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 international 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, especially 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 guerrillas 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 emergence 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, democracy, justice, and peace (El Despertador Mexicano, December 31, 1993). It was a combination of circumstances that allowed the guerrilla movement, 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 landless 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 further farmland from the government for a growing number of young families without ejido titles. Then, in 1992, an agrarian reform introduced by the government of Carlos Salinas officially put an end to all land distributions. Since the late 1960s Catholic priests and catechists,3 influenced by liberation 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 organizations 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 organization made up mainly of three independent associations of campesino communities 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, arrived in these remote areas, conditions in the villages of the Selva were con- ducive to the formation of a guerrilla movement: the land claims had received a definite and final rejection from the government, and the campesino organization was well established in the communities of the region, which were in search of a new way of pressing their demands. Arguably, the main conditions for the success of guerrilla activity, as set out by Wickham-Crowley (1991: 35), were fulfilled in Chiapas in the early 1980s: the social contract had not been met, and the colonist communities perceived government offi- cials as “predatory authorities.” There were also rather effective organiza- tional community structures in existence, and in the relative absence of legiti- mate authority the region of the Selva/Las Cañadas had become “virgin territory” for an organization promising to provide a “counter state or alternative government.” I will try to show that by becoming a project of the rebel colonist communities the EZLN did indeed develop characteristics of an alternative state. Whether it did so by providing what Wickham-Crowley (1991: 35) calls “the three classic contributions of government: defense of the populace, maintenance of internal peace and order, and contributions to material security” is not quite clear. Some aspects of these contributions were surely supplied by the guerrilla movement, if only indirectly. As for the third, I will try to show that at least in the short term, for the colonist communities the EZLN, although it may have served as leverage for the procurement of material supplies, it has been a considerable drain on resources. In the early 1980s the option of lending force to their demands by military means must have appealed to the colonists. According to García de León (cited in Harvey, 1998: 165), the beginnings of the EZLN were motivated by 126 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES the need of the colonist communities for self-defense in the face of the repression by landowners and judicial police. The armed students from the city were eventually received in some of the communities organized in the Unión de Uniónes, and the guerrilla project was brought to life. The fact that this process did not constitute a mobilization in the style of revolutionary groups of the 1970s but was rather initiated by the indigenous colonist communities and the guerrillas alike is suggested both in the literature (Tello Díaz, 1995: 76; Harvey, 1998) and by my interviews with the villagers of San Emiliano. The gradual involvement of indigenous communities in guerrilla activities was a lengthy process; in San Emiliano it was more than ten years before the entire village unanimously supported the guerrilla project. A main objective of the guerrilla movement was to bring about participation in the country’s prosperity for the marginalized settler communities. This meant access to an infrastructure of roads, electricity, and fresh water, as well as logistical means to transport goods into the region and sell local produce. Most of all, the EZLN base communities wanted control over the fertile lands owned by the country’s wealthy elites, which were often located in the immediate neighborhood of their own meager plots. Further aims included educational autonomy and an end to repression by district police and the landowners’ private armies.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE COMMUNITY AND THE GUERRILLAS

Because of the important changes it brought about for the communities involved, the Zapatista rebellion is often referred to by locals as “the revolution.” In the years following the 1994 uprising, the village of San Emiliano as a whole was integrated into the structures of the guerrilla movement. Since the founding of the EZLN on November 16, 1983, the people in the rebel villages have adjusted their ways so as to support that movement. On the one hand, they have provided the fighters and ensured the movement’s readiness for war. The large and, at the time of my research, still growing number of young parents in San Emiliano can be seen in that light. Even though contra- ception by the pill had been an option in many of the Zapatista communities for a number of years, it was obviously not being used very much. In some of my interviews with the villagers, fathers justified their numerous offspring jokingly but not without pride, stating that little soldiers had to be produced for the liberation struggle. On the other hand, the community financed weapons7 and equipment for the recruits and to the same extent provisions for Barmeyer / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT 127 the guerrillas, who because of their deployment in the mountains were unable to work in the fields. The financing was accomplished either by donations from the whole community or as a project of individual families, who by the sale of agrarian surplus provided their sons (and elsewhere also their daugh- ters) with the equipment necessary for the guerrilla war. In return for this they received prestige in the community. In early 1997, of the 100 adult men in the village, approximately 20 of the younger ones were part of the village militia. Additionally, 10 were insurgents stationed in the nearby mountains as part of a guerrilla unit that received food supplies from the village. The village was directly connected to the general command of the EZLN via ham radio, which transmitted messages to all base communities twice a day. Just how deeply rooted the EZLN was in the lives of the people in the base communities is apparent in the many rituals that emphasize the connec- tion between the struggle for land and liberation and everyday tasks such as working in the fields or raising children. In San Emiliano there were numerous occasions for such celebrations: the anniversary of Emiliano Zapata’s and Che Guevara’s death, the annual celebration of the January 1994 uprising, the commemoration of the village heroes who died in the ensuing battle of Ocosingo. On occasions like these, community leaders appealed to the people to keep up their united resistance. The prospect of a better future was evoked in speeches, church services were held to ensure divine support for the project, and the entire village repeated an oath of allegiance at the graves of those fallen in combat. Such practices do not fit the image of the docile indigenous peasant that Stoll, among others, has presented. Another aspect of the firm bond between base villages and the EZLN manifests itself in the way in which the Zapatista communities controlled the ventures of the guerrillas. The crucial decision to go ahead with the rebellion in January 1994, for example, was made at the base communities’insistence; the guerrilla command would have preferred to wait for a more opportune moment (Harvey, 1998). Decision making by opinion polls (consultas), although a lengthy process, is in principle a deeply democratic practice carried out in the village assemblies of Zapatista communities. One of the basic elements of community democracy is constituted by the small groups in which weekly discussions take place. According to Harvey (1994: 30), it was the above-mentioned Maoist student brigades from the cities who encour- aged the reintroduction of this traditional element of indigenous democracy to counteract the centralization of decision making. In San Emiliano each of these groups was made up of adult men or women of the same age-group and marital status. Assemblies were held every Sunday in conjunction with the church service, with which they shared the theme that had been addressed in the sermon and the chosen Bible passage. 128 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

The functionality of these small groups showed to advantage when decisions had to be made: they allowed the active participation of each community member in the debate and offered everyone the possibility of conversing in the familiar context of his or her own age-group. The discussions were taken down in writing and read out to the whole assembly. Usually consensus was reached within the small groups, and therefore a referendum could be decided by a majority of the groups rather than by individuals. Because there were six men’s groups as opposed to only four larger ones made up of women, in the event of disagreement along the gender divide the men had the upper hand. During the research period in San Emiliano there were differences in the ways in which the villagers were incorporated into the EZLN. Most community members were part of the support base rather than of a fighting unit, but militiamen and insurgents were soldiers trained in the use of firearms. While the insurgents, being full-time guerrillas, were stationed permanently in the mountains, the militiamen were equipped with small-caliber rifles and mobi- lized only in times of crisis. They lived in the village like the rest of the community and participated in the communal assemblies and community activities such as Saturday work and the preparations for village festivals. Above all, they worked the plots of land allocated to them by the comisariado ejidal8 and thereby contributed to the village economy. The contribution of the insurgents consisted in their role as guerrillas whose demands aimed at the long- term improvement of the economic situation in the Zapatista base villages. Until the fulfillment of these demands and the end of the guerrilla war, the fighters had to be supported at least in part by all community members. Their maintenance can therefore be regarded as an investment made by the communities in their future. For the time being, however, it represented an economic burden.

THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT

The preceding sections have shown the extent to which the emergence of the EZLN is linked to the history of the new settler communities of Las Cañadas and the Selva and that the guerrilla movement is fundamentally tied in with all aspects of village life in San Emiliano. On the basis of further examples I would now like to describe the guerrilla movement as a project of the Zapatista communities in the region. Community members from San Emiliano participated in the founding of the EZLN in 1983, and subsequently more and more families from the village joined the organization and helped to build it up further. Many men agreed to Barmeyer / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT 129 be trained in guerrilla tactics and the use of firearms by the activists. The con- tinuous procurement of weapons was secured by an alignment of the entire village economy to that end. In the context of a 1980s government program to promote cattle raising in Chiapas, the Zapatista villages in the region, officially organized in an Unión de Ejidos, had made a concerted effort to obtain credit from the Mexican agrarian credit bank BANRURAL. The money was used by the clandestine base communities, hitherto inexperienced in cattle raising, for the purchase of hundreds of calves. When the first loan was received in San Emiliano, 30 men and their families took part in the venture. At first the calves grazed on separate pastures, but as more families came to share in the project forest was cleared to make room for a large collective pas- ture. After six years the first loan had been paid back by the sale of bulls and the 100 cows remaining were sold by the campesino entrepreneurs, who by that time numbered 50 heads of families, to finance the purchase of arms, ammunition, equipment, and food for the recruits. The second loan, which paid for 200 new calves, was never repaid, not least because by 1994 the rebellion had occurred and the real objectives behind the cattle-raising activities in Las Cañadas had become clear to the banks. One by one these cows were also sold until the 84 remaining animals were stolen by federal soldiers during the army assault in February 1995. Since the early 1980s much of the surplus produced in the village has gone into the purchase of arms and equipment. With well-conceived long-term strategies such as the one described, carried out by the whole community, capital in addition to the comparatively small yields of the maize fields was generated. Moreover, a substantial part of the maize surplus was invested in the guerrilla movement by individual families who used the grain to rear pigs for sale to finance the equipment of their sons as recruits. The continuation of the surplus investment was ensured by a kind of prestige economics whereby individual effort for the benefit of the community was rewarded with prestige. Prestige in the community was attained either by occupying a position in the hierarchy of ceremonial and administrative offices or by embarking on a career as a soldier with the EZLN. Because village law tied eligibility for office to the possession of a land title, landless youngsters had to opt for the latter if they were to “be someone,” and in this they were supported by their families with the profits generated by the sale of pigs.9 In times of emergency, the community of San Emiliano shifted from individual family subsistence to collective production. The following summary of my field notes from January 1997 illustrates the conversion of all community activities to accommodate the changed situation: A crisis has occurred in the negotiations with the government.10 By way of radio communication, the Zapatista base communities are alerted by the 130 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES guerrillas’ central command. After the general assembly has made the decision for the militiamen to move out in order to join other troop units of the EZLN in the event of an escalation, the whole community prepares for a state of emergency: food is brought by women and deposited in a shed. The militiamen are getting ready to leave for the mountains, but first a mass is held to ensure their personal safety and success. During the ceremony, they are praised in singing as the “Militia of Christ.”11 On the same evening there is a dance in their honor in the center of the village. On the next day, the remaining men do not go to their milpas; half of them remain in the village to protect it and the other half heads out to a state-owned forest not far from the village equipped with saws and axes to cut down a couple of large trees. One of the secretarios municipales drives to the district capital to recruit buyers for the wood. It is sold to fill the quickly growing hole in the community funds (1,300 Mexican pesos, US$200) that has resulted from providing the militiamen with canned food. The village soldiers are supplied every few days by a truck, collectively owned by four community members. During the two weeks of the state of emergency a group of older men takes on the night vigil in the village and in return is exempted from the obligation of cutting and transporting wood. During this time village assemblies take place almost on a daily basis to keep community members informed and coordinated.

SHORTCOMINGS OF THE “REVOLUTION”

Almost eight years have passed since the Zapatista rebellion, and the situation in Chiapas remains as tense as ever. Even though the PRI has been replaced as governing party at both federal and state levels the initial pros- pects for dialogue between the guerrillas and the new government have not come to fruition. More than four years after the EZLN had called off its peace talks with the multiparty parliamentary commission in San Andrés, a resump- tion of dialogue was spoiled by the Fox government’s ratification of a crip- pled bill on indigenous cultural autonomy in the face of widespread opposi- tion from those affected by it. The number of Mexican federal troops and police units deployed in Chiapas, which had grown to more than 70,000, has not been reduced since the Partido de Acción Nacional (Party of National Action—PAN) has come to power. More than 250 army camps remain along the newly built communication lines through the jungle and the highlands. Human rights abuses and assaults on women and men of the Zapatista communities perpetrated by policemen and federal soldiers are ubiquitous (Castro and Hidalgo, 1998). After appearing in the Zona Norte and the highlands of Barmeyer / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT 131

Chiapas in 1996 and 1997, paramilitary groups have come to operate in Las Cañadas as well. In 1998 the intermediary between government and EZLN, the Comisión de Intermediación (Commission for Intermediation— CONAI), was dismantled, and Bishop Samuel Ruíz withdrew from his medi- ator role (Castro, 1998). Moreover, the unanimity amongst the Zapatistas is slowly beginning to crumble: in recent years there have been reports of villages’ abandoning the resistance and declaring their loyalty to the government (Smith, 1998). At the beginning of the twenty-first century the people of the remaining rebel communities (and the people of many of the communities loyal to the government as well) are just as poor as they were before the uprising. Villages that have fallen victim to army raids as San Emiliano did in February 1995 have lost what little they had along with their harvest. The current state of relative poverty can surely also be attributed to the fact that the communities have had to provide for the guerrillas for almost two decades: while villages have had to produce food for the fighters, each full-time guerrilla has been missing as a farmer in the fields. Since the early 1980s the bulk of the surplus has been used for weapons and equipment rather than invested in means of production used directly for the improvement of living conditions. Thus, the guerrilla movement has become a limiting factor for economic growth in the Zapatista communities. In the late 1990s San Emiliano stood out among communities with a Zapatista presence for its unanimity of alliance. However, when deemed necessary by the majority, consensus within the community was maintained by force. Anyone who attempted to leave the organization faced sanctions such as public shaming. My informants justified this punishment by pointing to the conditions in villages in which there were factional splits. In these places, they argued, violence was part of everyday life and the social climate of the community had been poisoned. There are also examples of communities originally in support of the uprising that have since given up their self-determination in exchange for conces- sions by the government. The offer by the Chiapas governor to divide up rebellious districts into smaller units and grant them legal transitional status under certain conditions was aimed at splitting the support for the Zapatistas (Smith, 1998). The remunicipalization plans implemented by his successor can be regarded as having the same objective of quelling unrest despite the new governor’s seemingly more sympathetic stance toward the rebels. In the counterinsurgency campaign of recent years the Mexican government has exploited the widespread landlessness of young indigenous men. In this context, the motivation to seek prestige has emerged as a severe structural weak- ness in the fabric of many Chiapanec peasant communities. The fact that 132 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES administrative or ceremonial office is tied to a land title makes the landless particularly susceptible to joining one of the numerous paramilitary bands affiliated with local PRI caciques in pursuit of prestige.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE ZAPATISTA PROJECT

Positive developments for the Zapatista communities become apparent when one compares conditions before and after the uprising. As previously mentioned, the justification of the Zapatistas for the rebellion was—apart from the demand for self-determination—the lack of productive lands and the general neglect of the region, characterized by the absence of basic goods and services (health care, electricity, just law, and so forth). Describing their self-perception as marginalized people, Leyva Solano (1998: 39) quotes the campesino settlers as referring to the Selva/Las Cañadas region as “inside” and using the term “outside” when speaking about towns and cities. Thus, on the “outside” were “hospitals, secondary schools, drinking water supplies, electricity and telephones, and cheaper and more varied merchandise.” “Inside,” however, “they only had health volunteers, local radio, primary school, spring water, and country paths.” This is still true in Las Cañadas today, and yet the situation has changed: in recent years, communication lines leading into the Selva/Las Cañadas region have been developed. Where once impassable fords blocked the path in the rainy season, there are now bridges. Where in days past only off-road vehicles found their way, today broad gravel roads connect remote places. The main reason for the sudden road construction activities on the part of the government was to facilitate the extraction of resources from the area and to make the mountain and jungle regions accessible for the troop transporters and armored vehicles of the Mexican army. The traffic in prostitutes, drugs, and contraband, largely organized by merchants from the urban centers, is of no advantage to the Zapatista communities. On the very roads that serve as supply lines for the many military camps in the region, however, goods des- tined for the remote communities make their way into the formerly closed-off territory. Also, local products such as pigs, coffee, sugarcane, and wood achieve broader distribution. The fact that the Compañia Nacional de Subsistencias Populares (National Company for the People’s Subsistence— CONASUPO) shop organized by San Emiliano’s village authorities sold subsidized food shows how at least some rebel communities profited from governmental aid programs,12 delivering merchandise arriving in the region via the new roads. Another example for this is the supply of 25 corrugated Barmeyer / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT 133 iron sheets per family for roofing that some local Zapatista communities negotiated at the end of 1996. There has been a similar development with basic medical care. By the late 1990s Zapatista villages and villages loyal to the government alike were regularly visited by health advisers from the diocese and the Red Cross medical staff. The children of San Emiliano had been inoculated against diseases such as polio and typhoid fever. In the case of serious illness, there was the possibility of being examined by a team of Red Cross physicians on the spot or being taken to the hospital in the district capital. Apart from the many small trucks driving along the new roads, there is now public transport in Las Cañadas, connecting the villages there with the cities of the highlands. In the late 1990s the Francisco Gómez autonomous municipio even operated its own bus line with an old school bus donated to the Zapatistas by a U.S. solidarity committee. An initial disadvantage for the rebel villages had arisen from the fact that, after the 1994 uprising, the government stopped all salary payments to teachers in Zapatista territory. However, this situation is beginning to change. By now many autonomous municipios have education projects in which urban solidarity activists train local teachers. Despite numerous official attempts to sabotage it, the first autonomous secondary school in the Zapatista highland community of Oventic has been such a success that it has spawned a similar project in the municipio of Francisco Gómez. At the end of 1996 a power line providing the community with street light- ing was constructed through San Emiliano because of its location between two military camps. Soon after, the villagers laid cables into their huts but refused to pay for the electricity, which was regularly switched off when the military camps down the road used their hardware to capacity. Although pri- marily a by-product of the militarization, the electrification of the structur- ally weak region does comply with the demands made by the insurgents in 1994. In summary, the recent imports of commodities into the hitherto relatively undeveloped region and the infrastructural changes that have made them possible, have, despite their aim of facilitating the supply of the Mexi- can army, in fact catered to the interests of the Zapatista base in the villages. Four years after the invasion of cattle lands farther up the valley as part of the Zapatista uprising, many of San Emiliano’s landless young people received orders from the guerrilla command to settle there. Maintaining good relations with their community of origin, 15 families have built new homes for themselves on the fertile pastures. The lands seized by various campesino organizations and indigenous communities since the 1994 uprising are esti- mated at between 60,000 and 500,000 hectares (Castro and Hidalgo, 1998; Smith, 1998). Governmental distribution in an apparent reaction to the 134 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES seizures amounted to 180,000 hectares by 1998 (Castro and Hidalgo, 1998). Whereas much of the land initially seized by campesinos from large estates has been retaken by the landowners, often with the help of the Mexican army, the lands of small and medium-sized ranchers remained occupied by Zapatistas and independent peasant organizations. This fits in with the Mexi- can government’s counterinsurgency campaign, since the farmers who were deprived of their lands have turned into fierce supporters of paramilitary groups operating in the region (Gledhill, 1999).

CONCLUSION

Since the seizure of seven Chiapas towns on the first of January 1994, the Zapatistas have gained access to a national and international audience, and this can be considered a great success. At the beginning of the millennium the EZLN has become one of the main agents of reform in Mexico and is wield- ing great influence on political public opinion in the country via daily papers such as La Jornada and the weekly magazine Proceso. The indigenous communities are quite conscious of this new attention, and it strengthens their changed self-perception as agents of change. The use of new media such as the Internet and the skilled public relations expert Subcomandante Marcos has assured the EZLN the sustained interest of the international media and the global public. In a relatively short time the movement has been able to mobilize a multitude of solidarity activists from all continents for its cause. The steady flow of monetary and material contributions into the Selva Lacandona has led to improvement of the conditions of individual Zapatista communities. Marcelino, who is over 70, is the oldest man in San Emiliano. His narrative about San Emiliano’s development over the past four decades (interview, February 17, 1997) reveals the modernizing discourse prevalent in the colonist communities, although the younger people in the village would not nor- mally describe their situation to an outsider in such a favorable light. Old Marcelino explains how the community San Emiliano has had to go through three steps before turning into what it is now: starting off as an ejido, the settlement developed into a colonia and now, having finally been electri- fied, is ready to assume the status of a proper pueblo. Marcelino regards the road and the electrification as already achieved aims for which he has worked all his life. He explains the use of the road in terms of the possibilities of getting to the hospital and into the hands of good doctors. In reference to this, he recounts how years ago a cataract had been removed from one of his eyes in the hospital of Las Margaritas. However, he Barmeyer / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT 135 is still waiting for the treatment of his other eye. Nevertheless, according to Marcelino, progress has come far in San Emiliano. The only thing that is really missing now is for everyone to have his own car. The statement frequently heard in San Emiliano about everything’s being so miserable is missing from Marcelino’s discourse. Rather, he praises the many improvements that have taken place in the village in recent years. Everyone was now able to speak and read Spanish, and people would know how to bring forth their requests to the state authorities with self-confidence. As he spoke he pointed to one of the small boys who had sat with us at the table during the interview and included him with a gesture in the circle of people who had profited so much from the great achievement of the school. Ironically, the boy had not enjoyed any classes except a couple of weeks of improvised lessons taught by myself, since the local teachers had been laid off after the 1994 uprising. Marcelino’s words cast light on the local long-term agendas in the Zapatista base communities. These are not only and maybe not even primar- ily about indigenous autonomy and land, at least not for the older generation, but about being included in the development that other parts of the country have been experiencing. Autonomy and access to land are seen by the campesinos as means to achieve the inclusion they have hitherto been denied. After the rebellion, the land issue was pivotal for many Zapatista communities. There had been land invasions, and the new territories had to be man- aged. This was one of the principal purposes of the autonomous municipios. By officially declaring their independence in the areas where they make up the majority, the Zapatistas had realized for themselves what the dialogue with the government in San Andrés had failed to achieve. The autonomous communities no longer recognize government-imposed authorities but dem- ocratically install their own community representatives. Within the newly created municipal structures, the Zapatista communities name their authorities and commissions for various spheres of duty such as land management, education, health, justice, and women. These commissions have worked out laws in their respective indigenous languages based on principles from the Zapatista discourse such as social, economic, political, and gender equality. There is a policy of boycotting official elections, and alcohol is usually banned both to prevent confidential information from leaking to outsiders and to protect women and children from domestic violence. There is no question about the beneficial effect that this has had both on communal life and on the self-consciousness of the indigenous communities, whose elders can still remember serfdom. The new self-image of independence seems to remain unshaken by obvious contradictions, such as the government-subsidized food sold in the village authorities’ shop. 136 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Eight years after the uprising, the predominantly poorer base villages in the region of the guerrilla movement’s origin have kept up their armed resistance against the state and entered into an alliance with communities from other regions of Chiapas, where a number of autonomous municipios have been established. The guerrilla movement has provided a military option for these communities and thereby strengthened their position in negotiations with the government and the landowning elites, in particular the assertion of their interests regarding the distribution and redistribution of land. It has also replaced the state and its institutions for these communities. What is more, in many ways it has provided them with a better state, since it was set up by the communities themselves and is controlled by them by means of base-democratic decision making. The new settlers have abandoned the passivity of the exploited and become actors themselves. With their project they have made hope, one of the most important human motivations, the focal point of their action. It replaces the feeling of powerlessness with regard to the state party and landowners that often comes up in the stories of campesinos from the times before they organized themselves. In addition, a “universal” value system in the form of the revolutionary laws of the EZLN provides cohesion in a time of uncertainty and upheaval. The value system, the prestige economics, and the new identity ensure that people coming from a situation characterized by marginalization create solidarity amongst themselves as indígenas, campesinos, and Zapatistas. As active members of rebel communities, they are strengthened in the face of the landed elites and governmental repression. “Zapatista” has become the principal identity of many rural people and serves as a means for their empowerment. In the meantime, the EZLN has become much more than the representative of the interests of the colonist communities of eastern Chiapas, their parastate organization and liberation movement. It has evolved into a political power of national and international significance. In this regard the question arises whether the objectives propagated in the EZLN’s communiqués to Mexican civil society, which are also aimed at international solidarity with regard to democratization and equal rights, are still in accordance with the most important demands of base communities such as San Emiliano.

NOTES

1. Common land owned and used by an association of independent producers with usufruct rights to individual parcels. 2. This was the case in Campeche during the presidency of Luis Echeverria in 1970–1976 (Gates, 1993). Barmeyer / THE GUERRILLA MOVEMENT AS A PROJECT 137

3. Catholic indigenous lay preachers who acted as “cultural mediators between the community and the Church” (Leyva Solano, 1995: 393). 4. The bolstering of Protestant communities as an important feature of the government’s counterinsurgency campaign in the second half of the 1990s must be seen in the light of this fact. It is worth noting that the percentage of Protestant converts in the regions in question (Ocosingo, 27 percent in 1990) is proportionally higher than in the rest of Chiapas (16 percent in 1990) (Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco, 1996: 68). 5. Since late 1989 the public face of the EZLN had been known as the Alianza Campesina Independiente Emiliano Zapata (Emiliano Zapata Peasant Alliance—ACIEZ). In early 1992 it had changed its name to ANCIEZ (adding “National” to its title) and had member organizations in six central and northern states (Harvey, 1998: 195). 6. The FLN had been founded by students August 6, 1969, in Monterrey, in northern Mex- ico. Most of its early members had been killed by police and army units during a first attempt to build up a guerrilla movement in Chiapas. Only in the early 1980s did the group manage to estab- lish contacts with local campesino organizations and thereby create a base for the construction of the EZLN (Tello Díaz, 1995: 62–85). 7. “Money that had previously been used for religious fiestas was redirected for purchasing arms on the black market. There was no massive or sudden sale of arms to the EZLN. Instead, they gradually and clandestinely built up their own collection of weapons and munitions” (Harvey, 1998: 167). 8. The community-based institution responsible for the administration of village lands. 9. Many men answered my questions about the future of their boys along the lines of “Well, he’s going to be a guerrilla.” This is in line with the generally accepted notion of the ideal career of a landless youth in the village: before marriage, the young man becomes a guerrilla. 10. This was shortly after President Ernesto Zedillo had refused to ratify the San Andrés Accords. The EZLN was angered by this, and for several weeks it looked as if the truce would be broken by one side or the other. 11. A millenarian character is found in many of the songs chanted by the congregation during the services, for example, when the imminent arrival of Christ is alluded to. 12. This practice is far from representative for Zapatista communities and has led to heavy criticism of the rule breakers by the regional Zapatista committee. The resulting conflict contributed to a division in at least one of the communities, and the practice has since been discontinued by villagers who remain Zapatistas.

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