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 Editorials | August 2005 
The Zapatistas: Betrayal and Autonomy
 Fred Rosen - The Herald Mexico
On Saturday, August 6, to the consternation of most of the habitués of the Mexican left, the eloquent field marshal, theoretician and spokesperson of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), Subcomandante Marcos, turned his biting verbal fury against the aboveground political group that probably contains more of his admirers and supporters than any other, the leftleaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).
"They treated us with disrespect," he told a news conference in the town of San Rafael, Chiapas, "and they will pay for it." Indeed, he vowed to break the PRD "into little pieces" even if it meant isolating his own movement.
Marcos' bill of particulars against the PRD came out over the next few days in additional comments to reporters and in two written responses to angry and perplexed letters to the editor in the leftist daily, La Jornada. The crux of the PRD's betrayal, he wrote, has been its refusal to support the autonomy of the Zapatista communities as spelled out first in the San Andrés Accords of 1996, and later that year in the similar proposal put together by the multi-party congressional Commission for Peace and Conciliation (Cocopa). The PRD legislators, he insists, who had pledged full support for both sets of accords, bowed eventually to the pressures of the Fox government and the PRI/PAN legislative majority, agreeing finally to pass a useless, diluted version of autonomy in 2001, which was promptly rejected by the EZLN.
Indian Rights Bill
The San Andrés Accords, signed in February, 1996, by the Zapatistas and representatives of the federal government, offered wide-ranging political autonomy to Mexico's indigenous communities. But despite the official signatures, the government of Ernesto Zedillo refused to implement the accords, arguing that they threatened national unity. Cocopa then produced a revised document that was acceptable to the Zapatistas and seemed like it might get Zedillo's support, but in the end was similarly rejected and never implemented.
Marcos' attack on the PRD appears to have nothing to do with the left-center debate within the party. Indeed, both the left's standard-bearer in that internal debate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and the purported carrier of the party to the center, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, are high on his list of betrayers. In fact, Marcos is not raising left-right issues at all here. He is simply claiming that the PRD has continually reneged on its promises to a loyal, needy and important constituency. These claims have ideological content only to the extent that Marcos says that he and the Zapatistas had hope only in the promises of the leftist PRD. But even there they are more personal than ideological. His comments read as though the Subcomandante had been slapped in the face by an intimate friend.
Abuses
And added to this slap in the face, says Marcos, have been a series of humiliating aggressions against Zapatista communities by local governments and quasi-governmental groups nominally affiliated with the PRD, aggressions made possible by the Zapatistas' lack of legal autonomy. That lack of autonomy persists, he says, because of the lack of fortitude of all the major parties, including those who claim to love the Zapatistas the most.
New Campaign
Marcos and the EZLN are now settling in for a long "other campaign," a movement that will be parallel to the upcoming electoral campaign but that is not meant to bring any particular party to power. The Zapatistas appear to see state power as increasingly irrelevant. A globalized class struggle, they have argued, is now the operative conflict in the world. Though they have not yet figured out how to turn this insight into practical global politics, they are beginning in Mexico. That's what the "other campaign" is all about.
Different Manifesto
They have argued that they want to create a Mexico in which there's room for everybody. They have left behind that old unified leftist sense of "the people" in rebellion, and replaced it a recognition that a broad diversity of "peoples" are one way or another living under conditions of oppression and are ready to rebel. The "other campaign" means to reach out to those other peoples and form some sort of common ground.
It is in that reaching out that the question of autonomy begins to make sense. A Mexico in which there is room for everyone is a Mexico in which people are free to be themselves and still be Mexican. It is a Mexico of great diversity, a Mexico in which indigenous communities can govern themselves as they see fit and still be part of the Mexican nation. That seems to be the Zapatista vision. That seems to be why the sense of "betrayal" over autonomy was so sharp.
frosen@terra.com.mx |
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