Chiapas: an uprising born of despair.

• Author: Renner, Michael
• Position: Mexican state - Cover Story

In Mexico, as in many developing societies, millions of people are trapped in a crucible of poverty, poisoned environments, and violent political repression. The Zapatista revolt shows why the fate of such people has become a pressing political challenge the world over.

On New Year's Day 1994, a group of towns in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, was seized by a ragtag peasant army composed mainly of indigenous Mayan people. Two weeks and at least 145 deaths later, the government had forced the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional, or EZLN) to retreat to its jungle strongholds in the eastern portion of the state. That New Year's Day also marked the coming into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, the treaty intended to integrate Mexico, the United States, and Canada into a unified trading bloc.

In a sense, NAFTA and the EZLN are the forces that define modern Mexico. Resolving the tensions of that troubled society will require a view broad enough to embrace both the rarefied world of international finance, and dirt-poor towns where most people don't even have access to proper latrines. Dealing with the tensions in places like Chiapas is a matter of prime international importance: the poverty, environmental degradation, and social inequities that underlie Mexico's troubles can be found throughout the developing world.

Worldwide, about 1.3 billion people, or 23 percent of the global population, live in poverty, according to the United Nations. At least 600 million of these people live in "absolute poverty" - a condition only several hundred calorics a day away from the slide into starvation. Some 1.2 billion people are landless or do not have access to enough land to feed themselves. At least 400 million people live in ecologically fragile areas - areas where drought, deforestation, pollution, and other forms of environmental degradation are putting increasing numbers of livelihoods at risk. Some 120 million people are unemployed, while another 700 million are working long hours for next to nothing. Today, the richest 20 percent of the world's people have 150 times the income of the poorest 20 percent - a disparity that, to varying degrees, can be found in virtually every country.

The Zapatistas present a genuine challenge to the Mexican version of this predicament - but the challenge is really political, not military. They take their name and their basic ideology from Emiliano Zapata, the leader of a peasant army during the Mexican Revolution of 1911 to 1917. After his assassination in 1919, Zapata became a figure of mythic proportions and a source of inspiration for Mexican campesinos, as small-scale farmers and farm laborers are called. The Zapatistas' ideals can perhaps best be summed up in a slogan they adopted from that earlier peasant army: "the land belongs to those who work it." But despite their rhetoric, the Zapatistas are not revolutionary in the usual sense of the term. In contrast to most Latin American guerrilla movements, the EZLN has insisted from its inception that it has no interest in overthrowing, the government. It sees itself as involved in a desperate struggle for democracy - and its leaders have a clear record of practicing what they preach. At every turn of events they have taken pains to consult with their supporters. In its talks with the government, for instance, the EZLN has made a point of having proposed agreements ratified by its constituency.

Even in Mexico, few people had heard of the EZLN before January 1994, but the movement dates back to at least 1983. In the poor communities of eastern Chiapas, people have long been keenly aware that the deck is stacked against them. Enormous economic inequalities, a political system that is almost completely unaccountable to its poorer constituents, desperate poverty, and the degradation of the land: these are facts of life in Chiapas, and to growing numbers of the poor, they made a strong case for the EZLN. By the early 1990s, the EZLN's ranks were expanding rapidly. By early 1993, when the Mexican military had its first brush with the EZLN, Zapatista supporters probably numbered at least 70,000.

At that time, the authorities had little to say about the Zapatistas; official Mexico was eager to project the image of a stable country in order to guarantee passage of NAFTA and encourage the growing ranks of foreign investors. But it was impossible to cover up the January 1994 uprising. Zapatista demands for land and election reform found wide resonance throughout the country. The Zapatistas succeeded in galvanizing national discussion of these issues - as well as some local action. Sympathizers throughout southern Mexico seized dozens of town halls to protest the string of fraudulent elections that had allowed Mexico's ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI, to maintain its decades-old grip on power. Land-hungry peasants invaded private ranches; some landowners fled, while others counterattacked with hired gunmen. Domestic and international interest intensified and by the end of February, then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari had begun peace talks with the EZLN.

A Dumping Ground for the Marginalized

Chiapas has long been known as "a rich land, a poor people." The state accounts for only 3 percent of Mexico's population, but has 5 percent of its oil production and 12 percent of its natural gas production. Chiapas grows 13 percent of Mexico's corn, the country's staple food crop, and 46 percent of its coffee - a major export crop. It also produces half of the country's hydroelectric power, yet only one in three Chiapanecan households is hooked up to the electrical grid. Fewer than half of the state's people regularly eat meat, even though Chiapas is a leading beef producer. In 1990, only 58 percent of Chiapanecan households had running water - well below the national average of 79 percent. Literacy stood at 70 percent, 17 points below the national rate. In comparison to the country as a whole, Chiapas also lags behind in terms of household income and education, and has above average rates of infant mortality (see table, page 22).

Within Chiapas, the same inequities repeat themselves on a finer scale. The western part of the state is relatively prosperous, thanks to the large-scale commercial farms in the Grijalva River valley and the coffee plantations along the Pacific coast. The central highlands are poorer, and the eastern lowlands, inhabited primarily by people of Mayan descent, are deeply impoverished (see map, page 15). These people, whose forebears built one of the greatest pro-Columbian civilizations, now live in a kind of de facto statelessness. They have virtually nothing in the way of government services, political power, or economic opportunity. Eastern Chiapas, in the words of George Collier, a social anthropologist at Stanford University, "is a kind of dumping ground for the marginalized." By every conventional indicator of social and economic well-being, the people of eastern Chiapas score far lower than the national average - and lower even than the average for Mexico's indigenous population. Profound discrimination is the lot of indigenous people all over Mexico, but Chiapas excels in this respect. Tom Barry, founder of the Interhemispheric Resource Center, a research institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, puts it bluntly: "nowhere else in Mexico is racism so pronounced."

Despite the huge number of problems, the Zapatista core issue is clearly farm land - or the lack of it. In part, the land troubles are a function of population growth: the number of Chiapanecans doubled between 1970 and 1990, to 3.2 million. In absolute terms, the state's cropland area is actually still expanding, although this is being accomplished largely through the clearing of rainforests and the cultivation of other areas of marginal agricultural value. But per capita cropland area has been declining since 1975.

The population pressure is exacerbated enormously by a highly inequitable land tenure system, which has bedeviled the area since the days of Spanish colonialism. A tiny farming and ranching elite controls much of the state's best land and dominates its political system. Among coffee growers, for instance, the richest 0.15 percent - those with more than 100 hectares in production - own 12 percent of coffee-growing land; 91 percent of coffee growers have less than 5 hectares each. Cattle ranching, too, is dominated by a handful of wealthy ladino (nonindigenous) families. The number of cattle in the state grew from under 1 million in 1960 to almost 4 million in 1980 before declining to its current level of about 3 million. Today, an estimated 45 percent of Chiapanecan territory is used as cattle pastureland. And in Chiapas, as in other parts of southern Mexico, the ranches have displaced many campesinos. Often, says Barry, the campesinos were "pushed off their lands by cattlemen protected by the army and their own paramilitary bands."

The growth of ranching over the past few decades has been a national phenomenon. To serve an expanding urban demand for meat, large swaths of land have been...