A flower in the hands of the people: Gustavo Esteva explains what lies at the heart of indigenous politics in Mexico - The Nation-State

New Internationalist, Sept, 2003 by Gustavo Esteva

'AUTONOMY,' said Don Gregorio, an old Yaqui Indian, 'is not something we ought to ask for or that anyone can give us. It is something we have, despite everything. Its other name is dignity.'

We are practising autonomy more than ever in our communities. While its momentum comes from the past, it acquired new vitality and meaning with the uprising of the indigenous Zapatista rebels in 1994 when they asserted their right to dignity, humanity, life, democracy. Now it has spread everywhere.

We reclaim our own definitions of 'the good life', which we had conceded to the market and the state when the myth of development captured people's imagination.

Capital's appetite is larger than ever, but it lacks the stomach to digest us all. The fatal swell of global forces now scratches from the payroll the few 'marginal' people who had managed to put themselves on it, and slams shut the doors of the global market to their products. We are now expendable. This growing irrelevance creates a lot of discomfort but it also creates opportunities. We don't get harassed so much. We can better resist the logic of capital and consumer society in which whoever is not a prisoner of addiction is a prisoner of envy. Greater self-sufficiency and direct bartering will allow us to keep the economy from being the centre of our lives. We 'marginal' people are placing the economy on our own margins.

Ruling by obeying

Autonomy also includes our own way of regulating community life. In Mazateco the word for person, shu, means 'a walking flower'. The shu-tasha--'a flower walking in the hands of the people'--is the supreme authority for the Mazatecos, one of the many indigenous peoples of Oaxaca, the state in southern Mexico where I live. No-one would dare to defy it. This authority deals with marital problems and conflicts between communities. It has no power of the kind exercised by officials or rich people, rather only the authority bestowed by the community. It rules by obeying, as the Zapatistas put it, in search of the common good rooted in harmony.

In thousands of indigenous communities, whoever commits a transgression needs comfort, not punishment. The point is to compensate the victim and reestablish harmony. Whoever kills someone must support the family of the victim for the rest of their life. There are no lawyers,judges or prisoners. The killer is free. To free from their grave responsibility would be worse than death or jail.

One of our best traditions is how we change tradition in a traditional way. Each generation inherits the customs that govern our community life, but each changes them autonomously, adapting them to the times and learning from others. By refusing to break with the past--to escape to the future as the 'moderns' would have it--we maintain our historical continuity.

Even those who built the poor barrios in big cities managed to keep intact the social fabric woven by the community spirit brought from the countryside. They have not allowed the rampant individualism that surrounds them to defeat them entirely.

In 1994, the Zapatistas' cry 'Enough is enough!' was an instant inspiration, their dignity contagious. Millions of us started moving, linked in broad coalitions of the discontented. They did not offer new promises, doctrines or ideologies. Only hope. Add hope is the essence of popular movements. If we don't use it It fuel our political potential, that potential will be stilled by fear or paralysis. Our common 'no', which unites all of us who do not want something, is open to multiple 'yeses' which reflect our plurality. Instead of the abstract and manipulative doctrines, the 'yeses' of functionaries and political parties, we affirmed those that flow from our differentiated autonomy.

The Zapatistas' cry of 'Enough'--directed at the new forms of colonization and militarism--affirmed what we are and helped us hold off the invading insanity. That's how we blocked a McDonald's in the historic centre of Oaxaca, the extension of the Mexico City airport, the shrimp farms in Tonameca or Union Hidalgo ...

Step by step we uudermine and block projects or policies that threaten us. On 31 January 2003 in Mexico City, 'The Countryside Can't Face Any More' held the most important peasant demonstration in decades. A movement built from the grassroots brought together hundreds of organizations and obliged the Government to begin to review all aspects of policy that affects rural areas, including the hare-brained opening of the agricultural market under the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Nobody would attribute the dismantling of the authoritarian regime--the PRI ruling party--we suffered under for 70 years solely to the Zapatistas, but they were a decisive factor. They changed the political correlation of forces. The insurrection of civil society in support of the Zapatistas but in favour of a peaceful resolution stopped the armed confrontation and made them champions of nonviolence. In the month following the uprising, the political opposition wrung more concessions from the oppressive regime than they had in the previous 50 years. Thus began the political transition we are in the midst of, still inspired by Zapatista initiatives.