Zapatismo October 5, 2021
“So that the people will have land, forests, and water.”
Emiliano Zapata, 1917
The man in the black ski mask, with a smoking pipe in his mouth hole, does indeed have a name after all. Today he calls himself Subcomandante Galeano, but in his glory years he was known only as Subcomandante Marcos, the military leader and chief spokesman for Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional, EZLN.
His actual name is Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, born in 1957, educated in Philosophy and the Liberal Arts at UNAM—like Che Guevara, a child of privilege. Until the early ’80’s he taught sociology at UAM, Mexico City’s radical academic hub, where he became involved with guerrilla groups, and he wrote intensely. By 1984, Professor Guillén relocated to Chiapas and took up the role of outside agitator among the Ttzotzil and other indigenous groups. It was a rapid transformation from teacher to soldier. One wonders if Rafael Guillén met the ghost of Che Guevara during his time in Mexico City or the Lacandón Jungle. He claims to know the ghost of Emiliano Zapata here in Chiapas, the revolutionary from Morelos.
The North American Free Trade Agreement may have signaled the revolt, as Guillén, Chomsky and others have said, and this was no doubt key to garnering international support for the fledgeling liberation movement in the ’90’s. However, for the EZLN the real trigger was in 1992 when Presidente Carlos Salinas took a machete to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution.
This was Zapata’s Article, a concession from Carranza and the other urban intellectuals to the peasant army, which was added to the document in 1917, just 2 years before Zapata’s ambush and assassination in Morelos. The Article states plainly that land should be owned only by those work it with their own hands. If I understand the premise correctly, I as a school teacher could not be a landowner, since I do not work with my hands except when I talk. In the world of Article 27, I would have to rent my living space, I suppose, from a farmer.
Clearly, the agrarian ideal did not come to be. Article 27 did manage to forbid foreigners from private and corporate land ownership, but it did not stop the indigenous people from losing their properties and livelihoods. These people knew where they lived, where their family had always lived, yet there was no paper to secure title. In the 1930’s, however, a system was established to protect indigenous property by granting tenure and prohibiting ownership transfers. Called Ejidos, these communal properties are sprinkled all over the country. By 1990’s, there were 28,000 of them in Mexico, accounting for more than 3 million households.
Food production in Mexico soared after World War II, but by the 1970’s and ’80’s it was on the wane, and urbanization was placing new pressures on the Ejidos. In addition, neoliberalism rose from the ashes of the Cold War, which called for a “new world order” and wide-open markets. This was the organizing mindset for leaders like Bush Senior and Clinton, Blair and Kohl, and Presidente Salinas, and it set in motion mechanisms that would best serve the world marketplace. Ejidos were obstacles to this tsunami, so Carlos Salinas tried to dissolve them through privatization. In Chiapas, he created a monster.
Zapatismo is a movement which looks backward. The original Zapatistas were peasant revolutionaries from Morelos, but the system they defended dates back to antiquity. In the Mexica world, Capullalli was the Nahuatl word used to describe Ejidos. Communal land ownership was the status quo before the conquest. Even after, while the conquistadors were busy creating slave plantations, King Carlos of Spain decreed that the integrity of the Capullalli shall be preserved. Following the lessons of the West Indies, he did not want to see another native genocide. This is the history that animates the movement.
What Zapatismo has achieved since the 1994 uprising is not so apparent in San Cristobal de las Casas. Despite the collective rhetoric and romanticism, which permeates every downtown cafe and pulqueria, we are not actually in one of the so-called autonomous zones. As my friend Gerardo says, “We may be Zapatista sympathizers, but here we abide by Mexican law, at least as it is.”
Outside San Cristobal, about a third of the state is organized into 5 independently governed regions, each with a designated capital, called a Caracol (yes, a snail). One of the autonomous zones calls itself “Mother of the Sea Snail of our Dreams.” Mystical references aside, representative governments oversee all legal functions through a process of consensus. These governments provide services, including water, power, transportation, police and fire, schools, and hospitals, and they ensure cooperative access to land and natural resources. Each of these 5 autonomous zones is explicitly exempt from NAFTA, and each is defended by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. This is the latest status quo.
When I start to ask too many questions, Gerardo becomes evasive, saying slyly, “The force is strong in this one.” As if he is Obi-Wan discussing the Jedi in Tatooine. I would hate for him to think that my prime motivation is merely to appeal to a snail, a Caracol, or whatever molluscan powers that be, that this foreigner might find a farmer with a cheap housing rental and maybe some forests and water.