THE REVOLT AGAINST DEVELOPMENT-THE CRISIS AND CHIAPAS 
A PRELIMINARY SKETCH	
	Before diving into the specific features of the Chiapas uprising it is important to understand the crisis in Mexico. It is not a one-
sided structural crisis conjured up by a political scientist or some other academic high priest but a two way give and take between two 
polar antagonists- Capital (which in Mexico is inimitably but not exclusively tied to the government and the PRI) and the many varied 
sectors of the working class (from industrial workers and technicians in the cities to the many groupings of campesinos and landless 
laborers in the countryside). The crisis comes as the fine edge between thes camps. At the risk of making an over generalized 
analogy the Chiapas conflict is like a very big rock which has been thrown into an already wildly agitated pool. To take the analogy
 farther the shock waves emanating from this rock have spread throughout the country extending into the heart of the governing PRI 
itself. A recent New York Times article (FEB. 8)  reported that several townhalls outside of the warzone in Chiapas have been seized by 
small campesino groups independent of the EZLN but who have realized their own ability to reclaim their autonomous power by way 
of the uprising. This is the extent and nature of the crisis.
	Predictably enough the orthodox Right and Left have trotted out their usual cliches and mystifications  concerning Chiapas but 
Chiapas is not Cuba, El Salvador or Guatemala. The uprising is following a pattern unique to the specific features of class 
antagonism in Mexico. This pattern has its historical origins in the agrarian revolts of  the last few centuries of Mexican history.
	Agrarismo  as a social force developed out of the material conditions of 19th century Mexico.  Before the 19th century, 
campesino resistance often took on  the everyday forms of tax evasion, draft resistance or the occasional bloody, short insurrection 
but toward the end of the century this cycle of struggle began to evolve into another plane of resistance.  The construction of railroads 
throughout Mexico in the last part of the 19th cent. lead to the creation of an export-oriented agricultural market. The large 
hacienda  owners who were the only ones in a real position to capitalize on this development began a vigorous campaign of 
dispossessing the lands of the traditional village ejidos.  A variety of tactics were used most hinging upon either legal maneuvers 
supported inevitably by the caciques  of the local and federal government or the use of hired gunmen (pistoleros).   Campesino  
resistance quite reasonably began to take on an increasingly militant flavor as these expropriations increased. A triangular agrarista  
alliance began to evolve at this time between a periodically active village mass, the local militants, and outside agitators composed 
mostly of anarchist urban intellectuals and workers.  Agrarismo  sprang directly from the autonomous cycle of rural struggle. 
Agraristas  frequently called for the creation of the  municipo libre , a decentralized village-based region free of the intervention of State 
and Capital. This desire was seen in the periodic burning of government records which accompanied their revolts. A reliance on 
armed struggle against the pistoleros, police and army became a central feature of their struggle alongside the call for the seizure of 
the large land holdings. Zapata's army  which had originally risen up against the sugar plantations of Morelos (and later in the Revolution 
against all of Mexico's bosses) came full heartedly from this cycle of struggle.
	Despite the land reform measures of the Revolution, which were codified as Article 27 in the Constitution, this cycle continues 
into the present. In Chiapas as in many other parts of Mexico land is still overwhelmingly concentrated in the hands of a few large 
landowners. For example in the municipio  of Tenegapa 3.8% of the landowners own over 60% of the land. This wealthy 3.8% is composed 
entirely of rancheros  who are nearly all mestizo  while predictably the bottom 96.2% are small Indian campesinos.  
	Land disputes between this group still take on the intensity of agrarian struggles of the past.  Large landowners still rely on hired 
gunman and correspondingly campesinos  and indigenous groups throughout Mexico have relied on small armed self-defense groups. 
Beginning in the 1940's with Ruben Jamarillo's armed rebellion in Morelos (Jamarillo incidentally had ridden with Zapata in his youth) 
a slew of small self-defense groups have sprung up in several states including Hidalgo, Guerrero, Veracruz and Oaxaca. In 1993 alone two 
such groups were formed. Last spring 80 people in the town of Paso de Aguila (on the Tehuantepec isthmus) sold their cattle, bought guns 
and took to the hills after gunmen from a local ranch attacked the ejido.  A little farther north a similar group calling itself the Eastern 
Mexican Democratic Front of Emiliano Zapata announce its creation. The Front claims to have re-appropriated 80,000 acres of land in the 
region.
	According to sources close to the rebel group (and supported by the Mexico City thinktank, the Center for Studies of Armed 
Movements) the EZLN had been originally formed as a similar campesino self-defense group four or five years ago. Andres Aubry, 
a French anthropologist who has lived in Chiapas for decades, said of the EZLN, "unlike the guerillas in Guatemala, they are not seeking out 
bases of support among the campesinos, but coming up from them. In that they are like Zapata himself." Since  its inception the EZLN has 
quite obviously taken on a more ambitious trajectory of its own. Jose Luis Moreno, a former militant in an urban guerilla group, the 
September 23 League,  attributes part of the EZLN's success to its ability to build horizontal alliances with urban groups. Certainly the 
presence of obviously urban intellectuals such as the much hyped Sub-comandante Marcos(who is rumored to have been an 
anthropologist at the Casa na Bolom) points to this. The EZLN has also reached out to the remants of Mexico's urban underground. The 
bombing of the Plaza Univerisdad in Mexico City and the Municipal Plaza in Acapulco have been attributed to an old  urban guerrilla 
group, the Clandestine Workers and Campesinos Popular Union (PROCUP). Interestingly enough PROCUP itself has roots in the rural 
struggle of the 60's and 70's. PROCUP along with another rural turned urban group, the Party of the Poor (not the keg variety I would bet), 
are assumed to have a hand in the bombings of two electrical towers in Michocan and Puebla which were attributed to the EZLN.
	Like the agraristas  of the late 19th and early 20th cent. the EZLN has risen directly from the specific features of class conflict in 
rural Chiapas. In discussing these features it is impossible to get away from a explanation of the key role the Mexican State plays in 
this conflict. In rural Mexico a two layered system of political control exists. At the federal level you have the national government and the 
PRI. At the local level the caciques  hold power with a complex patronage system. Both of these levels rely on alternating between 
the velvet glove and the iron fist for social control. The velvet glove nearly always means costly (and conspicuous) development 
programs while the iron fist covers a whole slew of repressive measures spanning the fence from beatings, torture, withholding of 
social services, and murder. The method usually corresponds tactically to the level of struggle put forward by the local working 
class.
	The interplay between class struggle and government development programs have created massive environmental 
destruction in Chiapas or more precisely the Selva Lacandon, the rainforest which used to cover most of the eastern part of the State. 
The story of the destruction of the Lacandon (an estimated 80% in the last 20 years) is very much tied into this crisis. Although this 
story really extends back all the way to the turn of the century mahogany debt peonage camps immortalized in fiction by B. Traven's 
Rebellion of the Hanged the most dramatic and relevant phase lies in the last 20-30 years. Responding to the pressures for land reform by 
campesinos  in southern Mexico the federal government began to look in the 1960's to the Lacandon as a panacea for its social control 
problem.  Large scale development schemes were dreamed up for the new "frontier" which included alongside intensive logging and oil 
exploration the resettlement of 150,000 landless peasants mainly drawn from indigenous Mayan-speaking groups like the Tzotzil,
 Tzeltal, Chol, Sekema and Tojolabal. 
	What followed is a pattern which mirrors the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The Lacandon's topsoil, like most tropical 
rainforest, is unsuited for long term agriculture. After the new settlers had slashed and burned the forest on theirejidos  they could 
hope to get only 2 or 3 good years out of the soil. A cycle followed in which the campesinos  were forced to squat and clear more and more 
of the Lacandon.  Meanwhile the rancheros  were busy buying up, swindling or coercing large tracts of cleared forest lands from the 
settlers. Cattle overgrazing reduced the already damaged forest lands into wasteland while social tensions rose rapidly between the 
frustrated campesinos  and cacique--dominated rancheros.  As a result of this pattern, only 275,000- 325,000 hectares of an 
original 1.3 million hectares of forest were left intact. 
	The federal government's response to this rising level of conflict clearly demonstrated the old velvet glove/iron fist social 
control method.  Government development programs aimed to pacify the area by two methods. The first was to pull the semi-autonomous 
indigenous farmers closer into the wage labor market by conducting  largescale infrastructure projects such as massive hydroelectric 
dams, road construction, oil exploration,etc. The second was through old fashioned pork barrel politics. Local caciques  meted out projects 
in accordance to the amount of political support or favors that were given to them.  In 1991 the Salinas government attempted to curb a 
widescale backlash against  debt-crisis fueled austerity programs by  creating the $9 billion dollar Solidaridad program.  Solidaridad 
predictably fell into the same pattern of development. As one Chiapas resident put it "we can't eat basketball courts."
	The inability of development to curb campesino  resistance has lead to the government's increased reliance on the iron fist of 
repression. Human rights abuse has a long history in Chiapas. To cite one example in 1975 soldiers of the 46th Battalion  attacked the 
Lacandon community of San Francisco, burned down their homes and drove them from the land (which was later given to several large 
landowners in the region). Since that time hundreds of cases of beatings, torture and murders have occured  under the hands of 
gunmen, police and soldiers. Less dramatically but just as harsh has been the use of underdevelopment as a passive weapon. In many of 
the newly formed Lacandon communities especially along the dirt roads social services such as adequate medical care or running water 
have been never been developed as promised or have been allowed to slowly deteriate.
	It is from these conditions that members of several, local autonomous groups such as the Emiliano Zapata Independent 
National Peasant Alliance (ANCIEZ)  decided to form the EZLN. This bottom up evolution places the EZLN in an entirely different category 
from the usual foco  external vanguard strategy which dominates most Latin American armed groups. The EZLN shares far more with 
the Mexican agrarista  tradition than it does with  the fidelistas.  When the EZLN took San Cristobal it opened up several stores and 
pharmacies to the people producing according to one eye witness an LA-style festival of the oppressed. Government records were taken 
out and exposed to the people on the street showing a very different attitude than the typical meet-the-new-boss attitude of successful 
guerrilla groups. However keep in mind this not to say that the EZLN are perfect little anti-authoritarian angels. Importantly  they are an 
army in every sense of the word including a hiearchical command structure and a certain degree of military  ruthlessness. Also a very 
distinctive Marxist-Leninist element  exists inside the EZLN including  a few militants from guerrilla groups and sects like the Maoist Linea 
Proletaria.Whether these elements will lead them to become detached from the autonomous cycles of struggle inside the Lacandon  
is yet to be determined.
								-Chris Kutalik
								Atlatl Collective
								Pobox 650116
								Austin,TX 78765
 

