Revolutionary appeals: Chiapas tells the old story of peasant Indians used by urban intellectuals - Mexico Manana: After Chiapas and Colosio

Reason, July, 1994 by Dario Fernandez-Morera

The anonymous masked leaders of the rebellious Zapatistas, as well as a number of sympathetic Mexican analysts, have attempted to portray the Chiapas revolt as a spontaneous, grassroots reaction to the constitutional and market-based economic reforms instituted by the Salinas administration. In the wake of the revolt, these people have called for a repudiation of the very policies that have energized the Mexican economy and set the stage for a more fully functioning democracy.

While the Mexican intelligentsia has largely toed the left-of-center line, there are significant exceptions, such as commentators Arturo Warman, Enrique Krauze, and Hector Aguilar Camin, who are attempting to articulate a more balanced understanding of the crisis. The leftist interpretation of events, they point out, is lacking both nuance and an understanding of regional history. Perhaps the highest-profile dissenter among Mexican intellectuals is Octavio Paz, the 1990 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. He finds it significant that the Chiapas revolt and the assassination of the PRI's Luis Donaldo Colosio, though probably unrelated to one another, coincide with a Mexican political climate that has reached levels of discord unseen for over half a century.

Paz lays much of the blame for that climate at the feet of Mexican intellectuals, many of whom keep writing outmoded "apologies for the use of violence." They have, says Paz, forgotten the great political lesson of the 20th century: The only way to achieve a more just, more liberal society is to further democracy, not authoritarian socialism. Paz believes that many of the demands of the Indian communities--such as land reform, establishing education and health programs, and ending the practice of caciquismo, in which local political bosses grant favors in exchange for personal allegiance--should be satisfied within existing legal parameters. He therefore condemns the armed uprising as an interruption of Mexico's ongoing political and economic liberalization.

Paz has identified a division within the PRI between hard-liners and conciliators. He warns against violent approaches, which would only produce more casualties, further divide a troubled nation, and create sympathy for the rebels. And indeed, after the initial skirmishes, the government has chosen the conciliatory road by declaring a unilateral cease-fire and granting amnesty (which the rebels rejected in a sarcastic letter published by the press). The government has also created an ad-hoc national commission composed of opposition party members and unaffiliated citizens, as well as government representatives, to improve the conditions of the communities.

Central to Paz's analysis is a recognition that the identity and interests of the comandantes, the leaders of the Zapatistas, do not always coincide with those of the rank-and-file Indians. The comandantes' speeches betray them as intellectuals, not unschooled peasants, something even admiring authors such as Jose Agustin concede. Paz's point is further confirmed, I think, by the comandantes' revealingly over-anxious populist explanation for sporting masks: They want to "share the masses' anonymity." A more likely explanation is that they are not themselves Indian, an inconvenient fact that would undermine their authority as spokesmen for oppressed natives.

Pioneered in Latin America by the Cuban Marxists, the term comandante was later adopted by the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. But Mexican observers have drawn connections between the Zapatistas and Latin America's highest-profile revolutionary group, Peru's Shining Path. Both groups repeat familiar Marxist programs: anti-individualism (evident in the Zapatistas' proud claims to having a "collective" leadership), expropriation of the landowners' property, economic equalization, and an "end to capitalism and the bourgeoisie." To the standard question--how can they persist in trying to implement socialist solutions in view of the repeated instances of mass misery and colossal crimes brought about by socialism since 1917?--both give the same standard answer: "Our socialism will be different."

Both groups also idealize a pre-Hispanic past. This idealization, of course, has no factual basis: The Incas destroyed earlier Peruvian cultures, replacing their religions with the convenient belief that the Incas descended from the gods. Similarly, the Mexica (the actual name of the Aztecs) were universally hated by other Indian nations, whose understandable desire to stop serving as taxpayers, slaves, and sacrificial victims was a crucial factor in Cortes's victory.

There are significant differences, however, between the Zapatistas and Shining Path. One is that the Zapatistas' claims to want democracy for Mexico have gained them acceptability and access to the national and international media. This tactic is more reminiscent of the early Cuban revolution and the Sandinistas than the more brutal--but also more honest--Shining Path. Along with the pointed use of comandantes, this savvier approach makes me suspect that the Zapatistas' ideology and perhaps even their armaments (whose mysterious financing suspicious observers have wondered about) might in fact have more to do with Cuba and the still Sandinista-controlled Nicaraguan army than with Shining Path.