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The Guerrilla Movement As a Project an Assessment of Community Involvement in the EZLN by Niels Barmeyer

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The Guerrilla Movement As a Project an Assessment of Community Involvement in the EZLN by Niels Barmeyer LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES 10.1177/0094582X02239201BarmeyerARTICLE / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT The Guerrilla Movement as a Project An Assessment of Community Involvement in the EZLN by Niels Barmeyer There seems to be a tendency among Latin Americanists at a time of highly refined counterinsurgency techniques to see guerrilla movements as generally detrimental to the rural base communities supporting them. I am referring in particular to David Stoll’s book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999), in which he confirms the statements made in an earlier book on peasants of the Ixil triangle caught in the crossfire of opposing armies (Stoll, 1993). Stoll argues that not only is the Guatemalan Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor—EGP) responsible for the enormous loss of life in the rural population but the inter- national solidarity brought about by Menchú’s publication has led to a pro- longation of the war and the murderous violence in Guatemala. It is not my purpose here to contest Stoll’s findings for Guatemala, espe- cially because I lack the necessary knowledge about the area to do so, but I would like to use the recent debate (see especially Latin American Perspec- tives 26 [6]) about his book to show how by getting involved with a guerrilla movement one peasant community has been able put itself in a position that is in many ways better than before. The case that I present in this article, which I believe to be representative of many other communities in the area, is that of the village San Emiliano, a colonist community settled in the 1950s in the remote Las Cañadas/Selva Lacandona region of Chiapas, Mexico. At the time of my fieldwork there, this community was unanimously supporting the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army for National Lib- eration—EZLN), an organization whose remarkable rootedness in the local peasant communities will be made explicit here. I also want to show that at least at the time of the research in spring 1997, involvement with the guerril- las on the part of communities striving to improve their living conditions had Niels Barmeyer is a graduate student at the University of Manchester. He has recently completed two years of fieldwork on the development of local autonomy in Zapatista-controlled areas and the involvement of foreign pro-Zapatista activists and their organizations in Chiapas. LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 128, Vol. 30 No. 1, January 2003 122-138 DOI: 10.1177/0094582X02239201 © 2003 Latin American Perspectives 122 Barmeyer / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT 123 a positive result, above all, with regard to the infrastructural developments that have taken place in the region over the past decade. Of course, the emer- gence of paramilitaries in recent years and the heavy presence of the army have severely limited the gains made by the colonist communities. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND In an armed uprising that entailed the takeover of seven strategically important towns in the highlands of Chiapas, the EZLN appeared as a new liberation movement on the Mexican political stage on the first of January 1994. The events of that day coincided with the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, which threatened the livelihoods of workers and peasants already struggling for survival. In a declaration of war against the Mexican government and its army, the EZLN issued a set of basic demands for work, land, housing, food, health care, education, independence, freedom, democ- racy, justice, and peace (El Despertador Mexicano, December 31, 1993). It was a combination of circumstances that allowed the guerrilla move- ment, which had grown clandestinely through a network of social relations in the indigenous communities, to become a key actor in Mexican politics. Apart from the drastic deterioration in the quality of life for Mexicans inhab- iting peripheral areas such as the remoter parts of eastern Chiapas, the unwill- ingness of the ruling party to abandon its traditional mechanisms of political control, as well as the fragmentation of the left and its electoral defeat in 1988, gave rise to a situation in which large parts of the population identified with the EZLN (Leyva Solano, 1998: 38). An investigation into the origins of the EZLN necessitates a closer look at intercommunal organization in Las Cañadas, a subregion of the Lacandon jungle that has been colonized in the past five decades by former plantation workers of various ethnic backgrounds from the highlands. According to Leyva Solano (1998: 40), the agricultural crisis in the 1970s and 1980s, which particularly affected marginalized areas such as the Selva Lacandona, where the government had issued uninhabited state-owned forest areas as ejido1 lands, contributed significantly to the rebellion. In the 1950s and 1960s, the region served as a relief valve for land distribution to hitherto land- less campesinos from densely populated highland communities. In the 1970s, however, the region remained marginalized and excluded from national development programs.2 There are several probable causes for this disparity, the two most obvious ones being the existence of a nonagricultural agenda for the resources (timber, oil, mineral deposits such as uranium and 124 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES aluminum, botanico-pharmaceutical resources, and ecotourism) to which the state gained access through the creation of the Reserva Integral de la Biósfera de Montes Azules (Blue Mountain Biosphere Reserve—RIBMA) and the fact that the power holders in Mexico City considered the settler communities of little political value. These communities were not regarded as integral to the maintenance of control over the country of the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (Party of the Institutionalized Revolution—PRI). The colonist campesinos of the Selva and Las Cañadas were left to grow maize for subsistence. In addition to rapid population growth (5.5 percent [Harvey, 1998]) there were infrastructural shortages such as lack of drinking water, roads, and electricity. The villages had great difficulty obtaining fur- ther farmland from the government for a growing number of young families without ejido titles. Then, in 1992, an agrarian reform introduced by the gov- ernment of Carlos Salinas officially put an end to all land distributions. Since the late 1960s Catholic priests and catechists,3 influenced by libera- tion theology, had been trying in their missionary work in the Selva and Las Cañadas to focus on indigenous practices and traditions and further the estab- lishment of local cooperatives. This was in line with the grassroots principles that the diocese of San Cristóbal had adopted after its bishop, Samuel Ruiz, attended the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellín in 1968. In the peripheral and dispersed settlements of the region the diocese succeeded in building a support base for autonomous forms of popular representation (Harvey, 1994: 27, 28).4 Apart from the activities of the Church, the engage- ment of Mexico’s independent left played an important role in the emergence of the EZLN and its predecessor organizations.5 Las Cañadas was visited in the early 1970s by student activists from the Mexican metropoles in the North who had survived the 1968 repression and were now trying to build a popular front along Maoist lines with the “working masses” in the periphery. In the late 1970s and early 1980s at least three different groups came into the region, of which the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (National Forces of Libera- tion—FLN)6 can be regarded as the embryo of today’s EZLN. Its founders drew their initial inspiration and ideology from the revolutions in Cuba and Nicaragua and various Latin American liberation movements as well as from Maoist forms of popular organization. They soon learned, however, that their survival and success depended on adapting to local forms of organization and decision making (Leyva Solano, 1998: 42; Tello Díaz, 1995: 63–64; Harvey, 1998). By that time there was already a network of so-called ejidal unions amongst the colonist communities. Taking advantage of new agrarian legis- lation introduced in the 1970s, many colonist communities had created orga- nizations to counter the official politics of exclusion by promoting their Barmeyer / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT 125 common interests and increasing their chances of success in obtaining devel- opmental support from the government. This mainly concerned funds for regional development, credits and resources for agricultural production, and, most important, the assignment of new ejido land titles. The umbrella organi- zation made up mainly of three independent associations of campesino com- munities in the Selva/Las Cañadas region went by the name of Unión de Uniónes (Harvey, 1998). Another factor uniting the colonist communities in resistance was the resettlement programs by which many of them were affected. The indigenous Lacandon, consisting of fewer than 70 families, had been given an enormous area of 614,000 hectares of jungle by the state. Fur- ther, after a government-owned logging company had exploited rare woods in the region for ten years a still larger area was declared an ecological pro- tection area (RIBMA), and the villages in that area were to be resettled as well (Gabbert, 1997: 176; Gledhill, 1999: 19; Harvey, 1998; Tello Díaz, 1995: 60). When the rebels from the city, among them Subcomandante Marcos,
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