The Zapatista rebellion on January 1,1994 stimulated the growth of a new indigenous movement in Mexico. New organizations were formed throughout the nation, old organizations became more militant, new alliances were formed. There was great support for indigenous rights among the Mexican population which manifested itself at key moments when the government staged or threatened to stage a more direct military offensive against the Zapatistas . With the victory of Vicente Fox, the candidate of the conservative party (PAN), in the July, 2000 presidential elections, new expectations awakened among all Mexicans. It was assumed that the defeat of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI) would bring about a new era in the political history of the nation and put an end to seventy-one years of party dictatorship. Among the promises made by the elected president were solving the Chiapas conflict in 15 minutes and responding to the demands for justice of indigenous peoples. In spite of Fox’s campaign promises, there has been no solution of the conflict in Chiapas and the government continues its low intensity war against indigenous communities through military and paramilitary actions.
The post-revolutionary Mexican state has shown a tremendous ability to appropriate discourses and co-opt organizations of the lower sectors. The ruling elites have been able to tear apart resistance movements through sophisticated co-opting strategies. The appropriation of revolutionary discourse, the reformulation of its rhetoric (through the creation of the symbols and concept of an institutionalized revolution), and of its aesthetics (through a nationalist muralist movement, also institutionalized), are just a few examples of the way in which the State managed to transmute resistance into reproduction of the system. The PAN government seems to have learned from its PRI predecessors how to adopt the discourses of resistance and empty them of their contra-hegemonic content: “Never again a Mexico without you,” says President Fox in the presentation of his National Development Plan for Indigenous Peoples. “A new relationship based on respect for diversity and dialogue between cultures,” he has declared. At the same time, through a PAN-PRI alliance, Congress passed an Indigenous Culture and Rights Bill which limits the autonomy of indigenous peoples and disassociates their political and territorial rights from their cultural rights. The right to difference and an identity of their own is recognized, but only from a culturalist perspective. The indigenous movement has responded to the new rhetoric of difference by countering with its own discourse on autonomy that claims the right to a culture of their own, but does so from a perspective that includes the right over lands, over the use and control of natural resources and over the reproduction of their own political institutions as a necessary component of cultural rights.
For their part, indigenous women have enriched the debate by rejecting any static or essentialist vision of the cultures of their people and have reclaimed the existence of changing cultural practices which are always being formulated and re-formulated. Instead of rejecting the recognition of cultural diversity because of the ways it can be used to oppress and exclude them, indigenous women have decided to fight for the definition of difference itself. They propose defining difference in terms of empowerment rather than of exclusion. Their demands for the recognition of a changing culture are reminiscent of the claims some critical feminists have made of the politics of diversity, that is, not as a strategy of the exclusion of others, but rather of specificity and heterogeneity, and in which the differences between groups are conceived as relative and not defined by essentialist categories and attributes.
The state has maintained a narrow view of human rights for Mexico’s indigenous peoples. This has had severe consequences for the indigenous population. Indigenous peoples have been excluded from the rights extended to the rest of the population. They face constant discrimination and live in conditions of extreme economic marginalization. The Mexican State has refused to recognize indigenous peoples as such, while at the same time, it has become fashionable during the current Mexican administration to use a new rhetoric of diversity which emphasizes the existence of a Multicultural Mexico. But this new rhetoric of diversity has not led to the development of an adequate normative framework in which the cultural differences of indigenous peoples are recognized, nor to public policies that promote such recognition.
The pressure of public mobilizations led the government to negotiate with the Zapatistas. The negotiations led to an agreement, known as the San Andrés Accords, in February 1996 to enact a new law of indigenous rights in the national Congress. The legislative proposal was then developed by a congressional commission (Cocopa) composed of representatives and senators of all major political parties with the clear understanding that it was to be subsequently enacted into federal legislation. The proposed legislation was accepted by the Zapatistas, the National Indigenous Congress and the government. These agreements were discussed and accepted by indigenous organizations all over the nation, showing an unprecedented degree of consensus in among Mexico’s indigenous peoples.
This legislative initiative held the promise of providing the foundation for building a new relationship between the Mexican state and indigenous peoples. The proposed modification of the legislative framework would have incorporated indigenous peoples as collective subjects before the law and granted them self determination through autonomy, thus enabling indigenous peoples to decide and practice their own ways of social, political, economic and cultural organization; to apply their normative systems for the resolution of internal problems; to secure access to the state justice system through recognition of their specific cultural characteristics; to enjoy rights over their lands and territories, and the natural resources found within them.
However, the initiative’s main demands for autonomy were rejected by a majority of both houses of Congress in April 2001. Congress passed a very different proposal known as the Indigenous Rights and Culture Act, which the EZLN and the indigenous movement nationally considered a mockery of their demands and a betrayal of the San Andrés Agreements. The defenders of the legislation argue that the formal recognition of cultural diversity represents significant progress away from the monocultural and homogenizing discourses of the past. But, in fact, it marks the emergence of an official discourse on multiculturalism in which the concept of culture has been stripped of its political and territorial dimensions. It will not bring about a real transformation that leads to social justice for indigenous peoples.
While the President spoke of a new day for indigenous peoples in Multicultural Mexico, the low intensity warfare in Chiapas continued. Although several military stations were dismantled in March 2001 in response to Zapatista conditions for the resumption of negotiations, the overall number of soldiers in the state of Chiapas has not diminished. In some cases, such as in the Garrucha army station in the Ocosingo municipality, the barracks were dismantled but the army units just moved further into the jungle. At the same time, new army checkpoints have been established in the Coast and Sierra regions.
In Highland municipalities such as San Pedro Chenalhó there is one soldier for every ten residents today. Paramilitary groups are still armed, and the few paramilitary leaders arrested when the new government was established walked free on minimum bail after a few months. Death threats against the members of the Las Abejas (an organization of civil society link to the Catholic Church) and against all those considered sympathizers of the Zapatista movement still continue. The weapons used to murder the people of Acteal in December 1997 are still for the most part in the hands of the paramilitary. Diego Hernández Gutiérrez and Antonio López Santis, two of the main paramilitary leaders responsible for the Acteal massacre were freed in along with four other suspects due to “lack of evidence” against them. A few days later, representatives of Las Abejas denounced renewed instances of harassment on the part of the acquitted paramilitary leaders. This panorama is very far from the situation of “normality” that the state and federal government are attempting to convey to investors on their many tours abroad.
However, the removal of troops is not the only promise broken by the PAN government. As mentioned before, the enactment of the San Andres Agreements remains unrealized, even as the new Indigenous Rights and Culture Act masquerades as a response to Zapatista demands. This law known as the Barlett-Ceballos Act to “honor” its main promoters, bears little relation with the COCOPA initiative and even less with the original agreement signed by representatives of the government and the EZLN in San Andrés. The national indigenous movement, through the National Indigenous Congress, has denounced the unconstitutional character of the Barlett-Ceballos Act in various arenas and forums. They point out that it is in violation of the 169th article of the International Labor Organization (signed by Mexico) because its contents were not widely consulted with indigenous peoples. In a move unprecedented in Mexican history, indigenous peoples have used legal procedures offered by the constitution to reject the new law. The resources of Protection (presented by individuals) and Constitutional Controversy (presented in this case by indigenous municipal authorities) had not been used to challenge any law since the creation of the constitution in 1917. It was precisely the most marginalized sectors of Mexican society —indigenous peoples from Puebla, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Tabasco, Michoacán, Guerrero, Hidalgo, and Morelos who presented not one but 339 Constitutional Controversies requesting that the new Act be invalidated. The Judiciary, however, fell in line with the Executive and Legislative powers and turned its back on the demands of indigenous peoples ruling that the Constitutional Controversies were “inappropriate” and rejecting them on September 6, 2002.
In spite of all the rhetorical commitments to diversity, indigenous peoples once again found that legislative and judicial struggle were off-bounds to them. They were still treated as third-class citizens. The main arguments in the Constitutional Controversies presented by indigenous authorities related to procedural problems, since the new law was written and passed without consulting the sectors which would be affected by it: indigenous peoples.
The Zapatistas and many specialists on indigenous issues denounced the law. The EZLN, a few days after the reform was approved, declared that “If that reform deserves a name at all it should be ‘Constitutional Recognition of the Rights and Culture of Landowners and Racists’ ”(La Jornada, May 18, 2001).Many of the changes made to the COCOPA law initiative are limitations to indigenous autonomy. In spite of the large political mobilizations carried out in support of the COCOPA initiative, its most important demands for autonomy were rejected by the majority in both houses of Congress.
The Indigenous Act that was adopted places a series of barriers on autonomy, as it was conceived in the COCOPA initiative. State legislatures, for example, are given powers to determine the ways in which such autonomy shall be recognized; the collective rights of indigenous peoples to their lands and territories are denied, as is the legal status of their normative systems. Considering that most state legislatures are still under the control of regional caciques (political bosses), autonomy as recognized in item “A” of the Second Article of the new Indigenous Act will be no more than a mere rhetorical gesture, lacking any legal substance that allows its enforcement.
The new act also states in several places that “the Mexican nation is one and indivisible”. The ghost of national fragmentation, the fear of the collectivization of natural resources and the disqualification of indigenous normative systems led senators from all parties to pass an act that does not respond to the central demands of the national indigenous movement.
President Fox did nothing to promote the COCOPA initiative. Once he sent the proposed law to Congress, he considered his promises to Mexico’s indigenous peoples fulfilled. In fact, he applauded the efforts of his party to approve an Act that betrayed the basic principles of the San Andrés Agreements. The “recognition of cultural diversity” announced by President Fox in his National Program for the Development of Indigenous Peoples is of a commercialized and trivialized sort. It does not include the right to territory, to the management of natural resources, nor to political structures of their own. The PAN’s neo-indigenism continues the top-down manner in which the PRI worked with indigenous people. Plans are still imposed from above, a few token indigenous intellectuals are included in the bureaucracy, but there is no effective participation of indigenous peoples and communities in the planning and implementation of development programs.
The governmental bureaucracy that deals with indigenous affairs has actually grown with the creation of new institutions, such as the Representation Office for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (ORDIPI) and the Counsel for the Development of Indigenous Peoples. The word “indigenous” has been added to other already existing institutions, such as the National Direction of Popular and Indigenous Cultures. Relations between the state and indigenous peoples, in spite of all these changes, remain basically unaltered. The only changes have been in some of the officials holding the posts and in the indigenist rhetoric, which now incorporates the language of business. The National Program for the Development of Indigenous Peoples (PNDPI), for example, includes a Program for Entrepreneurial Development which expresses the need to create “human capital”. But how can we talk about entrepreneurial development of indigenous peoples, when nine out of ten indigenous workers live in extreme poverty? Research on employment in indigenous regions in 2001 showed that the average income per hour is around $3.05 pesos (0.25 US dollars), in contrast to the average in urban centers, which is $11.50 (one US dollar). The same study also pointed out that 34.2% of all workers in indigenous regions do not receive any wages, since they work in family agricultural activities. This number is even more significant if separated by gender: it turns out that more than half of all working women in these regions, 53.4%, do not receive wages.
In spite of all the rhetoric about inclusion and the emphasis on consensual processes, the main government initiatives for indigenous peoples, whether they be legislative reforms, development programs or huge projects like the Puebla Panama Plan (PPP), are still being imposed from above and without the participation of the people affected. The solutions included in the PPP to development issues, presented by the PAN government as the panacea to the problems that plague the south-southeast indigenous region, were described by Alejandro Álvarez Bejar in the following terms: “The PPP has been presented as a plan for regional development and is filled with strong rhetorical discourse about ‘the need to build foundations of planning and consensus.’ However, up until now there has been no mention of anything resembling an agricultural policy (the most important sector in the region), or an environmental policy other than the military occupation of biodiversity sanctuaries — even though this is a region very much affected by irrational oil exploitation, which groups several states in the Southeast within a serious and far-reaching environmental crisis — , or any effort to reach consensus: the indigenous act passed last year literally suppresses any recognition of indigenous communities’ legal rights over their natural resources.”
These facts seem to indicate that the multicultural policies favored by the PAN government with its new rhetoric and new Indigenous Culture and Politics Act is rather a policy of inequality which continues the trend of the last decades of the PRI’s indigenism. The challenge of a true recognition of the human rights of indigenous peoples cannot be reduced to cultural recognition, but must establish the political terms that will serve to facilitate access to all life opportunities. To go beyond the trivialized versions of diversity, multiculturalism must be expressed also in social terms and terms of equal opportunity. These elements, however, are lacking in the new culturalist rhetoric of President Fox.
Against the unfulfilled promises of liberal citizenship, indigenous men and women are creating a new concept of differentiated citizenship in which participation in the national project does not necessitate the rejection of their own identities. The indigenous movement faces the challenge of the new multiculturalist rhetoric of a State that has appropriated their discourse on diversity and emptied it of any real meaning. The commercialization of ethnic diversity, ethnotourism, or folklorism transformed into symbols of diversity has gradually contributed to the realization of the basic concept of multiculturalism as a process of the creation of the principles for the equal recognition of the other’s culture. But the construction of a democratic project and a Multicultural state that recognizes the human rights of indigenous people as individuals does not eliminate the importance of the recognition of their collective rights as peoples in respect to land, the use and control of natural resources and the shaping their own political institutions. If these collective social, political and economic rights are not included, the multiculturalism of the PAN government will amount to just another set of policies and rhetoric that once again justifies inequality in the name of cultural diversity.•
Aída Hernández Castillo teaches at UNAM in Mexico City. Some of the ideas in this article are developed by the author in the book El Estado y los Indígenas en Tiempos del PAN: Identidad, Poder y Legalidad, México DF, CIESAS-Porrúa, 2005.
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