The politics of indigenous identity: neoliberalism, cultural rights, and the Mexican Zapatistas

Social Research, Summer, 2003 by Courtney Jung

The Demise of the Peasant

In Mexico, as in Latin America more broadly, the rise of the indigenous subject position has been intimately linked to the demise of the peasant as the privileged interlocutor of the corporatist state. The Mexican Revolution is the founding moment of modern Mexico, establishing the link between the government and the peasant--by whom and on whose behalf the revolution was fought. President Lazaro Cardenas reinforced the rural base of the government by identifying the peasant as one of the three pillars of support that sustained the ruling party (along with workers and the middle classes). The ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI) organized peasants as a social sector through top-down organizations like the Confederacion Nacional Campesina (National Peasant Federation), which operated as a base of party support as well as the access point to state patronage and resources, Until the last decade of the twentieth century, Mexico's rural poor identified consistently as peasants in their attempt to position themselves as political actors with privileged access to state power.

Starting in the mid-1980s, the neoliberal turn in Mexican economic and political policy began to undercut the peasant subject position. In an attempt to recover from the 1982 debt crisis, and under intense pressure from the IMF and United States, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari implemented a series of neoliberal economic reforms that reduced the social capacity of the state and undercut the ties of social responsibility that had linked the ruling party to its mass constituent base. Neoliberal policies have forced the end of government investment in the economy; they have also led to trade liberalization aimed at boosting nonoil exports, the privatization of most public enterprises, the reduction of import tariffs to increase domestic competitiveness, the withdrawal of subsidies and price guarantees for agricultural products, and opening the agricultural sector to foreign investors to increase productivity.

In Chiapas, which depends almost solely on agricultural production, the stress of liberalization was exacerbated by the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989, when the price of coffee on the world market dropped by half. The average income of small coffee growers dropped by 70 percent between 1989 and 1993. (Harvey, 1994: 21) Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of the Chiapas population occupied in the agricultural sector dropped from 73 percent to 58 percent (Chiapas en Cifras, n.d.). According to the World Bank, the number of people below the absolute poverty line in Mexico rose from 17 percent in 1980 to 23 percent in 1989. Those in extreme poverty have risen from 2.5 percent to 7 percent. Income distribution has also worsened, with the Gini coefficient rising from 0.51 in 1984 to 0.55 in 1989. The share of the bottom 20 percent of the population has dropped from 4.1 percent in 1984 to 3.2 percent in 1989. The proportion of the population below the poverty line grew from 11 percent in 1994 to 17 percent in 1996 (Weiss, 1996: 76).