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

Social Research, Summer, 2003 by Courtney Jung

International Rights, Domestic Politics

The Mexican indigenous rights movement frames its claims in terms set at the international level, and has been able to exploit the terms of Convention 169 to legitimate its political position. The fact that the Mexican government signed the convention, and yet has failed to comply with the terms of the accord, further strengthens the Mexican indigenous rights movement. In 2001, ANIPA formally denounced the Mexican government to the ILO following the ratification of an indigenous rights law that does not recognize the collective rights of indigenous people (ANIPA website, 2001). The ILO responded by promising to investigate, and could issue a reprimand to the Mexican government (interview with Margarito Ruiz, June 2002). Although such a reprimand lacks serious effect in the sense that punishment is unenforceable, Mexico is sensitive to international opinion and may be reluctant to risk such a negative sanction. Yet President Vicente Fox has said that he is sensitive to indigenous concerns and intends to reopen debate on the indigenous rights law.

It is the gap between law and practice that indigenous rights groups in Mexico have been able to exploit in their struggle for autonomy. Mexican indigenous rights groups use ILO Convention 169 like a life raft. As Hernandez explains it, the struggle for the recognition of indigenous rights in Mexico has Convention 169 and its ratification by the Mexican government as its starting point. The movement sees in 169 the instrument through which it can force the government to comply with the legislative commitments it has already assumed (interview with Luis Hernandez Cruz, June 2002) The language of self-determination, autonomy, and peoples (pueblos) that is used by the Mexican indigenous rights movement is the one guaranteed at the international level. Indigenous rights activist Adelfo Montes explains that the movement uses the definitional criteria established at the international level, through ILO 169 and various UN documents related to the rights of indigenous people, to delineate the boundaries of indigenous identity (Montes, 1999: 22). Mexico was censured by the ILO in 1995 for failing to implement Convention 169, and for permitting (not to say committing) grave abuses of human rights against rural indigenous workers. The EZLN has further recommended that Mexican civil society denounce the Mexican government in the ILO forum as a strategy to end the stalemate produced by the government's failure to implement the San Andres Accords negotiated between the government and the EZLN in 1996 ("Working Table Proposals," 1998).

ANIPA President Margarita Gutierrez has described the importance of this international Convention to the Mexican indigenous rights movement more fully:

   It's what we hold on to. It is a base from which we can project
   our demands. The existence of this law gives us the
   right to go in front of international committees on racism,
   on women, in short, in front of many bodies of the UN. It
   gives us the room to go before the ILO to denounce the
   failure of the Mexican government to comply with the San
   Andres Accords. It is a framework for litigation. It is the law,
   and although it has its deficiencies it is the only thing we
   have (interview with Margarita Gutierrez, May 2001).