Soberano July 7, 2021
Mexico’s 32nd state has a revealing name—el Estado Libre y Soberano (Free and Sovereign) de Chiapas. This title became codified after the 1994 Zapatista Uprising, but, to many, this has always been considered an occupied land.
In the first few decades of the 19th-Century, as Spain’s empire unraveled, independence movements spread like wildfire throughout the New World, from the Golden Gate to Tierra del Fuego, and emerging national borders were fluid, unfixed, and frequently contested. Although violent struggles raged among liberal and conservative descendants of European hegemony, Chiapas remained a backwater frontier, isolated by rugged mountains, with fewer than 20,000 Spanish-speakers. Apart from a few Catholic outposts like Ciudad Real—later to become San Cristobal de las Casas—the Chiapanecos were native speakers with few colonial affiliations. Lacking the obvious resources valued by the conquerors, they were autonomous by default, left to their own devices for over three centuries.
The new mapmakers of a liberated continent, meanwhile, were quick to annex the area, at least on paper. Mexico’s first claim was in 1825, but Guatemala responded in kind by including the territory in its grand designs for a unified Republic of Central America, a USA-styled experiment that lasted for barely 10 years before splintering into the quasi-military fiefdoms of Cost Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and the greatly diminished state of Guatemala.
Mexico reasserted its annexation of Chiapas mid-century, even as Texas, California, and Yucatan were breaking away, but ultimately Frontera Chiapaneca simply was not vital to Mexico’s national integrity. Consequently, Chiapas remained in a state of limbo, exercising de facto self-control while being exploited by enterprising plantation settlers, or hacendados, who began developing profitable industries of sugar cane, coffee, textiles, etc. In point of fact, however, there was no integrated government of which to speak but, rather, an informal relationship between exploiters and their exploited. Indeed, Guatemala, which was well familiar with the hacienda system, did not formally relinquish claims on the territory until 1895.
Even today, the indigenous cultural identity of Chiapas aligns more with the south than the north, although ongoing political instability in CIA-ravaged Guatemala makes Estado Libre y Soberano de Limbo a comparatively advantaged state of being.
As for what is to become of this officially-sanctioned “sovereign state,” the real citizens are not talking, even if they can speak the language of the conquerors. Its revolutionary reputation attracts many settlers from outside—Yanquis, Europeans, South Americans, and, let it be said, the Mestizos from the other 31 states of Mexico—and they are fulsome in their support of independence. It is not lost on observers that even the founder of the Zapatista movement, a masked revolutionary named Marcos, is an intellectual from Mexico City. Even the patron saint of this acclaimed indigenous movement, Emiliano Zapata, was from Estado Morelos, not Chiapas. The sovereign ones have so far outlasted all these outside liberators.