By Pip Hinman
Widespread popular support for the demands of the Zapatista rebel movement in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas has created a serious political crisis for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's promises of social stability and "entry" into the first world via NAFTA are now in tatters. The future is uncertain for the PRI, which has ruled continuously for 65 years.
Despite government attempts to marginalise the rebels, on January 12 more than 120,000 people marched on Mexico City in support of peace in Chiapas and indigenous rights. According to Peter Gellert, Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly's Mexican correspondent, the demonstration was the biggest since 1988, when the PRI declared itself the winner in what was widely regarded as a fraudulent election.
"The demonstration showed that, while not necessarily agreeing with the tactics of the rebels, the Indian peasant uprising has struck a responsive chord in many sectors", Gellert said. At short notice, opposition parties, neighbourhood organisations, independent trade unions and the urban poor were mobilised in a pro-Zapatista and very militant demonstration. "It reflected a very powerful movement in the streets against the government."
From many accounts, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) took the government and armed forces by surprise when it seized at least four towns in Chiapas, including the state's second-largest city, San Cristobal de las Casas, on January 1. Two hundred guerillas captured the municipal building, from which they issued public statements and freed 179 prisoners. They also briefly occupied the state radio station, using it to broadcast their demands in several Mayan languages.
By January 2, the army announced that it had recaptured San Cristobal, and a curfew was imposed. However, the rebels took another four towns located in or near the Lacandona forest. The Lacandona, which spreads across eastern Chiapas and northern Guatemala, the base of the rebel movement, is the subject of continual disputes between indigenous groups and corporate developers.
From January 5, the EZLN seemed to have retreated into the forest, taking with them some 1400 kg of dynamite from an installation of the state-owned Pemex oil company. However, the next day, EZLN rebels blew up two electric towers, one in the western state of Michoacan and one in Puebla state near Mexico City, sending further shock waves through government and business circles.
While President Salinas gave lip service to seeking a negotiated settlement, the army has indiscriminately gone on the offensive against the rebel movement and its supporters. Even before the uprising, San Cristobal had the biggest military base outside Mexico City. According to Gellert, 17,000 soldiers — over 10% of the country's armed forces — are involved in the operation against the rebels, whose strength is estimated at around 2000.
Bombs have been dropped on impoverished communities south of San Cristobal, and, as of January 5, it was estimated that at least 250 people had been killed. Journalists have found the bodies of rebels with their arms and legs bound, shot at close range in the back of the head. The press in clearly marked vehicles have also come under army fire, with one reporter from a leftist Mexico City daily, La Jornada, hit by three bullets.
"As the aerial bombardments were begun, the government went on a propaganda campaign blaming the rebels and saying that foreigners were involved in the EZLN", Gellert reported. "The rebels have repeatedly denied these allegations and said they have no interest in setting off bombs in parking lots. Very soon, what had been a government consensus to pursue a negotiated settlement dissolved. Criticisms about human rights abuses were raised, as well as demands to end the bombings, and to recognise the EZLN as a legitimate force."
Opinion polls in Mexico show that the majority of the population is in favour of a political, not a military, solution to the conflict. Only 12% said they thought that foreigners were behind the conflict.
With the presidential election due on August 21, growing domestic and international pressure has forced the Salinas government to find a quick "solution" to the crisis. Even the business sector, Gellert said, has called for "major resources to be assigned to the Chiapas area and for greater support for small industry" as a way of reducing unemployment and preventing violence.
Salinas has also had to carry out a strategic ministerial reshuffle. Gone is his interior minister and hated former governor of Chiapas, Patrocinio Gonzalez, to be replaced by the former chairperson for the government Human Rights Commission, Jorge Carpizo. And in an attempt to deflect growing criticism of the army's excessive force, Salinas has announced the formation of a Commission for Peace and Reconciliation in Chiapas, headed by Manuel Camacho Solis, a former foreign minister with a reputation as a skilled negotiator.
On January 10, the government agreed to negotiations with the EZLN. While the negotiating team is yet to be finalised, it is believed that Camacho will appoint as the government's chief intermediary with the EZLN Father Samuel Ruiz, the bishop of San Cristobal de las Casas, initially accused of promoting violence against the government. Given that the former interior minister Gonzalez, had succeeded in getting the Vatican to agree to transfer Father Ruiz, a liberation theologian, from Chiapas, this is being seen as another government back-down.
Apart from charging that the EZLN is being organised and armed by the Guatemalan United National Resistance movement and the Salvadoran Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the Salinas government has also pointed the finger at "certain ideologues and religious men". A January 14 Interior Ministry report stated that a large group of radical lay ministers trained in Ruiz's diocese have been working in the countryside, "pressuring entire families into being members of their violent cause".
While the government tried to scapegoat Bishop Ruiz for the enormous social problems which, in Chiapas, have helped to give rise to the rebel movement, his supporters compare him to the Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, assassinated by right-wing death squads in 1980. In his homilies, Ruiz has repeatedly condemned the use of violence, but said that it "can be understood without looking for external causes".
Thirty per cent of the population of Chiapas, one of Mexico's most impoverished states, are Mayan Indians. Most rely on the land to survive. But with the signing of NAFTA, and the subsequent intensification of logging and livestock enterprises, and the collapse of world coffee prices, life will become even harder for these landless peasants.
The Salinas government had hoped that its role in the NAFTA negotiations and promises of a better life would guarantee re-election of the PRI. But promises that Mexico is on the way to becoming a Latin American "tiger" ring hollow when Mexico's economy will be even more tied to the dictates of international capital and grossly distorted trade rules which severely disadvantage weaker nations.
Not many Mexicans have been convinced by the pro-NAFTA rhetoric of PRI and the other main conservative party, the National Action Party (PAN). And with official figures showing the economy contracting of 1.2% for the third quarter of 1993, with manufacturing down 5% and employment falling 6%, they have every reason to be pessimistic.
Economic experts paint a gloomy picture for Mexico under NAFTA. As Thea Lee, from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, was quoted in the January New Internationalist: "The fact is that the US is more important to Canada and Mexico than Canada and Mexico are to the US. Virtually all the important concessions have been made by Mexico."
The EZLN has described NAFTA as "a death sentence for the indigenous territory", and graffiti on San Cristobal's walls further spell out their position: "Land or death" and "We don't want NAFTA, we want freedom".
While the precise origin of the EZLN is unknown, they do take their name from Emiliano Zapata, a leader of the 1910 revolution. Zapata came from the state of Morelos and, like many of the EZLN rebels, was of indigenous descent.
Many of the revolutionary democratic demands raised by Zapata's army, including a mandatory eight-hour day, national ownership of mineral rights and the distribution of land to the peasantry, were included in the 1917 constitution, and remain the basis of the Mexican constitution. Many of these are being raised today by the EZLN.
In particular, the demand for new and democratic elections has received widespread popular support. The EZLN cite Article 39 of the constitution, which, in its 1917 version, says in part: "The people have at all times the inalienable right to alter or modify the form of their government". The PRI has been in government since 1929, and Mexicans have long felt cheated at the polls.
Contrary to press speculation, Gellert told Â鶹´«Ã½, the EZLN does not have an ultraleft or Maoist orientation. "The EZLN, which supports electoral participation, has a very sophisticated political program which shows that it is more than just a spontaneous peasant uprising, but an organisation with political cadres."
The EZLN have launched an eight-point governmental program which includes the auditing of government funds, the annulment of peasants' debts, the freeing of all prisoners except murderers, rapists and drug traffickers, the rights of city tenants to own their own apartments after 15 years of paying rent and a requirement that foreign companies pay their workers the same wages they would in their home countries.
Gellert believes that the main opposition party, the Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD), will stand to gain electorally from the PRI's political crisis. A populist, petty-bourgeois nationalist party, the PRD has called the uprising by the indigenous peoples "a desperate cry to defend their dignity as human beings, which has been trampled and denied by successive governments of the state [of Chiapas] and of the nation and by their proteges, the Chiapaneco caciques [indigenous political bosses] and landowners". The PRD's presidential candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, has also condemned the use of violence by the EZLN.
"While the PRD's program does not go beyond making minimal demands on capital, its dynamic is quite different", Gellert said, explaining why several of the small left parties, including the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT), have decided in favour of an electoral alliance with the PRD.
"It participates in the social movements, which puts it at loggerheads with the Mexican government, and increases its popular appeal." Because Cardenas has so much popular appeal, there are rumours that Salinas may replace the PRI candidate with Manuel Camacho in an effort to coopt the sentiment behind Cardenas.