Abstract
The New Year’s Eve party is over and President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has gone to bed happy, knowing that towards the end of his presidency Mexico is now entering “the First World.” With the NAFTA entering into effect with the New Year, Mexico, Canada, and the United States of America would now establish a “free trade zone” under which goods and services would now move freely between those three countries. Not people, however, but that is a different story. Of course, that would also mean the full exposure of Mexican small-scale agricultural producers to unfair competition by the North American multinationals that were producing more cheaply and in larger quantities.
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Notes
- 1.
These documents that are related to Mexico’s Guerra Sucia (some 80 million of them) were made available to the public in 2002, during the presidency of Vicente Fox, and were placed in the National Archive. Historian Jaime Pensado argues that those documents were declassified in an effort to uncover the PRI’s authoritarianism in those years (Pensado 2013, 11). His claim may have some substance, considering that access-restrictions were later imposed on the very same documents in 2015, under the Presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, which marked the return of the PRI to power. It is believed that those restrictions were related to the case of the 43 desaparecidos of Ayotzinapa rural school.
- 2.
Mestizaje: racial mixing between Indigenous Mexicans and Mexicans of Spanish origin.
- 3.
PRI (officially founded in 1929): successor of Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (Mexican Revolutionary Party), which emerged after the end of the Mexican Revolution (1920) and had been governing the country since then and until 2000.
- 4.
Electoral autocracies are societies in which a single party keeps ruling, even though elections (partly free/fair) may be regularly taking place.
- 5.
As Pacheco-López (2005: 595) summarizes: “Since the mid-1980s, the propensity to import has exceeded the propensity to export, and this has worsened the growth rate consistent with balanced trade, which is a major explanation of the slowdown of Mexico’s growth that was promised by the Mexico’s political leaders at the time.”
- 6.
Indigenous political bosses who used to control the state projects and used to have a monopoly on transport, markets, and access to credit.
- 7.
The ejido is one of the principal forms of land ownership in Mexico. It is distinct from private property because it is the result of a government land grant (dotación) to groups that have applied for the land and it is managed collectively through an ejido commission, which defines the use of the ejido lands amongst the members of the ejido (Harvey 2005: 648).
- 8.
Some theorists call the movement “neo-zapatistas,” viewing them as a continuation of the original Zapatistas (the supporters of Emiliano Zapata) of 1910–1919.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
- 12.
Indigenous Maya nations.
- 13.
It should be noted here that the fate of most of the members of the NGEZ still remains unknown. While for some of them it is known that they were arrested at some point by the army or the police—even the date and place of detention is known in some cases—we still do not know what happened to them afterwards. Some surviving members of the FLN—including the brother of César Germán Yáñez Muñoz, Fernando—have established an organization that preserves the history of the FLN and investigates the fate of its missing members. They call it Casa de Todas y Todos.
- 14.
This refers to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a region which comprises parts of the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Tabasco, and Veracruz, in which the distance between the Atlantic and the Pacific coast is only 215 kilometres.
- 15.
The FLN, as well as the EZLN, never accepted the fact that the members of the NGEZ have passed away. They prefer to still consider them “desaparecidos.”
- 16.
As Cedillo notes in her research, and I also observed during my fieldwork, there is a certain reluctance on the part of the FLN/EZLN members to accept the possibility of the death of their comrades. “Your thinking is right, they may be dead,” I was told by a Zapatista friend during my fieldwork, “But let’s call them ‘disappeared’, because if you call them ‘dead’, you are killing them already in your mind” (author’s fieldwork notes, Summer 2012). Subcomandante Marcos also follows this tendency: in a speech on 17 November 2006, he mentions the fallen heroes of EZLN, describing some of them—César Germán Yáñez Muñoz, for example—as desaparecidos. The day the EZLN still commemorates its fallen heroes is 14 February.
- 17.
It was kind of a tradition for the FLN to adopt the pseudonyms of their fallen comrades, as a way of keeping their memory alive. Subcomandante Marcos himself, who entered the FLN as Zacarias , would later—allegedly—adopt the nom de guerre of a fallen comrade of his, Mario Marcos. The same is the case for the legendary Subcomandante Pedro, who adopted his own pseudonym in honour of César Germán Yáñez Muñoz (Compañero Pedro) (Sellschopp 2004, 92).
- 18.
Mario and Ruth would rejoin later on.
- 19.
The government sent in more than a thousand soldiers on 10 June 1976 and killed dozens of indigenous chol and tsotsil, threw two of them into the river from helicopters, raped women, imprisoned hundreds of others, and so on.
- 20.
It is indicative that during my fieldwork in Chiapas (summer 2012), a new church was being constructed in one of the Zapatista caracoles.
- 21.
The EZLN uses the same system of self-teaching in their autonomous education system. The students themselves become promotores (promoters of education) and leave for their villages in order to train the next students. In addition, similar to the—seemingly successful—strategy of the first recruitments, the graduates of the Zapatista Education acquire several skills (agro-ecology, shoemaking, medicine, communication, etc.), which become the knowledge that they transmit to their own communities.
- 22.
There was a section called “Nuestros Heroes” (Our Heroes) in “Nepantla.” The FLN/EZLN still do not forget to honour their fallen comrades. In some of the Zapatista caracoles, one can still see photographs of them, while there is also a Zapatista song composed by EZLN members dedicated to them, which is called “Heroes y Martyres” (Heroes and Martyrs).
- 23.
Because of the numerous such bugs in the area.
- 24.
Author’s translation from Spanish. Author’s archive.
- 25.
“The indigenous told us…that not even God goes there!…not even us the indigenous live there” would say later on Subcomandante Marcos (Le Bot and Marcos 1997).
- 26.
The explanation I received during my fieldwork (summer, 2012) was that basketball pitches serve multiple purposes: community meetings, parades, celebrations, and of course for…the game itself!
- 27.
While it seems that in the course of the struggle gender roles were re-interpreted and the emancipation of women was slowly being achieved, and even though this is an extremely interesting development, further exploration of this issue is however beyond the scope of this research. The reason is that the issue is so extended that it would require a whole new book to be written on it only.
- 28.
Fernando Yañez says that there were 200–300 representatives of Zapatista communities. He also mentions that the whole process was filmed, but the videos are being kept outside Mexico (Interview with Petrich 2003). In an interview he conducted with the author of this book, he repeated that the whole process was filmed and that the FLN still has that video which confirms his words.
- 29.
Interview of Fernando Yañez with Leonidas Oikonomakis, 13 January 2016.
- 30.
The day Mexico was entering “the First World” with the NAFTA put into effect.
- 31.
The initial plan according to Marcos was to march forward as far away as possible from the communities (…all the way to Mexico City if possible). The reason was twofold: (a) for the battles to take place away from the communities and (b) for the communities to prepare themselves for the resistance to the army attack that was expected to follow (Le Bot and Marcos 1997).
- 32.
For a detailed analysis of the government proposals and the reasons why they were rejected, consult the relevant announcement by the CCRI (CCRI del E Z L N 1994b).
- 33.
The aforementioned communique is the instrument that publically mentions autonomy for the first time in a written form. However, during the dialogues of the Cathedral, the word autonomy was mentioned by EZLN representatives as a demand in at least two press conferences that took place in February 1994 as well.
- 34.
The reasons for calling it a “non plan” are analysed in the next chapter.
- 35.
Larráinzar was the name of the landowner to whom the area used to belong.
- 36.
“The discussion around this point generally hinged on what kind of definition of power would be used in such a statement, and the general feeling in the working groups was that the principle of ‘not struggling to take power’ implied the taking of State or institutional power, rather than a prohibition on the exercise of that power which lies in the people and society as a whole” (14 September 1997, CNI Assembly Second Day of the FZLN Congress).
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Oikonomakis, L. (2019). The Zapatistas. In: Political Strategies and Social Movements in Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90203-6_3
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