SCUOLA DI DOTTORATO UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI MILANO-BICOCCA "Riccardo Massa" Department for Human Sciences PhD program in Cultural and Social Anthropology Cycle XXXI in joint – supervision with École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales PhD program in Social Sciences FIGHTING FOR AND FIGHTING THROUGH ELECTRICITY. AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL RESISTANCE MOVEMENT "LUZ Y FUERZA DEL PUEBLO", FROM CHIAPAS, MEXICO Phd Candidate: Cao Umberto Registration number: 803149 Tutor: prof. Alice Bellagamba Co-tutor: prof. Valeria Siniscalchi Coordinator: prof. Alice Bellagamba ACADEMIC YEAR 2017-18 Acknowledgments This work has been realized thanks to a Ph.D. Scholarship granted by the University of Milano Bicocca, for the period November 2015 – October 2018. The research has also counted on the support of: the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the Centre Norbert Elias (UMR 8562), and the IRIS Global Studies at PSL - Paris Sciences et Lettres. During the period October 2016 – February 2018, who writes has been Visiting Ph.D. Student at the CIMSUR – Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur, of the UNAM – Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The views and opinions expressed in this work belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of any of the aforementioned institutions. The author's deepest thanks go to: the academic supervisors of this work – professors Alice Bellagamba in Milan, Valeria Siniscalchi in Marseille, and José Rubén Orantes García in San Cristóbal de las Casas; the external rapporteurs, professors Alessandro Mancuso and Filippo Zerilli; the language proofreader Sheriff Kora; all persons in Sardinia, Italy, France, and Mexico, that in any form and at any extent have supported and accompanied him during the complex but wonderful years of this doctorate; and above all, the people of Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo. INTRODUCTION 7 PART I - MEXICO TODAY 33 Introduction 33 CHAPTER 1. SOCIOECONOMIC FACTS 34 1.1 Country Profile 34 1.2 The Liberal Turn 39 1.3 Poverty and Inequalities 49 CHAPTER 2. AN ORDINARY STATE OF INSECURITY 54 2.1 Intentional Homicides 56 2.2 Enforced Disappearances, Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Mass Graves 59 2.3 Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment 61 2.4 Threats Against Journalists and Human Rights Defenders 63 2.5 Gender-Based Violence 66 2.6 Systematic Impunity and the Lack of Rule of law 67 2.7 Corruption 69 2.8 The "War On Drugs" 72 CHAPTER 3. THE INDIGENOUS "QUESTION" 78 3.1 Socioeconomic Profile of Indigenous Peoples of Mexico 78 3.2 Legal Framework and Political Participation 83 3.2.1 The Case of Indigenous Peoples' Right to Free, Informed and Prior Consultation 87 3.2.2 The Indigenous Participation in Mexican Politics 90 PART II - THEORY 95 CHAPTER 4. THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 96 4.1 Four Standpoints on Social Movements 96 4.2 Social Sciences' Approaches to Social Movements: Main Theoretical Frameworks 102 4.3 Anthropology and Social Movements Studies: Gaining Legitimacy 108 4.4 2008-2018: A Decade of Anthropological Regards on Social Movements 112 CHAPTER 5. AUTONOMY 125 5.1 A struggle between paradigms 126 5.1.1 Decolonization: Self-Determination Paradigm VS Colonial Paradigm 127 5.1.2 Resistance: Autonomic Paradigm VS Assimilationist/Integrationist Paradigm 130 5.1.3 Reconstitution: Autonomic Paradigm VS Multicultural Paradigm 132 5.2 Autonomies in Mexico: A Short Genealogy 135 PART III - ETHNOGRAPHY 145 CHAPTER 6. ORGANIZACIÓN DE LA RESISTENCIA CIVIL "LUZ Y FUERZA DEL PUEBLO" 145 6.1 Introduction and Genesis 145 6.2 Structure, operating mode and rules 154 6.3 Frameworks and Fields of Action 164 6.3.1 Electricity 164 6.3.2 Other Fields of Action 173 6.4 Three Exemplary Cases 180 6.4.1. 24 Militant Families Cut-Off From Electricity. 180 6.4.2 A Compañero Under the Attack of Usurpers. 183 6.4.3 The Young Son of a Compañero Kidnapped 187 CHAPTER 7. WHY JOINING LUZ Y FUERZA DEL PUEBLO? AN ANALYSIS OF MOTIVATIONS. 190 7.1 Poverty and Human Security 191 7.2 The habitus of Organized Social Activism 195 7.2.1 The Tradition of Social Movements 197 7.2.2 Primary Habitus: Family 200 7.2.3 Between Primary and the Secondary Habitus: the Epic of Mexican Revolution(s) 201 7.2.4 Liberation Theology and Catholic Activism 203 7.3 An Habitus, Many Social Movements, Multiple Militancies 208 7.3.1 EZLN and Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo 210 CHAPTER 8. THE POLITICAL AGENDA 217 8.1 Autonomy is the goal 217 8.1.1 Civil Society and Luz y Fuerza: the "Jelly" and the "Frame" 222 8.1.2 Control of The Government 227 8.1.3 Control of the Territory and Environment Protection 230 8.1.4 Place Politics and the Autonomic Gigsaw-Puzzle 238 8.2 Electricity in the Spotlight 242 CHAPTER 9. THE DAILY RESISTANCE TOWARDS.. A NEW HUMANITY 256 9.1 The shape and the practices of a meshwork 256 9.2 Physical Resistance and Danger, Violence and Non-Violence. 263 9.3 Strategic realism 275 CONCLUSIONS 282 Index of tables 298 Index of figures 298 Index of photos 298 Index of annexes 299 Index of interviews quoted 299 Bibliography 300 «We were born of the night. We live in the night. We will die in her. But the light will be tomorrow for others, for all those who today weep at the night, for those who have been denied the day, for those for whom death is a gift, for those who are denied life. For everyone the light. For everyone everything.» Emiliano Zapata, Zapatista Manifesto in Nahuatl, 1918 Introduction «[They are those] who don't exist, even if they do. Who speak no languages, only dialects. Who have no religions, only superstitions. Who make no arts, only crafts. Who have no culture, only folklore. Who are not humans, but human resources. Who have no face, only harms. Who have no name, and are only numbers. Who have no place in history, but only in local crime reports. They are the nobodies. Who are worth less than the bullet that will kill them». Eduardo Galeano, "El libro de los Abrazos", 1989: 52 The anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano once wrote that «we [anthropologists] – do depend on the contingent from the moment we start our research, and this dependency affects the way we do our research» (Crapanzano 2010: 58). Anyone who has ever experienced ethnographic fieldwork research could not agree more. Yet, I find that the "power of the contingent" often invests also the very choice of the study's subject. In the spring of 2014, I travelled across Chiapas for a project of visual anthropology, accompanying a Sardinian mural painter, Crisa. Through a long chain that I may not even retrace anymore, made of shared contacts, "friends of friends" and word of mouth, we came to know a group of people that decided to endorse our project. They opened their houses to us and hosted us in 6 different towns or villages. They provided walls to paint in their communities. With time, they shared their stories with us, their way of existence, and finally, their struggle. They were activists of a social movement named «Organización de la Resistencia Civil "Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo"». It seemed they were very "concerned" with electricity. 7 The more they shared stories and the more I observed their Organization, the more I became intrigued and, to a certain extent, surprised. At the time, I was personally quite aware about the "epic" of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas (mostly known for its 1994 armed uprising) and averagely interested in indigenous mobilizations in the Americas (having previously researched about indigenous people, in North America). However, I was experiencing in person that the social arena in Chiapas was "not just about" EZLN - a vision still quite common in Europe, and in Mexico too. It was much more complex and rich. Above all, what had looked really new to me was the object and purpose of their activisms. They struggled for electricity. But also - as I would discover through this study – they struggled through electricity. In social movements literature, I had never found anything alike before. That's in short, how the contingent drove me here five years later and almost two of which was spent on the field in Chiapas to complete this doctoral thesis in anthropology about Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo. The main characters of this study are peasant and poor people from Chiapas, militating in Luz y Fuerza del Pueblo. Where for "peasant" we rely on the definition provided by the anthropologist Eric Wolf: i.e. agricultural producers «who retain effective control of the land» and «aim at subsistence, not at reinvestment» (Wolf 2001: 196). They therefore differ from "tenants", «whose control of land is subject to an outside authority», and from "farmers" who «view agriculture as a business enterprise» (ibid.). They very much look like the "nobodies" (originally, in Spanish: "los nadies") the writer Eduardo Galeano described in the famous tale we quoted in the beginning. Additionally, they are also indigenous, mainly Tojolabal, Ch'ol, Mam, Tzotzil, Q'anjob'al and Chuj. Being peasant, poor and indigenous are features that very often goes together. About 85% of Luz y Fuerza militants are so. Yet, as we'll have the opportunity to argue, Luz y Fuerza is not an indigenous movement. Similar to what the anthropologist George Collier highlighted on EZLN soon after the armed uprising, in this case we are not faced by a movement demanding rights for indigenous peoples: «they are first and foremost calling attention to the plight of Mexico's rural poor and peasants, both indigenous and non-indigenous» wrote Collier (1994: 7).