Sorry, I just saw this rebuttal by Doug and Maureen's excellent reply. I'll not debate the "right" of urban-raised Mexican marxists to go to the worst-off areas, like Doug wouldn't debate the role of white solidarity activists in SNCC's mobilisations. Jim Petras has written about the extremely rich combination of urban marxism and indigenous social justice in Chiapas (against the Burbach thesis of post-modern socialism).
But at a practical level, I have a different impression than your Turkish friend. Here's how I understood the trajectory of organising. In retreat, the Zapatista army went way deep into the Lacandan Jungle after the early 1994 uprising; but nearly immediately, key indigenous cadres re-emerged into the communities (where Spanish is rarely spoken, and where a profusion of indigenous languages makes communication difficult). There they helped organise vibrant Chiapas-wide peasant and worker organisations (also named after Zapata), working closely with the catechists of the radical christian base communities. I witnessed all that first-hand and was repeatedly told of the harmonisation of approaches. The radical "civil society" activism by these EZLN-aligned groups was completely consistent with Zapatista ideology, and enhanced the militancy of the Zap theatre of 1 January 1994 by grounding and regrounding the struggle in campaigns associated with municipal autonomy (three dozen towns declared themselves independent of cnetral and provincial dictates), the widespread appropriation of free electricity, periodic land invasions of underutilised ranches, blockades of the Pan-American highway when they didn't get their way, and spirited resistance to the occupation of Chiapas (at the time) by 70,000 federal troops and the intimidating role of several dozen paramilitary groups acting on behalf of landowners (who killed 45 women and children one night in late 1997, as just one instance). Your Turkish correspondent didn't mention the organic character of the struggle, in such forms (and many others I didn't get acquainted with)? It was all remote-controlled romanticism (a la the Socialist Register piece last year which generated the critique from Cleaver)?
> >But let's talk about the Zaps. They're internationalists who've used
> >the Internet, images, and clever and literate communiques to make
> >their points. The leaders are all educated urban cosmopolites.
What? This is incorrect information, comrade Doug.
I won't go on now... but from dusty files, here's my travelogue:
Ya Basta!: Enough!
Zapatistas shake the Mexican countryside
Rural struggles are at centre stage in unfolding drama
in Land and Rural Policy Digest (Johannesburg)
September 1998
by Patrick Bond
At a time land hunger in South Africa has led both to heightened rural crisis and, half-heartedly, to sporadic reforms -- the World Bank-designed "willing-seller/willing- buyer" land redistribution deals that together with mass evictions of farmworkers and labour tenants have angered and sometimes demobilised rural social change activists -- an alternative praxis is emerging in Chiapas, Mexico. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, named after a charismatic early 20th century folk hero who united rural indigenous and "mestizo" (mixed-race) peasants against plantation owners, is only the best-known wing of a robust social movement that offers us much inspiration.
This is not a new fight, even if the rhetoric, strategies and tactics are innovative. More than 450 years ago, it was here in the Lacandan Jungle, in the mountainous southeast corner of Mexico (near what is now the Guatemalan border), that Spanish colonisers met their match and were forced to withdraw. The dense bush, difficult peaks and proud Mayan people were never conclusively tamed by "civilised" invaders, who looted and raped and spread holocaust-scale diseases elsewhere in the surrounding lowlands. Likewise, since the 1980s, Chiapas has hosted a remarkable guerrilla force renowned not only for determination, but for a profound sense of humanity, and humour.
The Zapatista army first made headlines by forcibly (though mainly non-violently) occupying the municipal headquarters of several provincial towns on 1 January 1994 - - chosen because it was the day a free trade agreement with the United States came into effect -- after having organised underground in the nearby jungle for a decade. Although more than a hundred of roughly 2 000 Zapatista troops were killed by army bombing during their retreat back into the mountain villages over the subsequent days, their dramatic debut served to awake Mexico and indeed the whole world, to racial discrimination, poverty and outright physical repression.
Pent-up rural fury
Land is central to the Zapatista struggle. Some 3,6 million people live in Chiapas, of whom a million are of Mayan descent. But ownership of arable soil, in a province nearly devoid of industry and a modern service sector, is nearly as skewed as in South Africa. Large-scale cattle ranchers, backed by the Mexican government and also, from the 1960s, by the World Bank, engaged in displacement tactics that would take pride of place in an honest history of the SA Agriculture Union or of most British colonial settlers.
The landed bourgeoisie were joined, more recently, by multinational logging firms -- also funded in part by the World Bank -- and oil companies anxious to pillage yet more natural Chiapas wealth. To enforce their piracy after the Zapatistas surfaced, an alliance of ranchers, local police and government officials organised six vicious paramilitary gangs which, like South Africa's early 1990s Third Force, have systematically terrorized the guerrillas' supporters.
Thus as was the case in South Africa during the last years of apartheid, the main above-ground liberation forces -- among them, the Organisation of Campesinos of Emiliano Zapata, the Organisation of Proletarians of Emiliano Zapata and thousands of Catholic liberation theology activists ("catechists") -- are today trying to fend off a lethal combination of military occupation, paramilitary massacres and day-to-day economic violence generated by the "neo- liberal" (free-market) model of development.
Last December, 45 women and children were slaughtered in the town of Acteal, an incident so vile that the Mexican government felt sufficiently pressured to arrest a local mayor and army general for facilitating that particular paramilitary force's deed. Subsequent massacres and the occupation of Chiapas by 70 000 Mexican security personnel - - half the army's entire national force -- have cast a pall of tension over the scenic mountains.
Under these difficult conditions, the Zapatista army's indigenous leadership and the wily spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos (a poetic ex-academic from Mexico City), play cat-and-mouse with the authorities, capturing the democratic imagination though not a great deal of wriggle-room during the on-off process of (so far fruitless) negotiations. Unlike early 1990s South Africa, though, the Zapatista strategy is fully in harmony with intensified direct action across the countryside. Formal negotiations broke down when the government violated several pledges regarding freedom of Zapatista movement in the occupied territory, and the guerrilla leadership is, today, in hiding deep in the Lacandan Jungle.
Byzantine Mexico
But while the state's grip on the throat of Chiapas appears firm, the Zapatistas are intent on prying it loose and, one day soon, singing their songs of liberation freely. The Mexican ruling regime, the "Party of Institutional Revolution," is the world's longest-serving government. Though stitched together from a series of progressive battles against dictatorship during the 1910s, the party degenerated and has reigned in recent decades through a mix of conservative economics, vote theft, self-serving patronage and straightforward brutality. Its leaders have consistently pledged far-reaching reform as part of a campaign to bring Mexico from Third to First World. But to do so -- in the process pleasing foreign investors and lining their own pockets -- the elites shrunk a once-proud Mexican state-owned industry to nothing through giveaways, free trade zones and crony-capitalism as corrupt as any on the global scene.
Things went from bad to worse, by several measures. Superficially, one recent Mexican president -- Carlos Salinas, once touted by the Clinton Administration to head the World Trade Organisation -- was so badly shamed by exposure of his family's milking of public monies in 1995 that he went on a farcical hunger strike to clear his name and then fled to self-imposed exile. Another predecessor retreated to Italy with an alleged billion dollars in stolen slush money.
The current president, Ernesto Zedillo, inherited from Salinas an economic Titanic barely afloat on a tumultuous sea of credit and, in terms of the coherence of national industry, simply tearing apart at the seams. In the space of a few weeks in early 1995, not long after Zedillo's inauguration, international speculators proceeded to submerge most of the economy's passengers. Two million workers lost their jobs and much of Mexico's middle class sunk directly into poverty. The currency fell by 65%, the stock market crashed, and interest rates soared from 14% to more than 100%. As 200 000 small businesses were declared bankrupt, a million Mexicans joined a "bond boycott" of consumer and petty-bourgeois debtors who -- calling themselves "El Barzon" (the cattle yoke) -- collectively refused to honour loans that had become unrepayable. Their slogan was "I don't deny I owe -- but I'll pay what is just!" and their solidarity with the Zapatistas included a pledge that "if one of us is attacked, we will act, and vice versa."
One tempting recourse for Zedillo and his allies was to blame the Zapatistas for the overall crash of the neoliberal model. In February 1995 an infamous Chase Manhattan Bank memo publicly advised the Mexican state to "eliminate" the guerrillas. But by then Chiapas protests had turned from the Zapatista army's mainly symbolic military action -- replete with ski masks, red bandannas and a romantic renaissance of Che Guevarraism -- to mass democratic mobilisation. After a formal peace accord and truce were finally agreed by a humiliated Zedillo, two huge Zapatista conferences of progressive activists (one a national democratic Mexican gathering and the other an "International Encounter Against Neoliberalism and For Humanity") were staged in distant jungle villages. Most Zapatista troops soon melted back into their communities, to continue their struggle via an increasingly militant civil society.
More recently, as social divisions have reopened across Mexico and as opposition political parties won gains in still-tainted elections (including more than half the Mexican parliament and some large cities, including the capital), Zedillo has appeared more determined, even desperate, to rid national politics of the Zapatistas, and to send an uncompromising signal to other indigenous insurgents who have since begun to surface elsewhere in Mexico.
Development for whom?
What the Zapatistas term their "Bad Government" not only cracks the military whip, it has also adopted the kind of Winning-Hearts-And-Minds strategy so badly fumbled in South Africa by P.W. Botha. Like Botha's late-apartheid regime, Mexican authorities turned to neoliberal economic techniques at both national and local levels.
Nationally, from being the "fair-haired boy" of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Mexico and South Africa now compete with Indonesia and Thailand for most spectacular structural adjustment flop. Mexico's 1995 meltdown was sharper than the steady economic hemorrhage South Africa has suffered since IMF advice was adopted during the late 1980s (even before GEAR cemented neoliberalism during a raid on the rand in 1996). In both countries, fast-bursting speculative bubbles and rising inequality are among the very few signs of dynamism. Meanwhile, in both South Africa and Mexico, industry fades, jobs evaporate and living conditions deteriorate.
Locally, Mexican development resources were aimed at exploiting hydropower and commercial agriculture in Chiapas, but were then tightly constrained after the Third World debt crisis broke out in 1982. Mayan villages languished in poverty, but after the Zapatista's 1994 uprising, state finances suddenly flowed through closely-guarded channels into those towns where a critical mass of government supporters could be bought.
But this is, by all accounts, an unsustainable approach. The power of mass popular protest -- expressed, for example, in a Chiapas-wide mass electricity payment boycott reminiscent of East Rand townships, or in periodic sit-ins by indigenous women activists on the Pan-American Highway (which cuts through the Zapatista heartland) -- has been sufficient to force serious concessions from the regime (the state power company acknowledges it cannot force Zapatista households to pay the R30 billed each month for, typically, powering a couple of lightbulbs).
Leading Zapatistas in both the guerrilla force and civil society groups have a long-term strategy: political (even constitutional) autonomy from rulers they demand financial resources from -- for it will never be possible to develop Chiapas without reclaiming the surplus drained away by the state and big capital -- yet whom they will not seek to defeat in tainted electoral battles. A widespread sentiment expressed by most hard-core activists I talked to recently was distrust of not only the state machinery, but also of orthodox political parties, including even the social- democratic Party of Revolutionary Democracy, which barely lost -- due to notorious fraud -- the 1988 presidential elections to Salinas.
One Zapatista stepping stone to a more thorough-going, radical democracy is consolidation of popular participation in nearly three dozen "autonomous municipalities" that each consist of thousands of rural residents in loosely-connected villages. These are, like many mid-1980s South African townships for brief moments, effectively "ungovernable" sites of dual power. Zedillo has demanded that the autonomous municipalities disband and the Mexican army has occupied several, but as of July 1998, most remained vibrant and functioning reminders of the Zapatista spirit.
These villages' courageous public identification with the rebel cause is not the only visible evidence of space contested and won. Organised land invasions of absentee landlords' plantations have picked up momentum, and by determinedly facing down the paramilitary eviction teams, several communities recently won state recognition that they control and effectively own the invaded land of their forebears. Two I visited in July were cooperatively owned and run, and appeared just as capably organised as any commercial South African farm.
Such organic strategies and tactics are part of an emerging, systematic approach to local development that will be in the image, and serve the interests, of the indigenous and mestizo peoples. No doubt, one day soon, missions comprised of World Bank loan-pushers and jet-set development experts will re-invade Chiapas as military tensions cool, aiming to modernise the peasants, break their hard-won land into atomistic individually-titled units, addict people to credit and pesticides, price water according to "economic resource cost," cost-recover on electricity and all other government services not already privatised, erode economically-inefficient forms of traditional expression and cultural survival, threaten stable natural ecologies, and in the process uproot socio-political solidarity -- in the very manner that many rural (and urban) South Africans are now suffering.
On the other hand, through their world-class resistance to military domination and economic neoliberalism, the Zapatistas may have dug roots so deep and durable that we will have opportunities well into the next century to admire, offer solidarity and draw out crucial lessons about rural social struggle.
AUTHOR ID:
Patrick Bond teaches at Wits. He visited Chiapas in July, shortly after the official expulsion of similar human rights observer delegations, as part of a Mexico Solidarity Network visit facilitated by two NGOs in San Cristobal de las Casas.