10 Years After Zapatista Uprising

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The Chiapas uprising of 1994:Historical antecedents andpolitical consequencesSarah Washbrook Sarah Washbrook, St. Anthony'sCollege, Oxford.

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Introduction

The Chiapas Uprising of 1994: HistoricalAntecedents and Political Consequences

SARAH WASHBROOK

This introduction examines the historical background and political

consequences of the 1994 armed uprising by the Ejercito Zapatista

de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) in the Mexican state of Chiapas. It

begins by presenting a chronology of events, and charting some of

the impacts of the uprising on democratization and the rights of

indigenous peoples and women in Mexico. This is followed by an

examination of the debate concerning the origins and nature of the

EZLN itself. Also considered are the agrarian reform, state

formation, economic crisis and political and religious change in

Chiapas over the period 1920–2004. The final section looks briefly

at some of the consequences of the rebellion of 1994, which

reignited and intensified many of the pre-existing social and

political conflicts in the state.

INTRODUCTION

On 1 January 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement

(NAFTA) between Mexico, Canada and the United States1 came into effect,

the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), declared war on the

Mexican government and seized four municipalities in the southern state of

Chiapas.2 Within ten days of combat the federal army had regained control;

however, instead of annihilating the rebel army, the fate of similar guerrilla

movements in Mexico in the post-1968 era,3 under the pressure of Mexican

and international public opinion, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari of

the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)4 called a unilateral truce

on 12 January 1994. In the years that followed, the EZLN became an

Sarah Washbrook, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford.

The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.32, Nos.3&4, July/October 2005, pp.417–449ISSN 0306-6150 print/1743-9523 onlineDOI: 10.1080/03066150500266778 ª 2005 Taylor & Francis

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important force in Mexican politics, criticizing the authoritarian regime and

its neo-liberal economic policies and contributing to anti-globalization

campaigns and movements for greater democratization and the rights of

women and indigenous peoples, both nationally and internationally. Part of

the reason for the success of the EZLN lay in its skilful manipulation of the

media, particularly the internet, and the timing of its appearance when

Mexican society was still reeling from structural adjustment and increasingly

demanding electoral reform and greater democratic accountability.

This special issue of The Journal of Peasant Studies seeks to examine

some of the social, economic and political consequences of the armed

uprising of 1994 and to analyse the phenomenon of Zapatismo in light of the

changes that have taken place in Chiapas and Mexico more broadly during

the last ten years. Three of the most salient consequences of the uprising of

1994 have been its impact on governability and the rural economy in Chiapas

(addressed in this edition by contributions by Neil Harvey, Marco Estrada

Saavedra, Heidi Mosknes, Daniel Villafuerte and Gemma van der Haar);

democratization in Mexico (examined by George and Jane Collier and

Antonio Garcıa de Leon); and the rights of indigenous people and women in

Mexico (see the contributions by Xochitl Leyva Solano and Mercedes

Oliveira respectively). A final contribution (by Tom Brass) locates their

findings in the broader context of debates about nationalism and the

peasantry. As will become apparent, there is disagreement among all these

contributors as to the nature of the EZLN and its impact on politics and

society in Mexico since 1994.

In this introduction I will survey the historical and political background to

the uprising and set out the terms of the debate by examining five areas of

interest: first, the political events following the uprising in January 1994;

second, the debate concerning the origins and nature of the EZLN itself;

third, the link between economic crisis and political and religious changes

in Chiapas between 1970 and 2004; fourth, agrarian reform and state

formation in the post-revolutionary era, covering the 1920–94 period; and

fifth, some of the social and political consequences of the uprising of 1994 in

Chiapas.

I

THE POLITICAL EVENTS OF 1994 AND AFTER

President Carlos Salinas de Gortari came to power in 1988 amidst widespread

claims of electoral fraud. In the context of economic crisis and structural

adjustment that followed Mexico’s Debt Crisis of 1982 a large number of

voters rejected the ruling PRI and voted instead for a leftist alliance led by

418 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

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Cuahtemoc Cardenas, ironically the son of President Lazaro Cardenas, who

had founded the PRM, a precursor to the PRI, in 1938. However, the

computers collating the electoral results crashed just as it was becoming

apparent that Cardenas might win, and the final result showed a resounding

victory for Salinas. During his period in office President Salinas extended and

deepened the neo-liberal economic reforms that had begun during the

presidency of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88).

However, by 1994 Mexico’s political system was beginning to crack. Two

months after the Zapatista uprising, in March 1994, the PRI’s presidential

candidate, Luis Donaldo Colossio was shot dead, and in September 1994 the

secretary-general of the PRI, Jose Francisco Ruiz Masseau, was also

assassinated. Nevertheless, the PRI’s replacement presidential candidate in

July 1994, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, emerged triumphant. In Chiapas,

Eduardo Robledo Rincon of the PRI won the gubernatorial elections of

August 1994 amid much controversy. The opposition candidate Amador

Avendano of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which was

founded by Cuahtemoc Cardenas after his defeat in 1988, refused to accept

the results, and a short-lived parallel government was inaugurated with

support of the state’s popular organizations.

In December 1995 the Mexican economy was wracked by the peso crisis,

when the national currency lost half its value overnight, reducing both the

ability of the middle class to repay dollar-denominated debts and the

purchasing power of the poor [Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace, 2003:

16]. In the following years, President Zedillo instituted electoral reform and

worked to modernize and democratize both Mexico and the PRI. In the

1997 National Congress elections the PRI lost its majority in the lower

house for the first time, although it remained the largest party, and in 1999

the PRI broke with the tradition of having presidents pick their own

successors and held its first presidential primary. Then, in the presidential

elections of July 2000, the PRI candidate, Francisco Labastida Ochoa,

lost to Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party (PAN), ending

more than 70 years of one-party rule. Less than two months later the

PRI candidate for the governorship of Chiapas was defeated by Pablo

Salazar Mendiguchıa, who was backed by an alliance of eight opposition

parties.

Despite the ceasefire of January 1994, from December 1994 to February

1995, the territory at least partially under EZLN control grew from four

municipalities to 38 as many towns and hamlets declared themselves free

from the control of the official municipal authorities. In February 1995 the

government, presided over by Ernesto Zedillo, broke the ceasefire and tried to

capture the EZLN high command. Although unsuccessful in its declared

objective, the army retook large areas of area controlled by the Zapatistas

INTRODUCTION 419

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[Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace, 2003: 16–17]. In October 1995

negotiations began between the federal government and the EZLN in the

small indigenous village of San Andres Larrainzar (renamed San Andres

Sacamch’en de los Pobres by the Zapatistas) near the city of San Cristobal de

Las Casas. Four themes were scheduled for discussion, but only the first, on

Indigenous Rights and Culture, made it to the negotiating table. An

agreement was signed between the government and the EZLN in February

1996, which became known as the San Andres Accords. But the EZLN

unilaterally pulled out of the negotiations soon afterwards, claiming

dissatisfaction with the implementation of the agreements.

During the period of negotiations overt military actions were put on hold,

but there was a strong military presence in the central and eastern regions of

state and a build-up of tension from late summer 1994 as local political

bosses (caciques) associated with the PRI began arming paramilitary groups.5

From 1996 the federal government stepped up its strategy of counter-

insurgency through increased military pressure and programmes of government

assistance designed to divide and co-opt communities in regions of Zapatista

influence and control [Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace, 2003: 18–19].

In many parts of Chiapas the result of the conflict between the EZLN and the

government was growing levels of poverty and intra-communal violence.

Policies of repression and paternalism in the wake of the breakdown of

negotiations culminated in the Acteal massacre of December 1997, in which a

group of paramilitaries associated with the local PRI entered a chapel in the

small hamlet of Acteal in the municipality of San Pedro Chenalho in

Chiapas’s central highlands, and massacred 13 men and 32 women, members

of ‘Las Abejas’ (the bees) an indigenous non-governmental human rights

organization, who were praying at the time (see Heidi Mosknes, this volume).

Although tensions in Chiapas eased after Acteal, inter and intra-communal

conflict and violence have continued to be one of the most tragic legacies of

the uprising of 1994 [Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace, 2003: 20].

Following the victory of Vincente Fox in 2000 the military presence was

significantly scaled down and the federal government began to seek new

solutions to the conflict in Chiapas.

After 1994 the EZLN became increasingly identified with the movement

for indigenous rights in Mexico (see Xochitl Leyva Solano, this volume). For

example, in January 1996, while discussions on Indigenous Rights and

Culture were taking place in San Andres, a National Indian Forum was

convened, organized and presided over by Zapatista commanders and

moderated by EZLN advisors in nearby San Cristobal de las Casas. The

forum attracted a large national and international turnout, including numerous

indigenous representatives and activists from Mexico and other parts of Latin

America [Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace, 2003: 17]. In December


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1996 the government announced that significant parts of the constitutional

reform, based on the San Andres Accords of February 1996, and put forward

by COCOPA (Comision de Concordia y Pacificacion), a mediating body

made up of congressional members of Mexico’s main four political parties,

was unconstitutional. The government was particularly unhappy with parts of

the reform referring to administrative autonomy for indigenous peoples [Rus,

Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace, 2003: 19].

After President Fox took power in December 2000 he sent COCOPA’s

proposal for constitutional reform to the Senate and the Zapatistas and

members of Mexico’s Indian National Congress (CNI) organized a march for

Indian rights to Mexico City in its support. However, the proposal was

significantly watered down by the Senate, and the new version, which

reduced the scope of Indian autonomy, was publicly rejected by the EZLN,

COCOPA, and the CNI (see Xochitl Leyva Solano, this volume). Despite

opposition from Indian organizations, the law was passed by the Senate on 25

April 2001 and three days later was accepted by the National Congress. It

became law in August 2001 [Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace, 2003:

22]. Since the defeat of the PRI in the presidential elections of 2000 and the

passing of the indigenous law of 2001 the EZLN has become less important

on Mexico’s political agenda and lost much popular support. Nevertheless,

the EZLN remains of relevance for understanding current social and political

events in Chiapas.

I I

WHAT IS THE EZLN? INTERPRETING THE CAUSES

AND CONSEQUENCES OF REBELLION

Since 1994 the EZLN has often been presented (and presented itself) in the

media, as a ‘new’ social movement, which, in contrast to the vanguard parties

and class-based social movements of the past, draws its support from the

grassroots participation of ‘civil society’ and aims to advance democracy and

identity-based claims such as the rights of women and indigenous peoples.

Yet, even though it is in those areas that the EZLN has had its greatest impact

at the national and international level, many analysts believe that such an

image does not accurately reflect the origins and concrete political aims of the

organization. Instead, they link the emergence of Zapatismo in Chiapas to

class-based demands for social justice in the form of peasant political

organizing from the 1970s onwards. Most obviously, the EZLN takes its

name from the greatest peasant leader, and socially the most radical figure, of

the Mexican Revolution, Emiliano Zapata, and in 1994 the organization’s

INTRODUCTION 421

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principal social base was among peasant cultivators located in the Lacandon

region of north-eastern Chiapas.

However, while analysts familiar with Chiapas’s social and political

history agree that the EZLN cannot be separated from ‘traditional’ class-

based politics, they disagree substantially over the exact nature and origins of

the EZLN, and this disagreement influences interpretations of the causes and

consequences of the armed rebellion of 1994. As Neil Harvey [1998: 8–9]

points out, two currents of opinion have developed. The first, usually

associated with anthropologists who have long experience in the field, sees

the uprising as resulting from a combination of ecological and economic

crisis, the lack of access to resources, the political and religious

reorganization of indigenous communities from the 1960s, and the

emergence of an increasingly politicized discourse of ethnic identity, all of

which were exacerbated by neo-liberal structural reforms in the late 1980s

and early 1990s. The causes are thus basically internal, historical and socio-

economic.

Other authors, who constitute the second current of opinion, are less

convinced that regional social grievances alone were responsible for the

rebellion and argue instead that outside activists with roots in the Marxist

Left of the 1970s manipulated Indians in Chiapas for their own political

objectives. For example, Carlos Tello Dıaz [1995] argues that the EZLN

was formed out of the association of revolutionary leftist groups with

workers of the Catholic diocese of San Cristobal de Las Casas. He therefore

considers that the EZLN’s socialist origins are a ‘truer’ reflection of the

organization’s nature than its outward discourse of democracy and freedom.

The reasons for the disagreement between authors are partly political and

epistemological and partly due to the shifting nature of the EZLN itself.

Below I will examine in greater depth the diverging interpretations given by

Neil Harvey [1998] and Pedro Pitarch [2004a] concerning these issues, both

of which throw light on the emergence of the EZLN in 1994 and its

subsequent development.

Neil Harvey asserts that in 1994 the EZLN ‘was not a small band of

guerrillas hoping to incite a popular uprising. Rather it was a well-organized

indigenous army with a mass base of support’ [Harvey, 1998: 3]. While he

does not dispute that the founders of the EZLN, originally known as the FLN

(Forces of National Liberation), were leftist urban guerrillas from central and

northern Mexico, he emphasizes the consensual nature of the relationship

between the outsiders and independent peasant organizations in northern and

eastern Chiapas, which constitute the ‘forerunners of the EZLN’.6 According

to Harvey the small group of guerrillas ‘avoided imposing yet another

political line or ideology on the indigenous communities’. Instead they

attracted recruits because, ‘many of these communities were tired of failure,


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manipulation, leadership rivalries, and ideological disputes. More important

they were tired of living in the same poverty and of facing the same

repression as had existed prior to their organisational efforts of the 1970s’

[Harvey, 1998: 164]. Regarding the origin of the EZLN, Harvey recounts a

version given by Subcommandante Marcos, the organization’s spokesperson,

according to which the formation of the EZLN in 1983 was a spontaneous

response to the local level repression of independent peasant organizations by

members of the official National Peasant Confederation (CNC), endorsed by

the state government.

The movement, then, was ‘not born as a guerrilla movement with a clear

revolutionary strategy for taking power, but as a regional network of

armed self-defence movements’. In terms of ideology, Marcos’s Marxist

beliefs were transformed by contact with indigenous cultural practices

and beliefs, giving rise to the generation of a new political discourse.

Similarly the guerrillas’ vertical structures of command were transformed by

exposure to the communities’ practices of collective decision-making

[Harvey, 1998: 165–7]. As a consequence, in 1994, the EZLN ‘was a new

type of political organisation with a collective leadership that transcended the

caudillismo typical of armed rural movements of Mexico’s past’ [Harvey,

1998: 7].

According to Harvey, the independent peasant organizations that

developed in Chiapas in the 1970s became united by their ‘opposition to

rural bossism or caciquismo’, the product of ‘a pattern of clientelistic control,

which became institutionalized in the post-revolutionary period’ [Harvey,

1998: 36]. As a result, the struggle for land reform in Chiapas developed into

a struggle for civil rights and the democratization of the political system

[Harvey, 1998: 199–200]. Yet, the struggle went beyond demanding the

individual rights promised by the constitution, to advocating collective rights,

such as those of women and indigenous peoples. Consequently, he considers

that ‘the Chiapas rebellion can be seen not only as a clear break with the

corporate citizenship of the Mexican State but also as a critique of narrow

versions of democratic citizenship. The Zapatistas not only exposed the gaps

between liberal ideals and the daily reality for most Mexicans; they opened

up the possibility for a more radical understanding of citizenship and

democracy’ [Harvey, 1998: 12].

Pedro Pitarch presents a radically different picture of the EZLN. According

to him, despite its pro-democracy and pro-human rights public image, the

EZLN remains, essentially, an authoritarian and hierarchical organization

designed to seize power by non-democratic means. He insists that Marcos

and the high command of the EZLN are ‘professional revolutionaries’ who

projected their own interests and political strategies onto the indigenous

population and made it appear that they were the origin of the EZLN’s

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opinions, regarding, for example, NAFTA and neo-liberalism. They thereby

gained strong symbolic capital, while beneath it all they remained committed

orthodox Marxists with the goal of undermining the Mexican State [Pitarch,

2004a: 109, 115, 122]. Following Tello Dıaz, Pitarch states that until 1

January the EZLN defined itself in terms of an armed revolutionary

movement of the left: a vanguard group that aimed to seize state power and

install a socialist regime. However, shortly after the armed uprising of

January 1994, the Zapatistas presented themselves as an ethnic movement,

which sought to defend the culture and tradition of indigenous peoples and

advance their human rights. This strategic shift from orthodox Marxism to

identity politics was very successful and the EZLN gained massive popular

support throughout Mexico and the world.

To support his argument Pitarch traces the changing discourse of the

EZLN from the Jungle Declaration of 1 January 1994, the document by

which the EZLN first addressed the Mexican public, to the constitutional

reform of 2001 and after. He illustrates that by January 1994 the

organization’s previous Marxist-Leninist discourse of revolutionary armed

struggle had been replaced by the nationalist rhetoric of the Mexican

Revolution. The Declaration portrayed the uprising as a struggle against an

illegitimate government that had betrayed the Revolution and sold out to

foreign interests. It included demands for democracy, justice, freedom,

education, healthcare, work, land; but did not contain any discourse of

identity. In addition, its terms of reference were drawn from an interpretation

of national history that had a paradoxical, ambivalent, and, at times,

conflictive relationship to the historical experiences of Mexico’s indigenous

peoples.

Furthermore, among the revolutionary laws promulgated by the EZLN in

the months following the uprising, there was no law of indigenous rights

[Pitarch, 2004a: 95–9]. It was not until 1995, during negotiations with the

government at San Andres, that the EZLN developed a programme of

indigenous rights, and even then, Pitarch contends, the discourse of political

autonomy, which became the centrepiece of the Zapatista project, came from

academic advisors to the EZLN rather than the movement’s social base

[Pitarch, 2004a: 120]. Looking more closely at the EZLN itself, Pitarch

points out that the high command is composed mainly of mestizos, and that it

was only a few weeks before the uprising, probably for cosmetic purposes,

that Subcomandante Marcos created the Clandestine Indigenous Revolu-

tionary Committee (CCRI), an intermediate tier of civilian authority, made up

principally of indigenous recruits, still subordinate to the military command

[Pitarch, 2004a: 107].

Pitarch asserts that the reason for the shift in discourse was strategic: the

fighting was over quickly; military defeat was inevitable; and the group had


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nothing to negotiate (its sole aim being to seize state power by violent

means). As a result, the press became a key weapon and, in a political context

in which indigenous rights were increasingly on the agenda, the EZLN began

to engage with identity politics and to invent its own ‘indigenous’ mythology,

language and programme of demands. Because of such media exposure, the

EZLN soon became directly identified with all Chiapas’s indigenous people,

despite the great linguistic, social, political and religious diversity of the

state’s population [Pitarch, 2004a: 102].7 This change in strategy provided

the EZLN with much popular legitimacy, although it was surprising and

paradoxical for Indians in the organization’s rank and file who had been

won over to Marxism-Leninism, identified with a worker-peasant discourse

and thought they were fighting for socialism (see Pitarch [2004a: 116], and

also Marco Estrada Saavedra, this volume). Yet in the end, the EZLN, by

being all things to all people, became a movement without a fixed identity or

character, and, after the victory of Vincente Fox in the presidential elections

of 2000 and the passing of the constitutional reform of 2001, the organization

was left without space on Mexico’s political agenda [Pitarch, 2004a: 110;

126–9].

Needless to say, Pitarch’s interpretation is controversial. According to

Harvey, the demands presented by the EZLN in February 1994 in the first

negotiations with the government did make reference to specifically

indigenous concerns.8 Additionally, various authors [Mattiace, 2003a,

2003b; Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2003] have pointed out that the Tojolob’al

Indians of Las Margaritas, many of whom came to make up the social base of

the EZLN, first developed a politicized ethnic discourse and a project for

regional autonomy in the late 1980s. Furthermore, even if Pitarch’s

characterization of the EZLN’s high command is accurate, it may be

problematic to reduce the political aims of the movement to an original

‘essence’ or to conceptualize the relationship between the high command and

the social base as one of straightforward political manipulation. For, as

Harvey states, the EZLN had strong links to earlier peasant organizations,

and the political significance of the uprising was much wider than the

immediate demands and military resources of the EZLN itself. In a similar

vein, Sonia Toledo argues that whatever the origin of the EZLN, in many

respects it appeared to be, in 1994, the armed expression of deep social

conflict. As a result, the declaration of war by the EZLN set off a resurgence

of the peasant movement throughout the state, expressed in the seizure of

many lands, and the overthrow of many municipal authorities [Toledo, 1996:

11]. Yet, Pitarch’s arguments are convincing and his position constitutes an

important point of reference for interpreting the genesis of Zapatismo and the

causes and consequences of the uprising of 1994 in Chiapas (see Antonio

Garcıa de Leon and Marco Estrada Saavedra, this volume).

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I I I

ECONOMIC CRISIS, POLITICAL CONFLICT AND RELIGIOUS

CHANGE, 1970–2004

While disagreement exists concerning the origins and political aims of the

EZLN, there is little dispute that during the period 1970–2000 Chiapas passed

through a period of serious economic crisis, which, directly and indirectly,

precipitated a political and religious reorganization of rural society. During

this period, stagnant or falling commodity prices, rising costs of inputs,

scarce and expensive credit and unfavourable exchange rates for exporters

contributed to the demise of the plantation economy that had been established

in Chiapas at the end of the nineteenth century. Many landowners sold their

properties or, prompted by relatively favourable market conditions, converted

arable land to cattle pasture. As a result, by the late 1970s the large-scale

seasonal migration of highland Indian labourers to lowland coffee plantations

had ended, and the growth of jobs in the primary sector during the period

1980–90 was stagnant and fell thereafter.

At the same time, petrol exploration and the construction of hydroelectric

dams often led to the confiscation of land from peasants (most of whom did

not receive adequate compensation). Both the agricultural frontier and

agrarian reform reached their limits, and as many as 200,000 Guatemalan

migrants – including approximately 80,000 adult men, fleeing repression and

poverty in Guatemala – entered Chiapas’s rural labour market in the 1980s

[Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace, 2003: 6; Viquiera, 2004]. These

changes were exacerbated by rapid population growth after 1950, the effects

of which continue to be felt today, despite evidence of a ‘demographic

revolution’ in Chiapas from 1990.9 Thus, since the 1970s the primary sector

has been unable to provide the number of jobs required for the large and

growing Economically Active Population (EAP) and investment in other

sectors has been very limited (see Viqueira [2004] and Daniel Villafuerte

Solıs, this volume).

The economic crisis, which has been significant throughout Chiapas, has

had different regional expressions and consequences. According to Jan and

Diane Rus, the percentage of men seasonally migrating from San Juan

Chamula in the central highlands of Chiapas to coffee plantations in

Soconusco on the Pacific coast dropped from 40% in 1974 to 11% in 1987.

The increase in Guatemalan migrants in 1983 and the collapse of coffee

prices of 1987 finally ended seasonal highland migration to Soconusco, a

process that was established at the end of nineteenth century and on which the

sustainability of rural community life had come to rely. The results were an

increase in informal employment, intensive land use, sharecropping on


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lowland properties, and rising levels of poverty. Diane and Jan Rus found that

between 1974 and 1998 family corn plots (milpas) became smaller in size and

were largely farmed by women. The latter were also increasingly involved in

the production and sale of handicrafts. However, as a result of very low prices

and the saturation of the market after 1987, handicraft production has

provided little replacement income (see also Oliveira, this volume).

In 1998 Diane and Jan Rus found that, in the sample under study, only

8% of households earned 1.5 times the minimum wage and above; 39% of

households earned less than a quarter of the minimum wage; and many

families work only for food. When they returned in 2004, they found that

there had been a very rapid increase in migration to the United States,

mainly by men and by the most educated and able members of the

community, who had experience of working outside the community [Diane

Rus and Jan Rus, 2004]. Since 1994 the situation has not improved, and the

responses of the rural population have included an increase in urban

migration, the seizure of the remaining lands in private hands, and – most

notably – a rapid rise in long-distance migration (see Villafuerte Solıs, this

volume).

Most of the participants in the Zapatista uprising of 1994 were Tzeltal,

Tzotzil, Ch’ol and Tojolob’al speaking peasants from central and northern

Chiapas. According to Rus, Hernandez Castillo and Mattiace [2003: 8–11]

after 1970 the economic foundation of Chiapas’s indigenous societies was

swept away and indigenous people were forced to search for alternative bases

of community and identity. At the same time, the system of state corporatism,

first established by the PRI in the 1930s, collapsed.10 For 40 years peasants

had been co-opted and controlled by official peasant organizations (most

notably the National Peasant Confederation, the CNC), which were

dependent on the state and federal governments, and which provided their

members with resources, such as land, credit and crop subsidies, in exchange

for political loyalty.

By the mid-1970s state funds began to dry up, and independent peasant

organizations emerged in Chiapas.11 At the same time, indigenous peoples

began to struggle against local and regional caciques, including PRI party

bosses, for control of municipal government. The state and federal govern-

ments responded with a policy of co-optation and the selective repression of

peasant and community leaders. However, the fallout of Mexico’s Debt Crisis

of 1982 further weakened the PRI and the ability of the system of state

corporatism to respond to these new challenges.12 Both Jan Rus [2004a: 210]

and Neil Harvey [1998: 26] agree that these developments were part of wider

struggles from 1968 to democratize Mexican society and politics and

undermine the PRI, which in Chiapas was associated with large landowners

and Indian and non-Indian (ladino) political bosses.

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In sum, from the 1970s, in a context of economic crisis and weakening

state corporatism, agrarian struggles and state sanctioned repression became

increasingly important in constituting the political consciousness of

indigenous peasants in the area that would later be most affected by the

Zapatista uprising of 1994. Furthermore, as will be shown below, many of the

consequences of the uprising, including the seizure of lands, the rejection of

the Mexican State, and calls for administrative autonomy, can be conceived

as reactions against corporatism, corruption and the repression of indepen-

dent peasant organizations in the period 1970–94.

Religious Change in Chiapas

Another variable which has become increasingly prominent in political

choices and decisions since 1970, and which has informed both Zapatista

and non-Zapatista rural community action since 1994, is religion (see

Moknes, this volume). During the period 1970–2000 Chiapas underwent

significant change in terms of religious affiliation. There was a growth of

Evangelical Protestantism from 5% to 22% of the population, a fall in

Catholicism from 91% to 65%, and a growth in the proportion of the

population professing no religion from 3.5% to 12%.13 According to

Carolina Rivera, Chiapas is now characterized by great religious pluralism

and fragmentation, with the percentage of each denomination varying

greatly in and between municipalities. She considers that Evangelical

groups have been successful because they provide security, belonging,

fraternity and solidarity, thereby aiding in the construction of new

communities in a changing world [Rivera, 2004].

After 1970 religious conversion also constituted a political strategy: by

rejecting the traditional civil-religious indigenous authorities, who had often

become incorporated into the party-state apparatus (above all in the central

highlands), converts were expressing their opposition to state corporatism and

caciquismo. The response in many municipalities, most notably in Chamula,

was repression. According to Jan Rus, a ‘widespread strategy for punishing

dissidents became forced exile’ or expulsion. Thus, he writes, ‘on the grounds

that they are defending ‘‘traditional culture,’’ community bosses and their

henchman allied with the state government and PRI have threatened, beaten,

raped, burned out, and killed such people, with the purpose of driving them

from their communities. The state and federal governments . . . have refused

to intervene . . . claiming that through the 1980s they could not interfere in

‘‘internal’’ community matters out of ‘‘respect for local culture,’’ and that

such ‘‘acts of fanaticism’’ in the 1990s were beyond state control. ‘By 1997

there were over 30,000 exiles in Chiapas, mainly in the central highlands, and

a large community of expelled Chamula Protestants resides in San Cristobal

de Las Casas’ [Rus, 2004a: 219].


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In Chiapas, as in other parts of Latin America, in the 1960s and 1970s the

Catholic Church became an important force promoting struggles for land,

social justice, civil rights and the democratization of political institutions.

Even before Samuel Ruiz Garcıa, who was named bishop San Cristobal in

1960, attended the Medellın conference of Latin American Bishops in 1968,

the diocese had started to create special teams of priests assigned to

indigenous regions to preach the Word of God. Around 1968 the diocese

began to promote ‘the preferential option for the poor’ and to encourage

reflection on the social and political injustices experienced by the rural

population of Chiapas. At the same time, with the goal of working within

native customs and traditions so as to bring out the message of the bible, the

diocese began to prepare young, bilingual and literate catechists from within

indigenous communities themselves. Consequently, according to Neil

Harvey, from the 1960s the Catholic Church in Chiapas contributed to the

emergence of a discourse of liberation struggle and to the creation of a new

set of community leaders in reconstituted indigenous communities, above all

in the jungle and a number of lowland regions. The political outcomes of

these developments were region and community-specific, but in broad terms,

the Church’s initiatives encouraged greater political participation and the

genesis and/or revitalization of communal structures of decision-making and

internal accountability; directly contributed to the emergence of the

independent peasant movement in the 1970s and 1980s; and also provided

the ‘organizational and ideological basis for the reinvention of ethnic

identity’ [Harvey, 1998: 62–5].

The clearest link between Liberation Theology, independent agrarian

organizing, political activism, and the development of a politicized ethnic

identity is to be found in the Indigenous Conference held in San Cristobal de

Las Casas in 1974. By 1974 the Church had over 1,000 catechists in

indigenous zones, including municipalities where the state had a relatively

weak presence. The governor, Manuel Velaso Suarez, invited the Bishop of

Chiapas to help organize the conference, which was intended as a means to

co-opt new indigenous leaders into the expanding state apparatus. However,

instead of successfully channelling dissent through the corporate system, the

conference strengthened the opposition movement. The diocese invited

teachers, students and lawyers to give courses in agrarian law, history and

economics in preparation for the conference, which provided many

community leaders with a broader political education. Most importantly,

for the first time, activists and leaders from throughout Chiapas came together

to discuss agrarian and labour issues, education, access to markets, public

health, and the corruption, arbitrariness and ineptitude of the political

authorities. Consequently, they found that they had many common grievances

against the state and resolved to remain independent of the PRI and the

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patronage that it distributed. According to Harvey, many of the new

community leaders who attended the conference, and who developed new

forms of peasant political and economic organizing thereafter, were

eventually absorbed into the EZLN [Harvey, 1998: 74, 77–8, 91].

IV

THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION AND AGRARIAN REFORM

IN CHIAPAS, 1910–94

In general schematic terms, Mexico experienced armed revolution during the

years 1910 to 1920, followed by a period of regime consolidation and state-

building between 1920 and 1940. Thus, by 1940 most of the corporate

institutions that allowed the post-revolutionary state to successfully manage

economic growth and political dissent before 1970 had been established. As

van der Haar (this volume) shows in following the paradigm of ‘everyday

forms of state formation’ developed by Joseph and Nugent [1994], the

construction of the post-revolutionary state involved processes of negotiation

as well as repression. In rural Mexico the most important instrument for

creating a new institutional framework, generating legitimacy, and establish-

ing a political clientele, was agrarian reform, through which land was

distributed to peasants in the form of communal land grants (ejidos).14

In Chiapas, which has a varied economic and social geography, the process

of land reform was uneven and regionally specific. In addition, in some areas,

notably that of the central highlands, the post-revolutionary state had a much

greater presence than, for example, in the Lacandon forest, where, from the

1960s, migrants ‘constructed a new social order largely at the margins of the

state’ [Harvey, 1998: 66–67]. Many of the social, political and economic

relationships that contributed to the emergence of Zapatismo in 1994 and

have determined its outcomes thereafter, can be traced to regionally specific

processes of state building and agrarian reform in Chiapas between 1920 and

1994. Furthermore the constitutional reform of 1992 which, as part of the

negotiations for the free trade agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, Canada

and the United States, ended land reform in Mexico, led to the alienation of

many peasants in Chiapas and growing support for the armed option offered

by the EZLN.

The Mexican Revolution in Chiapas

The Mexican Revolution, which began in central and northern Mexico in

1910, had little impact in Chiapas until 1914, when the promulgation of a

labour law abolishing debt servitude and granting workers the right to a

minimum wage and other benefits triggered a counter-revolution by local


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landlords against the government of Venustiano Carranza. In the central

valley and the Pacific coast the rebels, who had considerable popular support

in their guerrilla campaign against the occupying carrancista army, were

known as Mapaches (racoons), while, in the central highlands and northern

Chiapas, the rebels, led by Alberto Pineda, were known as pinedistas.15 Prior

to 1914, landlords in these two regions had been adversaries; but to defend

their local economic, political and social privileges they formed an alliance

against the central government that emerged triumphant in 1920. In that year

the counter-revolutionaries made peace with President Alvaro Obregon in

return for considerable de facto autonomy. They were consequently able to

dominate the state government for much of the post-revolutionary period.

It was not until the 1930s, under President Lazaro Cardenas (1934–40),

when the federal government began to intervene more actively in the regions,

that many of the social and political changes associated with the Mexican

Revolution arrived in Chiapas. Thus, in the 1930s peasant leagues and

unions, which later became incorporated into the PRI, emerged in the central

valley and Pacific coast [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 65]. It was also in the 1930s, in

the ‘time of Cardenas’ that the Revolution reached Maya peasants in Chiapas

in the form of agrarian reform, labour unions and an end to labour contracting

by means of debt. However, as Jan Rus states, it was an ‘ambivalent

revolution’ that ‘empowered the Indians and brought them new rights’ but at

the same time ‘led to a more intimate form of domination’ as the state

‘reached inside’ the communities, ‘not only changing leaders but rearranging

the governments.’ This involved, ‘creating new offices to deal with labour

and agrarian matters [and] at the same time. . .granting vast new powers to the

officials charged with maintaining relations with the party and state’. The

result, in many Indian communities, was a renovated form of caciquismo or

‘bossism’, which penetrated ‘the very community structures previously

identified with resistance to outside intervention and exploitation.’ Thus

indigenous corporate social and political traditions, inextricably linked to

local religious beliefs, became the means by which ‘institutionalized

revolutionary communities’ were harnessed to the state and the rule of the

PRI legitimized after 1936 [Rus, 1994: 266–7].

The corporate system enabled the state to establish a relatively strong

presence in certain regions of Chiapas from the mid-1930s, notably in

Chamula and other municipalities in the central highlands. It also constituted

a means by which local elites were able to co-opt and adapt the potentially

more radical initiatives of the central government to their own interests. For

example, in 1934 Cardenas promoted the creation of a Department of

Indigenous Social Action, Culture and Protection in Chiapas. The depart-

ment, which was dependent on the state executive, constituted an

intermediary organization designed to integrate Indians into national society

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and culture by encouraging agrarian and worker organization. Thus the Union

of Indigenous Workers (Sindicato de Trabajadores Indıgenas), which was

overseen by the department, was organized to ensure the payment of a

minimum wage, the fulfilment of labour regulations and the substitution of

collective for individual contracts. However, over time the Union became an

agency that operated for the benefit of employers, reducing the bargaining

power of workers through corporate control and outright repression.

Similarly, in agrarian matters, the department, which at first encouraged

production co-operatives and advised indigenous peoples on land reform laws

and procedures, became subordinated to the interests of local landowning

groups [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 56]. In 1940 these groups also established local

cattle associations linked to state unions and the PRI as a way to obtain tax

breaks, to pressure the government against agrarian reform and to repress

independent peasant activism [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 65].16 As a result, a

political and economic elite of prominent cattle ranchers was consolidated in

Chiapas in the post-revolutionary period.

Tension persisted between the projects and interests of the federal and state

governments in Chiapas after the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas. The federal

National Indigenous Institute (INI) was founded in 1948 and opened its first

regional centre in Chiapas in San Cristobal de Las Casas in 1951. According

to Jan Rus [2004a], by 1955 INI’s programme of ‘integrated community

development’ in Chiapas was in deep crisis. This programme, which

conceived indigenous peoples’ poverty and powerlessness as resulting from

their isolation from national society and culture, proposed to reorganize the

relationship between indigenous people’s ‘closed’ cultures and the wider

economy and society by ‘technical’ means. However, as Rus points out,

indigenous people were already well integrated into the regional economy,

and in practice INI’s project constituted ‘a direct assault on the interests

and prerogatives of the economic and political elites in the regions where

INI operated,’ thus provoking great resistance by important state actors

against the federal agency. INI employees, who uncovered numerous

abuses and illegal practices used to exploit members of Indian communities,

clashed with coffee planters and labour contractors over the continued

enforcement of debt peonage through state-sponsored violence and over

reform of the coffee workers’ union; with the state treasurer and leading

distillers over the state liquor monopoly; and with the state governor and

local political bosses over native legal rights, land claims and private armies

(guardias blancas).17

However, they often received little practical support from the federal

government, and conflicts between INI representatives and political and

economic elites continued in the 1960s and 1970s [Rus, 2004a: 202–3, 213].

Rus also points out that even though INI provoked considerable opposition in


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Chiapas, its remit in 1951 did not include indigenous people resident on

fincas as debt peons (peones acasillados) and wage labourers (jornaleros).18

He suggests that this was because it would have been too politically sensitive

to do so, and because these indigenous people, unlike those residing in

‘closed corporate communities’ outside the boundaries of the fincas, were not

‘traditional’ enough to be of interest to anthropologists.19 Therefore, it was

not until the 1970s, when many landlords switched to cattle production, that

INI, the Catholic Church, and other political organizations finally gained

access to these populations [Rus, 2004: 220]. The politicization of former

debt peons and agricultural labourers in northern Chiapas after 1970

constitutes an important aspect of the background to the uprising of 1994,

and their different regional experiences of the state during the post-

revolutionary period help to explain the varied regional manifestations and

outcomes of Zapatismo in Chiapas.

Agrarian Reform in Chiapas, 1920–92

The social and political consequences of land reform in Chiapas after 1920

are much debated, and new regional studies are emerging which question the

commonplace notion that agrarian reform was limited and had little impact

on rural society (see van der Haar in this volume). However, the most

comprehensive study of agrarian reform in Chiapas, by Marıa Eugenia Reyes

Ramos [1992], remains a key text for understanding the scope and nature of

agrarian reform in the state. As Reyes Ramos notes, her work is mainly

empirical and descriptive because – in the absence of detailed regional

studies on agrarian policy, agrarian reform and land tenure in Chiapas – she

had to base her study on the analysis of laws and statistics that had not been

published or compiled anywhere [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 16–18]. Using these

sources, Reyes Ramos shows that in quantitative terms agrarian reform was

extensive in Chiapas during the period 1920–88. But, she argues, it did not

bring about the end of the finca as a productive unit, act as a force for the

modernization of agricultural production, or bring about social and political

transformation [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 22].

This was because agrarian reform in Chiapas was principally a process of

colonization rather than redistribution [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 125]. Much

agrarian reform involved uninhabited national lands, rather than private

property, thereby preserving the economic and political power of the

landowning elite [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 32]. However, there were regional

differences in the timing, nature and extent of land reform in Chiapas. For

example, in Soconusco, where, in contrast to other parts of the state, agrarian

workers’ unions developed after 1914 and a Socialist party was established in

1921, extensive lobbying resulted in virtually the only land reform to take

place in Chiapas before 1930. However, Reyes Ramos contends that the

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establishment of ejidos on peripheral coffee plantation lands worked

principally to the benefit of the latter by providing a stable workforce in a

context of labour shortage [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 51–2]. In addition, as van der

Haar shows in this volume, the redistribution of land and its conversion from

private property to communal land tenure was extensive in the Tojolob’al

highlands, between Comitan and the Lacandon rainforest after 1930, with

different social and political consequences.

Looking more closely at the process of agrarian reform in Chiapas, Reyes

Ramos identifies two separate phases before 1940. In the period 1920–34 the

Mapache counter-revolutionaries who emerged triumphant in 1920 used their

power in the state government to limit agrarian reform and to increase their

power base in the countryside. In 1921 Governor Tiburcio Fernandez set the

upper legal limit for ‘small property’ (i.e. that not subject to agrarian reform)

at 8,000 hectares or 20,000 acres. Landlords whose properties were subject to

expropriation were to be able to choose the area that they wished to keep;

they were also given the chance to subdivide and sell off properties liable for

redistribution. In the event of expropriation, moreover, compensation would

be paid. The law also permitted the granting of parcels to poor peasants and

those who had worked for the ‘benefit of the state’, and allowed peasants to

purchase land from landlords and the state government, thereby facilitating

the creation of political clienteles. Additionally, in 1922 a federal law

exempted coffee, cacao, vanilla, rubber and other plantations from agrarian

reform [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 48]. As Table 1 shows, only 46,607 hectares

were granted to 5,026 peasants in the period 1920–29 [Reyes Ramos,

1992: 51].

In 1934 agrarian legislation became federal, and debt peons (peones

acasillados), who had previously been excluded, were allowed to petition for

ejidal grants. In 1935 the upper limits to the extensions of land not subject to

land reform were set according to the quality and type of land. But if the land

TAB L E 1 : L A ND R E F O RM S TA T I S T I C S F O R CH I A P A S , 1 9 2 0 – 8 4

YearsQuantity of Land Granted to

Peasants (hectares) Number of Beneficiaries

1920–29 46,607 50261930–39 290,354 20,0001940–49 468,146 26,4131950–59 649,631 27,3651960–69 483,526 20,9401970–79 569,082 20,8051980–84 445,292 23,4951920–84 2,952,638 144,044

Source: Compiled from Reyes Ramos [1992: 51, 62, 82, 83, 121, 122, 123].


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was employed productively, it could exceed such limits, and the buying and

selling of property potentially subject to land reform and the payment of

compensation continued [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 53–6]. As the data show

(Table 1), land reform increased considerably between 1930 and 1939, when

290,354 hectares of land were granted to more than 20,000 petitioners in

diverse regions of the state [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 62]. Nevertheless, according

to Reyes Ramos, in 1940 77% of landowners possessed only 4.4% of landed

property, whereas 2.6% of landowners possessed 63%. In addition, large

areas of private property remained uncultivated, production was character-

ized by a lack of diversification and low productivity; and large quantities

of land suitable for cultivation remained unutilized [Reyes Ramos, 1992:

65–6].

Systematic agrarian reform only began in Chiapas after 1940, when in

Mexico as a whole it was slowing down. Chiapas had a large amount of

untitled national land compared to other Mexican States, including big

expanses of virgin rainforest, and the state government, which in the 1940s

once again came to have a larger role in the interpretation of agrarian policy,

favoured opening up and colonizing areas that had previously remained under

populated and under cultivated due to poor communications [Reyes Ramos,

1992: 67–73]. Between 1920 and 1984 2,954,699 hectares of national lands

were distributed to ejidatarios and individual colonizers. Before 1934

colonization was basically private, and the parcels of land granted were

relatively large compared to the period 1934–62. In 1962 private colonization

ended, and thereafter national lands served exclusively for agrarian reform

and the creation of new ejidal population centres [Reyes Ramos, 1992, 73–

80].20 The emphasis on colonization meant that agrarian reform became

concentrated in a few municipalities. For example, in the period 1950–59,

46.1% of the total area distributed was located in 12 municipalities, mainly in

the unexploited regions of the Lacandon forest and the frontier. Similarly,

28% of all land granted to ejidatarios in the period 1970–79 and 12% in the

period 1980–84 was located in the same region of colonization [Reyes

Ramos, 1992: 82; 96].

However, even though agrarian reform was considerable after 1940, it

failed to resolve poverty or ease social tensions in the countryside.21 Seven

factors stand out which limited the social impact of land reform in Chiapas:

their relative importance differed by region. First, there was immunity from

redistribution of properties under 300 hectares in size that were engaged in

the export of agricultural commodities. Second, certificates of exemption

were used (inefectibilidad), first issued in the 1950s to protect livestock

ranches from expropriation. The number increased greatly in the 1970s and

1980s, until by 1984 they covered most of the remaining private property in

Chiapas. Third, private property was consolidated through individual

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colonization, prior to 1962. Fourth, ejidos were created next to commercial

fincas so as to provide a source of labour [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 84–7; 119].

Fifth, quite often land granted to peasants in areas of colonization was either

unofficially occupied by cattle ranchers and logging companies, who refused

to hand their de facto possessions over to the new owners, or the new ejidos

were adjacent to property held by these same interests. Both scenarios created

conflicts over territory and resources [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 96]. Sixth, many

presidential decrees granting land to petitioners were simply not executed, or

there was a long delay between their date of issue and the date on which the

land was handed over.22 In 1984 Reyes Ramos found 59 unexecuted

presidential decrees covering 792,105 hectares. The oldest dated back to

1920, but more than 70% were from the period after 1960. Seventh, and

related to the previous point, the length and complexity of the land reform

process itself limited the social impact of these reforms. The legal procedures

were an endless source of frustration for peasants and provided many

opportunities for landlords, surveyors and bureaucrats to delay. Ramos Reyes

found that the average period of time that peasants had to wait from the time

that they submitted their petition to the execution of the presidential decree

was 7.4 years. [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 100–102].

After 1970 agrarian reform in Chiapas was aimed at relieving growing

social pressures in a context of economic crisis and increasing peasant

radicalization. In Mexico as a whole, the government of Luis Echeverrıa

(1970–76) sought to regain political support after the brutal repression of the

1968 student movement by reviving agrarian reform and encouraging peasant

organizing. The practical results of Echeverrıa’s agrarian policies were

limited, but throughout the countryside independent organizations of landless

peasants, agricultural workers, and ejidatarios began to challenge the CNC as

the sole representative of rural demands and to reject co-option by parties and

the state [Harvey, 1998: 118]. After 1976, President Jose Lopez Portillo

(1976–82) attempted to shift the emphasis of rural policy away from land

redistribution and towards the modernization of production and marketing.

The result was a downgrading of agrarian reform, preference for production

over land-oriented organizations, and a policy of fomenting factionalism and

repressing many of the movements that had emerged in the earlier period

[Harvey, 1998: 118, 131].

In 1982, the year that Miguel de la Madrid (1982–88) was elected president

of Mexico, a hard-line military man from the land-owning elite in Chiapas,

Absalon Castellanos Domınguez, became state governor. The next six years

saw increasing militarization, state-sponsored repression of independent

peasant movements, and rising levels of rural violence as prominent land-

owning families, allied to the state government, used official peasant

organizations to defend their interests [Harvey, 1998: 148–50, 159]. During


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this period, the CNC, which was in decline in Mexico as whole, was strongly

supported by the state government and the local PRI as a means to divide and

co-opt the peasant movement. For example, members of the CNC received

preferential access to land and also benefited from subsidized credit and other

inputs [Harvey, 1998: 107–8; Reyes Ramos, 1992: 110–12]. In 1983, the state

government was forced to respond to growing peasant mobilization for

agrarian reform by formulating a new programme that eventually distributed

over 80,000 hectares to 9,000 peasants. However, the programme’s

implementation exacerbated rather than resolved existing conflicts [Harvey,

1998: 153].

In the Agrarian Rehabilitation Plan, initiated in 1984, the government

purchased land from landowners to sell to peasants whose claims for ejidos

had not been resolved through the official land reform process. The

programme was initially designed to resolve problems in areas where land

invasions were led mainly by independent peasant organizations. But, as a

result, the CNC began to carry out its own invasions and to evict many

peasant squatters belonging to other organizations. As Harvey points out,

although both groups received land, the programme transformed conflicts

between landowners and peasants into conflicts between independent peasant

organizations and the CNC. Furthermore, landowners received compensation

for land that they would have lost anyway or could not use, thereby

motivating them to invent land invasions or to create conflicts by evicting

peasants who were not occupying their land in order to have the pretext for a

claim. In addition land reform officials and members of the state bureaucracy

gained another means of corruption and patronage. For these reasons the

programme was briefly suspended in 1985 but then reinstated until 1987. At

the same time a large number of exemption certificates were issued to cattle

ranchers [Harvey, 1998: 153–5]. The repression of peasant leaders continued

under Patrocinio Gonzalez Garrido, who became governor of Chiapas in

1988, the year that Carlos Salinas de Gortari assumed the Mexican

presidency.

In sum, as a direct result of the state government’s agrarian policies, the

1980s and early 1990s saw an escalation of violence amongst peasant groups

and between peasants and the state, accompanied by the growing polarization

of society between the state government and landowners on the one hand and

the diocese of San Cristobal, independent peasant organizations and

indigenous communities on the other [Harvey, 1998: 171–3]. These conflicts

intersected with struggles for the control of municipal governments, better

roads and public services and, in line with events across the continent, the

growing politicization of ethnic identity (see Xochitl Leyva Solano, this

volume). When in 1992, as part of the negotiations for NAFTA, agrarian

reform was officially ended by President Salinas, many peasants in Chiapas

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felt that they had lost all chance of securing land, and became increasingly

alienated from the political system and the state.

The rebellion of 1994 revived the independent peasant movement and

exacerbated social and political conflicts in Chiapas. Peasant groups founded

the State Council of Indigenous and Peasant Organizations in late January

1994 and seized approximately 50,000 hectares in the first six months (see

Villafuerte Solıs, this volume). However, conflicts soon emerged between

independent peasant organizations with ties to the EZLN and official

organizations with ties to the PRI, as the government sought to resolve the

situation by forcefully evicting squatters and buying lands from landowners

to distribute to peasants, as it had in the 1980s (with many of the same

problems) [Harvey, 1998: 211–17]. Further schisms developed in 1995 after a

number of independent peasant leaders agreed to meet with a representative

of the federal government without the EZLN. They were promptly accused of

being traitors by the latter, which broke off all relations with their

organizations. Subsequently, the period 1995–96 saw escalating levels of

violence in countryside between Zapatista and non-Zapatista peasant groups

and between peasants and the military [Harvey, 1998: 218–23].

The Histories of Two Distinctive Regions of Zapatista Influence

In this section I shall briefly examine the histories of two regions of Chiapas

where the EZLN has had much support and influence, both before and since

1994. The areas in question are: the canadas of Ocosingo, Altamirano and

Las Margaritas in the Lacandon region of northeastern Chiapas, which make

up the geographical heartland of the EZLN, and the municipality of

Simojovel and its environs, to the north of San Cristobal de Las Casas.23 As

these histories show, although the Zapatista conflict was not the direct result

of the relationship of exploitation and subordination established between

private finca owners and debt peons at the end of the nineteenth century, both

the development of commercial agriculture in the pre-revolutionary period,

and the responses of the post-revolutionary state to peasant demands for land

and social justice are important for understanding the political context of the

uprising and its consequences.24

As Ramos Reyes [1992] emphasizes, the Lacandon region was an

important zone of colonization in the post-revolutionary period. The process

began unofficially in the 1930s, when former peons from fincas in

neighbouring municipalities began to colonize the rainforest. They were

joined by landless peasants from other regions of Chiapas, and the first ejidos

were granted in the 1940s. At the same time that land was distributed in

communal land grants, individual smallholdings and private cattle ranches

were also established in the region [Harvey, 1998: 62; Leyva Solano and

Ascencio Franco, 1996: 21–2, 53, 92]. In the 1950s and 1960s colonization


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accelerated and the Lacandon region became characterized by rapid

population growth and the establishment of a linguistically and ethnically

very diverse population. By 1970 approximately 100,000 colonists had

settled.

The majority were Tzeltal and Chol Indians from eastern and northern

highlands, and some were Tojolob’ales from the area east of Comitan, but

settlers also came from other parts of Mexico [Harvey, 1998: 62].25 In 1970,

738,000 hectares of land in the Lacandon region was in the ejidal sector and

300,000 hectares in private hands [Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco, 1996:

83]. In the 1970s and 1980s ejidatarios shifted from subsistence to coffee and

cattle production, and by 1990 27% of the total forest area was dedicated to

cattle raising and 19% to agriculture. Of land used for rural production 11%

was under coffee cultivation, 31% was dedicated to maize and beans, and

58% was cattle pasture [Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco, 1996: 139]. The

region’s economy was adversely hit by structural adjustment and the fall in

coffee prices during the 1980s and early 1990s, resulting in falling incomes

and rising levels of poverty and environmental degradation.

The post-revolutionary state had a relatively weak presence in the

Lacandon region, and the migrants that poured into the jungle after 1960

established independent peasant co-operatives and new self-governing

communities with much more horizontal social structures than the fincas

and communities that they had left behind [Rus, Hernandez Castillo and

Mattiace, 2003: 12; Harvey, 1998: 62–4]. The development of the

community, political and cultural identity of the colonists was strongly

influenced by religion. Protestant missionaries were first invited to Chiapas

by the Mexican government in the 1940s to assist in the acculturation of the

indigenous population. By 1990 25% of the population in the Lacandon

region were either Protestants or Evangelical Christians [Leyva Solano and

Ascencio Franco, 1996, 66]. Catholic missionaries and Indian catechists also

penetrated the region after 1960 to preach the Word of God.26 Unlike

Protestant missionaries, they sought to revive indigenous community

practices, for example through the creation of village co-operatives [Harvey,

1998: 62]. After the Indigenous Conference of 1974 the presence and

influence of Catholic pastoral agents became considerable, and Liberation

Theology was increasingly important in fomenting peasant political activism

and the development of a militant political and religious community identity

in the region.27 According to Pedro Pitarch, many Indian catechists were

recruited by the EZLN in the 1980s and 1990s, and their religious beliefs

have influenced the public morals of the organization in matters such as the

prohibition of alcohol, the strong sanctioning of adultery, and the emphasis

on discipline, obedience and cleanliness in Zapatista communities (see

Pitarch [2004: 117] and also Marco Estrada Saavedra, this volume).

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The political ideas and practices of Maoism also influenced the communal

identity of the inhabitants of the Canadas. A number of the outside advisers

who participated in the Indigenous Conference of 1974 were members of

Maoist groups from central and northern Mexico. Soon afterwards,

encouraged by subsidies from the government of Luis Echeverrıa, they

began to organize collective ejidos in the Lacandon region, where state

institutions such as the INI, the CNC and the PRI were weak. In 1980 the

Union of Ejidal Unions (Union de Uniones or UU), which had a focus on

coffee marketing, was formed from three smaller unions, thereby creating the

largest independent peasant organization in Chiapas, with 12,000, mainly

indigenous, families in 180 communities located in 11 municipalities.

However, the organization was wracked by leadership rivalries and split into

two factions in 1983. The bigger faction formed the Union de Ejidos de la

Selva (UE), which remained the largest organization in the Lacandon region

in the 1980s, and which participated in the creation of ARIC (Asociacion

Rural de Interes Colectivo) in 1988 [Harvey, 1998: 79–81, 84, 89, 193; Leyva

Solano and Ascencio Franco, 1996: 150–4]. In the 1980s and early 1990s, in

a context of economic crisis, structural adjustment, the end to agrarian reform

and growing political repression in Chiapas, leaders in these organizations,

notably ARIC, were increasingly attracted by the armed option offered by the

EZLN, which steadily penetrated and militarized the peasant movement in

the Lacandon region (Marco Estrada Saavedra, this volume).

The EZLN also had a strong influence in and around the municipality of

Simojovel after 1994. In the 1990s, social and ethnic relations in Simojovel

were still marked by the effects of the coffee boom of the late nineteenth

century, which had brought land privatization and migration and precipitated

the conversion of the previously free indigenous peasant population to debt

peons and labour tenants on ladino-owned fincas [Toledo, 1996: 61–4]. From

the 1940s a number of large fincas were subdivided as a result of agrarian

reform, and some ejidos were established. However, landowning families still

managed to concentrate property as a result of owning many small

contiguous properties (ranchos), and to exploit Indian producers by means

of moneylending and transport and commercial monopolies. Through

political connections to the state government, landowning families were

also able to retain land that had been granted to indigenous communities and

ejidatarios through the official land reform process. According to Sonia

Toledo, between 1930 and 1980 750,280 hectares were granted to peasants,

but only 141,383 hectares – 25% of which were already in communal hands –

were incorporated into the ejidal sector. In 1980 there were 533 fincas and 10

ejidos in Simojovel and 197 fincas and 16 ejidos in the neighbouring

municipality of Huitiupan. At that same conjuncture there were also still

approximately 10,000 debt peons in Simojovel [Toledo, 1996: 69–74, 102].


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Thus, although the Mexican Revolution and agrarian reform brought changes

to the region, state institutions remained weak, the political control of

finqueros, which was exercised through patron – client relations, intimidation

and outright violence, remained strong, and the lives of permanent finca

workers subject to debt peonage remained little changed [Toledo, 2004].

However, after 1970 a number of developments took place, including rapid

population growth, the construction of a hydroelectric dam, and the

expansion of cattle ranching, which reduced labour demand and increased

labour supply and the competition for land. These changes altered the

relationship between landowners and their workforce, precipitating the

development of a peasant movement, the invasion of many private properties,

rising levels of state sponsored violence and, in the 1980s, the redistribution

of much land by the state government [Toledo, 1996: 104–6; 2004].

According to Neil Harvey, the independent peasant movement began in the

municipality of Simojovel in 1971 when Tzotzil and Chol Indians, some of

whom were permanent debt peons but the majority of whom were landless

seasonal workers, undertook a series of land invasions on private coffee

plantations in protest against the lack of response to their agrarian reform

petitions. After finding the CNC ineffective, they formed an independent

peasant organization, which became increasingly important as community

leaders trained for the Indigenous Conference of 1974 and, inspired by

Liberation Theology, began to co-ordinate peasant activism in Simojovel. As

well as becoming influential among finca workers, independent peasant and

community leaders ousted priista officials on existing ejidos in the region.28

The response of the state to growing peasant militancy was violent

repression by the army in 1976. However, peasant mobilization in Simojovel

continued, and became linked to the Independent Confederation of

Agricultural Workers and Peasants (CIOAC), a national level peasant and

agricultural workers confederation with close ties to the Mexican Communist

Party. In 1979 the CIOAC established an agricultural workers union, which in

1981 organized a strike of coffee workers. The organization also co-ordinated

peasant protest against the construction of a hydroelectric dam [Harvey,

1998: 92–9]. During the 1980s, in a context of increasing repression, the

CIOAC continued to lead land invasions and labour struggles in Simojovel

[Harvey, 1998: 157–9].29 Eventually, the state government addressed the

conflict by redistributing much of the land that had been invaded to peasants.

However, the way that this was carried out exacerbated conflicts between

members of the CIOAC and the CNC. In 1994, the Zapatista uprising

reignited the remaining land conflicts in Simojovel and intensified the fight

for municipal control in a political context where memories of the bitter

struggles of the 1970s and 1980s remained strong. However, since then,

according to Toledo, the Zapatistas have reproduced much of the hierarchical

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authoritarianism characteristic of local society, and the recent years have seen

an increase in caudillismo and corruption in the movement and the erosion of

support for peasant leaders [Toledo, 2004].

V

SOME LEGACIES OF 1994

After 1994, at the national level, the EZLN contributed to the movement for

the democratization of Mexican politics, which saw the ending of the PRI

majority in the National Congress in 1997 and the election of Vincente Fox of

the PAN to the presidency in 2000 (see Collier and Collier and Garcıa de

Leon, this volume). In addition, although the organization eventually opposed

the reformed constitutional amendment of 2001, the EZLN was influential on

putting the issue of indigenous rights on the political agenda. In Chiapas, the

uprising reignited and intensified many of the social and political conflicts

that had emerged after 1970, giving rise to land invasions, state sponsored

repression, increasing levels of inter- and intra-communal violence, and the

establishment of de facto autonomous governments in many regions, which

rejected the authority and institutions of the Mexican State.

The period since 1994 has also seen continuing economic crisis, plus the

accompanying effects of this. Among them have been an increase in the

politicization of ethnicity and ‘tradition’, and a decrease in the emphasis on

peasant issues.30 In this respect, Chiapas fits into a pattern familiar in Latin

America and elsewhere (see Tom Brass, this volume). Also important has

been a growing, but limited, awareness of women’s rights.31 An outcome has

been the erosion of support for the Zapatistas, and, even though the EZLN

has rejected electoral politics (consistently boycotting national and state

elections in its area of control), the emergence of competitive elections and

political pluralism in many municipalities (see Villafuerte Solıs, this

volume).

One of the most significant effects of the uprising has been on the

governability of Chiapas. In 1994 approximately 40 town halls were seized

by insurgents, and 33 municipalities declared themselves in rebellion against

the government, and after 1994 political mobilization among those who

joined the Zapatistas focused on the creation of autonomous municipalities

and regions and structures of governance free from the state. Thus, although

Indian autonomy was not a demand presented by the EZLN in 1994, it came

increasingly to dominate Zapatista discourse after 1995 and was incorporated

into the San Andres Accords of 1996 [Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2003: 195].32

However, the EZLN is not the only group to have taken up the call for

municipal autonomy. Other groups, including those allied to the PRI, have


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used the issue of autonomy as a political strategy (in the latter case claiming

huge amounts of money and power from the government). In addition, the

state government has tried, largely unsuccessfully, to engage with demands

for the creation (and often the reconstitution) of municipalities by proposing

programmes of re-municipalization that would convert de facto local

governments into constitutional ones.

Thus, the establishment of autonomous municipalities in Chiapas has been

a complex, conflictive, and, at times contradictory process, with a large and

diverse number of actors, a plurality of meanings, and a number of far from

benign outcomes [Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2003: 191–2; 2004].33 Burguete

Cal y Mayor identifies two principal kinds of autonomous municipality in

Chiapas: on the one hand, Zapatista municipalities in regions controlled

militarily by the EZLN, many of which were dismantled by the army in

1998; on the other, ‘Civilian’ autonomous municipalities, supported by an

important segment of the indigenous movement in Chiapas. In the former,

the new authorities often have joint civil and military jurisdiction and

command, and conflicts, aggravated by the state and federal governments, are

common with non-Zapatistas who share the same territory but who do not

recognize Zapatista authority or laws [Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2003: 206–9,

213–6].

With regard to the EZLN itself, since the late 1990s the movement has

been characterized by divisions in its social base, splits within the leadership,

and internal conflicts over land, all of which have been exacerbated by

government programmes of social assistance and counter-insurgency. The

response in areas of Zapatista control has been the development of

autonomous parallel state structures (juntas de buen gobierno), with the

jurisdiction to impose taxes, laws and regulations within a given territory, and

which provide education, healthcare and other public services. However,

Zapatista objectives have become increasingly confused as demands for

education, healthcare, democracy, justice, and social and political integration

are mixed with the rejection of ‘modernity’ and calls for an increase in

tradition and indianidad (Marco Estrada Saavedra, this volume).

According to Carmen Legorreta [2004], initially the EZLN generated

hopes of liberty and justice, and since the uprising of 1994 Indian municipal

presidents have been elected for the first time in the Lacandon region.

However, the EZLN has suspended civil and political rights in its own

territory, and its vertical command structure had led to the abuse of power

and conflicts between its leadership and its social bases. In addition, the

Zapatista authorities impose rules and regulations on non-Zapatistas in the

same geographical space, and many of those who do not support the EZLN

have been intimidated into leaving their homes. Furthermore, the EZLN has

distributed land that it seized after 1994 – much of which was already in the

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ejido sector – only to its followers. Finally, the refusal to accept government

funding and the paralysis of rural commerce has resulted in economic decline

and growing levels of pauperization in regions under Zapatista control. As a

result, Legorreta considers that the main goal of the EZLN has become to

maintain people in its ranks rather than to improve their lives. Moreover,

many of the peasant and indianist organizations that originally supported the

EZLN have now distanced themselves from it, with the result that there has

been an increase in support for the PRI amongst former Zapatistas

[Legorreta, 2004].34

Thus it seems that, while the EZLN contributed to democratization and the

furthering of the rights of women and indigenous people in the years

following the uprising, in the long run the EZLN has recreated many of the

institutions and abuses perpetrated by the post-revolutionary Mexican State.

It has also repeated many of the errors committed by the guerrillas of the

1970s in its own territory.

NOTES

1 NAFTA was portrayed by the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari asevidence for the success of the ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or theInstitutional Revolutionary Party) programme of pro-market reforms. For a list of all theacronyms used in this volume, see the composite list (Glossary and Acronyms) whichprecedes this introduction.

2 The four municipalities were Ocosingo, Las Maragritas, Altamirano, and San Cristobal deLas Casas, stretching from the eastern lowlands to the central highlands of Chiapas.

3 In 1968, the year that Mexico hosted the Olympic Games, the Mexican government clampeddown sharply on the student movement, which was calling for greater civil and politicalrights, infamously massacring 300 protesters in Tlateloco on 2 October. The movement wassubsequently driven underground and a number of urban and rural armed guerrilla groupsemerged in the 1970s, which the state fought through a programme of counter-insurgency thatbecame known as Mexico’s ‘dirty war’.

4 Former President Plutarco Calles established the PRI in 1929 as the National RevolutionaryParty (PNR). In 1938 it was renamed the Mexican Revolutionary Party, and in 1946 itacquired its present name. During the rest of the century all Mexican presidents and mostofficials belonged to the PRI, which was often accused of corruption and electoral fraud. Itsvictory margins decreased in the 1980s and 1990s, and it lost some state elections to itsopponents, but the party still remained Mexico’s dominant political group.

5 According to Jan Rus, these para-military groups were an evolution of the private armiesused by landowners and the state to control the rural population in Chiapas after 1940. Hecontends that: ‘As the ‘‘traditional’’ controls of indigenous people represented by theguardias blancas and expulsions [private rural armies and the exile of political and religiousdissidents] have been increasingly challenged by the rise of opposition groups withinindigenous communities since . . . 1994 . . . , the state political apparatus has encouraged theformation of extra-official grupos armados, or paramilitares, made up of [indigenous]government loyalists within each community, to restore order.’ These semi-clandestinegroups, armed and paid through local officials of the state PRI, have conducted a campaign ofviolence and intimidation throughout indigenous regions of state – particularly in centralhighlands and north [Rus, 2004a: 219].

6 These were the Union of Ejidal Unions and United Peasant Groups of Chiapas (UU) in theLacandon forest and the central highlands, the Independent Confederation of Agricultural


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Workers and Peasants (CIOAC) in Simojovel and the Emiliano Zapata Peasant Organization(OCEZ), principally in the municipality of Venustiano Carranza [Harvey, 1998: 36].

7 According to Pitarch, the voices of non-Zapatista indigenous people from Chiapas or otherparts of Mexico were not heard in the press [Pitarch, 2004a: 105–8]. Furthermore, EZLNpropaganda rested on an inversion of the negative stereotype of the Indian, which was just asmisleading, and which Indians were required to play along with if they wished to gainpolitical influence [Pitarch, 2004a: 118]. The reactions and perspectives of indigenous peopleto the uprising were complex and varied. For a view of the 1994 uprising from the perspectiveof an urban Tzotzil Indian from San Cristobal de las Casas see Marian Peres Tsu [2002].

8 Such as the creation of an independent indigenous radio station, access to bilingual education,respect for indigenous culture and tradition, an end to discrimination, the granting ofindigenous autonomy, and curbs on the power of government-backed caciques [Harvey,1998: 203].

9 The ‘demographic revolution’ became evident in Chiapas in 1990, ten years later than in therest of Mexico. The birth rate began to fall around 1970 and the decline accelerated rapidlyafter 1994: in 1990 on average each woman gave birth to 4.5 children; in 2000 the figure was2.94 (compared to 2.4 in the rest of Mexico). This drop was not due to later marriage, butbecause more women started using contraceptives. Nevertheless, because of high birth ratesand falling mortality rates after 1950, the current economically active population is relativelylarge and due to grow 70 per cent between 2000 and 2030, therefore putting severe strain onthe labour market [Viqueira, 2004].

10 According to Guillermo de la Pena [1986], in rural Mexico the post-revolutionary state’scorporate institutions operated through informal networks of local and regional power.Political power was thus both centralized and dispersed. He characterizes the Mexicanpolitical system under the PRI as a ‘hierarchical patronage network’, in which regionalbrokers were subordinate to the central government and the party but were empowered by thatrelationship in the local context. As a result, there was an overlap between clientelism andcorporatism throughout rural Mexico, and both clientelism and violence were integral toinstitutional power at the regional level and as a means of achieving centralization [Harvey,1998: 55]. For a detailed study of how the PRI penetrated the institutional structure of oneindigenous community in Chiapas, and the operation of the resulting system of caciquismo,see Rus [1994].

11 The CNC was the official peasant organization that operated within the power structure: bycontrast independent peasant organizations were denied legitimacy and resources and subjectto co-option or repression [Harvey, 1998: 55].

12 Between 1981 and 1987 some 800 peasants were killed in land-related conflicts in Mexico,and many people were imprisoned for political activity in support of landless groups. Mostviolence was perpetrated against peasant organizations not affiliated to the PRI [Harvey,1998: 26].

13 People in this group could be costumbristas (whose religion is a syncretic mix of native andCatholic beliefs), Mormons or Jehovah’s witnesses, and those who have recently changedreligion.

14 This could involve the redistribution of private property expropriated from landlords, or, aswas often the case in Chiapas, the distribution of public lands (known as ‘national lands’) topeasants. According to Marıa Eugenia Reyes Ramos [1992: 31], throughout Mexico agrarianreform was used as a political weapon by the state and by diverse political and regionalgroups to define their position and mark out spheres of influence after the MexicanRevolution.

15 See Jan Rus [2004b] and Neil Harvey [1998: 52–54].16 For example, after 1940 successive state governments legally authorized rural landowners to

hire Mounted Rural Police Corps, also known as guardias blancas, to defend their interests.Although officially designated merely to protect livestock from rustlers, they were primarilyused to suppress peasant organizing and protest. Guardias blancas, which were particularlyprevalent in the municipalities of Simojovel, the valley of Venustiano Carranza, and much ofthe central valley region, were implicated in the murder of most of the 132 peasant leadersand activists documented as having been murdered in Chiapas over the 1974–87 period. They

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were also involved in the repression of members of opposition parties, independent peasantorganizations and NGO co-operatives. After 1994 they often evolved into para-militarygroups, linked to the PRI, which have been used to evict peasant squatters and suppresspolitical dissent in the countryside [Rus, 2004a: 218].

17 For more about INI and the state liquor monopoly, see Lewis [1994].18 Despite legal prohibitions, debt peonage continued in several remote parts of Chiapas,

notably Simojovel and Ocosingo, until the 1970s and 1980s.19 As Rus points out, although indigenous communities in Chiapas, above all those in the central

highlands, were idealized in much early anthropological literature as isolated and stagnantsocieties, their inhabitants had always participated in wider social, political and economicstructures. This they have done not just as ‘traditional’ peasants, but also as migrantlabourers, managed by ladino landowners, labour contractors and the state authorities [Rus,2004a: 199–200].

20 For example, in the period 1960–84, 83 new population centres were created in Chiapascovering 219,334 hectares and affecting 6,154 beneficiaries, many of whom came from othermunicipalities and even other states [Reyes Ramos, 1992: 94].

21 In 1988 virtually the entire ejidal sector was dependent on rain fed agriculture, and of the 3million hectares held by 200,000 ejidatarios (approximately one million people, if theirfamilies are included), only 41 per cent was classified as good for agriculture. On those landsmaize was the most important crop, followed by coffee. In that same year only 10% of ejidoshad paved roads, 50% had electricity and 35% had piped water [Harvey, 1998: 173–5]. After1988, the fall in international coffee prices combined with structural adjustment in the ruralsector had a negative impact on productivity, output, incomes and the environment in Chiapas[Harvey, 1998: 176–9]. Harvey considers that there was a lack of commitment by the state tohelp colonists, and ejidatarios in general, make their land more productive, and to allow themto retain enough profits to reinvest in improving their social and economic conditions[Harvey, 1998: 192].

22 This was the case in the municipality of Venustiano Carranza, located in the easternlowlands of Chiapas, where the Organizacion Campesina Emiliano Zapata (OCEZ) wasformed in 1982 out of a local Indian peasant organization that had developed in the 1970sto recover 50,000 hectares of land that had been granted by presidential decree in1965. OCEZ later became affiliated to the EZLN [Harvey, 1998: 59–61, 99–108, 116, 126,132–9].

23 The canadas of the Lacandon rainforest can be divided into two subregions: the canadas ofOcosingo and Altamirano; and the canadas of Las Margaritas. In the former Tzeltal and CholIndians predominate and the presence of Dominican and Jesuit missionaries has beensignificant. In the latter context, Tojolba’les are the majority, and priests from the diocese ofSan Cristobal and Marists were more common [Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco, 1996:21–2].

24 The regions in which the EZLN has had greatest influence since 1994 are either those inwhich coercive debt peonage increased during the dictatorship of Porfirio Dıaz (1876–1911) –for more on this topic see Washbrook [2005] – or areas that received migrants from suchregions in the post-revolutionary period.

25 In 1990 settlers (colonos) from the states of Campeche, Tabasco, Quintana Roo, Yucatan,Veracruz and Puebla made up 5% of the population of Las Canadas and the adjacent region ofPalenque, and 7% were from Guatemala [Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco, 1996: 51].

26 For example, from the 1960s Tzeltal migrants, the majority of whom had left nearbyhaciendas, were accompanied by Catholic pastoral agents, who sought to establish a newChristian community in the Lacandon jungle. The Tzltales began interpreting the process ofcolonization as a form of exodus that was destined to establish new kind of community in the‘promised land’ [de Vos, 2004: 219–22].

27 According to Gemma van der Haar (this volume), by 1974 there were ten times morecatechists than schoolteachers in the adjacent Tojolobal highlands.

28 Priistas are members of the PRI.29 As documented by Sonia Toledo [1996: 106–40], the struggle between peasants and landlords

in Simojovel during the 1980s was bitter. Backed by the state government, landlords used


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hired gunmen (pistoleros), public security agents, guardias blancas, para-militaries and thefederal army to repress, intimidate and dislodge organized peasants and union leaders. Humanrights were routinely flouted and a number of peasant leaders were murdered.

30 As Pitarch notes, ‘tradition’ has become increasingly powerful and attractive as a politicalstrategy, and discussions about ‘tradition’ and ‘change’ have become a key aspect of politicaldiscourse among Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas alike. Yet, ‘tradition’ in itself is an empty,complex and paradoxical category that can be used either to delegitimize and repress politicaldissent or as a means of resistance against state penetration and manipulation [Pitarch, 2004a:105–8; 2004b]. For a different and less optimistic view about the political role of ‘tradition’,see Tom Brass (this volume).

31 The discourse of women’s rights evolved through the process of grassroots organizing bythe Church and peasant institutions that took place in Chiapas from the 1970s onwards.After 1994, the Zapatistas provided the space for indigenous women to demand equalparticipation in their homes, communities, organizations and in Mexico as a whole.However, as Harvey notes, even though the peasant organizations that supported the EZLNbegan to construct a discourse and agenda regarding women’s rights in 1994, the Zapatistaresponse to its own initiative has been weak (see Harvey [1998: 223–6] and Oliveira, thisvolume).

32 For a discussion of the wider implications of political autonomy, and the link between thisand the formation of indigenous nationalism and ‘peasant nations’, see Tom Brass (thisvolume).

33 According to Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor, the struggle for administrative and politicalautonomy is a reaction against state corporatism, which has its antecedents in earlier strugglesfor municipal control by the peasant movement of the 1970s and the counter-celebrations in1992 marking the quincentenary of the conquest [Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2003: 195]. InChiapas earlier conflicts gave rise to social and political fragmentation and polarization asone group became allied to governmental institutions or the ruling party, and the other group,which was excluded from the social benefits provided by the state, became affiliated to churchdenominations, opposition political parties, social organizations and NGOs. Thus, before1994 most communities were already highly fragmented, but ‘the demand for autonomy waseclipsed by peasant organizations that prioritized the agrarian struggle and producerorganizations that emphasised the process of production’ [Burguete Cal y Mayor, 2003: 194–9]. After 1994, as the EZLN and a number of indianist organizations throughout Mexicofurthered the development of a discourse of indigenous rights (see Leyva Solano, thisvolume), autonomy became an increasingly attractive proposal in many divided munici-palities. Neil Harvey maintains that support for indigenous autonomy can be seen as ‘aresponse to the crisis of the institutional sphere and the continuing absence of democraticguarantees in Chiapas’ [Harvey, 1998: 234].

34 According to Leyva Solano, there has also been the consolidation of Zapatista rule and theresolution of conflicts between Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas living in same space [XochitlLeyva Solano, 2004].

REFERENCES

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Burguete Cal y Mayor, Araceli, 2004, ‘Los nuevos municipios’, conference paper presented at‘Coloquio Internacional – Chiapas: diez anos despues’, San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas,23 – 27 August.

De la Pena, Guillermo, 1986, ‘Poder local, poder regional’, in Jorge Zepeda Patterson (ed.),Poder Regional en Mexico, Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico.

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Peres Tsu, Marian, 2002, ‘A Tzotzil Chronicle of the Zapatista Uprising’, in Gilbert M. Josephand Timothy J. Henderson (eds.), The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Londonand Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Internacional – Chiapas: diez anos despues’, San Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas, 23 – 27August.

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10 Years After Zapatista Uprising

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