Carlos Fuentes on Chiapas
 
 
 

            Commandante Marcos, the spokesman of the Chiapas rebels, has said that Fuentes is his favorite writer.
 

            The Chiapas revolt has revealed the deep multicultural rifts that had been masked by official glorification of
            Mexico's pre- Hispanic past. In the United States, there are civil rights laws for dealing with racial conflict in a
            multicultural society.

            We have always congratulated ourselves in Mexico on our extraordinary Indian culture which we display in museums
            and through imposing monuments along our boulevards. We say we are proud of being the descendants of that culture.

            The Mexican Revolution made an attempt to respect the identity of the Indian communities of Mexico, recognizing and
            protecting them and their languages in the constitution.

            In actual practice, however, we have treated the Indians with more cruelty, perhaps, than Cortez.

            In Chiapas, in particular, there was a tradition of self- government among the several Indian peoples that endured up
            until the last 20 or 30 years. A succession of rapacious governors allied to equally rapacious land owners and cattle
            barons has since destroyed the autonomy of the Indian people, taking their land and driving them to desperation and
            poverty.

            The events of Chiapas have reminded us that Mexico is a multiethnic, multicultural country. Mexico has the desire to
            be, and regards itself, as a mestizo, or mixed race, country.

            But this does not mean that we can simply put aside the fact that there are 10 million Indians in Mexico who speak 42
            languages and have alternative cultures and values. They are not barbarians or uncivilized people. They are simply
            people with another culture.

            The challenge for mestizo Mexico after Chiapas is to come to grips with this multicultural and multiethnic reality
            with stricter laws and protections for the indigenous cultures.

            The draft settlement between the Mexican government and the Chiapas rebels calls for new anti-discrimination laws,
            like those in the U.S., for the Indians. But will such laws mean anything more than the empty guarantees in the
            Mexican constitution?

            Certainly the existence of such laws will mean that the country as a whole will become more sensitized to the issue of
            discrimination.

            But this is how the question of the alternative culture of the Indians is intimately linked to the question of
            democracy in Chiapas: If the people of Chiapas, for the first time, have the right to elect their own leaders -- people
            they have confidence in -- then there will be an end to discrimination.

            Without democracy, a law against discrimination would be meaningless. Law and its practice cannot be separated from
            effective democracy in Chiapas. ]

            Another element of the draft settlement would guarantee that the Indians of Chiapas would be able to teach and
            speak their own language in their local schools and in local media.

            In this respect we have to rethink what modernity means. If modernity is seen to be homogeneous and exclusive of
            alternative cultures then it is not really modernity at all. If we want only a modernity as defined in our large
            cosmopolitan cities, it is a false modernity.

            Modernity must be inclusive of plurality. Especially in a world that tends toward uniformity, it is healthy to
            remember that there are other people that have alternative values, alternative ways of life, alternative languages.

            Recently in Los Angeles I inaugurated the National Conference on Bilingual Education in the United States. How can
            I defend bilingualism in Spanish and English as something that enriches the U.S. and not defend multilingualism that
            enriches my own country, Mexico?

            In Oaxaca (a state in southern Mexico) a couple of years ago I saw how that state's government allowed the
            indigenous Indians to speak in their own language on TV. That allowed a wealth of myths, memories and aspirations to
            come through that would have otherwise remained lost in silence. This should be done for the nation as a whole.

            The problem for the U.S., for Mexico or for Spain -- for any multicultural country -- is to accept that
            multiculturalism is enriching as long as everyone's rights are equally protected under the law.

            Where there is intercultural conflict in a society, there is usually an economic overlay. Chiapas is situated, one might
            say, between backward Central America and the North American Free Trade zone.Mexico today has one foot in Central
            America and the other foot in North America.

            The Chiapas revolt, lest we forget, was launched on January 1, the day the NAFTA agreement took effect. But maybe
            fruit from the Mexican tropics and winter vegetables can compete in U.S. markets? I believe the two economies can
            be complementary in many respects; trade after all is not a zero-sum exercise.

            In any event, there is a deeper point to be drawn from Chiapas: People who have been traditionally exploited would
            rather go on being exploited than become marginalized. They will not be left out altogether and become non-persons in
            a non-economy.

            This is what would happen if the global market-type technocrats were to take over the Chiapas economy. The world
            economy simply cannot be organized in an enduring way if it only incorporates 30 percent of the world's inhabitants,
            leaving the remaining 70 percent -- some have called them the "lumpenplanet" -- to dwell or die in destitution.

            The demand of the Chiapas rebels for more democracy in all of Mexico has had great resonance through the whole
            country. Many people with cloudy minds in Mexico responded to what happened in Chiapas by saying, "Here we go again,
            these rebels are part of the old Sandinista-Castroite-Marxist-Leninist legacy. Is this what we want for Mexico?"

            The rebels proved exactly the contrary: Rather than the last rebellion of that type, this was the first
            post-communist rebellion in Latin America. For the rebels, the demand for democracy was central. They understood
            that all their other demands having to do with economic reform and laws against discrimination will not be realized if
            the people of Chiapas do not have the right to elect their own leaders.

            Now, you cannot have this kind of democracy in Chiapas when you have the undemocratic system we have in Mexico
            today. And you cannot have a democratic system in Mexico if you don't have local democracy in a poor and backward
            place like Chiapas. The two are inseparable.

            Everyone was sure that, after the massacre of protesting students in the Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City during the
            1968 Olympics, Mexico would have to move toward democracy. It didn't. 1968 provoked a succession of Mexican
            governments to at least try to save the system from collapsing into a South American-type dictatorship.

            Now the issue is no longer to save the system, but to save the country. And that can only happen through full scale
            democratization, including in Chiapas.

            The effect of Chiapas has been to show us as a nation that our problems can be solved through negotiation rather than
            force. This, it has to be said, is to the credit of Carlos Salinas, Mexico's president.

            He could have taken the trigger-happy path of repression that is the usual temptation of authoritarian governments.
            But he didn't. It must be understood that it would suffice for the rebel leader from Chiapas, Subcommandante
            Marcos, to give the signal and there would be two, three, many Chiapas-like revolts across Mexico -- in Chihuahua, in
            Michoacan, in Oaxaca, in Puebla, Hidalgo and Guerrero. Yet, The Mexican army is barely capable of handling a revolt in
            Chiapas, no less five or six throughout the country.

            So, the government had to take a different tack, and the rebels know this. And now the government has to deliver on
            its promises or it could face a much wider spread revolt.

            Finally, the Chiapas revolt forced all the political parties contending in the presidential elections coming up in August
            -- including the ruling PRI and the main opposition parties of the right and left -- the PAN (National Action Party)
            and the PRD (Party of Democratic Revolution headed by Cuahtemoc Cardenas) to agree on a series of measures that
            promise to make the 1994 elections the most open in Mexican history. The aim, mainly, is to make the electoral
            authorities independent of the ruling PRI and government, penalize electoral fraud and make sure the media access is
            fair.

            This electoral pact has prepared the way for President Salinas to campaign for democratic reform in Mexico the way
            he campaigned for NAFTA. If he takes up the challenge, he will go down in history not as the man who negotiated a
            trade agreement or was badly tainted by Chiapas, but as the man who brought democracy to Mexico.

            Mexico in its own way, as much as Russia, today encapsulates the central issues of the post-Cold War era. It is a
            country struggling to establish democracy while coping with two contradictory pulls -- cultural self-determination
            demanded by the likes of the Chiapas Indians on the one hand, and integration into the world market, exemplified by
            NAFTA, on the other. We have all become mirrors of the struggle between the global village and the local village,
            between economic integration on the world scale and loyalty to community, memory, tradition. For all the material
            appeal of free worldwide commerce, the fact is that no one lives in the macroeconomy.

            We live our actual daily existence, in our own way, in the local village. Because Mexico has such a powerful Indian
            past and present, the contradictory pulls will be more dramatized. But in other places, if it is not Indians that will
            dramatize this conflict, it will be immigrants who are the bearers of different cultures entering Germany, France and
            Britain; it will be the large Third World underclass in the U.S. that is shut out of the global village every bit as much
            as the Indians of Chiapas.

            There art 10 commandments for Mexican democracy.

            First is electoral reform. This includes the consecration of alternation in power, an independent electoral organism
            and clear rules on party access to funding and the media. Mexico cannot go on bleeding itself in post-electoral
            conflict.

            Four more articles of democracy in Mexico: a working federalism, a true division of powers, an electoral statute for
            Mexico City, and the rule of law through reform of the corrupt judiciary.

            The media are the sixth. The comedy of errors will never end if television - and Televisa, in particular - neither
            informs nor criticizes, limiting itself toparroting the presidential line.

            The next three are human rights, respect for civil society and its organizations, and reform of security agencies to
            assure safety at the individual, public and national levels.

            Finally, a market economy with a social dimension and balance between the public and private sectors through
            developing the social sector.

            If political reform is at the start of Mexico's solutions, at the end we are back in economics. The contract for
            Mexico must lead to a greater balance between healthy finances, growing production and higher salaries. We will
            achieve none of this if the principles of accountability and checks and balancesare not forcefully set in place. But we
            also will not gain anything if the present climate of vengeance against Mr. Salinas is allowed to get out of hand.

            Mexico should now devote itself to finding laws, rules of coexistence and tolerance, freedoms and agreements, so that
            our present troubles shall never come back to haunt us.
 

                                              Not So Sudden, Not So New
 

            Carlos Fuentes, one of Mexico's leading writers and often its "voice of political consciousness" recently spoke about
            the political problems in Chiapas.

            "With a state that could be prosperous, with fertile land, abundances for the majority of men and women, it is only
            because of the local government and its collusion with the powers of exploitation, and the indifference of the federal
            government that we see such poverty. Cocoa, coffee, wheat corn, virgin forests, and abundant pastures -- only a
            minority enjoy the rent of these products and if someone protests this situation they are grabbed, imprisoned,
            violated, killed and the situation continues."
 
 

            One cannot imagine a situation more primed for social explosion. It was with little surprise, that the Zapatista Army
            of National Liberation (Zapatistas), stormed the town of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas and officially proclaimed
            its armed insurrection. The Zapatistas have taken their name from the recognized Mexican hero Emiliano Zapata, who
            led a successful insurrection and eventual revolution in the 1910's and serves as a solid reminder of the years of
            injustice and repression.

            The rebels in Chiapas did not have to wait long for others to join their call to arms on the first day of the new year.
            The next night two bombs exploded--one in a shopping plaza in Mexico City, and the other in Acapulco's municipal
            plaza. This rash of bombings and subsequent bomb threats throughout the country bore the markings of the
            Revolutionary Worker Campesino Union (Party of the Poor), which has been operating underground for the last few
            decades. In a letter to Amnesty International, representatives wrote, "For more than 40 years we have asked for
            agricultural reform, without getting a solution. For that reason, we have formed an independent organization to
            defend the interests of our people."

            The Campesino Union, which is considered the "patriarch" of the country's various rebel groups, descended directly
            from a schoolmaster turned underground hero--Lucio Cabanas, who fought the Mexican Army in the jungle mountains of
            Guerrero (southwestern part of Mexico) for seven years until he was caught and killed in 1974.

            Reports of armed groups have increased in eastern parts of the country such as Veracruz and Hidalgo and in the other
            southern states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. Many of these organizations are believed to have been originally formed as
            defense groups that indigenous communities and campesinos created to defend themselves against "goon squads" hired
            by local ranchers. These rural bands have demonstrated the ability to switch from defensive to offensive tactics. It
            is believed that the Zapatistas where originally a self-defense group, turning to organized aggression when their
            peaceful protests went in vain.

            The Zapatistas are fighting attitudes which are typical of those expressed by the cattlemen and other large
            landholders such as Bartolomeo Dominguez who argues that the Zapatistas "...are not simply impoverished Indians.
            People who have no money to buy food have no money to buy machine guns!" Dominguez, who used an alias to protect his
            real identity and to avoid repercussions, added, "The Indians don't deserve the land because they don't know how to
            make the land produce what it should."

            In perfect contrast to this, the leader of the Zapatistas, Subcomandante Marcos, was quoted "Our form of armed
            struggle is just and true. If we had not raised our rifles for the Chiapas poor, the government would never have been
            concerned about the Indians and campesinos in our land."

            The uprising in Chiapas sheds light on a problem which is not new. It has its origins as much in a constant political
            dichotomy as in the economic differences which have long existed. It has also confirmed a national suspicion that
            without political reform, any economic reform is fragile and even deceitful.

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                                                Glenn Welker nativelit@earthlink.net
                                                  Last Updated: September 9, 1998

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