One No, Many Yeses Read online

  I couldn’t escape a growing conviction that what I was seeing was the fumbling birth of a genuinely new political movement – something international, something different and something potentially huge. But what exactly was it? Where had it come from? Was it really, as so many claimed, ‘global’, and if so, what did that mean? Did it have any substantial ideas beyond objecting to the status quo? Was it a flash in the pan or a bushfire across the political landscape? I felt a part of it, whatever it was. I wanted to know.

  It took me eight months of travelling across five continents to get near to answering those questions. I knew that to really understand this movement I would have to go and see it at work – not simply in the cities where the highly publicised protests happen, but in the places where the movement was really born, where its strength and numbers lie and where its essence can be found – places which lie mainly in poor countries, away from the camera’s eye. Choosing some of the places to visit was difficult, but one decision was easy to make. I knew I had to go to where so many said this whole thing had been born: I had to go to Chiapas.

  I knew that whatever had happened, and was happening, in Chiapas, would tell me a lot about this movement, and about the hopes that kept it alive. Hopes expressed by the shadowy Subcomandante two months after he stormed the police station in San Cristobal, in words which, as well as any other, provided an explanation for the hard struggle into the light of something genuinely new: ‘In our dreams, we have seen another world.’

  Mexico, August 2001

  My plane touched down in a Mexico that would have been almost unthinkable just a few years before. In July 2000, the country had finally shaken off the world’s longest-ever period of rule by one political party: one which, more or less, had been in existence since Mexico became the stage for the first revolution of the twentieth century.

  In 1910, sick of the corrupt, thirty-four-year rule of their dictator-president Porfirio Díaz, the people of Mexico rose up in revolution. Armies of peasants, led by the populist radicals Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, called for tierra y libertad – land and freedom – in a seven-year skirmish of competing interests. When the dust settled, in 1917, nearly a million lives had been lost, and Mexico had emerged with a new constitution and a new political order.

  For seventy-one years that constitution had been – so they claimed, anyway – safeguarded by its descendants, the deliciously named Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Seventy-one years is a long time in politics, and in the intervening period the PRI, who remained in power throughout, had moved from being (at least in theory) a party of revolutionary redistributists to a party of laissez-faire corporate libertarians; from a party of democrats to a party of oligarchs; and from a party loved, or at least supported, by the majority, to a party loathed or at best tolerated by most of its people.

  Mexico was, theoretically, a democracy under the PRI, and had been since the revolution. In reality, elections were rigged so heavily and blatantly that for seven decades, despite growing popular discontent, the PRI managed to stay on top. But in 2000, the complacent party unexpectedly lost the first presidential election in its history. Shell-shocked, the rightful rulers of Mexico cleared their desks to make way for the parvenu Vicente Fox, ex-head of Coca-Cola Mexico, leader of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), cowboy, political novice and showman. It was the start of something very new. Would it be something very different?

  A year later it wasn’t yet clear what, if anything, would be changed by Fox’s shock defeat of the PRI. It was beginning, though, to be obvious what wouldn’t. Fox’s PAN, like the PRI and perhaps even more so, were enthusiastic free marketeers, committed to NAFTA, ‘globalisation’, open markets and everything else that had given birth to the Zapatista rebellion. Fox, on coming to power, had boasted that he could solve the Chiapas problem ‘in fifteen minutes’ – and unlike his PRI forerunners, he was talking about dialogue rather than military crackdowns. When I arrived in Mexico City, though, he had been in power for a year, and the Zapatistas were still where they had been since January 1994 – in the forests of Chiapas, holding out for a new nation.

  The twenty-hour bus ride from Mexico City to San Cristobal de las Casas is painful. On cracked leather seats with dubbed American films blasting out from four television screens, the bus takes us through valleys and forests and fields, along motorways and pitted tracks, from a modernising metropolis towards something much older. I am here with a friend, Lucy, who speaks Spanish and has been to Mexico before. We arrive, dazed, in San Cristobal, check into a hotel, grab some food, and then wander the gently undulating cobbled streets, taking in the sights.

  The lanes and squares are full of tourists, come to gaze on the colonial beauty of the buildings: the grey and white Municipal Palace, from the balcony of which the declaration of war was read; the vast, curlicued gold and white cathedral, like a conqueror watching over its people; the trees decked with ropes of red, gold and white for forthcoming Independence Day, and all around, the rolling green mountains.

  In the central Plaza where the Zapatistas announced themselves to the world, withered old men in cowboy hats lean on poles strung with bags of candyfloss. Men with wooden boxes strung around their necks roam the square offering sweets, chiclets, single cigarettes. Chaotic kids chase you for money, try to clean your shoes, sell you dolls, purses, belts – the deserved fate of the rich foreign tourist. In the centre of the Plaza stands an iron bandstand reminiscent of the Bournemouth Pleasure Gardens, surrounded by lawns and flowerbeds, newspaper stands and shoe-cleaning stalls, their shadows painted on to the paving stones by a deep white sunlight.

  San Cristobal is a beautiful city, but it tells you little about Chiapas. The only indication that over a quarter of the state’s inhabitants are pre-conquest people are the Indian women, their black hair flowing in ponytails down their backs, long blue or black skirts, delicate white tops, ruffled in pink and green and yellow, the traditional colours of their villages. The women are in San Cristobal trying to sell necklaces, beads and trinkets to the tourists. They will step off the pavement as you pass because, even now, despite all that has happened since 1994, they know their place.

  But look beyond San Cristobal, at the state of Chiapas itself, and you begin to see why an uprising happened here. Chiapas is paradoxically the poorest and the richest state in Mexico. It is the top producer of coffee in the country, growing 36 per cent of Mexico’s total coffee production.2 It produces 55 per cent of Mexico’s hydro-power (from a series of vast dams, many built on requisitioned Indian land) and almost 20 per cent of the country’s total electricity.3 It produces 13 per cent of the country’s maize, 5 per cent of its oil, and 12 per cent of its natural gas.4 What remains of the heavily deforested Lacandon jungle, in the south of the state, is trumped in terms of Latin American biological diversity only by the Amazon. Chiapas, by any standards, is extraordinarily resource-rich.

  Meanwhile, its people are extraordinarily poor, even by the standards of a nation in which 40 per cent of people live below the poverty line. For the riches of Chiapas do not go to feed, pay, house or clothe the people from whose land they are extracted. They go to other states, to Mexico City, to the USA and to the world’s export markets, courtesy of national and foreign corporations, corrupt landowners and deeply unjust land and property distribution.

  Thus it is that in the state which produces almost 20 per cent of Mexico’s electricity, more than a third of homes do not have electricity at all. Thirty per cent of the population is illiterate, rising to 49 per cent in some rural areas. Almost 40 per cent live on an income of less than US$3 a day; 19 per cent simply have no income. Diseases of poverty, from river blindness to malaria, are rife. Education is sparse, health services often non-existent.5 ‘There are seven hotel rooms for every thousand tourists,’ noted Subcomandante Marcos, sharply, in 1992, ‘while there are only 0.3 hospital beds per ten thousand Chiapaneco citizens.’ Worse, he said, 1.5 million people in Chiapas had no medical services w
ithin reach and 54 per cent of the population suffered from malnutrition. ‘The tribute that capitalism demands from Chiapas,’ wrote Marcos, ‘has no historical parallel.’6

  Marcos wrote those words shortly after the government had set in motion a measure that tipped the putative EZLN over the edge – the measure that, more than any other, they were later to say, cemented their determination to go to war, even if it meant their deaths – better that, they would say, than the death which would come if they stayed silent: the death of their people.

  It has been said that the Mexican Revolution never reached Chiapas – certainly it remains a land of corrupt landlords, racism and inequality. What did get there, even if slightly fitfully, was Article 27 of the post-revolutionary constitution of 1917. Article 27 set in motion a process of land reform dedicated to breaking up the corruption of Mexico’s ancient hacienda system, under which vast tracts of land were owned by rich absentee landlords and thousands of peasants starved, or existed as peons – debt slaves, forced to work for their landed masters.

  Article 27, one of many radical measures in the post-revolutionary constitution, allowed the government to expropriate land to provide each rural community with an ejido – a piece of communal land. Landowners had no right of recourse, and the size of land owned by an individual – or, crucially, a corporation – was limited. Ejidos could not be broken up or sold; they were to be passed on through families to ensure rural self-sufficiency and stability and fend off poverty. Mexico’s 28,000 ejidos make up almost half of the national territory – and a huge difference in the lives of those who live on them.7 They were the best and only hope for many rural families, in Chiapas as elsewhere, to achieve self-sufficiency – and with it a measure of pride and something to pass on to their children.

  But Carlos Salinas, PRI president from 1988 to 1994, had plans for the ejido law. Salinas was the man at the helm of Mexico as the world emerged from the Cold War and George Bush Senior’s ‘new world order’ came into operation. As elsewhere, this order turned out to be the order of a newly triumphant capitalism – ‘neoliberalism’, as it is widely known in Latin America – its authority and ideology finally unchallenged by any serious alternative. Salinas was going to modernise Mexico, seek a place for his nation near the top of that order – drag it into the twenty-first century, whether it liked it or not. He knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  The ejido law presented him with his first major obstacle. A quarter of his fellow Mexicans still worked on the land; largely on small farms, ejidos and family holdings. They were secure, they were rural and they were, in the government’s view, hopelessly ‘anti-modern’.8 They needed ‘restructuring’, the ultimate aim of which was to destroy the peasant class in Mexico and replace it with the kind of rural landscape that was becoming the norm elsewhere in the world – intensive agribusiness farms focused on export. This was the progressive thing to do. It made economic sense. And it was a prerequisite for Salinas’s dreams of a New Model Mexico.

  And so it began. Article 27 was repealed in 1992. Privatisation of communal land was allowed for the first time since the revolution, and land redistribution was brought to a standstill to prevent any more land being given over to ‘inefficient’ peasant production. For the first time since 1919, land reform in Mexico was officially over. Latin American historian Eduardo Galeano called it ‘the second death of Emiliano Zapata’.9 But this low punch to Mexico’s rural population was no isolated legal change. Article 27 was repealed to lay the ground for something much bigger; something that the Zapatistas would call the ‘death blow’ for their people: NAFTA.

  When the North American Free Trade Agreement was dreamt up by the leaders of Mexico, Canada and the USA in the early 1990s, it was sold to their people as a treaty which, by removing unfair trade barriers, would bring jobs, development and growth to all three countries. The real impact was very different. Millions of jobs were lost as economic sectors collapsed, their government support removed. A steady stream of US and Canadian companies moved their operations to Mexico to take advantage of its cheap labour. NAFTA also allowed private corporations to sue governments if they felt they were getting in the way of their ‘investor rights’; which they began to do. The US waste-management company Metalclad, for example, successfully sued the Mexican government for almost $17 million when it was prevented from siting a toxic waste dump in an ecological reserve.10 But it was in agriculture that NAFTA caused the most devastation; and Mexican agriculture in particular.

  NAFTA began to phase out government support for vulnerable crops and opened the country’s markets to mass-produced imports from the USA and Canada. Within a year, Mexico’s production of corn fell by half as cheap imports, many of them below market price, flooded the country. Meanwhile, the price of corn in the shops rose. Record profits were recorded by some agribusinesses in the USA as millions of peasants in Mexico lost their land – land that was no longer secure because of the repeal of the ejido law, and no longer economically viable because of NAFTA. The hundreds of varieties of the ancient maize plant, which originated in Central America, began to disappear, replaced by a handful of intensive chemically raised hybrid varieties grown on the vast prairie farms of the USA.11

  For the Mayans of Chiapas, known since the dawn of time as ‘the people of the corn’, who lived by growing maize, the effect was devastating. Entire rural communities were decimated – a process that shows no sign of stopping. ‘We, the indigenous people,’ wrote Marcos in 1996, ‘are not profitable. We are a bad investment . . . Power’s money does not want to buy a merchandise that does not yield good profits . . . Today, the shopkeeper has to modernise his store and get rid of all the merchandise that is unattractive. And we, with our dark skin and our overwhelming need to stay close to the earth . . . are not attractive.’

  The repeal of Article 27 and the signing of NAFTA meant that the last avenues for the Indians of Chiapas had been shut down. As far as they could see, they had two choices: they could rise up against what was being done to them by an unscrupulous alliance of their own government and foreign economic interests, or they could lay down and die.

  And so, on 1 January 1994, they rose. Twelve days later, a ceasefire declared, the EZLN and the government of President Salinas began a game of cat-and-mouse that was to last for years, continuing through the governments of his successor, Ernesto Zedillo, and, later, Vicente Fox. While the Zapatistas declared an indefinite ceasefire, the governments of Salinas and Zedillo alternated dialogue with military incursions and bombing raids. National and international pressure on the government to reach a negotiated settlement grew and finally, in 1996, after months of talks, the EZLN and government negotiators agreed to a set of proposals known as the San Andres Accords, after the Zapatista village in which they were thrashed out.

  The government said it would craft a new law on indigenous rights based on the Accords. Though what they contained was by no means all that the rebels had wanted (they had hoped to talk about bigger, national, non-Indian issues like democracy and development and the future of Mexico; the government was having none of it) they represented a big step forward for Mexico’s 10 million indigenous people. The Accords called for Mexico’s Indians to be granted ‘autonomy as part of the Mexican state’, giving them the right to choose their own forms of political and social organisation based on their customs and traditions, control their own land and resources and organise their own lives as communities. It would give them a degree of control over their own destinies which they had not enjoyed since the arrival of Hernán Cortés.

  And for a brief moment, in 2001, it looked like the dream could come true. President Fox’s first act on taking office in December 2000 was to send an indigenous rights bill based on the San Andres Accords to the Mexican Congress for approval. Buoyed up by possibilities, the Zapatista army, masks still on but guns left behind, undertook a historic 2,000-mile journey – quickly labelled the ‘Zapatour’ – from the jungles of Chiapas to Mexico City along routes lined with che
ering crowds. When they got there, 100,000 people came out to meet the first rebels to come to the capital since Pancho Villa met with Emiliano Zapata in 1914, at the height of the revolution. Still masked, the Zapatistas were allowed to address the Congress, and plead with the legislators to pass the indigenous bill.

  Within a few months, the dream was dead. Congress passed the bill in July 2001, but with so many amendments that the Zapatistas – and every other Indian group in Mexico – rejected it as worse than nothing. Where the San Andres Accords had promised autonomy, control of resources and indigenous rights, the ‘gutted’ law said that indigenous communities were subject to existing government structures, that any moves towards autonomy must be designed and approved by each state, and that Indian use and ownership of their own resources was subject to national laws governing resource extraction. In other words: no change. The Zapatistas issued a furious condemnation of the government’s ‘betrayal’, claiming that Fox had always intended to hijack the bill, and retreated back to the forests of the Lacandon. They are still there.

  I’m hoping Ryan Zinn is going to help me understand what might happen next. Ryan, a young, friendly Californian with ginger stubble and a limitless supply of patience, works for Global Exchange, a US-based human-rights group which has been working in Chiapas since the Zapatista uprising. Officially, like virtually everyone else who works on the issue, they don’t take sides – the Mexican constitution gives the president the power to immediately expel any foreigners accused of meddling in Mexican politics, and that power has been used many times since 1994. Over 450 people, from aid workers to journalists to priests, have been ejected from the country for being, or looking like they might be, involved in the Zapatista struggle. It’s the reason I’m keeping my notebook firmly in my pocket in public.