Andersen, Martin E.
"Hemisphere"
Winter/Spring 1994
After Chiapas: The Indian Agenda
The violence seemed like part of a well-known script. Masked young men wearing baseball caps and bearing old rifles took control of town squares in a poor region far from the modern comforts of the capital city. Stunned military and police, jarred from the stupor of their New Year's revelry, called for reinforcements, then counterattacked. As propeller-driven aircraft bombed and strafed once-sleepy hamlets nestled in the mountains, the estimated 2,000 insurgents shrank back into the protective rain forest. Meanwhile, the government forces swelled to more than 10,000. The build-up was accompanied by displays of bodies-alleged to be those of guerrillas-with hands tied behind their backs and skulls shattered by pointblank bullets. In Washington, strategic thinkers muttered darkly about outside support for the unheard-of rebels.
The bloody rebellion by native Americans in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico proved to be an international embarrassment for a country widely praised for its economic reforms. It also appeared timed to undermine President Carlos Salinas de Gortari just as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was coming into effect. While the rebels of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación National- named for Emiliano Zapata, the hero of the 1910 Mexican Revolution-melted into the surrounding countryside, the government retaliated with claims of foreign participation in the uprising. From the government's perspective, this was, perhaps, the best way to explain why the well-disciplined guerrillas had even seized the square in San Cristóbal de Las Casas (the second largest city in Chiapas with some 90,000 people), but it was not a claim borne out by guerrilla casualties. The dead insurgents bore the physical features characteristic of the region's Mayan tribes.
No one should be surprised by the uprising in Chiapas. It is Mexico's poorest state and the site of a long-running series of violations against the human rights of native peoples. It is also the scene of a virtual assault by large landowners against the small agricultural holdings of the Mayan, Tzeltale, Zapoteco, Zoque, and other indigenous communities of the region. In recent years, wealthy landowners have forced thousands off communal farrn lands, known as ejidos, which according to official Mexican lore, are one of the most important social gains of the "Institutional Revolution" inaugurated by Zapata and others. The guerrillas' protest against what they called the Salinas government's complicity in rights violations and the erosion of their land rights was intensified by worries about what NAFTA will do to the price of corn-a staple-and by a fear that multinational corporations would be able to push those remaining off their lands.
The situation in Chiapas mirrors the condition of native peoples in many areas of Mexico, home to Latin America's largest indigenous population. More than a million Mexican Indians speak no Spanish, and eight times that many use native Indian languages as their preferred idiom. Nearly 70% of those who live in rural areas are considered by the government to be "marginalized" (as the Mexican government refers to its Indian communities), with nine in ten outside the reach of sanitation and sewerage systems and thus victims of intestinal disease.
Indian Needs
To some observers, the Chiapas revolt, coming at the end of the UN "International Year of the World's Indigenous Peoples," underscored the urgency of addressing the needs of Latin America's 35-40 million Indians-particularly their political rights and the protection of their lands and resources. Victims of poverty, violence, and political and.social marginalization, the plight of native peoples has largely escaped the notice and attention of policymakers, both in Latin America and in Washington.
The rebellion was tragic proof of the risks posed by the failure of govermnents to protect the political, social, and economic rights of native peoples. The degree to which the Zapatistas struck a popular chord throughout Mexico seemed to do as much with the widespread appeal of their demands-the protection of native lands, real democracy, and the fair treatment of native peoples-as with the puckish and impassioned flair of their enigmatic leader, Subcomandante Marcos.
The Native Agenda
The grito de Chiapas reflected the serious problems confronted by an estimated 300 million indigenous peoples around the world. The indigenous agenda includes many of the most intriguing and urgent items that need to be addressed by policymakers as their countries approach the twenty-first century. These include:
As the seemingly endless stream of newspaper articles and editorials about Chiapas made clear, the indigenous revolution is here. The question is will it be largely nonviolent and beneficial to indigenous and tribal people, as well as the rest of humanity, or will it result in an endless series of "lowintensity conflicts."
Indian advocates point out that, if violent episodes like that of Chiapas are to be kept from recurring, a systematic effort needs to be made to help indigenous peoples living in fragile environments to conserve their resources. Part of the solution is to ensure them resource rights (access to land, water, and fuel), to promote their ability to defend their land and resource base, and to help them meet their needs in a modern world without losing their time-honored resource management methods. The continued progression of the global march to democracy as well as the protection of our common natural inheritance requires helping indigenous peoples to take meaningful and representative roles in their own governments.
The Chiapas revolt spawned several myths, which policymakers can ignore at their peril. The Salinas administration was protecting its own vested interests when it dismissed pre- New Year's reports of guerrilla activities as fabrications generated by its opponents and the opposition to NAFTA. It is now clear, however, that the Mexican army was involved in a classic, and brutal, counterinsurgency effort in the mountains of Chiapas throughout 1993.
Following the revolt, the Salinas -government tried to evade responsibility for the conditions that led to the revolt by claiming the guerrillas had ourside contacts and foreign supporters in their ranks. The causes of the revolt, however, were clearly Mexican in character and content. Manuel Camacho Solís- Salinas's own special negotiator- gave lie to government claims that the Zapatistas were led by foreigners by describing the rebels as homegrown insurgents; his use of the term "army" when describing the insurgents flew in the face of government claims that the gierrillas were a band of "lawbreakers"
Finally, while the Zapatistas have stolen the headlines, most indigenous activism throughout the hemisphere has been nonviolent, if not always peaceful. The Zapatistas' leftist rhetoric should not be the prism through which all indigenous activism is evaluated. Indian issues are not, in the main, either "leftist" or "rightist," although some activists may be thus characterized. At the most fundamental level, the indigenous agenda is one of political and economic empowerment and, to a certain degree, of cultural sovereignty.
There is also the danger that the New Year's Day revolt will become a pretext for spending more on the military, not just in Mexico, but throughout Latin America, and that indigenous activism may become the new raison d'etre for army involvement in internal security. Chiapas has become the symbol of what can go wrong when armies-even comparatively small ones-attempt to carry out tasks other than the defense of the nation-state against external threats. Inappropriate roles and missions, not necessarily size, are what make militaries potentially dangerous actors outside civilian control. The lack of effective recourse to a functioning legal system, coupled with the employment of military forces as a virtual army of occupation, can be seen as an open invitation to the disenfranchised and disaffected to join the Zapatista rebels.
Throughout Latin America the absence of a unifying communist threat has sent militaries scrambling to define new threats to security as a means of holding onto budgets and prestige. Despite the fact that Mexico has one of the lowest per capita military expenditures in Latin America, the lack of an appropriate role and mission for its army is pushing the force to demand a greater say in major national decisions, the antechamber of militarism. This trend is exacerbated by a financial independence that dates back to the Mexican Revolution, and now, by the events in Chiapas.
That the military's own role in internal security in Chiapas itself contributed to popular support for the Zapatista insurgents is evidenced by a 1993 Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights report about conditions in the southern Mexican state. Despite a constitutional prohibition against military involvement in domestic affairs, the report notes "troubling . . . signs of renewed involvement of the military in civilian affairs during the administration of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.... Another disturbing development is the deployment of the army among the indigenous populations of southem Mexico- especially in Chiapas-where long-simmering land conflicts have been aggravated by the government's agrarian policy.... [L]awless practices of the Mexican military have become increasingly tolerated at the highest levels of the Mexican government.... The growing acceptance of lawless military involvement in detentions and searches among civilian populations is a dangerous development."
Trained to employ maximum force to destroy an "enemy," utilizing forces that are largely alien to the community in which they are deployed, illegal acts by the Mexican army were almost inevitable- all the more so once the guerrilla insurgency burst forth with unsuspected force. In testimony before the US Congress on February 2, 1994, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck pointed out that, despite reports of hundreds killed in the fighting in Chiapas, the government has never produced a single wounded prisoner!
According to many knowledgeable observers, the Salinas government has increasingly used the army to intervene in political and labor disputes, as well as a major actor in the fight against narcotics trafficking. The Minnesota Advocates report notes: "The militarization of the drog war is, in large measure, a result of the government's inability or unwillingness to pursue serious reform of the police," even as the army has itself been implicated in almost surreal episodes of narcotics-related misconduct, including the murder of law enforcement officers. Meanwhile, in many precincts, antinarcotics police have had to buy their own ammunition, even though most local police make a mere $200 a month.
The events in Chiapas raised specific issues that are broadly representative
of the challenges facing indigenous peoples throughout the continent: the
political empowerment of indigenous peoples; the protection of their land
rights; indigenous rights and the administration of justice; and forest
management and the protection of indigenous cultures.
Country |
Total Population (Millions) |
Indigenous Population (Percentage) |
| Argentina | 31.9 |
0.1 |
| Belize | 0.2 |
10 |
| Bolivia | 6.5 |
66 |
| Brazil | 150.8 |
1 |
| Chile | 12.8 |
9 |
| Colombia | 31.9 |
1 |
| Costa Rica | 3.0 |
1 |
| Ecuador | 10.3 |
21 |
| El Salvador | 5.1 |
21 |
| Guatemala | 9.1 |
50 |
| Guayana | 0.4 |
1 |
| Honduras | 5.1 |
7 |
| Mexico | 86.4 |
11 |
| Nicaragua | 3.5 |
3 |
| Panama | 2.4 |
6 |
| Paraguay | 4.5 |
3 |
| Peru | 21.4 |
40 |
| Suriname | 0.8 |
3 |
| Uruguay | 3.0 |
0 |
| Venezuela | 13.9 |
1 |
Political Empowerment
Bringing "marginalized" peoples into the democratic process is a key component for the consolidation of elected governments. Throughout Latin America-but most certainly in Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia- democratic participation cannot be limited to areas of relative privilege if the long-term prospects for democracy are to be secure. New and emerging democracies can remain healthy only if they are fully representative.
In Guatemala nearly 60% of the country's 10 million people are descendants of the ancient Mayas, yet there are only six indigenous members of the congress. Independent observers say one important factor in the low turnout in Guatemala's crucial January referendum on constitutional reforms was the fact the ballots wore printed only in Spanish, although hundreds of thousands of potential voters speak only indigenous languages.
In Ecuador there is a single native American congressman. And in Bolivia, of the 130 members of parliament, only three are indigenous, a fact ameliorated only partially by the 1993 election of Víctor Hugo Cárdenas-a recognized native American leader-to the vicepresidency.
Protection of Land Rights
Indian homelands-in many cases the last remote forests, savannas, and wetlands of Latin America- are facing a ruthless onslaught by lawless cattle ranchers, loggers, and landless peasants. Experts say-and the experience of Chiapas seems to bear out-that securing legal protection for their lands, and thus their way of life and the ecosystem that sustains it, is the greatest challenge faced by native peoples. In Mexico an estimated 70% of Indian land is forest. For example, the 50,000 Tarahumara Indians of Chihuahua's Sierra Madre Occidental live in one of the richest biosystems in North America. Both the ecosystem, with its stunning variety of plants and animals, and the Tarahumara Indians are at risk-victims of an unholy alliance of large landowners and drug traffickers. Ineffective policing by the Mexican army has helped to make the sprawling state on the US border a lawless cesspool of corruption.
In places such as Central America, where the population is expected to double within the next 25 years, the increasing shortage of what were once "frontier" lands means that commercial agricultural interests can only expand at the expense of native peoples and their control over their own territories. In Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere, land issues are at the forefront of the indigenous agenda.
An important part of helping indigenous peoples protect their lands is to help provide them with the information and support needed to create accurate land-use maps, thus demolishing a racist myth that endures from the Spanish colonial era: that the remaining forests, savannas, and wetlands are "uninhabited," and therefore there for the taking.
One promising effort has been undertaken by native peoples in Honduras and Panama, assisted by the nongovernmental organization Native Lands. In both countries, Indians have escaped the invisibility myth by creating graphic, detailed records of their lands, including who lives there and how the land is used. By employing scientific maps and technical evaluations, native peoples can make credible cases for legalizing communal homelands, stanching the invasions of their lands by landless peasants and multinational companies, and resolving on more favorable terms the relationship between Indian homelands and national protected areas.
Administration of Justice
The revolt in Chiapas has helped to focus attention on the need for new rules and new laws governing how countries treat their Indian nations and other indigenous peoples. In countries as diverse as Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Peru, native Americans continue to be victimized by military-run internal security forces. Both the military and insurgent groups subject native Americans to forced recruitment and violence. The lack of representative legal systems at the community level means the denial to native peoples of the full protection of the law, while Indigenous continue to be overrun, confiscated, or threatened.
Human rights advocates point out it is necessary to strengthen civilian
justice systems-including police-at the local level in order to effectively
confront abuses. Native American demands for legal protection through the
creation and support of community and regional justice systems, including
law enforcement, mirror the democratic experience of the US itself, where
law enforcement is overwhelmingly civilian and local (as opposed to many
countries of Latin America, where the armed forces still control the police).
The creation of and support for local administration of justice helps to
ensure community empowerment on issues of vital concern, and is directly
related to questions of demilitarization and human rights.
Forest Management and the Protection of Indigenous Cultures
There is a growing recognition in Latin America of the needs of indigenous peoples who use forests as the basis for their livelihood, social organization, or cultural identity. These groups and established local communities that depend on forest resources have an economic stake in sustainable forest use. The international community can and should help indigenous peoples increase their capacity to protect their own lands and thus support sustainable resource use and the protection of the environment.
These efforts should also include the definition and strengthening of the participation and stake of indigenous peoples in local, national, and international economies, particularly in the sustainable harvest of both timber (including fuel wood) and nontimber forest products and services, and the facilitation and furthering of the cultural, educational, and economic self-sufficiency of indigenous peoples.
Chiapas, and Beyond
During the Bush administration, the US was seen as unsympathetic to UN efforts to address the indigenous agenda. The Clinton administration also got off to a slow start when the US delegation at the June 1993 human rights summit in Vienna was not even prepared to discuss indigenous rights (the summit's second hottest topic after women's rights).
The Clinton administration should clearly state that it is US policy to assist indigenous peoples, particularly in emerging democracies and in nations in which native peoples are either a numerical majority or a significant minority. One promising development came in late January, when the 1993 State Department country reports on human rights featured, for the first time, beefed up coverage of indigenous rights (thanks to legislation sponsored by former senator Alan Cranston [D-CA].
Where possible, native peoples must be included in sustainable development strategies, particularly those that would enhance the protection of rain forests or other environmental treasures. The Clinton administration should also vigorously champion indigenous interests and concerns within the multilateral development banks and international trade organizations. As a recent Congressional study on the impact of US foreign assistance shows, the Agency for International Development has done limited work in providing aid to indigenous peoples. US efforts, however, should reach out to meet the special needs of indigenous peoples, rather than hoping they benefit indirectly from programs aimed at rural peoples or the poor. Greater emphasis should be made on programs that facilitate indigenous institution-building and economic empowerment; fortify cultural identity; increase technical and professional training; and strengthen legal rights.
For better or worse, events in southern Mexico have riveted our attention at the point of a gun -albeit a rusty shotgun. Their meaning-the violence, the marginalization, the potential for more resources to be funneled to the security forces and away from the people-needs, however, to be juxtaposed with recent developments in Bolivia. There the newly elected presidential ticket included an indigenous leader whose schoolteacher wife still wears the traditional dress-long black braid, multilayered skirt, felt shoes, and a bowler hat-of the Andean Altiplano. The August 1993 inaugural address of vice president Víctor Hugo Cárdenas-whose presence on the ticket was instrumental in achieving President Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada's wide margin of victory-was given not only in Spanish, but also in the native languages of Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani.
"After 500 years of colonial silence and after 168 of republican exclusion, we now speak up to tell our truth," Cárdenas said. "Democracy in a country that is multiethnic, pluricultural, and plurilingual ought also to be multiethnic, pluricultural, and plurilingual.... A tree grows from its own roots."