Autonomous Mexico: What happened when some indigenous people took their lands back from the state.

• Author: Russell, Thaddeus

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT the autonomous movements in Mexico from my anarchocommunist college buddies in the early 1990s. They loved the idea of indigenous people taking up arms and seizing control of their communities--and of the lucrative natural resources upon which those communities sat--from exploitative corporations and their government enforcers. The Zapatistas of the southern state of Chiapas, with their brazen armed seizures of corporate land holdings, served as the most inspiring example, and their dashing postmodernist leader Subcomandante Marcos became the Che Guevara of Gen X leftists.

Three decades later, I started hearing glowing reports about new autonomous indigenous movements in the central Mexican states of Guerrero and Michoacan from a different political crowd: attendees at the Anarchapulco conference, an annual festival of drug- and cryptocurrency-loving anarcho-libertarians held in a resort city that had also become the center of wars between rival cartels and thus the murder capital of Mexico.

Both my proto-antifa college friends and the Acapulco ancaps seemed romantically attached to the concept of conquered indigenous peoples taking direct and violent action to reclaim their land from corrupt and ruthless institutions: governments at the local, state, and federal level; the large mining, logging, agricultural, and ranching conglomerates to whom those governments had effectively granted legal sovereignty over the land inhabited by much of Mexico's 25 million indigenous people; and the globally infamous drug cartels that had begun to seize natural resources through extortion, intimidation, and mass murder, often in partnership with government and corporate actors.

Though it is an incomplete and sometimes unsophisticated study, Luis Hernandez Navarro's recently translated Self-Defense in Mexico: Indigenous Community Policing and the New Dirty Wars provides enough detail about the autonomous movements to give us a less rose-colored view of a complex and often contradictory political phenomenon.

On a fundamental level, the story of the Zapatistas, the autodefensas of Michoacan and Guerrero, and the community-policed autonomous towns that have sprung up all over the country is a story of anti-imperialism and self-determination, two principles that will excite fans of both Ron Paul and Naomi Klein. The indigenous people at the center of this remarkable recent history are the descendants of people who successfully resisted the...