Zapatista-run Chiapas

From Anarchy In Action
Zapatista National Liberation Army flag displayed at La Realidad during closing ceremony of January 2014 Escuelita. Photo by Dan Fischer.

In Mexico's southern-most state of Chiapas, indigenous Mayan small farmers rose up in 1994 and established an autonomous, libertarian socialist zone encompassing an estimated 120,000 to 300,000 people.[1] Without accepting any funds from the Mexican government since 1996[2], the Zapatistas have built their own schools, hospitals, health clinics, banks, community centers, and more. They govern their own affairs with a direct democratic governance system, centered in each zone’s administrative center called a carcacol, meaning “snail.” Their struggle has profoundly influenced social movements around the world.

Culture

The Zapatistas have sought to carry out “cultural resistance” to combat consumerist and oppressive elements of mainstream society while both preserving and revolutionizing the traditions of the Tojolabal, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Chol, Zoque and Latin@ peoples in the Zapatista territories. At the start of their 1994 uprising, the Zapatistas banned alcohol consumption in their communities. They try to preserve local music, holidays and languages.[3]


Since the Zapatistas passed the Revolutionary Law of Women in 1994, women have a right to work at any job they want. “Before, the women lived below the control of their fathers. We respected our fathers, and they said if their daughters could work a job or no,” reports the Zapatista woman Eloísa. She notes, “Afterwards, when we arrived as our organization [in 1994] we began to see the distinct areas of work that we have as an organization of the [Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN,] and we began to carry out different jobs as women.”[4] Women make up about a quarter of the EZLN.[5] The Good Government Board in the Zapatistas' region of La Realidad has seen an increase in women membership. The first term had only one woman out of the 24 members. The second term had 5 women, and the third term had 12 women, or 50 percent.[6]

Sexist tendencies still persist in Zapatista communities. The anthropologist Neils Barameyer observes, “In any indigenous village of Chiapas, women can be seen working from well before dawn until after sunset. This often involves heavy labor such as carrying large bundles of wood, scrubbing laundry, separating corn from the cob, or milling pozól. In contrast, the men usually take the afternoon off after returning from the milpa. After their siesta they can be seen standing around in groups, talking and smoking along the road.[7]

Although they have yet not reached full liberation in practice, the Zapatistas have declared an opposition to heterosexism and all other forms of oppression. Their Sixth Declaration from the Lancondon Jungle expresses solidarity with “women, young people, the indigenous, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexual persons, migrants and many other groups who exist all over the world but who we do not see until they shout [enough already] of being despised”.[8]


Decisions

The Zapatistas' autonomous government has three levels: the community, the autonomous municipality, and the region. Over a thousand communities confederate into 29 autonomous municipalities, which confederate into five regions.[9] At the community level, people gather at regular assemblies to make decisions, elect community administrators, and elect delegates to higher levels. Elections are made with a simple majority vote.

In 2003, the Zapatistas established their regional level of government, called the Good Government Boards. The members of this level of government serve only 15 days of each month and only for three years. At first the Good Government Board members received a salary, but the Zapatistas quickly abolished monetary compensation to these delegates. Instead, Good Government Board members receive food or some other non-monetary assistance from their communities, such as help with their farmland while they are serving in government. “[W]e realized that the conscience and the desire to serve our community is what is greatest,” explains the Zapatista Lorena.[10] The Good Government Boards help redistribute resources and coordinate regulations between different municipalities. The delegates at the municipal and regional levels in the region of La Realidad work together to coordinate three communal stores and use the profits to fund region-wide mobilizations.

Economy

The Zapatistas have built a libertarian collectivist economy, with a combination of communes, worker collectives and family units, and communal stores. Their autonomous government provides low-interest loans, free education and low-cost health care. Without any assistance from the Mexican government, the Zapatistas have built two hospitals, 18 health clinics, and 800 community health houses since 1994. They run 300 schools, with 1,000 teachers, and a center for secondary education. [11]

Zapatistas farm on collectively owned areas of land called “ejidos”. The community collectively decides how to use the ejido, usually dividing it up so there is a plot for each family. Gustavo Esteva, a former adviser to the Zapatistas, explains, “One thing it’s important to mention is there doesn’t exist private property in the Zapatista communities. In each one of the communities, all of the land is property of the community.” There is no hunger among the Zapatistas, since the communities grow enough food for everyone, and surplus to sell to outsiders. The Zapatistas sell $44 million worth of goods to the world market every year, reported Esteva in October of 2013.[12]

Residents of the Zapatista territories make a living by growing corn, beans, coffee, bananas, sugar, and raising cattle, chicken and pigs. Some residents work at clothing, food and convenience stores, run by the autonomous government or by worker collectives. Others work in the autonomous education and health care systems. There are also less common jobs such as veterinarians or blacksmiths. Many work as part of a family unit, while others work in cooperatives coordinated by the communities and by the municipalities.[13] The Good Government Boards coordinate cattle collectives, radio stations, low-interest loans to help people’s health costs, and a fund called BANAMAZ for women’s worker collectives.[14]

Education

The Zapatistas run 300 schools, with 1,000 teachers, and a center for secondary education. [15] On average, the Zapatistas have more schools than the surrounding indigenous communities governed by the right-wing PRI.[16] In the Zapatista schools, children and their elders together decide on a curriculum, and there are no grades. The schools operate based on the principle “Nobody educates any- body else, nobody is educated alone”.[17]

Health Care

“The rebel Zapatista communities, although not all, are the only ones that have free health services” in Chiapas's indigenous communities.[18] Residents of the Zapatistas' region of La Realidad maintain that their hospital is better than the surrounding non-Zapatista hospitals. Unlike the La Realidad hospital, surrounding non-Zapatista hospitals lack an ultra-sound machine and have doctors with racist attitudes toward indigenous people. Roel, a former member of La Realidad's Good Government Board, notes, “The result is that people go to the [Mexican] government's hospital and need to have an ultrasound study, for example, or a laboratory analysis, and the doctors send them to our hospital.”[19]

A 2007 study commissioned by the Health Systems Knowledge Network (at the time, a part of the World Health Organization's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health) praises the Zapatistas' health care system. It notes improvements like a decline in maternal mortality at 2 Zapatista clinics and concludes, “This is a model which has proved able to have an impact on what one can call the primary level of health care.”[20]

Environment

The Zapatistas have struggled against the extraction of oil, uranium and timber on their lands. The Zapatista's autonomous government has banned pesticides and chemical fertilizers.[21] In Enemy of Nature, the eco-Marxist scholar Joel Kovel calls the Zapatista rebellion “the first model of revolutionary ecosocialism on a bioregional scale.”[22]

Many Zapatista communities sit on top of or near oil deposits, and the Zapatistas have resisted the oil industry's extraction. On February 16, 1996, the Zapatistas and the Mexican government signed the San Andrés Accords, which allow the Zapatistas to veto extraction projects, but the Mexican government has often violated the treaty.[23] From 1999 to 2000, the Zapatistas conducted a 16-month blockade that successfully prevented the construction of a highway through Armador Hernandez's Montes Azules bioreserve. The highway would have been used for the extraction of timber, uranium and oil.[24]

In 2007, the Zapatistas declared part of Huitepec a “Zapatista community protected natural area and ecological reserve.”[25]

Crime

Gustavo Esteva argues that the Zapatista territories are “the safest place in Mexico and perhaps one of the safest in the world.” In the Zapatista communities, land is communally owned and no one goes hungry, so one could argue that there is little to be gained from theft. With a significant degree of control over their work, education, culture and communities, the Zapatistas experience a comparably low level of alienation.

“There are only two men in jail in the whole of the Zapatista area today,” says Esteva. “And these two guys are in jail because they committed the worst possible crime. They were cultivating marijuana. The problem in that case is not just the use of marijuana. The problem is they can give the government a pretext to attack the Zapatistas and to attack the communities.”.[26]

The Zapatistas say they almost never imprison criminals. Instead, they assign community service as a punishment. The Zapatista Doroteo discusses the Zapatistas’ response to undocumented Guatemalans passing through their territory. The Mexican government uses these migrants as an excuse to crack down on the Zapatistas. So, the Good Government Board in La Realidad once punished an undocumented person with six months of community service building a bridge. The intent was to give the person an incentive to run away. Doroteo notes that the person wound up staying the six months and thanked the Zapatists for the lenient punishment.[27] Neils Barameyer has observed a prominent use of fines as punishment in Zapatista communities.[28]

Revolution

Gloria Muñoz Ramírez maintains that since 1994 the Zapatistas have combined popular organization with two alternating strategies: fire and the word. Fire refers to “military actions, preparations, battles, military movements.” The word refers to “meetings, dialogues, communiqués”. According to Ramírez, the Zapatistas primarily used fire from 1994-5, the word from 1996-7, fire in 1998 and the word in 1999.[29] The Zapatistas' refusal to take state power and their commitment to a radically decentralized “world where many worlds fit” signify a commitment to an anti-authoritarian strategy.

In violation of the 1996 San Andrés Accords, the Mexican government and right-wing paramilitary groups have conducted a low-intensity terror campaign against the Zapatistas and their supporters. In 1997, a paramilitary group murdered 47 Zapatista supporters, mostly women and children, in Acteal, with the tacit support of at least local levels of government.[30] In 2014, paramilitary members attacked La Realidad and killed Zapatista community member Compañero Galeano.[31]

The Zapatistas were instrumental in sparking and helping coordinate the alter-globalization movement. At a 1998 conference the Zapatistas organized in Barcelona, participants met and later went on to form People's Global Action, the network that called for the mobilization which shut down the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle. The anthropologist and activist David Graeber argues in “The Shock of Victory” that the alter-globalization movement helped bring about the collapse of the Washington Consensus and defeated the corporate class’s proposed Free Trade of the Americas Agreement.[32]

1994 Uprising

On January 1, 1994, thousands of armed Zapatistas occupied seven cities in Chiapas, freed prisoners, burnerd down police headquarters, and took over City Halls. Their army, commonly referred to by its Spanish initials EZLN, issued a declaration of war against the Mexican state, demanding “work, land, housing, food, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.”[33]

Although the Zapatistas declared themselves “the product of 500 years of struggle”—a reference to indigenous people’s resistance since 1492—they responded most immediately to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Taking effect that same day—January 1st, 1994—NAFTA promised to devastate the peasant farmers’ livelihoods by flooding Mexico with subsidized US corn. Even worse, the negotiations leading to NAFTA compelled Mexico to revoke Article 27 of its Constitution, which guaranteed peasants a right to land for communally-owned farms called ejidos. “Enough is enough,” they exclaimed in their declaration of war.[34]

On January 6, the Zapatistas proposed a cease-fire. On January 12, hours before 100,000 demonstrators filled Mexico City's central plaza demanding an end to government hostilities, Mexico signed a peace treaty with the Zapatistas.[35] Since January 1994, the Zapatistas' struggle has been almost entirely nonviolent. They retain a military and have occasionally used it in self-defense, for example in San Juan in 1998.[36]

Encuentros

In 1996, the Zapatistas held a Continental Encuentro and then the First Intercontinental Encuentro for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, where almost 5,000 people from 42 countries met to coordinate and advance the global struggle against neoliberalism. “Encuentro” means encounter in Spanish. [37]

Armador Hernandez

In the 1990s, the Mexican government wanted to build a highway in Armador Hernandez through the Montes Azules bioreserve, which would be used for the extraction of timber, uranium and oil. In August of 1999, the Mexican army entered Armador Hernandez to enable the highway's construction. For sixteen months, the Zapatistas kept up a 24-hour blockade, preventing construction. When the soldiers tried drowning out the protests with loud noise, the Zapatistas “bombed” the military base with hundreds of paper airplanes. On December 22, 2000, the government ordered military withdrawal, and the highway was defeated.[38]

Neighboring Societies

Receiving no assistance from the Mexican government, the Zapaitstas have heavily relied upon international solidarity. Peter Gelderloos writes, “Thousands of volunteers and people with technical experience came from around the world to help Zapatista communities build up their infrastructure, and thousands of others continue to support the Zapatistas by sending donations of money and equipment or buying fair-trade goods produced in the autonomous territory. This assistance is given in a spirit of solidarity; most importantly, it is on the Zapatista’s own terms. This contrasts starkly with the model of Christian charity, in which the goals of the privileged giver are imposed on the impoverished receiver, who is expected to be grateful.”[39]

  1. ↑ Political scientist Neil Harvey estimates 120,000 to 150,000 residents. Journalist Raúl Zibecci estimates 200,000. Subcommandante Marcos estimates 300,000 people including both Zapatistas and residents who accept the Zapatista government as legitimate. Ioan Grillo, “Return of the Zapatistas: Are Mexico's Rebels Still Relevant?”, Time, 8 January 2013, http://world.time.com/2013/01/08/return-of-the-zapatistas-are-mexicos-rebels-still-relevant/. Raúl Zibechi, Territories in Resistance: A Cartography of Latin American Social Movements (Oakland, Edinburgh, Baltimore: AK Press, 2012), 132. El Kilombo Intergaláctico and Subcomandante Marcos, Beyond Resistance: Everything (Durham: PaperBoat Express, 2007) 23.
  2. ↑ Niels Barameyer, Developing Zapatista Autonomy: Conflict and NGO Involvement in Rebel Chiapas (University of New Mexico Press, 2009)
  3. ↑ Resistencia Autónoma I: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas” 15-16.
  4. ↑ Translated by Dan Fischer, Participación de las Mujeres en el Gobierno Autónomo: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas”, 6-10.
  5. ↑ Barameyer, Developing Zapatista Autonomy.
  6. ↑ Gobierno Autónomo I: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas”, 14.
  7. ↑ Barameyer, Developing Zapatista Autonomy.
  8. ↑ http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/sdsl-en/
  9. ↑ Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.
  10. ↑ Translated by Dan Fischer, Gobierno Autónomo I: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas”, 6-10.
  11. ↑ Zibechi, Territories in Resistance, 132.
  12. ↑ Gustavo Esteva, “Liberty According to the Zapatistas”, Lecture at Bridgeport Free Skool, Bridgeport, Connecticut, October 2013.
  13. ↑ Resistencia Autónoma: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas”, 6-13.
  14. ↑ Gobierno Autómo II: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas”, 10-13.
  15. ↑ Zibechi, Territories in Resistance, 132.
  16. ↑ Ramírez, The Fire and the Word, 311.
  17. ↑ Zibechi, Territories in Resistance.
  18. ↑ Ramírez, The Fire and the Word, 310.
  19. ↑ Translated by Dan Fischer, 'Resistencia Autónoma: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas” 19.
  20. ↑ J.H. Cuevas, “Health and Autonomy: the case of Chiapas”, March 2007.
  21. ↑ Gobierno Autónomo I: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas”, 19.
  22. ↑ Joel Kovel, Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World? (Zed Books, 2007) 253.
  23. ↑ George Caffentzis, “The Petroleum Commons: Local, Islamic, and Global,” World War 4 Report, http://www.ww4report.com/node/75.
  24. ↑ See the “Revolution” section.
  25. ↑ Sipaz, “Natural resources: a rich state with a largely poor population,” http://www.sipaz.org/en/chiapas/facts-about-chiapas/405-ds-6-recursos-naturales-un-estado-rico-con-una-poblacion-mayoritariamente-pobre.html.
  26. ↑ Esteva, “Liberty According to the Zapatistas”.
  27. ↑ Gobierno Autónomo II: Cuaderno de texto de primer grado del curso de “La Libertad según l@s Zapatistas”, 6-7.
  28. ↑ Barameyer, Developing Zapatista Autonomy.
  29. ↑ Ramírez, The Fire and the Word, 283-286.
  30. ↑ Ramírez, The Fire and the Word, 164.
  31. ↑ http://www.anattackonusall.org/
  32. ↑ Alter-globalization movement
  33. ↑ Ramírez, The Fire and the Word, 105-6. Notes from Nowhere, “Emergence: an irresistable global uprising” in Editor: Notes from Nowhere, we are everywhere: the irresistable rise of global anticapitalism (London: Verso, 2003) 22.
  34. ↑ “Declaration of War” http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/Zapatistas/chapter01.html.
  35. ↑ Ramírez, The Fire and the Word, 110-112.
  36. ↑ Sipaz, “1998,” http://www.sipaz.org/en/chiapas/peace-process-war-process/338-1998.html.
  37. ↑ Ramírez, The Fire and the Word, 140, 144.
  38. ↑ Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, The Fire and the Word: A History of the Zapatista Movement (San Fransisco: City Lights, 2008) 188-191, 206.
  39. ↑ Peter Gelerloos, Anarchy Works.

--DFischer (talk) 15:53, 23 October 2014 (EDT)

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