Fifteen Years After The Zapatistas

April 13, 2009 by Jason Lakin

Last Friday, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard sponsored a conference to reflect on the fifteen years that have transpired since the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. The conference featured academics from both Mexico and the United States. It attempted to describe and debate the nature of political, social and economic change in Chiapas, as well as other poor states, in Mexico since 1994.

The conference was motivated by a central puzzle: since the Zapatista revolt, Chiapas, by most measures Mexico's poorest state, has undergone massive political transformation, just as the broader country has. And yet the day-to-day lives of poor Chiapanecans seem to have changed relatively little by comparison. How is this possible?

It is worth rehearsing in detail some of the breathtaking political changes noted above. The Zapatista revolt itself enjoyed a certain political success, catching the authoritarian PRI regime off-balance, and leading to a substantial increase in federal financial flows to the state. The Zapatistas also achieved international fame and brought new NGO money and foreign aid to the region.

Indirectly, the rebellion achieved even more. Both Zapatista and non-Zapatista groups took advantage of the insecurity surrounding the revolt to press claims for land reform, resulting in a tremendous redistribution of land from large landholders to small peasants between 1994-1998. Indigenous peasants began to play a more active role in local and state politics as well, as various municipalities elected their first indigenous mayors, and CIOAC, a left-wing peasant group, dominated by indigenous Tojolabales, participated in the state government for the first time.

In 2000, the PRI was swept aside not only at the national level in Mexico, but also at the gubernatorial level in Chiapas. The relationship between the Zapatistas and electoral change has always been ambiguous, since the militants have generally distrusted electoral politics. But peasants who had supported the guerillas in the past opted to vote for change in 2000, and did play a role in the state's democratic transition. Today, Chiapas is a highly competitive, multi-party state. In 2007 local elections, for example, 8 parties competed.

By any normal standards, this constitutes seismic political change. Yet the peasants of Chiapas today face bleak economic conditions. State GDP has largely been stagnant since the 1990s, and the poor states of Mexico's South have, as a result, fallen further behind the rest of the country. The solution for most young, male peasants, is increasingly migration to the United States. Chiapas has moved from the bottom third to the top third of states receiving international remittances during this period.

So why haven't all of these political changes made more of a difference to the lives of ordinary peasants? The conference participants suggested a few reasons. First, even the most ardent supporters of the Zapatistas admitted that the militants, who have largely given up violent struggle, have not replaced it with a realistic alternative tool of social change. Zapatistas today continue to experiment with the creation of “autonomous” zones of power in Chiapas, where they have set up parallel institutions of governance. Panelists disagreed about the efficacy of these institutions in political and juridical terms, but not in economic terms: the Zapatistas have not created a viable model of economic autonomy for poor peasants. At the same time, the turn inward, and away from the state, has rendered the Zapatistas less effective at reforming the Mexican state. While some panelists saw the Zapatista experiments as noble efforts to create alternative political structures that are more democratic than those of the wider society, others argued that the Zapatistas had missed an opportunity to build a broad movement to reform the state.

But of course, the failure of development in Chiapas goes far beyond the Zapatistas. The land reforms of the mid-1990s have not brought economic self-sufficiency, because the redistributed land is of low quality, and has been sub-divided into plots that are simply too small to yield enough for survival. All of this has happened at a time when the Mexican state has offered little in the way of subsidies to small farmers, and has also failed to offer an alternative development path that would move Chiapas up the value chain.

Electoral changes are also, to a certain degree, more apparent than real. A common theme to emerge from the panels was that, in spite of changes in political institutions, such as democratic elections, or decentralization, political practice at the state level in Mexico continues to be dominated by patron-client relationships and high discretion on the part of politicians. Thus, even though the PRI has been humbled, and new resources have been made available to Chiapas, and even though indigenous peasants have entered politics, dysfunctional institutions and corruption persist. The result is a failure to ameliorate basic inequalities. These findings are consistent across states as different as Oaxaca, Mexico and Chiapas.

The failures of the Zapatistas, the government, and other less radical opposition groups has resulted in an increasingly significant flow of migrants out of the state. Sadly, these flows, which are in part caused by the absence of a serious political project to redistribute resources and spur development, probably also contribute over time to the absence of such a project. After all, the support base for a pro-development coalition ought to be young peasants who see no future in the current economic model. But these are the same people who are not around to support such a coalition.

Is a different world possible? The panelists were not particularly optimistic. But, in my view, Mexico is slowly developing a civil society with a broader agenda of state transformation. This agenda should continue to focus on transparency and redistribution, as well as empowering the judiciary and other watch dogs to prevent abuse. Today, this coalition consists of a few small but dynamic groups, like FUNDAR. Over time, it is to be hoped, there will be more groups, particularly at the sub-national level. The road is long, but the journey has begun.