Marginalized Violent Internal Conflict In The Age Of Globalization: Mexico And Egypt

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 1999 by Dan Tschirgi

Although Chiapas is rich in resources this has not benefited most of its people. Chiapas is among the poorest - and in many ways the poorest, of the states in the Mexican Republic.(17) The largely rural population, mainly composed of Indian and Mestizo peasants, has steadily suffered from a high population growth rate and ensuing pressures on already scarce resources of available land. These pressures have been exacerbated by the local judicial system's traditional unresponsiveness to peasants seeking legal redress for lands taken by large landowners. These unhappy characteristics are found in exaggerated form in the Highlands area, the region where the Zapatista rebellion unfolded.(18)

Few of Chiapas' rural population have not experienced nontraditional ways of life or false hopes of modernizing change. During the 1970s, the Highlands became the primary focus of the central government's attempts to include Mexico's Indian communities in national development efforts.(19) Although corruption and inefficiency severely limited their long-term impact, federal funds poured into the region at a rate that surpassed that of resources allocated to other areas of the country for similar purposes. International agencies, also became heavily involved in attempts to further socio-economic development in the Highlands. At the same time, urbanization accelerated, as unstable conditions and lack of opportunities in the countryside drove peasants to the cities. Indeed, the extent of the urbanizing movement was such that Chiapaneco scholar David Davila notes that the eventual outbreak of the Zapatista uprising must be understood as a "rejoining of urban peasants with rural peasants."(20)

The economic crises that gripped Mexico in the 1980s and the country's ensuing turn to neoliberal policies severely affected the already precarious conditions of the small farmer in Chiapas and, particularly, in the Highlands. Declining federal investment in rural development led to the reduction or elimination of governmental organizations and programs designed to help peasant and Indian farmers. However limited or ineffective such aid had been in the past, its reduction further increased the level of misery in Chiapas. So too did decreases of subsidies to the agricultural sector and - particularly - the elimination of subsidies to coffee producers.(21) The peasants' plight was augmented as the liberalization of Mexico's trade policies led to an influx of cheaper foreign agricultural products into the domestic market. At the same time, the termination of large-scale government projects and the privatization of major agricultural concerns reduced employment opportunities for peasants.(22)

A bitter twist was added to the problems that engulfed Chiapas' in the 1980s by the fact that the overall picture of the state's agriculture during the same period showed significant gains made by large landowners who benefited from the De la Madrid administration's "Chiapas Plan."(23) However, the most striking step in the liberalizing drive to rationalize agriculture and facilitate movement toward agro-industry came in 1992, when the modification of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution effectively halted land reform and permitted the sale of ejido land distributed under the old order.