Zapatista's New Direction: Zmag

The Zapatista's New Direction
Originally Published in Zmag, December 2005
Chris Arsenault

After a few years of relative quiet, relegated to their misty mountain strongholds in southern Mexico, Zapatista rebels recently tried to re-assert their presence on the international stage,
continung a unique military strategy based more on words than weapons.

Throughout July and August, during a highly publicized red-alert and a series of communiques, the Zapatistas announced a broad new political initiative-for now, called "the other campaign"-to break
out of a stalemate with government forces.

What began as a "scandalously Indian" uprising in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, is metamorphosing into a "national campaign for building another way of doing politics, for a program of national struggle of the left, and for a new Constitution," according to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacondon, issued by the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRIG), the military commanders of the Zapatistas' armed wing.

After a series of September meetings in the Zapatista strong hold of la Garrucha with 91 social organizations from throughout Mexico, 36 political organizations, 129 groups, collectives and NGO's, and 26 indigenous organizations, it was decided that a national tour should begin in January to hear from different sectors of Mexican society.

Subcommandante Marcos, the rebels iconoic mestizo pip-smoking former-spokesman (he's stepping down as spokesperson for the EZLN to work the campaign) will essentially be going it alone across Mexico consulting and listening to help build a non-parliamentary leftist movement.

It won't be the first time the Zapatistas have taken their show on the road. In 2001 the comandantes toured through Mexico, rallying for constitutional changes to guarantee indigenous rights to land and self-determination. The march was hugely popular, cumulating with a rally of 400 000 in Mexico City, but failed to gain the constitutional changes the rebels demanded. This time around the tour will have a broader focus, the politic from The Other campaign belongs "to everyone who embraces them", according to Marcos.

Politically, the timing for a national grassroots movement couldn't be better. When the Zapatistas first called NAFTA a "death sentence" in 1994, they were at odds with the majority of the Mexican
population; 68 percent of Mexicans supported the agreement. Ten years later, less than 45 percent support NAFTA, according to polls published in Business Week. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace notes that by 2004, 1.3 million farm jobs had disappeared in Mexico, as heavily subsidized corn, pork, poultry, and other foodstuffs from the U.S. competed with products from rural communities.

Internationally, the "intergalactic committee of the EZLN" will be bringing corn and other donations to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City, in violation of the US embargo. Zapatista women's co-operatives will send woven blankets and coffee to Europeans fighting for social justice. And Zapatista GMO-free corn will be delivered to people's movements in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Moving beyond just international solidarity or national movement building, the new initiative is key to combating the line, towed by Vincent Fox's government: the Zapatistas are a revolution that
couldn't deliver.

Without headline-grabbing massacres, like the 1997 slaughter in Acteal (when 45 unarmed indigenous villagers were massacred in their church), troop incursions, or major political initiatives, the
strategy saw some success outside of Chiapas. The New York Times, which in 1994 gushed about the Zapatistas as "the first-postmodern Latin American revolution," deemed the insurgency "stalled" at the beginning of 2005: Subcomandante Marcos was co-writing a mystery novel.

Even Elena Poniatowska, Mexico's leading feminist and founder of the left-leaning La Journada newspaper, told Democracy Now in April 2005 that, "I think they [the Zapatistas] have lost power. When time goes by, you lose power."

It's remarkable that a movement of 100,000 peasants in southern Mexico (some sources on the ground estimate their number at closer to 500,000) became a lasting media phenomenon in the first place.

"Thank you for listening to the thunder of our arms on New Year's Day," said a masked representative from the Zapatista's Juntas of Buen Goberino, (good government boards), the Zapatista movement's elected civilian administrative wing, speaking to international solidarity activists from his sparse office in San Andres de Los Pobres.

The importance of a new constitution, links with other social movements, and media attention notwithstanding, what will insure their lasting survival is the Zapatistas' ability to improve the
lives of people living in their base communities. To combat the movement, the State and Federal governments use a combination of low-intensity warfare against Zapatista supporters and targeted aid for those loyal to the state.

"People in Chiapas were very poor and forgotten but the Zapatistas didn't change anything and most people have moved on. The revolution couldn't deliver," said Luis Alvarez, the Mexican government's chief negotiator for Chiapas, during a 2003 lecture at Trent University.

In some cases, Alvarez is correct. " Truthfully the situation is still the same," said the rep from San Andres (Zapatista supporters almost never give their names in interviews).

Economically, the Zapatistas are facing a dilemma, how do you get something from nothing?

When America was created it had a fewmajor advantages: foreign capital to finance development and an almost infinite supply of farm land- obviously stolen at indigenous expense, along with a huge pool of slave labor.

"At present [in 1997, but little has changed since then] some 6,000 cattle ranching families hold more than three million hectares, which is almost one half the area of the state," notes a report by
CONPAZ, the Coordination of Non-Governmental Organizations for Peace. Unless an unlikely constitutional break-thorough is reached through 'other other campaign' the Zapatistas can't move onto anymore productive ranch land without re-starting the war. Small farmers are forced to grow corn on steeped elevations eking a precarious existence from rocky soil.

And unlike other regions striving for 'development', it's unlikely the Zapatistas will get a bank loan for new capital; a 1994 memo from the Chase Manhattan Bank urging the Mexican army to, 'eliminate
the Zapatistas' elucidates how global capital evaluates those who seek alternatives. With no access to capital and no new land, the Zapatista's are in a difficult economic spot.

Still, activists, especially youth who were first involved in planning the insurgency or grew up with it, are taking on the tasks of economic development, teaching in autonomous schools with radical
pedagogy, and creating a viable health-care system.

In a 2003 report, the World Bank notes that the key to Latin American prosperity is to "Increase access by the poor to high-quality public services, especially education, health, water and electricity, as well as access to farmland and the rural services the poor need to make it productive." Ironically, the anti-capitalist Zapatistas are following the Bank's fluffy dictum's better than any of the remaining neo-liberal governments in the region.

"The biggest problem is health. Before, people in the bases of support had to pay for their own medicines, now they are free," said one Zapatista supporter after getting a check-up at the rebel-run clinic in Ovenitc Caracole, a Zapatista stronghold two hours outside
the colonial tourist city of San Cristobal de las Casas.

The clinic is a thriving example of the kinds of "high quality public services" the Zapatistas are trying to create. It prominently displays a picture of campesinos washing vegetables in river water with a large X though it. People are advised to boil water and leave limejuice and ash in their latrines to prevent dysentery and other all-too-common curable diseases. Young "promoters of health" receive medical training from Mexico City-based doctors, and have been traveling to tiny, distant communities to convey life-saving messages.

"Communities give food-beans, tortillas, and fruit-to the workers of the clinic, so the clinic decided they couldn't charge them," says Anastasio, a health promoter, community organizer, and well-known basketball talent who never attended primary school.

In Anastasio's home region of Los Altos, a rebel stronghold divided into seven administrative regions, the Zapatistas run eight micro-clinics along with the major facility in Oventic, which boasts a small operating room, dentistry equipment, herbal remedies, and an admittedly sparse pharmacy. "It isn't only the Zapatistas who don't have medicine; the government hospitals don't either," says
Anastasio.

"Women want work and markets for their art-crafts. They are being exploited by coyotes [middlemen] and need a just price for their products," said a representative from the Municipality 16 de Febrero community. Mujures por la Dignidad, one of the largest co-ops, is by self-organized women, with more than 1,000 members producing shirts, blankets, hammocks, and other weavings.

"When there are meetings for the co-op, we leave our homes, our children, and our husbands. We also walk many hours and some of us on the board [fo directors] live far from our homes," said an
elected board member from Mujures Por la Dignidad between forkfuls of rice and beans.

Coffee workers are also organizing themselves into fair trade co-operatives-or what farmers in Mutz Vitz, the largest Zapatista coffee operation, call "fairer trade"-they are still working long
days and living in poverty. Coffee farmers are among the most radical elements of the Zapatista movement, representing a large portion of those who were armed on New Year's Day 1994.

Throughout the 1970s, the federal government and the IMF used marketing boards, training incentives, and loan guarantees to entice subsistence corn farmers to grow coffee for export. When Vietnam entered coffee production under IMF dictums, causing a massive devaluation of world coffee prices, coffee growers became among the most angry and desperate of a population already facing "acute marginalization", as defined by the Mexican government.

The state of Chiapas produces 55 percent of Mexico's hydroelectric power, yet 30 percent of homes lack not only electricity, but also running water and sewage. "Power here is taken from the grid. They are always trying to take our electricity. When they cut one [power line] we just set up another," said a representative from Santa Catalonia.

When electrical workers come to cut the power, as they tried on February 16th, 2004, women in Santa Catalonia surround the poles, physically stopping the electricians from climbing down until the
power is reconnected. Many electrical workers now refuse to enter autonomous municipalities for fear of living indefinitely atop a power line.

Red alerts, international networking and a new constitution are important, and will determine what kind of role the Zapatistas will play as a political movement outside their Chiapenco strongholds.
But it is the schools, clinics, co-operatives, workshops, "high quality public services" and community organizing that rebut the rhetoric of "a revolution that couldn't deliver"-and prove another
world really may be possible in the Zapatistas' Chiapas.

New York Times on Zapatistas: 2005

Where Poverty Drove Zapatistas, the Living Is No Easier

New York Times
September 11, 2005

By James C. McKinley Jr

PATIHUITZ, Mexico - The shooting war between the Mexican government and Zapatista rebels in these fertile hills ended long ago, but the struggle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people like Rigoberto Alvarez goes on, with no clear winner in sight.

Mr. Alvarez spent 15 years in the Zapatista rebel army, training in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, but quit four years ago, at the age of 46. Why? He had eight children he could not afford to educate. The government was offering cash incentives for each one in school.

"If I don't find a way to put them through school, my children won't learn to read and write any more than I do," he said as he waited for hours recently under a broiling sun for the chance to enroll his son in a new secondary school. "The struggle is too long. I am already old."

In recent years, the government has poured more money into roads, health clinics, schools and electrification projects in the mountainous backcountry where the Mayans live. Patihuitz, for instance, has electricity, running water and the new secondary school (the classes are to be held in a borrowed house). Officials have handed out cash scholarships and roofing materials.

The Zapatistas, who long ago ceased to be a military threat, have set up communities that reject government aid and organize community projects. In some places, they have also set up farming cooperatives and small factories.

But the grinding poverty that provoked the first rebel uprising in 1994 continues to trap the Indians. Neither the rebels' attempts at self-government nor the government's antipoverty programs have done much to change the odds against indigenous children in these rugged, jungle-covered mountains, according to Mayan farmers inside and outside the Zapatistas.

"It's the same as it ever was," said Manuel Marín, a 46-year-old farmer in Patihuitz, as he gathered beans from one of his fields. "There is no way to change this life."

Many adults are barely literate and speak little or no Spanish. Most of the schools the government has built are too small. Secondary schools are scarce and charge enrollment fees.

The new clinics are often short of medicine. And while the cash grants for children in school buy food and clothes, they are not large enough to make saving possible, many parents say.

"Chiapas continues to be the poorest state in the country, as it was in 1990," said Julio Boltvinik, a professor at the College of Mexico who studies poverty. "The indigenous people really don't have anything that we would call a humane, dignified, modern developed life. They are living in an abysmally precarious state."

Nearly everyone works hard, but there is little profit for most. The 1994 free-trade agreement with the United States has driven prices for corn and beans brutally low. Government crop subsidies and supports have disappeared, erasing any gain from new welfare programs.

As a result, farmers here must spend more to grow crops like corn than they can make selling them. So most now farm only a small section of their land, growing just enough corn and beans to survive and leaving the rest fallow. They look for other ways to earn cash, either hiring themselves out as labor for better-off farmers in the region or migrating to northern Mexico or the southern United States to pick fruit, several said.

"Things are going down the tubes faster and faster," said Peter Rosset, an American professor who runs a center for agricultural policy in Oaxaca. "You can't spend your whole life selling things for below the cost of production. That leads you to move to L.A."

Complicating matters has been the protracted conflict with the rebels, who, in January 1994, marched out of the Lacadona jungle and took over seven towns and dozens of large ranches, dividing the land among poor farmers who used to work on them for about 70 cents a day. A year later, the army drove the guerrillas, led by Subcommander Marcos, back into the mountains. Since then, an uneasy cease-fire has reigned while peace talks have dragged on without resolution.

The rebels have declared they will not cooperate with the government until it fulfills promises it made in a 1996 accord to allow Indians to govern themselves to a large extent in regions where they are the majority. In 2003, frustrated with the inaction of Congress, the Zapatistas pushed ahead on their own, setting up five governmental centers with clinics and schools to oversee dozens of what they call "autonomous municipalities."

The region, as a result, is a patchwork of rebel-run villages, military bases established by the Mexican government and villages where pro-government Indians are a majority. Army trucks with troops rumble up and down the roads. Rebel centers are closed to most outsiders and reporters.

Subcommander Marcos, meanwhile, seems more intent on pushing mainstream politicians to the left than on trying to consolidate rebel territory or improve the rebels' agricultural output.

In the last month, he has held a series of meetings with unionists, left-wing politicians and community groups, calling on them to carry out "a national leftist, anticapitalist program" with the goal of "a new constitution, which is another way of saying a new agreement for a new society."

The rebel leader has also attacked the most popular leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, suggesting that he and his party will sell out ordinary working people once in power.

Mr. Marcos's anticapitalist talk seems out of touch with the daily life of many Indians here.

A new constitution is the farthest thing from the mind of Pepe Luna López, for instance, who lives in San José del Carmen, a Zapatista autonomous community right next to the government-run village of Nuevo Morelia.

Mr. López, who is 35, has seven children ages 4 to 16. They all sleep in a leaky one-room shack with dirt floors and walls of slender poles. None of the children are in school; he refuses to send them to the government school a quarter-mile away and the Zapatista government has sent no teacher.

He farms only two acres of his five, and has no source of cash. His clothes are rags. He does not go to the health clinic down the road in Nuevo Morelia.

"We are resisting," he said. "We cannot accept anything from the government because they have not kept their word."

Another Zapatista farmer, Silvio López González, lives across the street from Nuevo Morelia's government school and health clinic. He, too, will not send his two children to either. But he acknowledges he is not much better off than he was before the 1994 uprising.

"We have 20 years in the struggle, and we are not even halfway there," he said.

For 30 years, Mr. Alvarez has lived in a small village called Tierra Blanca, once solidly in the rebel camp, above the main road about three miles away from the Zapatista center known as La Garrucha. He has 10 acres and a wood shack with a thatched roof. His eight children and his wife sleep on boards above the dirt floor.

Two years ago, however, the government took electricity to Tierra Blanca. And when it started offering scholarships for children in school, Mr. Alvarez gave up the rebel cause and accepted the cash - about $30 a month. His only other source of hard currency was a few coffee trees on his land, which he said brought in about $400 in a good year, $200 in a bad one.

He has also accepted the government's roofing and is building a new house next to the old one.

His eldest son, Rigoberto, completed the sixth grade, then migrated to Baja California to pick tomatoes for $800 a month. He turned 15 in May, far away from home.

Mr. Alvarez's eyes filled with tears when he explained that he could not afford to send Rigoberto to a secondary school; the nearest one then was two hours away. It is his second son, Alfonse, 12, who will go to the school in Patihuitz, a 45-minute walk away.

Education, he says, is the only way to break the chain that binds his children to his mountainous plot of earth.

"Otherwise we die, and the children stay here suffering," he said. "That's the end of it. There is no other step."