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From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995, p. 12.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The year ended badly for Mexico’s rulers. The money markets fell, the peso was devalued, the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas mobilised again. As the Los Angeles Times put it, ‘at the heart of those crises is Chiapas.’
A year ago the Zapatista National Liberation Army erupted on to a world stage all set for a grey suit gathering to launch the North American Free Trade Agreement, a new step towards world economic integration.
One year on, Chiapas remains occupied by the Mexican army – as it was before January 1994. A new president, Ernesto Zedillo, has taken office with promises of ‘political dialogue with the opposition’. But he still represents the PRI, the political apparatus that has controlled Mexico’s political life for decades.
Much was made of how clean the elections in August were. Yet the original presidential candidate, Colosio, was shot dead at an election rally, and in September the general secretary of the PRI, Ruiz Massieu, was murdered.
The Chiapas rising was, in the first place, a response to local conditions. The poverty of most of its inhabitants was growing deeper as the profitable cattle lands and the coffee estates absorbed more and more of the plots on which the Indian communities grew their food.
In one sense Chiapas was remote; in another it was at the centre of the government’s economic strategy. Its land could be turned to private profit by exporting cattle and producing corn on big farms and the farms could be cheaply bought by the food multinationals. Its oil and hydroelectricity could keep the factories of the Valley of Mexico running.
The governor of Chiapas (who later became interior minister and sent the troops against the Zapatistas) was himself a major landowner and used his power to suppress Indian resistance. The bishop for the area, Samuel Ruiz, was constantly protesting at the repression and abuses that were perpetrated. That governor has long since departed, but the new man, Eduardo Robledo, still represents the PRI. He took office in December despite very well founded claims that his opponent had won the election. The Zapatistas promised to renew the armed struggle if he was installed – but it did not happen.
Recent events show economic crisis dogs Mexico. The Chiapas rising was a serious threat to the worldwide strategy of the most powerful actors in the world economy. Its containment had costs for the ruling classes of Mexico and the US in Mexico itself. The US is calling in its debts and its debtors.
The old military dictators have been sent into comfortable retirement – from Central America to Chile and Argentina. All this was part of the preparation for the creation of a world system without economic frontiers.
Now Clinton is calling for Chile to be admitted into the Free Trade Agreement – and Argentina and Colombia will undoubtedly be next. What are Chile’s qualifications? In 1969 28.5 percent of Chileans lived below the official poverty line. After the US supported the military coup of September 1973, those figures grew worse. By 1989 42 percent of the population were living in poverty while the wealthiest fifth of the population had increased its share of the national wealth from 44.5 to 54.6 percent.
These figures are typical. In Mexico by 1987 real wages were worth just over half of their value seven years earlier. Welfare spending fell from 17 percent of GDP to 13 percent by the mid-1980s. At the same time, public spending on rural development fell from 12 percent of the total in 1980 to 7.5 percent in 1988.
In the 1980s the strategy was to drive down living standards, to concentrate economic power, to destroy the central economic role of the state, to allow banks, financial agencies and the great corporations to discipline and control the market directly. There was resistance – in Central America particularly – and the system protected the military regimes who set out to crush that resistance mercilessly.
Then there was the ‘return to democracy’! In Central America today many of those who participated in the resistance are collaborating in governments with the people who tortured and killed their comrades a few years ago. Those who have claimed to lead the struggles of the masses have become partners in government with the enemies of the working class. Is it just a case of corruption – or stupidity?
Everything centres on the notion of ‘democracy’. The Sandinistas, for example, have staked everything on winning the next presidential elections in Nicaragua. It seems unlikely, but even if they do, they will run a state with no economic power and which has lost the mass popular support it had when it was seen as a protection against the world market. Where there is less and less economic democracy, control of the state is no guarantee at all of political freedom or democracy.
And so back to Chiapas. One commentator described it as ‘the first postmodern rebellion’ – abandoning the traditional language of the left and ‘not bent on taking power’. Events have proved how double edged a quality this was.
The Zapatista National Liberation Army called a Democratic National Convention in Chiapas in August, just before the elections. It was chaired by Rosario Ibarra, leader of an organisation of mothers of disappeared political prisoners.
The convention called for gathering resistance across the country against corruption, exploitation and injustice. Without a strategy, however, this movement from below turned to the old left gathered around Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, who took upon themselves the role of political leadership.
The democracy for which the Zapatistas and their supporters still yearn was used as a bargaining counter by yesterday’s leaders. Today, now that they have a place in government, they want nothing to do with it. In November, the EZLN leadership issued a document of self-criticism, but there is no criticism in it of those who used the genuine courage and anger of the peasant fighters of Chiapas to their own limited advantage.
A new leadership must begin from the understanding that the state is a deadly enemy of genuine socialist democracy – and must be overthrown.
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Last updated: 3 November 2019