Every now and then a tourist commercial on the Mexican state of Chiapas airs on Mexican television. The camera sweeps over the grand details of a perfect day in Chiapas: mystical Mayan ruins, abyssal canyons, turquoise rivers and lastly a "Welcome to Chiapas" sign adjacent to a newly painted highway. Despite its luster, this image is not as deceptive as it might have been eight years ago before the Zapatista Rebellion shook Mexico. Because of the revolution, "Chiapas" now evokes resistance, uncertainty, and instability.
On New Years Day 1994 the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional seized the capital of Chiapas and declared armed struggle against the Mexican government. As a group comprised mostly of scantly armed peasants, their chances of survival against the Mexican Army were as low as the value the Mexican government granted to their cause. Yet it was no laughing matter. One could sense the apprehensive tightness in the country's political and economic mood. Information gaps eventually placated the public to abandon the development of the war in Chiapas to government hands. Few national newspapers risked coverage of the low-intensity warfare carried out against the EZLN.
However, some non-governmental organizations and daring newspapers had been monitoring the perversions of war in Chiapas: human rights abuses, political imprisonment, the sequestering of land by the military and the consequent displacement of people from their land. Most of the information was disseminated through the Internet, and it has captured the attention of the international community. Many people of various countries have traveled to Chiapas, some to volunteer with the NGOs working around the conflict. Doubtless, the international community's opposition to the war has diluted the Mexican government's intentions to annihilate the EZLN in a full-force offensive.
The attention the conflict has garnered is not illogical or excessive. Chiapas is a turbulent microcosm of the major global issues being debated in our day. The conflicts in Chiapas have as basis five hundred years of inequality and neglect for the large indigenous populations of the state. Within the last fifty years, polemic developments in the areas of globalization, conservation, self-autonomy, and politics have complicated these unresolved problems.
The pith of the Chiapas conflict is racism. Since the arrival of the Spanish to the region, fertile land has been concentrated in the hands of Ladino (of mixed indigenous and Spanish ancestry) landholders who exploit the Indigenous majority that is left to occupy infertile land. In an effort to rectify this injustice, Emiliano Zapata spearheaded the Mexican Revolution in 1910 to redistribute land more equally amongst the peasants of Mexico. The Constitution enacted as a result of the Revolution provided peasants with communal land. Despite these provisions, large landholders retained most land in the states with large Indigenous populations in southern Mexico. Since then, the law and government development projects have not visibly impacted the regions within these states that are primarily inhabited by Indigenous people. Chiapas, although milked for its rich natural resources, is the least electrically-supplied, least schooled, least literate, and poorest state in Mexico.
The large and varying indigenous populations inhabiting Chiapas are derelict to this day because they are regarded by the Mexican government as inferior peoples. The government has only become more and more resentful towards these populations. Within the last fifty years their population explosion has precipitated a mass settling of the previously uninhabited Highlands region of Chiapas. The Mexican Army was dispatched in great numbers to dislodge communities from new settlements and others from their age-old land. This violent military involvement was a major cause of the 1994 rebellion. Since then, Mexico has waged war against the EZLN and any indigenous community that is sympathetic to the rebels.
However, there is more that explains the government's low-intensity war in Chiapas. The destitute indigenous communities inhabit a much coveted region that extends from Chiapas to Guatemala. This region is rich in bio-diversity (and so a hotspot for biological patents), oil, natural gas, uranium, costly woods, and water resources that can generate electricity. Not surprisingly, the U.S., Canada, Japan and Europe have been putting pressure on Mexico and Guatemala to open up this region to trade and exploration. In the way stand the EZLN and the Indigenous populations that uphold the communal ownership of land parcels issued to them by the Mexican Constitution.
Different tactics besides military seizures are employed by the government to oust the Indigenous from coveted land. Certain agents offer Eucalyptus seeds to peasants so they can grow it in their own land, knowing that Eucalyptus trees make the land useless for at least twenty years after only seven years of harvest. Peasant farmers then abandon the land. Another scheme is to offer small numbers of cattle in return for titles to large land parcels. The transaction is not equal in value, so when peasants try to live off of the money generated by the cattle they soon run out. Also, titles to land parcels are taken as collateral for loans. All sorts of financial tricks are then employed to prevent the peasants from being able to pay the loans. The government also forces the Indigenous people off their land by claiming that they are settled in national ecological preserves.
All in all, NGO figures estimate that at the end of 1999 16,000 to 21,000 peasants were living in displacement camps in the jungles. Some argue that the desperate conditions in the camps are intended to force the peasants to migrate to the cities where they will comprise a large, uneducated population ripe to become cheap labor for "maquiladoras." The building of highways to transport materials for the construction of "maquiladoras" and dams is seen already (these dams are not intended for the energy needs of Chiapas).
Some contend that these processes are the pangs of modernization, worthwhile to endure. However, the thousands of displaced communities and the EZLN argue for self-autonomy -- that is, the power to decide their own future. They do not want to be poor, they want a better standard of living, but they want to achieve this goal in terms that are just and sensitive to their own cultures. Before taking a side on what is perhaps one of the bigger questions raised by the Chiapas conflict, it is important to consider whether the processes of modernization and globalization such as are occurring in Chiapas are compatible with the war cries of the EZLN -- "Democracy! Justice! Liberty!"
