociologist Yvon Le Bot, El Sueno Zapatista, " ..it is an Indigenous movement that aspires to no longer be only an Indigenous movement... it is proud of being majority Indigenous but with aspirations of no longer being so." Further, the Zapatistas are "... a bridge, a common point" from which to develop a national movement.

The Bill, fruits of the hard-won San Andres Accords that were signed on February 16, 1996, is of profound importance. It contains explicit provisions for Indigenous self-government, land tenure and resource control. The fact that the Bill's intent and content is diametrically opposed to capitalist interests and to Fox's Puebla-Panama Plan is most certainly not lost on the Zapatistas or the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) that supports them.

The Zapatour was therefore an opportune political journey to Mexico City via more than a dozen Mexican states. It was a mobilization tour, a tour to rejuvenate support, one to inspire ongoing self-organization all over Mexico. The Zapatista message to the state was firm on the demands for re-initiation of talks. They didn't get dragged into wars of words and the wrong kinds of political battles: it was crucial that Marcos not meet with Fox, denying him the "man of Mexican peace" photo-op that he would've liked. And, the symbolic power of the Zapatista address to the Congress in March is highly significant in Mexicans politics. At the same time, the facts that fairly conciliatory language was used in their address, that they continue at this juncture with their political position of not wanting to take power and Marcos' occasionally anti-insurgent remarks to the press ("I am a social rebel, not a revolutionary") are causes for questioning how they may have drifted not only tactically but also politically in the last few years.

In terms of the actual tour meetings and concrete discussions, the one we know most about and seems to be the most significant is the three day meeting with the CNI in the state of Michoacan. Representing Indigenous groups from all over Mexico, the CNI meeting reaffirmed support for both the Zapatistas and the Bill. Further, there was a clear warning made about the consequences of the Bill's failure. As the result of the first of what were to be four rounds of the 1995 Zapatista and state-approved dialogue process, if the Bill is voted down by the state, it will signal an end of the road for negotiations. While the message suggests that a nation-wide civil response to this will be a united one, it's still unclear just how well prepared the CNI is to co-ordinate such a response.

And what of the bridges to the non-Indigenous left? There have been many ambitious construction attempts including the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1994, the 1996 First Encounter of Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, and a number of national consultations with civil society. The most structural and hopeful attempt has been the Zapatista National Liberation Front (FZLN) launched by the Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Committee (CCRI - the Zapatista leadership) in January 1996. Constituted as the civil arm to carry Zapatista demands and their collective organizing to the national stage and act as a vehicle for Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizing to come together, it has simply become a disappointment. It is rarely even mentioned or referred to anymore. Beyond the EZLN demands put out on the eve on 1994, the Front's objectives are noble, important pillars of the struggle, yet have been too broad or vague to be implemented as they are: "a space for thinking... organizing citizen demands and proposals by leading through obeying... develop collective solutions to without political parties and the Mexican government...".

Even more than in many other contexts, in the Mexican setting the avoidance of parties or party-like structures and methods has real sense to it. In terms of mobilizing support and organizing on the ground, this avoidance may well be indispensable at this stage as party development is so intertwined with the state bureaucracy that fighting for public legitimacy and against co-optation and corruption can become the focus of a party's existence. As well, the FZLN's task has been to organize at a national level across a wide range of local realities and political groupings - including the varied situations and levels of class privilege - both between left intellectuals and/or professionals and workers, and among public sector workers, working-class students, school teachers, university professors and maquiladora workers - apparently through applying a variation of the organizing form existing in the relatively culturally and class-based homogenous and geographically-localized Zapatista communities. As well, the very fact that the Zapatista movement proposes a universal struggle based on the liberation of Indigenous people puts out an organizing challenge to non-Indigenous groups that may be hard for them to live up to. Just like everywhere else in the Americas, it's likely hard for the non-Indigenous left to grasp such an applied anti-racism and commit to a universal project from such a starting point. Given all this, it is no wonder that the FZLN has not become the bridge that was hoped for.

The Mexican state's peace-process negotiating body, the COCOPA, wanted to see the Bill approved by April 30, 2001 when the last session of Congress ended. It was quite possible the Bill wouldn't pass: the vote to allow the Zapatistas to speak in Congress was a hard-lobbied 220 to 210. The final passing of the Bill requires a 2/3 majority in both the Congress and the Senate, as well as implementation at each state level. But, given the June 15 meeting in San Salvador to push ahead with the Puebla-Panama Plan, the PAN probably didn't want to risk civil unrest. So, they took an easier way out: they simply removed parts of Bill key to Indigenous land tenure and self-determination. The Congress passed this revised version on April 27.

The EZLN put out a communique on April 29 denouncing the new Bill. They also cut off communication with the state until the real "COCOPA Bill" is passed, saying that this betrayal both closes the door on peace negotiations and serves to validate the numerous armed groups in Mexico who refuse to dialogue with the state. Now all stops are being pulled out by the PAN to have la sociedad civil read the passing of what Marcos calls the "Large-scale Landowners' and Racists' Rights and Culture Bill" as instant peace and to demonize the EZLN for their discontent.

The big question now is if the Mexican poor and working people - both Indigenous and non - identify enough with the Zapatista cause, if their anger at the poverty and exclusion they live in is intense enough to provoke their response, and if the Mexican left is ready to make the most of that mobilization and start to organize something broader out of it. Rather than waiting for an answer, we on the international left need to work out our own version of Zapatism. Let's take a page from the best of la dignidad rebelde and build our own bridges to real broad-based organizing.

Sheila Wilmot is a feminist socialist activist in Toronto who was actively involved in Zapatista solidarity work for the first five years after the 1994 uprising.