Revolutionary Appeals

Chiapas tells the old story of peasant Indians used by urban intellecturals.

Dario Fernandez-Morera from the July 1994 issue

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But what makes the bishop's embrace of the revolutionary agenda so out of touch is that it overlooks the fact that, precisely in the cultural realm, the Mexican government has far from neglected the Indian. Throughout most of the 20th century, the government has vigorously promoted the Indian past as essential to Mexico's national pride and cultural heritage--would that such attention to the native culture were accompanied by an equal regard for the well-being of the remaining natives! The bishop overlooks, too, that a true recovery of "ancestral values" in Mexico would be incompatible with the existence of the bishop himself. In a pre-Hispanic Mexico, there would simply be no room for Catholic priests, except perhaps as sacrificial victims.

Like the good bishop, the governor of Chiapas supports "agrarian reform" and is unencumbered by a knowledge of history. If the "conditions" for the reform are not sufficiently favorable now, he has told the press, the government must then create them by "brushing aside" the "minor differences" standing in the way. Among the minor differences he would brush aside could conceivably be the reluctance of cattle ranchers to have their land taken away.

The awkward truth for the governor is that past Mexican agrarian reforms seriously hurt productivity. In the 1920s and '30s, expropriation ruined many farmers and cattlemen. Land redistribution disrupted production, especially among cattle ranchers, who suddenly found themselves without land on which to raise their cattle. The inefficiency of the agricultural cooperatives was the reason the PRI government of Lázaro Cárdenas, which had redistributed almost half of all arable land and nationalized major enterprises, abruptly changed its policies in 1938. The party protected landowners from further expropriation, and a year later chose as presidential candidate a moderate Catholic rather than an avowed socialist.

This is not to say there are no problems in Chiapas. There is no question that local unhappiness with the political status quo helped recruit soldiers for the Zapatistas, but it seems that inequalities alone do not explain the revolt. Another explanation is that the comandantes by their own admission, prepared for the uprising for more than 10 years. But there are other factors beyond the control of either the Zapatistas or the government.

Immigration from neighboring regions (including Guatemala) added to the notorious Mexican demographic explosion over the past decade and greatly strained local resources. In fact, the population growth in Chiapas between 1980 and 1990 was double the national rate. In addition, international coffee prices, the main pillar of the local economy, collapsed in 1991. They have yet to recover, adversely affecting more than 60,000 peasant growers. International meat prices have also declined, and cattle raising is the area's second major source of income. To combat deforestation, the government implemented a moratorium on timber harvesting. While the ban might save trees, it also eviscerates Chiapas's third major source of wealth. The state continues to rank below the national average by every possible living standard.

Racial discord also contributes to the region's problems. In neighboring Yucatan, an uprising from 1847 to 1850 tried to exterminate the whites and return to the pre-Hispanic past; in Chiapas the Tzeltal Indians rebelled in 1712 and 1869. Chiapas lacks the degree of miscegenation that grants other Mexican states a measure of racial harmony. One sees whites on the one hand and Indians on the other, with only a few mestizos in between. Cattlemen are white and sometimes behave like overlords. And since cattle require a great deal of land, cattlemen own large properties. Most peasants are Indian. They farm small plots that, until Salinas's constitutional reforms passed, they could not even sell; and such farming is much less profitable than cattle.

Nor is official neglect a sufficient explanation for the revolt. Since 1985 the government has granted land to 40,000 peasant families and created 400 new agrarian commons. In the past five years, the National Solidarity Program has pumped a great
deal of money into Chiapas. A good example is a government loan of 200,000 new pesos granted in 1993 to the Peasant Organization Emiliano Zapata. By the end of the year, most peasants were sufficiently well off to begin repaying the loan. Ninety Indians, however, argued against repayment and then killed the head of the organization, who favored complying with the agreement.

Interestingly, much of the government aid went to areas now occupied by the Zapatistas. Obviously the government's efforts have not been enough. But perhaps the revolt could also be explained as yet another case of an upheaval following a period of comparative economic and political liberalization complicated by the peculiar interests of a resentful intellectual class. This is how historians such as Simon Schama and, much earlier, François Guizot explained the French Revolution.

Explaining the past is easier than predicting the future. Mexico can become a Peru, but that is not inevitable. A clean election should be a sufficient prelude to ending the crisis now facing the country. Then the problems of the Indian communities should be addressed, though not at the expense of property owners who are productive members of the Mexican economy.

Clean elections and granting the more reasonable Indian demands would take away much of the high ground from the armed-to-the-teeth comandantes, who want socialism through turmoil because they fear democratic contests that their outmoded ideology might not win. The revolt and the murder would then be only another chapter in a long, painful process of modernization, whereby Mexico could eventually achieve the prosperity of such formerly backward economies as Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Chile.