Casinos for Chiapas - Mexico eyes gambling industry

Progressive, The, March, 1997 by Chip Mitchell

Means, president of the International Indian Treaty Council and brother of activist Russell Means, has support among some Native Americans for his casinos. "If they ask me to help, I'll help," says Vernon Bellecourt, the Minneapolis-based fieldservices coordinator of the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center in Minneapolis and a veteran American Indian Movement activist. "It's either going to be the indigenous people that develop the casinos or it's going to be the ruling oligarchy and the mafia."

The Minnesota banquet was held at Mystic Lake Casino on the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota reservation. Rossell brought two associates, Teodulo Camacho, a Mexico Citybased cosmetics manufacturer and real-estate developer, and his son, Francisco Camacho, an engineer. The three were impressed with Mystic Lake, the country's second-largest Native American casino, which generates an estimated $500,000 a year for each of the tribe's roughly 150 certified members.

The day after the banquet, Means took the Mexicans to the largest Native American gaming facility, a Connecticut resort called Foxwoods. Run by the Mashantucket Pequots, the casino grosses nearly $1 billion a year.

"In the United States, Indian people are starting to gain political power, and that's because of casino profits," says Gilbert. And, despite publicity that tends to focus on casino corruption, many tribes have put the windfalls to good use. The Mille Lacs Band of the Ojibwe in central Minnesota, for example, has devoted profit from its two casinos to a new water tower, two new schools, a major clinic, new housing, and new roads. This experience is valuable for Mexico's indigenous people, Gilbert says. "Somebody's got to take the lead. Who better than Native Americans?"

In the next breath, Gilbert derides the role of European "communists" and white North Americans in Chiapas. "You know they're not going to overthrow the government," he says. "The government would just start a wholesale slaughter of indigenous and rural people. Look what happened in Chiapas right after the rebellion started. So why not talk about something that will work?"

"If something happened in Guatemala," he adds, "they'd all leave Chiapas and run there. After Wounded Knee, the American Indian Movement had the same problem with all the non-Indians running around looking for the revolution." Gilbert singles out Pastors for Peace, a Chicago-based group that has led twelve human-rights-observer delegations and five material-aid caravans to Chiapas since February 1995. "Pastors is doing a lot of good, but are they doing anything to bring in jobs and businesses for real change?"

Robin Hayes, a Pastors national cocoordinator, argues that her group took great care to consult human-rights organizations and indigenous representatives before launching its Chiapas program. "What we've done is exactly what we were asked to do," she says.

This is more than Calumet can claim. Mexico's National Indigenous Congress, which convened for the first time last October, has not taken a stand on casinos. Neither have the Zapatistas, according to their U.S. representative, Cecilia Rodriguez. "The Zapatista National Liberation Army is focusing on their lands, period," she says from her office in El Paso, Texas. "It's their livelihood and their way of life that's at stake. Casinos are out in space."