the provocative cocktail: intellectual origins of...

THE PROVOCATIVE COCKTAIL:

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE ZAPATISTA UPRISING,

1960-1994

by

Christopher Gunderson

VOLUME I

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Sociology in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2013

Gunderson ii

This manuscript has been read and accepted for the

Graduate Faculty in Sociology in satisfaction of the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Stanley Aronowitz

[required signature]

Date Chair of Examining Committee

John Torpey

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Date Executive Officer

Frances Fox Piven

John Hammond

David Harvey

Supervisory Committee

THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Gunderson iii



1960-1994

by


Adviser: Stanley Aronowitz

ABSTRACT

Drawing on critical currents in the study of contentious politics and the formation of class, racial

and political identities, this dissertation seeks to account for the intellectual origins and global

resonance of Zapatismo, the distinctive political discourse and practices of the Ejercito Zapatista

de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army or EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico. It is

an historical sociological case study that combines archival research and interviews with

participants in, and observers of, the indigenous campesino movement in Chiapas to construct an

intellectual history of the indigenous Mayan communities that form the EZLN’s bases of popular

support. It elaborates a theoretical account of anti-systemic social movements and other forms of

contentious politics as expressions of what Marx called the realization of “species being,” “the

real movement which abolishes the present state of things” or communism. The study finds that

the training of catechists by the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas produced a layer of

organic indigenous campesino intellectuals who became first the leaders of the indigenous

campesino movement and later of the EZLN. The study argues that Zapatismo is a product not

only of transformations in the political economy of Chiapas and Mexico but of a process of

emergent collective revolutionary political subjectivity on the part of the indigenous

Gunderson iv

communities that occurred in the context of a global crisis in revolutionary theory arising out of

the contradictory experiences of the socialist revolutions of the 20th

century. Specifically the

study argues that Zapatismo is a synthesis of proto-communist elements from the traditional

religious worldview of their communities, the liberation theology of the Diocese, the Maoism of

several organizations that assisted the communities in the construction of independent peasant

organizations, and the left-wing revolutionary nationalism of the EZLN’s parent organization,

the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN) inspired by the Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions.

The dissertation is a contribution both to the literature on the origins of the Zapatistas and to the

development of a Marxist theory of revolutionary social movements and peasant insurgencies.

Gunderson v

Dedication and Acknowledgements

I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my mother, Donna Gunderson-Rogers without

whose love and patient support it and my academic career would not have been possible, and to

my father, Keith Gunderson who provided me with my first and most influential model of the

life of the mind.

This dissertation was made possible by the support and assistance of many people. I

regret that I can only acknowledge a small fraction of them. It is the nature of a study like this

that I know many who made important contributions only by their first names, which in any

event were often pseudonymous.

First and foremost I would like to thank the Zapatista communities that extended their

hospitality to me and whose courage and determination inspired my desire to better understand

their political development. Tomas, Antonio, their families and all of the people of villages of

Emiliano Zapata and Benito Juarez who welcomed my wife and I into their homes were

generous beyond their means. I only hope that what I have written properly honors the sacrifices

that they and all of their compañeros have made for a better world that contains many worlds.

A study of this nature is both a profoundly solitary endeavor and one in which one is

made deeply aware of all of the intellectual debts that one owes. I am especially indebted to the

the chair of my dissertation committee, Stanley Aronowitz, for his guidance and perceptive

criticisms, his patience, and his faith in my abilities to undertake a study of this scope. I would

also like to thank my other committee members: Jack Hammond who guided my readings in the

comparative historical sociology of revolutions, David Harvey whose insights on the

implications of Marx’s understanding of species being challenged me to radically rethink much

Gunderson vi

of what I thought I knew about Marx, and especially Frances Fox Piven who is a model of the

contributions that a scholar-activist can make to popular movements and who always made time

to respond to my work and to make helpful introductions. I am indebted as well to Xóchitl

Leyva Solano, my on-site supervisor at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en

Antropologia Social (CIESAS) in San Cristóbal de Las Casas for her many insights into the

genesis and development of the indigenous campesino movement and of Zapatismo and her

commitment to the decolonization of the methods of social scientific inquiry.

Before I had even completed my undergraduate studies I received a generous grant from

the Institute for Anarchist Studies to produce a work on the intellectual origins of Zapatismo. It

took considerably longer than anticipated, but here it is. While the theoretical framework that

was to underpin that study subsequently underwent major revisions, this work is no less the

result of the initial investigations and the collection of books and other research materials that

this grant made possible and for which I remain ever thankful. I am also grateful to the Ralph

Bunche Institute for International Studies for a generous fellowship that supported my archival

and interview research in Chiapas.

In addition my committee members I would like to thanks a number of other members of

the CUNY Graduate Center community. John Torpey’s course on historical sociology and Bill

Kornblum’s course on ethnography provided me with critical methodological training. Patricia

Clough’s singularly brilliant, and occasionally incomprehensible, course on contemporary issues

in sociological theory challenged me in ways I have not yet fully processed. For better or for

worse this study owes essentially nothing to the course on statistics I took from Juan Battle, but I

owe a great deal to his often brutally frank advice on the more mercenary aspects of academic

life. Finally I would like to express my gratitude to Rati Kashyap and Urania Wills, without

Gunderson vii

whom the Sociology program at the Graduate Center would undoubtedly completely fall apart

and without whose assistance in navigating the administrative side of life at the Graduate Center

I, and undoubtedly many others, would never have completed our studies.

I would also like to thank the scholars I have gotten to know through conferences and

workshops who have either commented on my work or otherwise assisted me, including Lesley

Wood, John Krinsky, Jeff Goodwin, and Mauricio Font. I am also grateful to Patrick Coy and the

anonymous reviewers at Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change for their

comments on an article that became the basis for Chapter 6 of this work.

It is an honor for me to thank each of my interview subjects for sharing their stories about

and insights into the indigenous campesino movement in Chiapas and the radical left in Mexico:

Enrique Arreguin Rodriguez, Adela Cedillo, Maria Teresa García Móises, Gerardo Alberto

González Figueroa, Juan González Esponda, Alberto Hijar, Padre Pablo Iribarren, Gonzalo

Ituarte, Sor Patricia Moisen Márquez, Jesus Morales Bermudez, Gaspar Morquecho Escamilla,

Mercedes Olivera, Jorge Santiago Santiago, Javier Vargas, Ismael Velazquez, and the

pseudonymous “Margarita,” “Juan,” and “Miguel.” I am also very grateful to Ana Luz Valadez

Ortega for her excellent and always timely transcriptions of the recorded interviews and her

thoughtful comments.

I would also like to thank all the librarians and archivists whose assistance was critical in

my research. I would especially like to thank María Guadalupe Salazar Zenteno of the Biblioteca

Jan de Vos at CIESAS, Maria Elena Fernández-Galán at the Instituto de Estudios Indigenas at

UNACH and the staffs at the Archivo Historico Diocesano, DESMI, the Seminario Conciliar

Inmaculada Concepción, and EcoSur. I am especially grateful to those who shared materials

from their private collections: Miguel Angel García Aguirre, Enrique Arreguin, Alberto Hijar,

Gunderson viii

and especially to Adela Cedillo for giving me access to her extensive collection of FLN

documents and to her unpublished theses.

The members of the always shifting community of Mexican and international Zapatista

solidarity activists in San Cristóbal de Las Casas whose observations, camaraderie, and

friendship assisted me in one way or another are simply too numerous to name. Several however

deserve special recognition. The members and supporters of Amor y Rabia and the Martires de

Chicago Direct Solidarity Encampment, especially Cui, Memo, Ana, and Orlando were among

my first guides into the worlds of Zapatismo and Mexican radicalism. The water system workers

who operated under several names and allowed me to tag along on trips to many different

Zapatista communities enabled me to learn the complex political geography of Zapatismo.

Gaspar Morquecho Escamilla, the veteran activist and proprietor of San Cristóbal’s irreplaceable

bookstore and news kiosk, Mono de Papel, was a continuous source of leads and insights. My

friend Hilary Klein’s sharp wit and good humor in her struggle to complete her own manuscript

on the struggles of Zapatista women did much to ease my own and I am indebted to her for

comments on earlier versions of several chapters of this manuscript. Charlotte Saenz’s warmth

and curiosity were similarly a continual source of encouragement. Peter Rosset’s exemplary

internationalism, frequently conveyed over lunch in Tierra Adentro, helped me strike the balance

between global perspective and local detail that I sought. He and Maria Elena Martínez-Torres

also hosted wonderful dinners and parties. Raymor Ryan’s darkly hilarious storytelling

encouraged me in my skepticism towards some of the pieties of solidarity even if I drew

somewhat different conclusions. Vivian Newdick, Melissa Forbiss and Mariana Moro all made

contributions to my understanding of the theory, practice, and origins of Zapatismo.

This is not just a work of scholarship but also very much an intervention in debates

Gunderson ix

arising within contemporary movements struggling for a better world. As such it is indebted to

many people I have gotten to know through radical movement organizing and activism. I would

accordingly like to collectively thank all of my compañeros from Love and Rage and Amor y

Rabia, the Zapatista Solidarity Committee, the New York Committee for Democracy in Mexico,

the Spirit of Magon Direct Solidarity Committee, Estación Libre, the Student Liberation Action

Movement at CUNY, the Fire By Night Organizing Committee and the Kasama Project. I would

like to thank in particular the activists and organizers who have read and commented on portions

of this work in earlier stages including R.J. Maccani, Jed Brandt, Harmony Goldberg and Mike

Ely. Ely’s notion of a “revolutionary people” did much to encourage my development of that

notion within these pages. Similarly while there are too many fellow students whose comments

and encouragement assisted me at various stages in my work, I would like to single out some of

those who shared with me the struggle to reconcile the demands of scholarship and political

commitment: Andy Greenberg, Polly Sylvia, Mitra Rastegar, Howard Caro-Lopez, Stephanie

Campos, Jamie McCallum, Dawn Plummer, Diana Polson, and Andrea Morrell.

To the extent that this study achieves its aims I owe much of the credit to all those

mentioned above. Its errors and failings are my own.

In addition to my parents, I would also like to thank the rest of my family for all of their

love and support. My brothers Jonathan and Nathaniel, their wives, Catherine and Leah, my

wonderful nieces, Ella and Alice, and my step-mother Sandra Riekki are all sources of joy in my

life and keep bringing me back to Minnesota. I would also like to thank my in-laws: Fred, Anne,

Leigh and Candy and the extended Klonsky clan.

Last but certainly not least, I can not possibly sufficiently express my gratitude to my

wife and compañera, Jessica Klonsky, for her constant love and support, not just her patience but

Gunderson x

also her impatience, without which this work truly would never have been completed. Even

though I can’t imagine how, every day I love you a little more. Finally, of course, I would like to

thank our brilliant, hilarious and passionate children, Lucy and Joseph without whom this work

would undoubtedly have been completed much earlier but at the price of making my life

immeasurably poorer. If the philosophers have so far sought only to understand the world you

have become for me the most compelling reason of all to change it.

Gunderson xi



1960-1994

Table of Contents

VOLUME I

Approval ii

Abstract iiI

Dedication and Acknowledgements v

Table of Contents xi

List of Maps xv

PART I: INTRODUCTION, THEORY, AND METHODS

1

Chapter 1: Introduction 2

1.1 Zapatismo and Its Global Significance 9

1.2 Structure of Presentation 27

Chapter 2: Orientation and Methods 34

2.1 Accounting for Zapatismo 34

2.2 Research Questions and Orientation 55

2.3 Methodology 57

Chapter 3: Theorizing Zapatismo, Theorizing Revolution, 66

3.1 Revolution and Theory 69

Gunderson xii

3.2 Revolutionary Ideology in the Sociology of Revolution 80

3.3 The Crisis in Revolutionary Theory 99

3.4 Visions of Autonomy 116

3.5 Rethinking Revolution 128

3.6 Conclusions 143

PART II: SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS

AND DEVELOPMENT OF ZAPATISMO

145

Chapter 4: Neither God, Nor King – The Deep Roots of Indigenous Radicalism

146

4.1 The Terrain 147

4.2 From Conquest To Colony: The Making of A Racialized Social Order 151

4.3 From Independence To Revolution 171

4.4 Conclusion 178

Chapter 5: The Mexican Revolution and the Crisis in the Indigenous Communities 190

5.1 The Mexican Revolution 191

5.2 Post-Revolutionary Transformations 205

5.3 Crisis in the Indigenous Communities 214

5.4 Conclusion 220

Chapter 6: Liberationist Christianity and the Formation of Indigenous Catechists 221

6.1 The Catholic Church in Chiapas Before Ruíz 223

6.2 From Charity to Liberation: The Evolution of a Diocese 231

6.3 A Radicalized Church 251

6.4 The Indigenous Congress and Its Aftermath 260

6.5 Conclusion 271

Gunderson xiii

VOLUME II

Chapter 7: The Mass Line and the Rise of Maoism in Mexico 273

7.1 The Roots of Mexican Maoism 276

7.2 1968 and its Aftermath 290

7.3 Conclusion 312

Chapter 8: The Indigenous Campesino Movement in Chiapas 313

8.1 Agrarian Crisis and Campesino Resistance in Mexico 314

8.2 The Movement Comes to Chiapas 316

8.3 Línea Proletaria Comes to Chiapas 324

8.4 The Double Legacy of Maoism in Chiapas 350

Chapter 9: Armed Struggle in Mexico 353

9.1 Mexico’s Legacy of Armed Struggle 355

9.2 Ché Guevara and the Cuban Revolution 361

9.3 The Rural Guerrillas 372

9.4 The Second Wave: The Student as Guerrilla 383

Chapter 10: Path of Fire 386

10.1 Origins of the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional 387

10.2 The F.L.N. to 1974 398

10.3 Rebuilding and Rethinking 425

10.4 Conclusion 449

Chapter 11: The Making of a Rebel Army 452

11.1 The Right Mix 453

Gunderson xiv

11.2 To Build a Rebel Army 463

11.3 The Road to War 486

11.4 Conclusion 517

PART III: CONCLUSIONS

520

Chapter 12: Conclusions 521

12.1 Zapatismo and the Development of Revolutionary Thought 524

12.2 Communism, Anti-Communism, and the Study of Contentious Politics 553

12.3 Implications for the Practice of Contentious Politics 559

Interviews and Works Cited 573

Gunderson xv

List of Maps

MAP 1. Zapatista Military Offensive, January 1, 1994.

12

MAP 2. Location and Regions of Chiapas.

149

MAP 3. Diocese of San Cristóbal and Pastoral Zones.

236

PART I

INTRODUCTION, THEORY, AND METHODS

Chapter 1 Gunderson 2

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Zapatismo was not Marxism-Leninism, but it also was Marxism-Leninism, it wasn’t the

Marxism of the university, it wasn’t the Marxism of concrete analysis, it wasn’t the

history of Mexico, it wasn’t fundamentalist and millennialist indigenous thought, it

wasn’t indigenous resistance: it was a mix of all this, a cocktail that was mixed in the

mountains and that crystalized in the fighting force of the EZLN, that is to say among the

regular troops. The regular troops, the insurgents, us, Major Mario, Captain Maribel,

Major Ana Maria, those that had spent all this time in the mountains, we are the final

product of this collision of cultures. And all the compañeros of the Committee that had

spent the most time, like Tacho, David, Zevedeo, compañeros that were there from the

start, who had been in the Zapatista National Liberation Army for 10, 12 years, and who

by their work were the leaders of the movement, began to produce their own definition of

what Zapatismo is.

Then the leaders of the four indigenous ethnic groups met for the first time, now as

leaders, now with the title of comandantes to resolve to work together and make war as

indigenous people and not as one ethnicity, but as the four principal ethnicities of the

state. The general character of the war was established, that it was for national demands,

not just indigenous ones, but national ones. The principal demands, the banners of the

struggle are: democracy, liberty, and justice.

… In the moment that it was decided to make decisions democratically the great majority

of the organization acquired a power that hadn’t been recognized. Their real power was

converted into formal power and was able to influence the rest of the organization. That

is what determined that they begin to rely on the mountains and on the Revolutionary

Clandestine Committee for those activities on which they previously relied on the city.

The whole organization suffered this process of transformation. Everybody had to

subordinate their thinking to the interests of the indigenous leadership, furthermore an

indigenous leadership with this trajectory, with this mix that I tell you about, with this

provocative cocktail.

SubComanadante Insurgente Marcos

(LeBot 1997:198–201)

In the weeks, months and years that followed the January 1, 1994 Zapatista uprising in

Chiapas, Mexico, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación

Nacional or EZLN) progressively articulated and attempted to put into practice a new and

distinctive form of radical politics – Zapatismo – that appeared to break sharply with the


dominant theory and practice of the international revolutionary left over the course of the 20th

century. The Zapatistas would be heralded by the emerging alter-globalization movement as the

embodiment of a new radical anti-capitalist politics that rejected the vanguardist claims of

Leninist parties and refused the pursuit of state power. Indeed, the Zapatista uprising and the

Zapatistas themselves played an important role in encouraging the emergence of the alter-

globalization movement and their ideas and organizational forms and practices were widely

regarded as a model within that movement. While the alter-globalization movement as such

experienced a steep decline after 2001, its influence, and through it the influence of Zapatismo,

on the both the tactical repertoire and the strategic and organizational thinking of participants in

the recent global wave of protest, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, continues to be

felt.

This study has its roots in my own political involvement with the Zapatistas. Like many

other young radical activists, the 1994 Zapatista uprising seized my imagination. Living in New

York City at the time, I threw myself into Zapatista solidarity work immediately, organizing

protests at the Mexican consulate against the actions of the Mexican Army, putting together

educational events, and reading and distributing translations of the seemingly endless stream of

Zapatista communiqués and interviews with their spokesman, Subcomandante Insurgente

Marcos. In 1996 I travelled with my then partner and now wife, Jessica Klonsky, to Chiapas to

participate in the First Intercontinental Encuentro Against Neoliberalism and For Humanity. A

year later we relocated to Chiapas where we spent the better part of the next two years working

on the construction of a medical clinic, located just outside the village of Benito Juarez-Miramar,

intended to serve a dozen Zapatista villages in the heart of the Lacandon Jungle. We also were

able to visit many other Zapatista villages, either accompanying friends working on various other


material aid projects or acting as human rights observers during a wave of Mexican Army

incursions into Zapatista villages following the December 22, 1997 massacre of 45 men, women

and children in the village of Acteal.

It was during this time that I became increasingly aware of differences between the actual

practices of the EZLN and their popular representation within broader international activist

circles of which I was a part. Whether it was in the writings of influential radical theorists like

John Holloway, Raul Zibechi, Gustavo Esteva, Walter Mignolo, Michael Hardt and Antonio

Negri, or in the sea of flyers, pamphlets and web pages produced by more anonymous local

activists, the Zapatistas were widely portrayed as advocating and, more importantly,

implementing a sort of indigenous anarchism in which, in the words of Hardt and Negri,

“leadership positions are rotated, and there seems to be a vacuum of authority at the center.”

(2004)

It was certainly true that through the formation, first of roughly 30 municipos autonomos

(autonomous municipalities, essentially county level rebel governments), and later of five

regional Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Committees or JBGs), the Zapatista

communities were engaged in an exhilarating experiment in participatory democratic self-

government based in popular assemblies and utilizing rotating delegate bodies to make decisions

above the village level. This experiment, however, depended on the ability of the EZLN’s

decidedly hierarchical military organization to seize and secure the territories within which that

experiment could take place. In addition to commanding a disciplined military force of roughly

5,000 women and men under arms, the Zapatistas coordinated economic development, organized

education, collected taxes, carried out police functions, and administered justice – whether that

meant throwing drunken machete wielding rowdies in jail for a week or sentencing a rapist to a


year of hard labor that included work building the clinic we were working on as well. Thus,

while the Zapatistas declared their disinterest in the seizure of state power on the national level,

it was increasingly apparent to me that they acted as a de facto state within those territories

where their influence permitted it.

For some of my contemporaries, the realization that the Zapatistas did not conform to the

frankly utopian image of them promoted within international activist circles would become a

source of disillusionment with the Zapatistas themselves. For me it became, instead, a starting

point for a critical reconsideration of some of the assumptions that had made that image so

seductive. I increasingly came to appreciate that the messier and more contradictory reality was

all the more inspiring precisely because it grappled with the concrete dilemmas involved in the

actual exercise of political power. The EZLN had wrested at least partial political control over a

patchwork of territory in the eastern half of Chiapas out of the hands of the Mexican state.

Seeing it up close I came to realize that to not take on the functions of a state would have been an

abdication of the EZLN’s most basic obligations to the people that they had led into rebellion.

Shortly after our return to New York from Chiapas, the alter-globalization movement

announced itself to the world in the form of the massive and highly confrontational protests

against the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) hosted by the city of

Seattle. The protests emboldened the leaders of poorer countries to resist proposals being pushed

by the United States and other rich countries and the meeting ended without an anticipated

agreement. The spectacle of protesters shutting down central Seattle and the taste of actual

victory inspired a wave of similar massive militant protests at meetings of the WTO and other

international summits over the next several years. Appearances to the contrary, however, the

alter-globalization movement represented by these protests did not spring from nowhere. It had


significant roots in, and was in many respects a broadening out of what Rovira (2009) has called

the “transnational Zapatista solidarity network” that had arisen in the wake of the Zapatista

uprising. Zapatismo, or to be more precise, its representation by radical intellectuals and

activists, would consequently exercise an enormous influence on the strategic and organizational

assumptions and thinking that would shape the alter-globalization movement.

The problem, however, was that this representation was in important ways a

misrepresentation that erased from consideration precisely the most interesting features of the

Zapatistas’ actual practice, their innovative navigation of the complex tensions between

revolutionary leadership and broad democratic participation in a context of often deadly state

repression. As the alter-globalization movement developed, I realized that this erasure came at a

very high price, namely their ability to use the Zapatista experience to navigate those very same

tensions when they arose within their own ranks, as they inevitably did.

If Zapatismo did not conform neatly to the libertarian image promoted by sympathetic

radical intellectuals and activists, it was still quite clear that neither did it represent a simple

continuation of the orthodox Marxist Leninist politics of previous Latin American guerrilla

movements. Zapatismo was clearly something genuinely new that could not be reduced to the

categories of an earlier era. Whatever else there was to say, it was evident that Zapatismo was a

response to the constellation of political economic transformations commonly referred to as neo-

liberal globalization. Furthermore, its global resonance, as expressed in the explosion of the

alter-globalization movement, suggested that an understanding of what exactly made Zapatismo

distinctive held out the possibility of illuminating the implications of these transformations for

anti-systemic movements more generally.


This promise drove me to immerse myself in the considerable literature on the Zapatistas.

As I read the analyses of Zapatismo that sought to draw out its implications for the alter-

globalization movement, however, one thing consistently stood out – a poverty of concrete

historical analysis. This expressed itself in several ways. In the works of Holloway (1998, 2002)

and Hardt and Negri (2004) there was conscious rejection of an approach grounded in the

particular history of Mexico, Chiapas or of the indigenous communities, on the grounds that

what was most important about the Zapatistas was precisely that which was most universal in

them. More commonly it took the form of the uncritical repetition of the Zapatistas own public

accounts of their history in assorted communiqués and interviews. While some more serious

sympathetic scholarship offered valuable accounts of the local social structural transformations

that generated the particular grievances that appeared to motivate the Zapatistas and the broader

indigenous-campesino movement from which they emerged, (Leyva Solano and Ascencio

Franco 1996; Collier and Quaratiello 2005; Harvey 1998) little attempt was made to give a

comprehensive account of the intellectual genesis of Zapatismo as a distinctive political

discourse and practice. Indeed, the works that came closest to attempting such a thing were those

of a group of authors designated by one of their members, Saavedra, as “the anti-Zapatistas.”

(Tello Díaz 2000; Legorreta Díaz 1998; La Grange and Rico 1998; Womack 1998, 1999;

Saavedra 2009) While these last works raise a number of provocative questions, their common

political commitment to “unmasking” the leadership of the EZLN as unreconstructed orthodox

Marxist Leninists limits their value in explaining precisely those features of Zapatismo that defy

this characterization and that make Zapatismo an object of special interest in the first place.

It became increasingly apparent to me that I could not arrive at an adequate

understanding of what Zapatismo actually is and what the Zapatistas’ experiences have to teach


anti-systemic movements in the age of neo-liberal globalization more generally without a much

more thorough historical study of the intellectual origins and development of Zapatismo in the

period prior to the 1994 uprising.

In short, the view of this study is that Zapatismo represents, in both theory and practice, a

radical reconception of the relationship between the roles of revolutionary leadership and mass

democracy in the revolutionary process. I believe this reconception represents an important

practical and theoretical contribution to counter-systemic movements in the 21st century. To fully

understand what this reconception is and isn’t, however, it is critical to locate it within the whole

historical process that produced it. Unfortunately most of the attempts to date to theorize

Zapatismo for the benefit of counter-systemic movements fundamentally fail to do this. The

general result of this has been a seductively anti-authoritarian misreading of the Zapatista

experience that profoundly underestimates or even denies outright the important role of

disciplined revolutionary political leadership and a hierarchically organized military command

structure to the Zapatistas accomplishments and that imagines that those accomplishments can

therefore be easily reproduced without these elements. By in effect turning the Zapatistas’

sophisticated reconception of the relationship between revolutionary leadership and mass

democracy into a one-sided romantic caricature in which leadership plays no part, I believe this

misreading squanders the precious conquest of hard-fought struggles that Zapatismo actually is

and thus ultimately invites defeat and disaster for the movements that embrace it.

The primary purpose of this study, then, is to excavate the intellectual origins and

development of what would become Zapatismo over the course of the several decades prior to

the 1994 uprising in order to properly ground a theoretical account of the significance of those

politics beyond Chiapas. This requires in turn an examination of the closely related


transformation over the same period of the Mayan Indian communities that constitute the

EZLN’s primary bases of support from seemingly passive and fragmented victims of systematic

exploitation and racism to a disciplined revolutionary people in arms, as well as the critical role

of several key “outside” actors in this process of transformation.

Before proceeding to these tasks, however, it is necessary to establish, in this and the next

two chapters, the larger framework of the study. While the next two chapters will deal with

methodological and theoretical issues the rest of this chapter is focused on identifying and

provide a narrative description of the object that this study seeks to explain, namely the

distinctive politics of the Zapatistas and their larger significance for anti-systemic movements

globally. I sketch in broad strokes the larger contexts in which the distinctive politics of

Zapatismo were first articulated by the EZLN and then taken up by anti-systemic movement

activists globally. I conclude the chapter with a presentation of the plan for the rest of the study.

1.1 ZAPATISMO AND ITS GLOBAL SIGNIFICANCE

In the 1970s, eastern Chiapas saw the emergence of a vibrant indigenous campesino

movement that fought for land and demanded political rights and improved social conditions for

the state’s impoverished and despised indigenous communities. Supported by the pastoral staff

of the Catholic Diocese of San Cristóbal and advised by the urban university-educated cadres of

several radical left-wing organizations (in particular two Maoist organizations, Unión del Pueblo

and Línea Proletaria) the communities built several large independent campesino organizations.

Based in village and regional popular assemblies, this movement challenged the power of the

state’s land-owning elite by seizing lands and defying the authority of the ruling Partido

Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI). By 1983, however, the


movement was in disarray as a result of violent state repression and sharp internal conflicts over

the way forward. Advisers from the largest Maoist organization, Línea Proletaria, argued against

more land takeovers and for a strategy of alliances with factions within the PRI to secure

financial support for projects intended to increase economic productivity, while leaders of many

of the indigenous communities and a fraction of the pastoral staff of the Diocese were looking to

the insurgent movements in Central America as a model for more thoroughgoing revolutionary

change.

On November 17, 1983, five men and one woman established a guerrilla encampment in

the heart of the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas, Mexico and declared the formation of the EZLN.

All six were members of the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Forces or

FLN), a clandestine political-military organization founded in 1969 in the northern Mexican city

of Monterey that had made several previous abortive attempts to establish a guerrilla nucleus in

the Lacandon Jungle. Three were Tzotzil Indians recruited in the northern part of the state and

the other three were, in the racial argot that Chiapas inherited from Guatemala, ladinos, or as

they would have been called by the Indians, caxlanes, non-indigenous.

Over the next several years a large fraction of the indigenous campesino movement,

particularly in the Cañadas (canyons) region of the Lacandon Jungle, would join the EZLN

which as a result was transformed from a tiny guerrilla nucleus into a force of several thousand

armed combatants. By the early 1990s frustrations in the indigenous communities were reaching

a boiling point. The elimination of price supports for coffee had devastated many communities.

The revision of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, which had served as the basis of land

reform policies since the Mexican Revolution, threatened pending title claims by thousands of

families, particularly in the Cañadas. Provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement


(NAFTA) set to go into effect on January 1, 1994 threatened to flood the Mexican market with

cheap subsidized U.S. corn that would ruin already struggling campesinos in Chiapas. It was not

without reason that Subcomandante Marcos would describe NAFTA as “a death sentence” on the

Indians of Chiapas. It was in this context that in January 1993 delegates from the EZLN and its

support bases made the decision to declare war on the Mexican government and to organize an

uprising.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo, Cabrones!

The Zapatista uprising began in the early morning hours of New Years Day, 1994 with

the capture of the cities of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, and Ocosingo and the towns of Las

Margaritas, Altamirano and Chanal, all municipal seats in the central highlands and eastern

lowlands of Chiapas. The towns of Huixtan, Oxchuc, Chalam, Simojovel and San Andres

Larráinzar would also fall to the rebels that day. The Zapatista forces were composed of several

thousand poorly armed milicianos and a smaller number of better armed and trained insurgentes,

recruited almost exclusively from the four Mayan Indian ethnic groups – the Tzotziles, Tzeltales,

Choles and Tojolabales – that are concentrated in the eastern half of the state.

In the days that followed, the Zapatista forces retreated from the cities and towns that

they had captured, and were pursued and attacked by the Mexican Army. News of the aerial

bombardment of poor Indian neighborhoods around the old colonial capital of San Cristóbal and

images of young Indians, armed only with wooden replicas of rifles, shot down in the streets of

Ocosingo, or summarily executed with their hands bound behind their backs, galvanized both

Mexican and international sympathy for the rebels which quickly took the form of a giant wave

of protest demonstrations demanding an end to the fighting and acceptance of the rebels’ call for


a ceasefire and dialogue. By January 12, Mexican President Carlos Salinas announced a

ceasefire, which the Zapatistas accepted on January 18, opening the way for talks between the

rebels and the government.

MAP 1. Zapatista Military Offensive, January 1, 1994. (De Vos 2002:457)

Thus, after roughly two weeks of fighting, a large but poorly armed and previously

unknown rebel army was able to force the government of Mexico to sit down and discuss its

demands.

The first round of talks began on February 21 in the Cathedral of the Catholic Diocese of

San Cristobal with Bishop Samuel Ruíz serving as mediator. On March 1, the representative of

the government presented the Zapatistas with a 32-point offer in response to their demands,

which the Zapatista delegation in turn promised to take back to their communities for a consulta

or consultation. The consulta ended on May 30 and on June 10 the Zapatista’s issued the results,

a resounding rejection of the government’s offer as inadequate for its refusal to take up the


Zapatistas’ national demands for constitutional reforms to guarantee free and fair elections, the

restoration of land reform provisions gutted in 1992, and to recognize the communal rights of

Mexico’s indigenous peoples.

The rejection of the government’s offer came as Mexico was preparing to elect a new

president and Chiapas a new governor. The Zapatistas supported the campaign of Amador

Avendaño, the publisher of the small San Cristobal based newspaper Tiempo who was running

for governor under the banner of the center-left Partido Revolucionario Democratico (PRD).

When the candidate of the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) was declared the

winner, the Zapatistas denounced the gubernatorial elections as fraudulent and supported

Avendaño’s formation of a parallel state government “in rebellion.” On October 12, the

Democratic Assembly of the People of the State of Chiapas (AEDPCH), a broad coalition

composed mainly of campesino and indigenous organizations and aligned with the EZLN,

declared the creation of nine Regiones Plurietnicas Autonomos (Pluriethnic Autonomous

Regions or RAPs), essentially autonomous municipal governments that would support the rebel

state government.

Two months later, on December 19, the EZLN announced that its units had passed

through Mexican army lines and taken up positions in 38 municipalities composing the eastern

half of the state, and declared the formation of thirty more autonomous municipalities on top of

the nine RAPs declared in October.

The Zapatistas’ actions greatly upset foreign holders of short-term Mexican bonds,

contributing to an abrupt devaluation of the peso which in turn sharpened the already serious

political crisis facing the government. On February 9, 1995 Salinas’s successor, President

Ernesto Zedillo, announced the issuance of arrest warrants for the EZLN’s military leader and


spokesman, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, revealed to be a former philosophy instructor,

Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, as well as several other alleged non-indigenous Zapatista

“comandantes.” The warrants would serve as a pretext for a short-lived military offensive against

the Zapatistas. The military offensive, however, quickly backfired. In the face of massive

national and international protests Zedillo was forced to call it off after only five days, and

shortly thereafter was compelled by the Congress to sign the Law for Dialogue, Reconciliation

and a Dignified Peace in Chiapas that granted the Zapatistas amnesty and empowered a newly

created Commission of Concord and Pacification (COCOPA), composed of representatives of

the five parties in the Congress, to facilitate future talks between the government and the

Zapatistas.

The talks began again on April 10, 1995 with a focus on the question of indigenous

rights. By bringing on leaders of Mexico’s 56 recognized indigenous ethnicities and

prominentilntellectuals as advisors, eventually provoking public splits in the government’s

delegation, the Zapatistas were able to use the talks very effectively to put the government on the

political defensive. On February 16, 1996 the Zapatistas and the government would sign the San

Andres Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture.

The Elements of Zapatismo

The defining and distinctive features of Zapatismo were all largely articulated in

declarations and communiqués over the period beginning with the 1994 uprising and concluding

with the signing of the San Andres Accords. This is, accordingly, a good point to interrupt the

narrative and discuss the distinct content of Zapatismo as it was articulated in these documents.


While Zapatismo’s most distinctive features are not present in the Declaration of War

(later known as The First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle) and the Revolutionary Laws

(EZLN 1994:33–48) issued at the outbreak of the uprising, these documents nonetheless express

important and stable core commitments of the EZLN that are often ignored, especially by their

international sympathizers. The First Declaration is a short document that presents a justification

for the uprising and declares the EZLN’s immediate intentions to march on Mexico City, topple

the dictatorship of the PRI and to install a “free and democratic” government. The First

Declaration also very clearly defines the Zapatistas’ fight as a popular struggle for national

liberation from foreign (presumably primarily U.S.) domination exercised through the PRI and

locates that struggle in the larger sweep of Mexican history:

We are a product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, then during the War of

Independence against Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by North

American imperialism, then to promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire

from our soil, and later the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz denied us the just application of

the Reform laws and the people rebelled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor

men just like us. We have been denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us

as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have

nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health

care, no food nor education. Nor are we able to freely and democratically elect our

political representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor is there peace nor

justice for ourselves and our children.

Today, we say ENOUGH. We are the inheritors of the true builders of our nation. The

dispossessed, we are millions and we thereby call upon our brothers and sisters to join

this struggle as the only path, so that we will not die of hunger due to the insatiable

ambition of a 70 year dictatorship led by a clique of traitors that represent the most

conservative and sell-out groups. They are the same ones that opposed Hidalgo and

Morelos, the same ones that betrayed Vicente Guerrero, the same ones that sold half our

country to the foreign invader, the same ones that imported a European prince to rule our

country, the same ones that formed the “scientific” Porfirsta dictatorship, the same ones

that opposed the Petroleum Expropriation, the same ones that massacred the railroad

workers in 1958 and the students in 1968, the same ones that today take everything from

us, absolutely everything. (EZLN 1994:33)


The legitimacy of the uprising is further affirmed by invoking Article 39 of the Mexican

Constitution:

National Sovereignty essentially and originally resides in the people. All political power

emanates from the people and its purpose is to help the people. The people have, at all

times, the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government.

Finally, the popular and revolutionary character of the Zapatista uprising is condensed in their 11

one-word demands:

work, land, housing, food, healthcare, education, independence, freedom, democracy,

justice and peace.

With the subsequent inclusion of “culture” and “information” this list would be enlarged to 13

demands. If the demands stand out for their brevity, a number of them were effectively

elaborated in greater detail in the Revolutionary Laws. The Revolutionary Laws address an

assortment of questions including: the rights of women, tenants, and workers; the regulation of

industry and commerce, agrarian reform, and the administration of justice. The Revolutionary

Laws were to be applied in territories liberated by the EZLN in the course of their march on

Mexico City. Many were rendered moot by the EZLN’s subsequent failure to expand their areas

of influence beyond the largely rural confines of eastern Chiapas. The Revolutionary Women’s

Law however committed the EZLN to a struggle against male supremacy in the indigenous

communities that were their base. If the rights enumerated in the law (to divorce, to drive, to

vote) were common features of many liberal democratic constitutions as well as Mexico’s

already established legal code, within the indigenous communities they were still very radical.

More generally the Revolutionary Laws were a clear declaration of the EZLN’s original intention

to exercise political power and thus significantly at odds with later statements by Marcos

eschewing state power.


While the First Declaration and the Revolutionary Laws carefully avoid any specific

reference to socialism, their language is entirely consistent with that of a socialist-led struggle for

national liberation and its more orthodox style has been frequently contrasted with that of later

statements from the EZLN. It is also noteworthy that there is not a single direct mention in the

First Declaration or in the Revolutionary Laws of the indigenous character of the EZLN, nor is

there any reference to the question of indigenous rights or autonomy.

It is worth noting here that while the conceptual apparatus of these initial documents has

been considerably expanded and that while the ceasefire and talks with the government rendered

certain portions effectively moot, that the EZLN has never repudiated the fundamental

conception of their struggle as a popular one for national liberation and that indeed this

conception has been consistently and repeatedly reaffirmed over the years. It is important to

emphasize this point precisely because it is a feature of Zapatismo that is often de-emphasized or

ignored by the Zapatistas international sympathizers in the alter-globalization movement but that

has actually been quite critical to the EZLN’s capacity to command broad support in Mexico.

In Other Forms of Struggle, a communique issued on January 20 the CCRI-GC

recognizes the decisive role of street protests, media work and other forms of action in producing

the ceasefire and insists that they do not regard armed struggle as the only legitimate form of

struggle or see themselves as the only legitimate revolutionary force or organization in the

country. While insisting that they resorted to arms only after being denied any other means, in

this communiqué the Zapatistas begin to articulate a strategy of mobilizing a broad

“revolutionary national movement” that can contain “diverse tendencies … different thoughts,

distinct forms of struggle, but where there is only one longing and one goal: freedom,

democracy, and justice.” (EZLN 1994:102)


Another key communiqué issued several weeks later, To Lead Obeying (EZLN

1994:175–177) demanded that President Carlos Salinas and the governors of the Mexican states

resign, that new and democratic elections be organized under a transitional government and that

these be monitored by non-partisan citizens organizations. The real importance of this

communiqué, however, was to be found in its suggestion of the Zapatistas’ distinctive vision of

democracy and the role of leadership. Presented with a mytho-poetic solemnity that would

become one of several distinctive voices employed in Zapatista communiques, this vision has

several elements. The first is a critique of the few who rule “without obeying the will of the

many.” In contrast with this method of rule, which is attributed to the government, the “truthful

faceless men” of the EZLN uphold the principles that while the majority should rule that

minorities must not be silenced, and that the hearts of those who would lead must become able to

obey and act according to the will of the majority.

The concept of mandar obedeciendo is arguably the key distinguishing feature of

Zapatismo. Its implications would be continuously elaborated in subsequent communiqués and

statements. It proved to be a very potent rhetorical weapon in the hands of the Zapatistas, so

much so that Mexican politicians started sprinkling the term into speeches. In essence it refers to

a method of political leadership and governance that takes seriously and is fundamentally

accountable to the people. The term is deliberately paradoxical and as such recognizes an

inherent tension between democracy and political leadership, and, without denying the

importance of the latter, insists on its ultimate subordination to the former.

The concept of mandar obedeciendo would underpin all subsequent Zapatista critiques of

the anti-democratic character of the Mexican state, their fundamental distrust of all political

parties, their style of leadership in relation to the broad Zapatista solidarity movement that was


emerging nationally and internationally, and in the organization of the autonomous structures of

self-governance within and between the Zapatista communities.

A fourth major innovation was contained in a communiqué entitled The beginning of the

dialogue (EZLN 1994:155–156) which uses the phrase “Para todos todo, […] para nosotros

nada” – “Everything for everybody, [… ] for ourselves nothing.” This signaled both the

radicalism of the Zapatistas’ objectives and that in the talks the leaders of the EZLN would not

be looking out for their own narrow, or even primarily the interests of the Zapatista communities,

but would rather be seeking the resolution of national issues that they regarded as the deeper

structural causes of the communities grievances and, furthermore, that they would actively refuse

attempts to corrupt or co-opt them. This was not simply empty posturing. In the years that

followed, Zapatista communities would consistently refuse all sorts of assistance offered by the

government, which, in the absence of fulfillment of a negotiated settlement, they regarded as

attempted bribes. This policy would contribute significantly to strains within Zapatista

communities that would, in some instances, lead to fractions of, or even whole communities,

leaving the ranks of the organization. At the same time, the refusal of any benefit for themselves

gave the Zapatistas’ claim to advance national demands greater moral weight and strongly

reinforced the notion of a leadership that viewed itself as subordinate to the larger aspirations of

the people. In light of the PRI’s long history of successfully coopting popular challenges to its

rule, this explicit stance won the Zapatistas broad respect among people with good reason to

distrust the revolutionary posturing of caudillos.

Another distinguishing feature of Zapatismo would be its critical analysis of neo-

liberalism as a new and distinct phase of capitalism that could only be effectively confronted

with a new radical politics. While the Zapatistas identified their main enemy as the PRI party-


state that had ruled Mexico since the end of the Mexican Revolution, it was the PRI’s more

recent embrace of neo-liberal policies of austerity, privatization, and most importantly, the end of

land reform signaled by the revision of Article 27 of the Mexican constitution, that constituted

their final and worst betrayal of the Revolution. While foreshadowed in several of Marcos’s

stories about Durito (a talking pipe-smoking beetle who plays Don Quixote to Marcos’s Sancho

Panza) (EZLN 1996:256–268, 314–322, 413–419) the Zapatistas critique of neo-liberalism

would be articulated most clearly in The Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle (EZLN

2003:47–72) which characterizes neo-liberalism as a “Fourth World War” waged by trans-

national financial capital against the peoples of the world.

The final feature that would characterize and distinguish the politics of the EZLN

concerned their conception of the culture, rights and status of indigenous peoples within Mexico.

As noted previously these themes were absent from both the First Declaration of the Lacandon

Jungle and the Revolutionary Laws. While the meaning of this absence has been debated it seems

clear that the EZLN’s own precise position on these questions emerged largely in the aftermath

of the 1994 uprising, was importantly informed by their newfound role as leaders of Mexico’s

national indigenous movement, and achieved its clearest and most forceful articulation in the

course of the talks that led ultimately to the signing of the San Andres Accords in 1996. (Vera

Herrera and Hernández Navarro 1998) At the heart of the Zapatista position on indigenous

rights and autonomy is a view of Mexico as a multi-ethnic society in which the recognition of the

collective rights of indigenous peoples – to communicate in their own languages and cultures, to

freedom from discrimination, to govern themselves autonomously, to control resources and

direct their own economic development – is a necessary condition for the overall

democratization of Mexico.


To review, the main elements of Zapatismo as a distinct politics are: a commitment to a

broad popular struggle for national liberation, a recognition of the legitimacy of multiple forms

of struggle in addition to a reliance on arms, an identification of civil society as the real agent of

democratic change, an emphasis on the democratic responsibilities of leadership in the form of

mandar obedeciendo, a commitment to the construction of autonomous institutions of popular

self-governance in the form of autonomous municipalities, and an understanding that the

recognition of indigenous rights within a multi-ethnic society is a condition of democracy. In

different measures these elements would capture the imagination of sympathetic forces in

Mexico and around the world, giving Zapatismo a significance that reached well beyond the

indigenous communities of Chiapas.

Zapatismo and the Rise of the Alter-Globalization Movement

The first two years following the Zapatista uprising was a period of intense political

innovation and experimentation on the part of the Zapatistas during which they sought to respond

to unexpected and rapidly unfolding events and developments. One very significant such

development was the emergence of what Rovira (2009) has called “the transnational Zapatista

solidarity network.” As Cleaver (1998a) argues, the Zapatista uprising brought together, initially

mainly by means of the internet, previously disconnected networks of activists, scholars and

NGO workers concerned with a wide range of issues. Rovira documents in detail the process by

which this network was initially constituted, how it developed over time, the tactical repertoire

that came to characterize it, and how, by initiating the wave of protests targeting international

summit meetings, it metamorphosized into the alter-globalization movement.


While the internet played a central role in initially constituting the transnational Zapatista

solidarity network, it would be a mistake to think of it as existing exclusively on the internet.

Rather the availability of information on the internet seemed to encourage activists to travel to

Chiapas and then, as their reports on their travels circulated on the internet, amplified their

impact. All of these comings and going from Chiapas established a very dense network of face to

face relationships with the Zapatistas but also between their supporters. The tens of thousands of

people from outside Chiapas who travelled there and had some direct personal experience of the

Zapatista uprising thus constituted a large committed core of a much larger network of their

friends, family members, co-workers, church members, fellow students, and other activists

whom they would share information with and mobilize as events demanded. It was in the hopes

of consolidating this network further that the Zapatistas called for the first Intercontinental

Encuentro Against Neo-Liberalism and For Humanity (or the Intergalactica as it would be

dubbed by Marcos) to be held in Zapatista territory in the summer of 1996. This gathering

brought together thousands of Zapatista solidarity activists from dozens of countries for the first

time. While participants listened to speeches by Marcos and other Zapatistas and participated in

formal meetings, the real significance of the Encuentro was the face to face consolidation of

heretofore largely electronic lines of communications between Zapatista sympathizers, laying the

foundations for what would soon emerge as the alter-globalization movement.

This is most clearly illustrated by the role of the Encuentro in the formation of Peoples

Global Action. (Wood 2005) The success of the First Intercontinental Encuentro in Chiapas

resulted in a call for a Second Intercontinental Encuentro Against Neo-Liberalism and For

Humanity in Spain in 1997. Out of that meeting a call was made for another meeting in Geneva

in February, 1998 to organize Peoples Global Action (PGA) to coordinate resistance to neo-


liberal globalization generaly, and to the upcoming May ministerial meeting of the World Trade

Organization (WTO) in Geneva in particular. The protests in Geneva marked the beginning of

the cycle of transnational protests at major international summit meetings that became the most

visible expression of what came ti be called the alter-globalization movement. The influence of

Zapatismo on the political outlook and organizational practice of the alter-globalization

movement is evident in the “Five Hallmarks” that would be the PGA’s basis of political unity.

The Five Hallmarks are:

A very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism; all trade agreements,

institutions and governments that promote destructive globalization.

We reject all forms and systems of domination and discrimination including, but not

limited to, patriarchy, racism and religious fundamentalism of all creeds. We embrace the

full dignity of all human beings.

A confrontational attitude, since we do not think that lobbying can have a major impact in

such biased and undemocratic organisations, in which transnational capital is the only

real policy-maker.

A call to direct action and civil disobedience, support for social movements’ struggles,

advocating forms of resistance which maximize respect for life and oppressed peoples’

rights, as well as the construction of local alternatives to global capitalism.

An organizational philosophy based on decentralisation and autonomy. (L. J. Wood

2005)

Although the alter-globalization movement would be socially and ideologically very

heterogeneous, the Five Hallmarks reflected a core set of political assumptions and practices that

predominate within it and that came to define it. These included: a profound distrust of the state

in all its forms and of political parties that seek state power, and a determination to engage in

political action at a distance from the state; a belief in the superiority of decentralized, networked

or horizontal forms of political organization, and a general hostility to hierarchical forms of


organization; a reliance on consensus-based methods of decision-making; and an affirmation of

social and cultural diversity as a virtue in its own right.

While these political assumptions and practices draw on a variety of lineages including

anarchism, feminism, and the participatory democratic ethos of the New Left of the 1960s, it is

clear that the Zapatista uprising played a critical role in catalyzing the emergence of the alter-

globalization movement and that Zapatismo has had a major and direct influence on the

configuration of its political outlook and practices.

While the alter-globalization movement in general experienced a sharp decline following

the events of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing global U.S. “war on terror,” the more recent

upsurges beginning in 2011 of the Arab Spring, the movements of the plazas in southern Europe,

and Occupy Wall Street in the United States (to name only a few) are widely acknowledged as

inheritors of its radical anti-capitalist and participatory democratic ethos. The initiators in

particular of both the movements of the plazas and Occupy Wall Street included prominent

veterans of the alter-globalization upsurge of the previous decade. While the words and imagery

of the Zapatista uprising are, not surprisingly considerably less prominent in these recent

upsurges, the Zapatistas continue to command considerable respect within their ranks. More

importantly their ideas continue to exercise considerable influence even if their success in

becoming the common sense of the movement means that many participants are not even aware

of their genesis.

EZLN Activities Since 1996

If 1996 marked the beginnings of the alter-globalization movement, it also marked the

beginning of a very difficult period for the EZLN. No further talks followed the signing of the


San Andres Accords. Instead, the late 1990s saw the government pursue a counter-insurgency

strategy of “low-intensity conflict” against the EZLN and their civilian support bases that would

culminate in the massacre by government trained and sponsored paramilitaries of 45 men,

women and children in the village of Acteal on December 22, 1997.

The defeat of the PRI in the presidential elections of 2000 produced a number of changes

in the situation facing the Zapatistas. The new President, Vicente Fox, ordered the release of

Zapatista prisoners and the closure of a number of the military bases that had been built outside

Zapatista communities, and the Zapatistas organized a march (known widely as La Marcha) on

Mexico City to press the Congress to implement the San Andres Accords. While La Marcha

attracted enormous crowds as it moved through Southern Mexico, and while members of the

Zapatista comandancia were allowed to address the Congress, the legislation that was finally

passed effectively gutted the San Andres Accords.

In the aftermath of La Marcha and the betrayal of the San Andres Accords, the Zapatistas

refocused on building up the structures of civilian self-government that they had initiated with

the formation of the autonomous municipalities and in 2004 announced the formation of five

regional Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Committees), charged with coordinating

the work of the 30 functioning autonomous municipalities.

While the period from 1996 to 2004 saw the Zapatistas engaged in often intense

struggles, their general political orientation remained more or less consistent. The conceptual

repertoire articulated between the 1994 uprising and the signing of the San Andres Accords was

further elaborated here and there, but its central themes changed little. Zapatista activity during

this period was focused on three main concerns: the implementation of the San Andres Accords;


confronting the police, military and paramilitary violence directed at the Zapatista communities;

and building up their own autonomous structures of self-government.

This orientation shifted in June 2005, when the EZLN issued the Sixth Declaration of the

Lacandon Jungle (Subcomandante Marcos and EZLN 2006) more commonly known as la Sexta.

La Sexta represented a break with the almost single-minded focus on the question of indigenous

rights and autonomy that had dominated the Zapatista’s discourse since the signing of the San

Andres Accords. It envisioned an alliance of the indigenous peoples with all the other oppressed,

exploited and excluded sectors of Mexican society and proposed a series of meetings in Zapatista

territory with representatives of the different sectors. These gatherings, conducted over several

weekends in the fall of 2005, produced the call for the La Otra Campaña (the Other Campaign or

simply La Otra ), conceived of as an alternative to the electoral campaigns of the political parties

scheduled for 2006. The first phase of La Otra consisted primarily of a sort of reconnaissance

tour of the country by Marcos, now renamed Delegate Zero on a motorcycle, accompanied by a

“penguin” (actually a chicken) and various allies.

La Sexta discursively, and La Otra in practice, marked a shift in the EZLN’s political

orientation. Pérez Ruíz (2005) has argued that la Sexta was a return to the EZLN’s pre-1994

“radical project.” While that characterization oversimplifies the process of political development

involved, it is certainly the case that la Sexta marked a re-articulation of a vision of a broad

extra-electoral and anti-capitalist Mexican left reminiscent of the themes of the First

Declaration. In practice La Otra pursued with mixed results, the linking together of

heterogeneous nodes of resistance in order to reconstitute that left.


Very recently in a series of communiques under the heading of Us and Them, the EZLN

announced the dissolution of La Otra and their intention to launch a new initiative, the contours

of which have yet to be stated.

To summarize, with the founding of the EZLN in 1983 and its subsequent embrace by a

large fraction of the indigenous-campesino movement, Zapatismo emerged as a distinct political

current within that movement in Chiapas. When the 1994 Zapatista uprising and the rapid

initiation of talks with the government compelled the Zapatistas to experiment politically, they

were able to draw on the unusual conceptual wealth of both the indigenous-campesino

movement, and its indigenous and non-indigenous antecedents, to articulate a very creative

response to the new political terrain carved out by neo-liberal globalization, a response that in

turn captured the imaginations of the generation of young radical activists who would initiate the

alter-globalization movement. The influence of a particular reading of Zapatismo on the alter-

globalization (and later) movements suggests the value of a serious historical sociological

investigation into the origins and development of the Zapatistas’ distinctive politics. That is the

objective of this study.

1.2 STRUCTURE OF PRESENTATION

I have so far sought simply to explain my reasons for undertaking this investigation and

to make the case for its significance. I will now sketch out the structure of the presentation of the

results. This study is divided into three parts, which in turn are divided into a total of twelve

chapters. The first part, consisting of this and the next two chapters defines the problem that the

study is addressing and establishes the methodological and theoretical frameworks for the

investigation. An earlier draft of much of the material in this part was presented at a mini-


conference of the American Sociological Association’s section on Collective Behavior and

Social Movements. (Gunderson 2011a) The second part, consisting of seven chapters in which

the genesis of Zapatismo is traced, is the heart of the study. The third part consists of a single

concluding chapter that reviews the findings and considers the larger theoretical and practical

implications of the material excavated in the second part. I have presented summaries of my

entire work at several stages in its development including at a meeting of the American

Sociological Association (Gunderson 2006) and at a conference on Zapatismo organized by the

Bildner Center for Western Hemispher Studies. (Gunderson 2009a)

In Chapter 2, titled Orientation and Methods I first review the contributions of other

theorists and researchers to an understanding of the genesis of Zapatismo that constitutes the

foundation for the rest of this study. I then present the research questions and general orientation

that will guide the study. Finally I describe my research methods.

In Chapter 3, titled Theorizing Zapatismo, Theorizing Revolution I lay down the

theoretical foundations for the rest of the study. This chapter is divided into four sections. In the

first I discuss the relationship between theory developed in the service of revolutionary

movements and the social scientific study of revolutions and revolutionary movements. In the

second section I discuss how the sociology of revolutions has dealt with the role of ideology in

revolutions and revolutionary movements. In the third section I discuss what I characterize as a

crisis in revolutionary theory and how it shaped the genesis of Zapatismo. I then consider some

of the attempts so far to “theorize Zapatismo” on the part of Harry Cleaver, John Holloway,

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that I argue have had an important influence on how they are

understood by actors in counter-systemic movements worldwide. In the final section of the

chapter I present, in the light of the preceding discussion, a theoretical model of the genesis of


Zapatismo. Earlier versions of material used in this chapter was presented at the Social Theory

Forum (Gunderson 2007c), the Political Science Graduate Students Conference at McGill

University (Gunderson 2007a), and a meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society. (Gunderson

2007d)

The second part of the study consists of seven empirical and historical chapters. The first

of these chapters gives an abbreviated account of the history of the state, while the next considers

the effects of the Mexican Revolution and the crisis that confronted the indigenous communities

in post-war Chiapas in its aftermath. The five subsequent chapters present a detailed historical

narrative of the constitution of a new political subject first in the form of a broad indigenous

campesino movement and then in the form of the EZLN. Organized chronologically, each

chapter examines the development of a major outside actor and/or its influence on the indigenous

communities and the evolving indigenous campesino movement. – starting with the Diocese of

San Cristóbal, followed by the cadres of several Maoist organizations who arrived in the 1970s,

and finally the members of FLN, the clandestine political-military organization that would

launch the EZLN in 1983 – and the complex and contradictory relationships between each actor

and the indigenous communities. Each of these five chapters thus either considers the

development of the politics of one of these actors or how the interactions between them and the

indigenous communities contributed to the development of the latter’s political subjectivity and

the eventual emergence of Zapatismo.

Chapter 4, Roots of a Rebellion, establishes the general geographical, historical and

political economic context for the rest of the study. It begins with an overview of the basic social

structure of Chiapas with particular reference to its peopling, its physical and political geography

and the workings of racial, class and gender divisions. This is followed by an abbreviated


historical narrative from pre-colonial times to the eve of the Mexican Revolution that weaves

together elements of local Chiapanecan and Mexican national history that set the stage for study

as a whole. In particular I consider the origins of what I call a proto-communist current of

thought within the communities that can be traced back to the interaction between communal

elements in the pre-Columbian social organization of the indigenous communities and the

Lascasian Christianity introduced into the communities by Dominican friars (including Las

Casas himself) in the early colonial era. This current expressed itself, I argue, in two indigenous

rebellions in 1712 and 1869. I also consider in this chapter the complex and dynamic relationship

between the social organization of the haciendas or fincas and the integration of Chiapas into the

capitalist world market over the course of this history. An earlier version of some of the material

in this chapter was presented at a meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

(Gunderson 2007b)

Chapter 5, The Mexican Revolution and the Crisis in the Indigenous Communities, is

devoted to an examination of the course of the Mexican Revolution in Chiapas and its impact on

the indigenous communities. In particular I consider the first interactions between the proto-

communism of the communities with representatives of modern anarchist, socialist and

communist thought going back to the 1869 “caste war” in Chamula and the activities of several

left-wing political parties in the state in the 1920s and 30s, in particular the Partido Comunista

Mexicano (PCM). Finally, I examine the political economic transformations of the state

following the revolution and the consequent crisis in traditional authority that emerged within the

indigenous communities after the Second World War, as well as the first responses of the

communities and their members to this crisis.


In Chapter 6, Liberationist Christianity and The Formation of Indigenous Catechists, I

tell the story of the movement of indigenous catechists that began in the early 1950s and by the

late 1960s had produced a distinct group of largely young men and women that I am

characterizing as organic indigenous campesino intellectuals. This movement, born in response

to the challenges posed by the successes of Protestant evangelization and the objective

weaknesses of the Catholic hierarchy in Chiapas, would be profoundly shaped by upheavals

within the larger church and would in turn promote a kind of cultural revolution within the

indigenous communities. I also consider the importance of the introduction via liberation

theology of historical materialist modes of critical social analysis into the communities. While

the movement continues to this day, the chapter concludes with the organization of the 1974

Indigenous Congress and the launching of the autochthonous church with the establishment of an

indigenous diaconate. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as an article in Research in

Social Movements, Conflicts and Change. (Gunderson 2011b)

Chapter 7, Mexican Maoism, describes the emergence of Maoism in Mexico in the

context first of divisions within the PCM and the larger international communist movement and

Then of the repression of the Mexican student movement in 1968. I pay special attention to the

role of the Maoist “mass line method of leadership” in the successes of several Maoist

organizations in building popular mass organizations of the urban poor, workers, and campesinos

prior to their arrival in Chiapas.

In Chapter 8, The Indigenous Campesino Movement in Chiapas, I chart the rise following

the Indigenous Congress of 1974 of several mass militant independent campesino organizations

based in village and regional assemblies that greatly enlarged the communities’ capacities for


collective action and prefigured the autonomous political structures that would later be built up

by the Zapatistas. I consider the complex role of both the pastoral staff of the Diocese and Maoist

asesores (or advisors) in this organizational process. By the early 1980s, I argue, relations

between the Maoists and many of the communities had soured, but not before the layer of

organic indigenous campesino intellectuals formed originally through the training of indigenous

catechists acquired an additional repertoire of analytical and organizational skills that would

importantly shape the subsequent development of Zapatismo. An earlier version of some of the

material in this chapter was presented at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en

Antropología Social in San Cristóbal. (Gunderson 2009b)

In Chapter 9, Armed Struggle in Mexico, I briefly consider Mexico’s long history of

indigenous and agrarian insurgency and guerrilla warfare before I recount the re-emergence of

revolutionary armed struggle in Mexico in the 1960s with the formation of at least two dozen

rural and urban guerrilla formations. I focus on three experiences I believe of special importance

to the later development of Zapatismo. The first is of Ruben Jaramillo, who as a young man

fought under Emiliano Zapata in the Mexican Revolution, and whose subsequent resort to arms

in the 1940s and 50s would make him an important bridge between the first Zapatistas and the

guerrillas of the 1960s and 70s. The other two experiences are of the Grupo Popular GuerrilleroI

(GPG) led by Arturo Gamiz in the state of Chihuahua and the Partido de los Pobres (PdlP) led

by Lucio Cabañas in the state of Guerrero.

In Chapter 10, Path of Fire, I focus on the origins and development of the Fuerzas de

Liberación Nacional from their roots in radical student activism in the cities of Monterey,

Puebla, and Villahermosa though their several attempts to establish a guerrilla base in the

Lacandon Jungle to their eventual success in winning over a small fraction of the indigenous


campesino movement that would eventually enable them to establish the nucleus of what would

become the EZLN. I pay special attention to the impact of the FLN’s experiences of state

repression and their encounter with the Nicaraguan Revolution on the evolution of the their

political-military strategy.

In Chapter 11, The Making of Rebel Army, I finally describe how with the support of a

cohort of indigenous activists recruited in the northern part of the state, the FLN founded the

EZLN itself and how a large fraction of the indigenous campesino movement eventually came to

embrace the EZLN’s political military project. I concentrate here on the processes of mutual

transformation involved in the fusion of an urban and largely university-educated political

military organization with the most radical elements of the indigenous campesino movement and

its consequences for the distinctive features of the Zapatismo that would emerge after the 1994

uprising.

The the third part of the study, consisting of Chapter 12 summarizes and synthesizes the

results of the study as a whole, proposing a radical re-reading of what Zapatismo is and what the

experiences of the indigenous campesino movement and the EZLN have to teach anti-systemic

movements in the 21st century. Some of the material in this chapter was presented at a meeting of

the Protest and Politics Workshop. (Gunderson 2012)


CHAPTER 2: ORIENTATION AND METHODS

I will do several things in this chapter. First I will review the contributions of other

theorists and researchers to an understanding of the genesis of Zapatismo that constitutes the

foundation for the rest of this study. Second, I will present the research questions and explain the

general orientation that guided the investigation. Third, and finally, I will describe my research

methods.

2.1: ACCOUNTING FOR ZAPATISMO

In this section I will briefly review the major literature dealing directly with the problem

that this study sets out to illuminate, namely accounting for the Zapatistas distinctive political

discourses and practice. It is important here to be clear that I am not looking to give an account

of the causes of the rebellion, but rather to explain why the rebellion took the very particular

form that it did. While there is a very extensive literature on the Zapatistas, the number of works

that attempt in any sort of systematic way to explain why their distinctive politics took the form

that they did is much more restricted.

This literature can be divided into several basic approaches that each emphasize one of

several explanatory factors. These factors are: first, the social structure of Chiapas and the

indigenous communities; second, the impact of global political economic transformations on

those structures; and third the emerging political agency of the indigenous communities; and

fourth, the influence, for good or for ill, of several “outside” actors – in particular the Diocese of

San Cristóbal, members of several Maoist organizations, and the FLN – on the indigenous

communities and the indigenous-campesino movement.


The Zapatistas in their own words.

The natural place to start looking for an account of the genesis of Zapatismo is in the

Zapatistas own words. Almost immediately after the cease-fire in January 1994, the Zapatistas

began to offer an account of their own development through communiqués and interviews. Of

the many interviews with Marcos and other Zapatistas, the most important ones are to be found

in Rovira (1994, 1996), Duran de Huerta (1994), Gilly (1995), LeBot (1997), and Muñoz

Ramírez.(Muñoz Ramírez 2003) Of these, LeBot’s interview with Marcos, Comandante Tacho

and then Mayor (and now Subcomandante Insurgente) Moises remains the single most

comprehensive presentation of the history of the EZLN by the Zapatistas themselves. While the

Zapatistas’ account of their history became progressively more detailed over time, particularly in

response to the publication of more hostile accounts by the “anti-Zapatistas,” it also left many

basic questions unanswered.

There are two key elements in the Zapatista account that are of special interest to this

study. The first of these is what Marcos calls “the provocative cocktail” (LeBot 1997:201) of

distinct forces that came together to constitute the EZLN. The second element is what Marcos

calls the “first defeat” of the EZLN in its initial encounters with the indigenous villages of the

Cañadas. In the interview with LeBot, Marcos posits that Zapatismo is the product of the

interaction of three groups: first, the ladino or mestizo members of a political-military

organization (the FLN); second, what he calls “the indigenous elite,” a small group of

indigenous activists who were supposedly “in practically all the political organizations of the left

that there were then, and who knew all the prisons of the country,” (132) and third, the

indigenous communities in the Cañadas region of the Lacandon Jungle. The “indigenous elite”

are recruited to the FLN at some unspecified point and become part of the founding nucleus of


the EZLN. It is only after the nucleus establishes itself and learns to survive in the mountains of

the Lacandon Jungle that they begin to make their first contacts with members of the indigenous

communities of the Cañadas which Marcos characterizes as “very isolated.”

For Marcos it is this contact between the EZLN in the mountains and the indigenous

movement in the communities that produces the distinctive politics that we now call Zapatismo.1

Marcos emphasizes several points in his account of the founding nucleus of the EZLN’s contact

with the indigenous campesino movement in the Cañadas. The first is that the guerrillas came to

the communities not from the cities, but from the mountains and that this commanded the respect

of the communities. The second is the important role of cultural translation played variously by

the figure of El Viejo Antonio and the indigenous elite. The third, and most critical, is that the

EZLN experienced its “first defeat” in the encounter between its own political orthodoxies and

the outlook of the communities.

Marcos’s description of the “first defeat” is so central to his account of their history that it

is worth quoting at length:

And the result is that we were not talking with an indigenous movement that was

awaiting a savior, but rather with an indigenous movement with a great tradition of

struggle, with a lot of experience, very resistant, very intelligent as well, to which we

might serve simply as something like an armed wing.

In this then – we are speaking of the period 85-87 – we are learning. We quickly realize

that there is a reality for which we are not prepared; we discover the indigenous world,

we know that they aren’t just any people, that they aren’t waiting for us, that we have not

come to teach them everything that we had constructed for whatever sector. We thought

1 The preferred name for the political ideology of the EZLN in the Mexican and other Spanish language literature is

“neo-Zapatismo” to distinguish it from the ideology of the EZLN’s namesake, Emiliano Zapata, a leader of

Mexico’s 1910 revolution. For the purposes of this study, however, I simply use the term “Zapatismo” to refer to

the political theory of the EZLN.


that it was the same to talk with a proletarian, with a campesino, with a clerk or with a

student. Everyone would understand the word of the revolution. And we were

confrontred with a new world for which we had no answer.

[The indigenous elite didn’t have a response either.] They didn’t have sufficient distance

for this either. So this organization, still within the Marxist-Leninist tradition, suddenly

was faced with a reality that it could not explain, for which it couldn’t account, and with

which it had to work.

The virtue of this organization is in recognizing that it didn’t have a response and that it

had to learn. That was the first defeat of the EZLN, the most important and that would

mark it into the future. When the EZLN faces something new and recognizes that it has

no solution to this problem, that it has to wait and learn, giving up the role of teacher.

The only thing we produce before this reality was a pile of questions, but no answers.

This provoked the EZLN, in which there were no more than two or three ladinos, to

recognize that there was nothing we could do, and to assume, consciously or

unconsciously, the role of students before the teachers. And this is where El Viejo

Antonio, the heads of the communities and the indigenous guerrillas became the teachers

of this political-military organization, that even though we might only be three or four

ladinos, was still a political-military organization.

And thus began the process of the transformation of the EZLN, from an army of the

revolutionary vanguard to an army of the indigenous communities, an army that is part of

an indigenous resistance movement. We didn’t see it like this; for us the armed struggle

was the spinal column, the highest echelon, etcetera… We believed in all the assumptions

and commonplaces you might imagine. But then the EZLN, in the moment that it

overlaps with the communities, becomes one more element within this larger resistance,

is contaminated by and subordinated to the communities. The communities appropriate it

and make it theirs, bringing it under their control.

I think that what allowed the EZLN to survive and grow was the acceptance of this

defeat. If the EZLN had not accepted it, it would have been isolated, it would have

remained small, it would have disappeared, the EZLN that came out on January 1, 1994

would never have been born. This is an army of thousands of combatants, even if poorly

armed, but they are thousands, and to find thousands of people disposed to fight to their

deaths isn’t easy. But this can’t be credited to the EZLN’s proposal. For me, on the

contrary, the EZLN was born at the moment it accepted that it faced a new reality for

which it had no answer and to which it must subordinate itself in order to survive within.

(LeBot 1997:147–149)

A critical point to note here, and one we will return to later, is how the tension between

revolutionary leadership and mass democracy is mediated through the question of cultural

difference. The FLN’s leadership claims are complicated by the evident ignorance on the part of


their ladino members of the culture of those they sought to lead. The assertion of the cultural

specificity of the indigenous in this context democratizes to some extent relations within a

hierarchically organized political-military organization still very much under ladino leadership.

There is an important pedagogical dimension to this reflected in Marcos’s comment on the

EZLN assuming “the role of students before the teachers.”

While the Zapatistas’ own account of their historical development is an invaluable source

of insights, it is important to recognize that it is also very much a consciously constructed

narrative in the service of contemporary political objectives. The most important of those

objectives was to counter attempts to portray the Zapatista uprising as the product of the

manipulation of the indigenous communities by ladino outsiders. This was a constant theme of

statements coming from the government and, as we shall see, of a series of tendentious

journalistic and scholarly treatments of the Zapatistas pre-1994 history. Underlying this

discourse was a racist refusal to recognize the political agency of indigenous communities. The

Zapatistas countered this discourse with an account that correctly emphasized that agency but, as

I will argue later, also elided the important actual role of “outside” actors, including the ladino

members of the FLN, in its emergence.

Zapatismo as an expression of global political-economic transformations.

Many social and political theorists were quick to see in the novelty of the Zapatista

uprising an expression of global political economic transformations described variously as post-

Fordism, globalization, and the rise of the network society. The New York Times dubbed the

Zapatistas “the first post-modern guerrilla,” a characterization taken up by Burbach. (1994) In a

similar vein Castells (2009:78–86) describes the Zapatistas as “the first informational guerilla.”


Hardt and Negri’s (2004)insistence that the Zapatistas were an expression of the post-Fordist rise

of immaterial labor was anticipated by Cleaver, (1998a) Holloway (Holloway 1998) and Cecena

and Barreda. (1998) The recognition that the distinctive politics of Zapatismo are at least as

much a response to new global conditions and processes as they are to the local particularities of

eastern Chiapas was not confined to these largely sympathetic analyses. Writing for the RAND

Corporation, Ronfeldt (1998) sees the Zapatistas as pioneers of what he calls “netwar,” a new

decentralized form of conflict made possible by emergent global communications networks, a

threat that he argues demands that the U.S. military develop its own capacities to wage netwar.

The approach of all of these theorists emphasizes and celebrates the newness of the

Zapatistas and largely ignores their specific historical development prior to 1994. Despite serious

limitations, these works have had an enormous influence on how Zapatismo has come to be

understood internationally both within and beyond the alter-globalization movement. They have

emphasized certain features of the Zapatista’s contemporary discourse and practice – their anti-

statism and hostility to political parties – and downplayed others – in particular their nationalism

and hierarchical military command structure – as if they were merely vestigial features from an

earlier era. Unfortunately, the attempts in these works to actually specify how global political

economic transformations produced Zapatismo are consistently overbroad, poorly grounded

empirically, and in a number of instances simply factually wrong. The lack of interest in the

actual particular process by which Zapatismo emerged is expressed explicitly by Holloway

(1998:160) when he declares:

The purpose of trying to distil the theoretical themes of Zapatismo is similar to the

purpose behind any distillation process: to separate those themes from the immediate

historical development of the Zapatista movement, to extend the fragrance beyond the

immediacy of the particular experience.


The problem with Holloway’s approach, and it is emblematic of that of many others, is not in the

desire to separate out what is particular to Chiapas and Mexico from what is more general or

universal in Zapatismo, but rather to imagine that this can be done without a serious historical

investigation that takes into account the particular as well.

Zapatismo “unmasked.”

In contrast to the works above, there is another body of works that holds that there is

really very little importantly new about the Zapatistas and that seeks to “unmask” them by

demonstrating their roots in, and supposed continued allegiance to, the authoritarianism of the

old Marxist-Leninist left. This approach is represented in the works of the aforementioned anti-

Zapatistas: Tello (1995, 2000), Legoretta, (1998), LaGrange and Rico (1998), Womack (1998,

1999), and Estrada (2009). While there is considerable variation in the quality of the scholarship

in these works and consequently some differences over particular questions of fact, they present

a more or less shared narrative in which the ladino leaders of the FLN, with the critical assistance

of some portion of the pastoral staff of the Diocese of San Cristóbal, hijacked the indigenous

campesino movement and subordinate its legitimate demands to their own, presumably

misconceived, revolutionary socialist objectives, leading them into a tragically doomed armed

uprising and confrontation with the superior firepower of the Mexican Army.

Of the anti-Zapatistas, the work of María del Carmen Legorreta Díaz deserves special

attention, not least because the works of both Tello and Womack rely heavily on her research.

Legorreta was an adviser to ARIC Union de Uniones, the largest independent campesino

organization in Chiapas and, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, the main one active in the

Cañadas. She is the author of two important studies. The more recent, Desafíos de la


emancipación indígena (2008) is a valuable study of the transformation of land tenure and labor

relations in the municipality of Ocosingo from the 1930s up to the Zapatista uprising. It is her

first book, Religión, política y guerrilla en Las Cañadas de la Selva Lacandona,(1998) which is

of concern here. It is specifically focused on the involvement of the pastoral agents of the

Diocese and the Maoists in assisting the organization of the indigenous campesino movement in

the 1970s and then what she regards as its hijacking by the EZLN in the 1980s. She makes two

main points. The first is that the EZLN was built on the previous organizational

accomplishments of the Diocese in the training of indigenous catechists and deacons (or

tuhuneles, as they were called in Tzeltal), but more importantly of the Maoist cadres who came

to Chiapas in the 1970s and who were Legorreta’s mentors. The second is that the clandestine,

authoritarian and military character of the EZLN profoundly damaged the mass democratic

organizations that the communities had built up in the form of the ejidal unions.2 The first point

is very effectively established by Legorreta’s history of the ejidal unions up to 1983, which

provides ample support for her conclusion that:

2 An ejido refers to the communally held village lands, most of which are typically divided into separate family

holdings. These holdings may not be sold but may be passed on to heirs. The system has its roots in pre-Columbian

Mexican systems of land tenure that combined communal ownership with individual use. The system survived

through the colonial era and the first half of the 19th

century. In the wake of the Reforma, however, Indian villages

were stripped of their communal lands. The land reform provisions of the Mexican Constitution re-established the

ejido and made it a vehicle for agararian reform. In the 1970s President Luis Echeverría introduced “unions” of

multiple ejidos as a legal vehicle to channel rising agrarian discontent into more controllable forms. Several such

unions were established in Chiapas in the latter half of the 1970s and would merge in 1980 to form the Unión de

Uniones.


The recruitment work of the FLN militants was facilitated, moreover, by the the

organizational development that had been achieved in the zone, sustained and replenished

as much by the militants of the Maoist current of Línea Proletaria as by the pastoral

agents committed to liberation theology.

In effect, the Forces of National Liberation did not find a fragmented, disorganized, and

extremely impoverished people. They found, rather, a cohesive and organized region with

a certain political experience and aspirations to improve their living conditions that had

been dignified by their organizational process; moreover the legacy of a dynamic of real

appropriation and participation on the part of the base, that is to say where the

communities had been compelled in the solution of their own problems. (1998:188-189)

The second proposition, however, is much less persuasively established. Indeed there is a

contradiction between the picture Legoretta paints of the politically conscious, mobilized and

organized communities prior to 1983 and the victims of the FLN’s manipulations that they

become subsequently in her narrative. While Legorreta offers some anecdotal support for this

characterization, her argument rests heavily on the judgement that the 1994 uprising was a

terrible mistake and contrary to the interests of the communities and that therefore anything that

the EZLN did to prepare for such a thing is evidence of their authoritarian disregard for the

“real” interests of the indigenous communities. The profound problems with Legorreta’s

approach notwithstanding, the more general questions that she raises concerning the relationship

between the ladino leadership of the FLN, the catechists and the democratic participation of the

rest of the indigenous communities in setting the direction of the movement are very much the

preoccupation of this study.

Legorreta attributes the success of the EZLN in the Cañadas, first to the authoritarianism

of the state government which closed off other options, and second to the internal crisis and

leadership vacuum that would plague the Union de Uniones after 1983. There are problems with

both of these explanations.


Legoretta places considerable weight on the contradictions between the modernizing

program of PRI at the federal level and the conservatism of the political class in Chiapas. There

are two main difficulties here. First, while very real contradictions existed between national and

state elites, they were considerably more integrated than Legorreta seems prepared to

acknowledge. The national leadership of the PRI, while committed to a developmentalist project

that ultimately demanded the modernization of agricultural production as well as

industrialization, also appreciated the critical role of local elites in the maintenance of order.

Similar patterns of support for very conservative local elites can be found not just in Chiapas but

across southern Mexico. The process of rural modernization envisioned was a gradualist one that

sought wherever possible to transform the technical methods of production while leaving intact

large landholdings. The second difficulty in Legorreta’s analysis is the complete absence of any

analysis of the PRI’s orientation towards the neo-liberal restructuring of the whole Mexican

economy from 1983 forward. The picture of the federal government as the sincere but thwarted

defender of the interests of the indigenous communities is completely contradicted by the

policies it actually put into place, and which Legorreta blandly refers to only as “modernizing”

reforms. These reforms were, in fcat, a source of conflict within the PRI between the neo-liberal

“technocrats” and the “dinosaurs” whose power base included the extensive patronage networks

attached to the PRI’s control of official trade unions, campesino organizations and other mass

formations. In this conflict however, Legorreta and her (ex-)Maoist mentors were firmly aligned

with the teachnocrats grouped around Carlos Salinas.

Legorreta’s account of the leadership crisis in the Unión de Uniones is similarly flawed.

She casts this crisis chiefly in terms of a competition for influence between the diocese and the

Maoists, attributing the indigenous communities’rejection of the Maoists to the machinations of


the Diocese. The objective failure of the Maoists’s strategy of relying on alliances with elements

within the PRI is attributed simply to the effectiveness of the resistance of local elites without

any serious consideration of why this wasn’t anticipated or how the strategy deprived the

communities of their most effective instrument for undermining the power those local elites,

namely the struggle for land.

Implicit in Legorreta’s analysis is a view of indigenous culture as a brake on the

economic development of the indigenous communities and a greater faith in the benign

intentions of the PRI party-state than in the path of struggle ultimately chosen by the

communities themselves. She is sharply critical of what she regards as the Diocese’s complicity

in the constitution of a new layer of supposed “caciques” in the form of the catechists and

tuheneles, a criticism that she extends to the EZLN. These are points that need to be taken

seriously and answered. But Legoretta’s own credibility is seriously compromised by her

credulity before the declarations of good intentions on the part of the PRI party-state in the face

of the evident effects of its actual policies.

Legoretta’s research grounds the work of Carlos Tello Díaz, whose La rebelion de las

Cañadas, was published in 1995. The Mexican armed forces gave Tello access to a selection of

captured internal FLN documents as well as the testimony of Salvador Morales Garibay, better

known as the EZLN’s highest level defector Subcomandante Daniel, making it the authoritative

source on the EZLN and FLN’s pre-1994 history despite serious deficiencies. An enlarged and

somewhat more thoroughly sourced second edition (Tello Díaz 2000) lamentably retains that

position amongst published accounts. Womack’s lengthy introduction to his valuable English-

language collection of documents (Womack 1999) relies heavily on both Legoretta and Tello and

remains the best published English-language treatment of this history. La Grange and Rico’s


biography of the EZLN’s spokeman, Marcos, la genial impostura (La Grange and Rico 1998) is

even less reliable than Tello and dependent on the same sources. Saavedra’s La comunidad

rebelde y el EZLN (Estrada Saavedra 2009) should be contrasted with the work of the other anti-

Zapatistas. A much more systematic study of the communities that constituted the EZLN’s

support bases in the Tojolabal Cañadas in the municipality of Las Margaritas, Saavedra’s while

overly dependent on the recollections of ex-Zapatistas is distinguished by its much finer-grained

depiction of the relationship between Zapatista villages and their army.

The Fire and the Silence.

The narrative developed by the anti-Zapatistas coincides with that developed and

promoted in the counter-insurgency operations of the Mexican state.3 All of these works rely on

a selection of FLN documents and the testimony of informants obtained through the Mexican

intelligence services. (Flores 2004:150–153) In spite of these serious problems, until very

recently these works offered far and away the most detailed account of the EZLN’s pre-1994

history, especially with respect to the role of the FLN. Given the Zapatistas’ own reluctance to

discuss the history and role of the FLN in much detail, this chapter in their history has been, until

recently, told largely by the anti-Zapatistas.

This situation has changed considerably with the appearance of Adela Cedillo’s bachelors

and masters theses, which taken together constitute a sympathetic and serious two-part historical

study of the FLN, El Fuego y el Silencio, (2008) and El Suspiro del Silencio (2010) based on

3 Two of the works, Tello’s and Legorreta’s, were originally published by Cal y arena, a publishing house

associated politically with former President Carlos Salinas, while Lagrange and Rico’s was brought back into print

by Cal y arena.


extensive research in newly available archives of Mexico’s intelligence services, including an

extensive collection of captured FLN documents and transcripts from interrogations of captured

FLN members. Cedillo was also able to obtain interviews with former members of the FLN and

witnesses to key events in their history. El Fuego y el Silencio traces the roots of the FLN in

several social struggles of the 1960s through their founding in 1969 to 1974 when many leading

members were killed or captured in a series of raids, including an attack on a base they had

established in the Lacandon Jungle. El Suspiro del Silencio picks up the story at this point,

describing the FLN’s recovery following the events of 1974 and concluding with the founding of

the EZLN in 1983. While Cedillo does not purport to give an account of the origins of Zapatismo

as such, her work finally establishes a solid foundation for a balanced consideration of the FLN’s

contributions to Zapatismo.

The Chiapanecan context.

In addition to the works noted above, there is an extensive anthropological and historical

literature that helps to establish the Chiapanecan context out of which Zapatismo emerged

without necessarily advancing any overarching theory to explain its emergence or its distinctive

political form and content. These works engage three main themes: the political-economic

transformation of post-World War II Chiapas and its effects on the indigenous communities, the

catalytic role of the pastoral staff of the Diocese of San Cristóbal, and the indigenous campesino

movement that emerged in Chiapas in the 1970s.

Leyva (Leyva Solano 1995, 2001) and Leyva and Ascensio (1996) offered the first

systematic analyses of the political organization of the indigenous communities of the Cañadas.

Of special interest here is Leyva’s analysis of the critical role of the comon (a Tzeltal variation


on the Spanish comun), which refers to the authority of village and/or regional communal

assemblies. While the comon has deep roots in the traditional civil-religious organization of the

indigenous communities, Leyva explains how it took on a new character as the main

organizational form of the indigenous-campesino movement. An understanding of the

significance and development of the comon is, I believe, critical to weighing contending claims

about the character and significance of “outside” actors in the development of Zapatismo.

Similarly, the third volume (2002) of De Vos’s magisterial history of the Lacandon

Jungle, covering the period from 1950 to 2000, gives us a particularly rich picture of the

successive transformations in the consciousness of the members of the communities of the

Cañadas and establishes the striking wealth of political experience that the indigenous

communities of the Cañadas had already acquired before they even entered into sustained

contact the EZLN. García de León (2002) covers roughly the same period but looks at the whole

state of Chiapas, reminding us that while the Cañadas region of the Lacandon Jungle provided

uniquely auspicious conditions for the EZLN to sink deep roots, that the processes driving

indigenous communities to embrace the EZLN’s political-military project were hardly confined

to that region. Harvey (1998) focuses specifically on the development of the indigenous

campesino movement from the 1960s up through the Zapatista uprising and locates its twists and

turns within the context of policy changes and repressive action on the part of the Mexican state.

Several writers have addressed the particular role of the pastoral staff of the Diocese of

San Cristóbal and its bishop, Samuel Ruíz, in the gestation of the EZLN. The Diocese clearly

played a critical role in this process, first nurturing the indigenous catechist movement beginning

in the 1950s, then in organizing the 1974 Indigenous Congress which brought together over a

thousand delegates from indigenous communities in the Diocese to articulate a common critique


of their conditions and to develop program for changing them, and finally in the creation of what

was called the autochthonous church through the training of tuhuneles authorized to administer

most of the sacraments. In a study commissioned by the Mexican Conference of Bishops, Meyer

(2000) makes clear that despite its critical importance, the Diocese cannot be understood as a

unitary actor, but was itself riven with internal divisions between different religious orders and

the secular clergy and with distinct dynamics arising in the different pastoral zones established

by the Diocese. Also important is Meyer’s insistence that the role of the Diocese can not be fully

understood without an appreciation of the weakness, and in some regions, near total absence, of

state institutions. Morales’s (2005) definitive history of the Diocese from 1950 to 1995 is less

preoccupied with answering particular charges made against the Diocese and paints an even

more complicated picture of the intellectual ferment within the church and its interaction with the

emergent political subjectivity of the indigenous communities.

Ríos (2002) brings together in one volume two separate, but both very valuable studies.

The first deals with the tumultuous history of the Diocese of Chiapas (which would only later be

divided into the Dioceses of San Cristóbal, Tuxtla, and Tapachula) during the Mexican

Revolution and through the Presidency of Lazaro Cardenas, which is critical to understanding the

posture of both the church and the indigenous communities vis a vis the Mexican state. The

second study charts in detail the complex evolution of Bishop Ruíz’s thinking on the culture and

status of the indigenous communities and peoples of Chiapas, which exercised an enormous

influence not just on the rest of the pastoral staff of the Diocese but on the indigenous

communities themselves.


The Subcomandante as Salesman

A work that does not neatly fall into any of the categories above is Bob’s (2005)

comparative study of two insurgent movements each in Mexico and Nigeria in which he argues

that the global resonance of Zapatismo, and the failure of another Mexican guerrilla group, the

Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (Popular Revolutionary Army or EPR) to command similar

international support, is primarily a function of their respective skill in securing the support of

internation Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Bob’s study rightly challenges the rosy

picture of global civil society allocating its resources according to a “meritocracy of suffering”

and illuminates the complex interactions between NGOs and insurgent movements, which

unquestionably played a critical role in the Zapatistas’ success in gaining international sympathy.

His weak grounding in the EZLN’s pre-1994 history, however, weakens his argument. The

result is an account of the relative successes of the EZLN and the EPR that emphasizes

“organizational and material resources, knowledge of distant audiences’ preferences, media

savvy and strategic skills … [that] allow groups like the Zapatistas to exploit opportunities

available in the global support market.” (Bob 2005:176) Bob fails, however, to deeply

interrogate how the respective political development of each group prior to their public

appearances in the 1990s informed their ability to access those initial resources, knowledge, and

skills in the first place. The significant and historically evolved political differences between the

two groups are thus effectively reduced to an inventory of their respective self-marketing

capacities without adequately appreciating the substantive political differences in what they were

“selling” to prospective sympathizers, which in neither case was simply “suffering.” Bob’s work

is thus of special interest less for what it says about the genesis of Zapatismo than what it says


about its subsequent international reception. Unfortunately its weak understanding of the former

seriously compromises what it has to say about the latter.

Thus, while there are a number of works that tell different pieces of the story of the

origins of the Zapatistas, there does not exist a single comprehensive study of the intellectual

origins and development of Zapatismo adequate to underpinning a proper theoretical

consideration of its significance to anti-systemic movements globally. The purpose of this study

then is to fill that gap. In the next section of this chapter I will present the general orientation of

the study itself and the research questions that will guide it.

1.3 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND ORIENTATION

Central to all of the misreadings of the Zapatistas and Zapatismo, in my view, is a failure

both to ground their analyses in a thorough investigation of the pre-1994 intellectual history of

the larger indigenous campesino movement and of the EZLN proper. Such an investigation,

therefore, constitutes the heart of this study. While Cleaver, Holloway, Hardt and Negri, are my

principal theoretical interlocutors, along the way it will also be necessary to also address the

often tendentious claims of the “anti-Zapatistas” (Tello, Legorreta, et al).

In many respects Zapatismo is quite clearly the product of very particular local conditions

obtaining in eastern Chiapas. Its global resonance, however, suggests that it is also in important

ways a response to emergent global processes as well. Specifying what is particular to Chiapas

and what is more general or even universal in the conditions and processes that gave rise to

Zapatismo therefore has the potential to illuminate concrete political, strategic and organizational

problems that confront anti-systemic movements in the 21st century more generally.


I believe that Zapatismo should be viewed as anticipatory of new modes of contentious

politics. Old boundaries between revolutionary political movements in an agrarian periphery that

have as their aim the capture of state power by resort to arms, and radical social movements in

the urban industrialized metropole that have sought to influence policies within existing liberal

democratic framework have been losing their explanatory power. The urbanization and formal, if

not substantive, democratization of much of the Global South have undercut the effectiveness of

strategies based primarily on rural guerrilla warfare and raised in sharp ways the question of

internal democracy within anti-systemic movements where prevailing authoritarian

organizational methods had gone largely unchallenged. At the same time, the hollowing out of

democratic political life in the Global North under neo-liberalism has rendered strategies of

contention that, however militant, ultimately rely on influencing the calculus of electoral

alliances, increasingly impotent. The strategic challenges of political contention in largely

urbanized but shallowly democratic societies is generating hybrid forms of contentious action

and organization. These new forms are highly varied, reflecting the complex interactions of

global and local dynamics in their genesis. Amongst them, Zapatismo may claim a special

significance by virtue of its global resonance and role in the emergence of the alter-globalization

movement. This is not intended to suggest that the EZLN has necessarily hit upon the correct

answers to the problems posed to contentious actors by the new global terrain. Rather it is to

suggest that by investigating the genesis of Zapatismo that we may arrive as new insighnts that

illuminate emerging global as well as local dynamics.

What I propose in this study is to construct and explain the intellectual geneology of the

new political subject that announced its existence to the world with the Zapatista uprising in

1994. The emergence of this new political subject has several phases. In the first phase, starting


fitfully in the 1950s but gaining increasing momentum in the early 1960s, the indigenous

catechist movement constitutes a layer of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals – a group

of young, literate, and critical minded men and women from the communities who come to

articulate an analysis of the social conditions of their peoples and a program for their radical

transformation. Beginning in the early 1970s this layer of organic indigenous campesino

intellectuals, with the assistance of the diocese and the Maoists, took the lead in building several

independent mass campesino organizations that taken together came to constitute a broad, radical

indigenous campesino movement from which a fraction came to constitute itself as what I am

calling a “revolutionary people.” By the early 1980s this movement found itself thwarted by

increasingly bloody political repression on the part of the Mexican Army, state police and the

hired guns of large landowners, as well as sophisticated efforts by the ruling party to co-opt its

leadership. In this context a large fraction of the movement aligned and fused with the nascent

EZLN which was itself transformed in the process.

Each of these phases involved advances in the political sophistication and organizational

capacities of the communities and each entailed a renewed struggle over the relationship between

external and internal leaderships and democracy. Central to this whole account is a continuous

process of negotiating and renegotiating the relations between leaderships, coming from both

inside and outside the communities, and the power of the communities themselves. This is a

process that is also thoroughly wound up with the negotiation and renegotiation of the content

and meaning of indigenous culture and ethnic identity.

This is first and foremost a study of emergent political subjectivity, of the conditions and

processes by which a despised and fractured collection of peoples came to constitute themselves

as a revolutionary people and to organize a revolutionary army to advance a vision of radical


social transformation. My argument is that this new political subject is neither the product simply

of processes internal to the indigenous communities of Chiapas, nor of larger structural or

political economic transformations, nor of the interventions of various ideologically motivated

outside actors, but rather of all of these interacting in a highly dynamic manner. While I reject

the view that sees the indigenous communities as victims of manipulation by outside actors, I

also reject those accounts that would erase or minimize the important roles played by the pastoral

staff of the Diocese, the Maoists and the ladino members of the FLN and pretend that Zapatismo

is purely a creation of the indigenous communities. I hold rather that it was precisely through

their engagement with the globally circulating anti-systemic ideologies represented by these

outside actors that the indigenous communities were able to reconstitute their collective political

subjectivity within the context of the capitalist world system that dominated their lives.

Of course the indigenous communities were not mute objects prior to this process. They

had survived over 400 years of often murderous oppression. They had developed a repertoire of

day to day forms of resistance and survival methods that enabled them to preserve their

languages and maintain their cultural integrity when many others had not. They had on several

occasions risen up in revolt and the historical memory of those revolts was passed down from

generation to generation. Nonetheless it seems clear that by the 1960s many in the communities

were convinced that their previous traditional understanding of their place in the world and the

forms of political organization developed in keeping with that understanding were fundamentally

inadequate to new conditions. The crisis that arose within the communities that provoked the

development of new understandings and new organizational forms can not be understood without

a recognition of that inadequacy. While their previous history of resistance and revolt and the

traditional understandings and practices of the communities would constitute important resources


that they would draw on, the nature of the crisis that they confronted demanded a radical rupture

with many elements of those traditions and an engagement with globally circulating radical ideas

that offered the means to analyze their conditions within a larger, global framework.

Specifically, I will argue, it demanded engagement with the idea of communism, with the

idea of the possibility and desirability of a classless society, the corresponding systemic critique

of capitalism, and the political traditions arising from the international struggles to overthrow

and supersede it. I will argue that while there were important proto-communist elements in the

indigenous communities’ own historical traditions of resistance, and that while there had been

some prior exposure to modern globally circulating communist ideas dating as far back as the

1869 Caste War in Chamula, that it was through their successive encounters with liberation

theology, Maoism, and the left-wing revolutionary nationalism and guerrilla tradition represented

by the FLN, that the communities forged a revitalized politics that was broadly communist if not

always in name, then most certainly in content. I will argue that it was precisely because

Zapatismo represented a revitalization of the communist idea at a moment when even the name

of communism had been made unspeakable that Zapatismo encountered the global resonance

that it did.

Scope of the Study

It is necessary in a study of this nature to define in advance as best as possible the

boundaries of the field of study, temporally and spatially. Speaking temporally, in the First

Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, the Zapatistas define themselves as “the product of 500

years of struggle” (EZLN 1994:33) and undoubtedly they are. But aside from a necessarily

cursory treatment of much of this history in Chapter 3, this study begins with the political


economic transformations that began to shake up the indigenous communities of eastern Chiapas

after the Second World War and concludes on the eve of the Zapatista uprising itself on

December 31, 1993, with most of the action taking place after 1968, a watershed year for all of

the major currents that would contribute to what would become Zapatismo.

While eastern Chiapas is the central stage on which much of this story unfolds, it does

not define the spatial limits of the study. A central preoccupation of the study is precisely the

global circulation of anti-systemic ideologies and their impact on the emerging political

subjectivity of the indigenous-campesino movement. The pastoral staff of the diocese, the

Maoists, and the FLN were all bearers of overlapping but quite distinct radical ideologies that

would in different ways be taken up and reworked by the indigenous communities. The

alternately exhilarating and traumatic world and national events of the late 1960s drove several

groups of conscientious young urban, university educated Mexicans to embrace radical and

revolutionary ideas, to interpret them in the light of particularly Mexican experiences and to

attempt to put them into practice by working with the Indian communities of Chiapas.

Accordingly this study must touch upon events in Havana, Shanghai, Saigon, Paris, Medellin and

Mexico City that would profoundly inform the outlooks of the various outside actors.

2.2 RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND ORIENTATION

The overarching objective of this study is to provide an account of the origins and

development of the distinctive political discourse and practices of the EZLN. It is guided by the

following research questions:

1. What were the social structures and processes that conditioned the emergence of the

indigenous campesino movement in eastern Chiapas? Here I intend to describe both the internal


social organization of the indigenous communities and their location within the political

economy of Chiapas, Mexico and the world and how transformations in the latter produced

dislocations in the former, generating both new grievances and new predispositions to defy

customary relationships both within the communities and with representatives of the dominant

ladino power structure.

2. How did a poor, largely illiterate, and fragmented rural population obtain the capacity

to collectively and critically analyze those processes and their place within them? Here I am

looking to describe a complex process of cognitive liberation through which first individuals and

then whole communities obtained, primarily through the assistance of the Diocese of San

Cristóbal and the indigenous catechist movement, practical and critical skills, undertook

reflection on their social conditions and formed new solidarities and identities.

3. How did they then develop the organizational capacities to act on this critical analysis?

Here I am concerned with the movement from critical reflection to collective political action in

the form of what came to be called the indigenous campesino movement which involved the

arrival and intervention of cadres of a number of mainly Maoist left-wing political formations

born out of the student upsurges of the late 1960s.

4. How did a fraction of this movement then come to constitute itself as a revolutionary

political-military organization and to further develop the distinctive politics of Zapatismo? The

founding of the EZLN in 1983 and its subsequent dramatic growth marked a significant shift in

the trajectory of the indigenous-campesino movement in response to a constellation of challenges

to and struggles within that movement. I am looking to understand exactly how and why that

shift occurred and what it meant for the politics of Zapatismo.


5. What was the role of intellectuals, both external and internal to the indigenous

communities, at each moment in this process? This complex process involved both the

intervention both of outside, non-indigenous intellectuals in the form of the pastoral staff of the

Diocese, Maoist cadres, and the urban university-educated guerrillas of the FLN, and of the

emergent layer of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals born of the catechist movement

that challenged the traditional authorities of their communities and came to progressively

mediate relations between their communities and outside actors. Here I am interested in drawing

out the nature of the formation of new political subjects.

6. How did this process contribute to and how was it influenced by changes in the status

of women and youth? Most of the catechists in training were in their late-teens and early 20s and

many were women. How did this influence the socio-political dynamics within the communities?

How did the views of the pastoral staff of the Diocese, the Maoists and the FLN inform this

process? How, in particular, did the experience of military training and life in the FLN’s safe

houses and the EZLN’s guerrilla encampments effect the status of women in the communities?

7. What was the role of indigenous identity and culture in this process and how in turn

were they transformed through this process? While the members of the communities always

understood themselves as indigenous and partook of distinct cultures, the meaning and

significance of that identity underwent profound transformations in the period under

consideration as they confronted, grappled with and reworked ideas of modernization,

development, class struggle, and decolonization. This process involved both challenges to and

the reconstitution of traditional community authorities on new bases. Here I am interested in the

intersection of the formation of racial and ethnic identities and political subjectivities.


2.3 METHODOLOGY

This is a historical sociological case study that relies on a combination of existing

secondary source materials, original archival research, and interviews with participants in and

observers of the processes under investigation. Which is to say that it uses methods generally

employed in comparative historical sociology to consider what would normally be thought of as

a single case. In this section I will discuss several issues involved in the use of this methodology

and then describe my own research experiences and sources.

The use of an individual case study commonly raises questions concerning the theoretical

robustness of any conclusions derived from such an approach. The use of an individual case

study is preferable, however, when one is interested in moving beyond finding correlations

toward identifying causal mechanisms or in troubling existing theories by closely examining an

aberrant case rather than discarding it as an outlier. In the study of contentious politics (social

movements, revolutions, ethnic conflicts, civil wars, etc…) the Zapatista uprising is clearly an

aberrant case that I will argue is prefiguratively symptomatic of important but still emergent

global processes, which is precisely what makes it an appropriate object of this approach. When

a particular case of political contention exhibits the sort of global resonance we see in the case of

the Zapatistas, I am arguing that it is reasonable to expect that a case study will suggestively

illuminate other cases. Furthermore, the detailed investigation of an aberrant case can also

indicate whether and where established theory is in need of minor modifications or wholesale

revision. This sort of exploratory and diagnostic investigation is most appropriate in cases of

emergent phenomena where significant problems of identifying genuinely comparable cases

exist, and when the existing theoretical literature is highly speculative and lacking in empirical


grounding. I believe all of these conditions obtain in this case and support the application of this

approach.

The use of the individual case study, however, must not be taken as implying an

abandonment of a comparative approach. On the contrary, it involves constant comparison of

different moments within the case as the particular trajectories of different communities, sub-

regions, and organizations are considered. It also involves, albeit sometimes only implicitly,

comparison with all the cases that constitute the empirical grounds of the multiple theories being

tested here against the Zapatista case. At the same time there is also an implicit critique in this

choice of an assumption of the comparative historical method that cases are discrete when in fact

they are not. Anti-sytemic social movements do not occur in neatly isolated national formations,

but rather within an historically evolved capitalist world system. (Wallerstein 2004) Counter-

systemic ideas and ideologies, organizational forms, and tactical repertoires have been

circulating globally for centuries. Revolutions and revolutionary movements, and the states that

they challenge, are continuously informed by the effects of revolutionary experiences elsewhere

in the world. Indeed, a major theme of this study is precisely how globally circulating anti-

systemic ideas initially articulated in Brazil, Cuba, China, France and elsewhere came to deeply

inform the political perspective of an indigenous movement in what is arguably the most remote

and isolated corner of Mexico.

The resort to detailed historical investigation as a tool of sociological analysis is called

for precisely when present-centered approaches are productive of theoretical error, as I’ve

already suggested is the case with prevailing characterizations of the Zapatistas and Zapatismo.

While an historical narrative can explain a great deal, when used to test the adequacy of larger


theoretical claims of the sort under consideration here, it is critical to subject it to a systematic

analysis.

The use of archival and interview data each raise separate issues. In the case of a

clandestine movement composed mainly of poor, often illiterate, campesinos, most of whom

speak Spanish only as a second language, the archival record will be heavily weighted in favor of

the observations of outsiders. Similarly, certain structural changes (e.g. shifts from subsistence

farming to cattle ranching) are more likely to be documented than contending interpretations of

those changes within a subaltern population. Oral interviews are necessary to compensate for the

resulting gaps in the archival record, but these in turn raise the problem of the reliability of

informant’s memories, especially of distant events. Here the only solution is the historian’s

skepticism before each piece of evidence and a search for corroborating evidence from multiple

independent sources.

As indicated earlier, I have been closely following and studying the Zapatistas since the

1994 uprising, first as an activist and later as a scholar. For years I read all of their many

communiqués as they came out and read every significant book to come out on them in English.

In 1995 I travelled to Mexico for the first time and began gathering books and other materials in

Spanish and have a similar level of familiarity with the Spanish-language studies coming out of

Mexico. I travelled to Chiapas for the first time in the summer of 1996 for the First

Intercontinental Encuentro where I also gathered materials. During my stay in Chiapas from

1997 to 1999 I amassed an extensive personal library of materials related directly to the EZLN

and more broadly concerning the history of Chiapas, and of indigenous and agrarian conflicts in

Mexico. During this period I visited many Zapatista communities and spent more time in two

communities located in Las Cañadas, Emiliano Zapata located on the Rio Jataté and Benito


Juarez located near Laguna Miramar. The community of Emiliano Zapata would play a very

important role in the history of the indigenous campesino movement and Benito Juarez was one

of a few villages in the immediate vicinity of the EZLN’s first encampment on Chuncerro

Mountain and was among the first wave of villages to join the EZLN. Conversations with

members of these communities and with other solidarity activists working in other communities

gave me a valuable initial grounding for considering the reliability of the various materials I was

reading. I returned to Chiapas in the summer of 2000 and in the summer of 2006 I returned

again, this time to conduct preliminary research for this study. From July 2008 to July 2009 I

returned again as a guest student at the Centro de Investigacios y Estudios Superiores en

Antropología Social (CIESAS) under the guidance of Xochitl Leyva Solano. While in Chiapas I

attended the monthly Immanuel Wallerstein Seminar organized by Dr. Raymundo Sánchez

Barraza, the general coordinator of the Centro Indígena de Capacitación Integral (CIDECI) in

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico which deepened my appreciation of the influence

anti-colonial movements around the world on the consciousness of the indigenous campesino

movement in Chiapas. During this period I carried out extensive archival and library research

and conducted interviews, typically about two hours long, with 18 individuals, mainly

participants in or close observers of either the indigenous campesino movement or of one of the

several organizations that played an important role in the genesis of the EZLN.

In addition to the considerable secondary literature specifically on the EZLN itself, I read

widely on the history of Chiapas as well as in the extensive anthropological literature. Since the

1950s Chiapas has been a preferred site for anthropological and other social scientific field work

by the University of Chicago, Stanford and Harvard as well as several English, French and

Mexican universities, making the indigenous communities there amongst the most studied people


in the world. In addition to published works I was also able to read a significant number of

bachelors, masters and doctoral theses, often enough by participants in the movements under

study.

An interesting source that I did not initially expect to make use of is that of historical

novels. The combination of political repression and the pursuit of a broader popular audience has

made the historical novel an important vehicle for the treatment of certain subjects in Mexico,

not least of which include the social conditions of the indigenous communities and the activities

of armed clandestine movements. For the purpose of getting a handle on the consciousness of

various actors, I often found that such treatments were more valuable than more conventional

academic histories. Among the novels that helped me understand the processes I sought to study

here were: Juan Pedro Viqueira’s novelization of the 1712 Tzeltal rebellion (1993); Rosario

Castellaños’s Book of Lamentations (1998) which relocates the 1869 “caste war” in Chamula in

the trurbulence of the 1930s; B. Traven’s “Jungle Novels” (Traven 1993, 1994b, 1994b, 1995,

1998, 2007) which depict the life of indigenous campesinos in Chiapas culminating in an

uprising in the logging camps of the Lacandon Jungle; Graham Greene’s very problematic but

still illuminating treatment of the anti-clerical campaigns waged in Chiapas and Tabasco in the

1930s in The Power and the Glory (2003); Jesus Morales Bermudez’s Ceremonial (1992) which

is set during the emergence of the authocthonous church in the 1970s; Montemayor’s Guerra en

el paraiso (2009) which revolves around the kidnapping of Ruben Figuerroa by the Partido de

los Pobres in the Mexican state of Guerrero in the 1970s; Fritz Glockner’s Veinte de cobre

(2006) which attempts to reconstruct the life and death of his father, Napoleon Glockner, a

militant in the FLN; Carlos Ímaz’s Tierna memoria (2006) which depicts the life of a Tzeltal boy

who joins the EZLN in the 1980s; and finally Alejandro Sellschopp’s Nudo de serpientes (2004)


a novelization of the life of then Mayor and now Subcomandante Moises up to the 1994

rebellion.

Archives and Libraries

In addition to the collections of several academic libraries (CIESAS, UNACH,

ECOSUR) I was able to conduct research in several institutional archives and to make use of the

personal document collections of former members of several organizations. The Archivo

Historico del Diocesis de San Cristóbal gave me access to the minutes of the periodic assemblies

of the pastoral staff of the Diocese beginning in the 1970s, a rich source of insights into internal

debates within the Diocese. Between the Instituto de Estudios Indigenas (IEI) housed at the

Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Chiapas (UNACH ) and Desarrollo Económico Social de

los Mexicanos Indígenas (DESMI), an NGO aligned with the Diocese, I was able to gather

together a large collection of the very detailed reports and analyses written by Padre Pablo

Iribarren in the course of his work overseeing the Tzeltal Zone of the Diocese from the Parish of

Ocosingo. Between DESMI and the collections of the Seminario Mayor de la Inmaculada

Concepción I was also able to put together a near complete collection of the first series of El

Caminante, the lively internal bulletin of the Diocese published in the 1970s and 80s. DESMI’s

collections of periodicals (including Tiempo, Hoy, El Indio, Textual and Cristus), pamphlets and

other materials helped fill many gaps in the narrative I have constructed.

Miguel Angel Garcia and Enrique Arreguin both shared their personal collections of

materials related to Mexican Maoism, enabling me to gain a much more detailed understanding

of the development of Línea Proletaria and its influence on the indigenous campesino movement

in Chiapas.


Adela Cedillo graciously shared her collection of captured internal FLN communiqués,

publications and other documents painstakingly extracted from the Archivo General del Nación.

Alberto Hijar shared his collection of the FLN’s clandestine theoretical journal, Conciencia

Proletaria as well as work by his former student, Raphael Sebastian Guillen Vicente, better

known today as Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos.

Interviews

In addition to the original archival research, I conducted interviews of roughly two hours

each with 18 individuals all presently living either in Chiapas or in Mexico City who were either

participants in, or especially knowledgeable of the processes studied here. Subjects were selected

primarily on the basis of likely ability to speak knowledgeably to the questions I am seeking to

answer and to fill in gaps in the secondary and archival literatures to produce a more complete

account of the genesis of Zapatismo. They include members of the pastoral staff of the Diocese

involved in the training of indigenous catechists, two catechists, former members of Unión del

Pueblo, Línea Proletaria and other left-wing organizations present in Chiapas, former members

of the FLN, the son of a murdered FLN leader, several prominent local activist scholars, one

journalist and another scholar. Most were sympathetic to the EZLN, although several were

hostile. All but the two catechists were non-indigenous. Six of the subjects were women. All

were, broadly speaking, intellectuals with varying degrees of formal training. All but three

subjects chose to be identified by their given names.

I was unable to obtain permission from the EZLN itself to interview leading members.

This was not a surprise as they had stopped giving permission to any academic research projects

at least a year prior to my return to Chiapas in 2008, presumably for security reasons. A request


for access to catechists directed to leading figures in the autochthonous church was also rebuffed,

presumably at least in part so as not to contradict the EZLN’s policies. While there is a formal

cease-fire between the EZLN and the Mexican government and its duration has convinced many

that it is permanent, the Mexican government has never ceased conducting counter-insurgency

operations of various types against the Zapatistas and there is no reason to assume that open

hostilities will not eventually be resumed. In other words, the security concerns of the EZLN

and its civilian support bases in the communities are, in my view, quite legitimate.

Interview subjects were asked to sign a consent form before the interview began. The

three individuals who chose to use pseudonyms also chose not to sign the form, instead giving

verbal permission for the interview. With the exception of one interview conducted mainly in

English, all of the other interviews were conducted in Spanish in places chosen by the subjects:

in their homes or offices or in cafes. They were recorded using a digital audio recorder and then

transcribed. I worked from a script of questions prepared in advance of each interview, tailoring

questions from a large master list to what I already knew about each subject. Questions were

open-ended and intended to solicit extended responses that often went off on unanticipated

tangents. At the end of each interview, subjects were asked for suggestions of who else I might

interview and for their thoughts on the relationship between academic research and the

movement. Subjects were offered 200 Mexican pesos for their time, though over half refused any

compensation.


CHAPTER 3: THEORIZING ZAPATISMO, THEORIZING REVOLUTION

If, in Hegel’s terms, Becoming now appears as the truth of Being, and process as

the truth about things, then this means that the developing tendencies of history

constitute a higher reality than the empirical ‘facts’. It is doubtless true that in

capitalist society the past dominates the present – as indeed we have shown

elsewhere. But this only means that there is an antagonistic process that is not

guided by a consciousness but is instead driven forward by its own immanent,

blind dynamic and that this process stands revealed in all its immediate

manifestations as the rule of the past over the present, the rule of capital over

labour. It follows that any thinker who bases his thought on such ideas will be

trapped in the frozen forms of the various stages. He will nevertheless stand

helpless when confronted by the enigmatic forces thrown up by the course of

events, and the actions open to him will never be adequate to deal with this

challenge.

This image of a frozen reality that nevertheless is caught up in an unremitting,

ghostly movement at once becomes meaningful when this reality is dissolved into

the process of which man is the driving force. This can be seen only from the

standpoint of the proletariat because the meaning of these tendencies is the

abolition of capitalism and so for the bourgeoisie to become conscious of them

would be tantamount to suicide.

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1972)

In the decades that followed the Second World War political-economic transformations

produced in Chiapas particular conditions that favored the organization of an indigenous revolt.

The specific content of that revolt, that is to say the distinctive politics of Zapatismo, I will argue

are rooted not simply in those local conditions but also in a global crisis in revolutionary theory

and practice that emerged in the 1950s and 60s. This crisis, in turn, must be understood in

relation to a global process of revolutionary change. The interventions of the Diocese, the

Maoists and the FLN in the indigenous communities and the indigenous campesino movement in

Chiapas were all colored by this crisis and by the global revolutionary process it reflected. As

they brought the communities into contact with globally circulating ideas and debates arising

from this crisis in revolutionary theory, the crisis came to shape the political culture of the


communities as well, ultimately producing the “provocative cocktail” that is Zapatismo. Studies

of Zapatismo that confine themselves to the conditions and processes internal to Chiapas and that

fail to also locate it within the global development and circulation of revolutionary theory can

not account for either its distinctive content or its global resonance.

The contradictions and crises that characterize the capitalist world system set in motion

and continuously fuel global processes of political contention and revolutionary upheaval.

Revolutionary theory seeks to make this general process self-conscious by constituting new

collective political subjects and arming them with a critique of existing society and the various

and constantly evolving processes and mechanisms by which it maintains and reproduces itself.

Thus, both the capitalist world system, and the anti-systemic movements to which it gives rise,

undergo continuous and interpenetrating processes of transformation with each responding to

new challenges posed by the other’s development.

The historical development of revolutionary theory has always been driven by concrete

problems posed in the course of political struggles. By the late 1960s, a general crisis in

revolutionary theory had emerged as the conquest of state power by revolutionary parties in

several countries posed new problems that existing revolutionary theory was unable to

satisfactorily answer. This crisis coincided with the mass radicalization produced by the political

upheavals of this time. Guevarism, Maoism, Liberation Theology, and the emergence of new

forms of pan-indigenous political consciousness, as well as the appearance of critical currents

within the social sciences, should all be understood as responding in different ways to the

simultaneous global processes of mass radicalization and theoretical crisis.

As in many other places, this period also saw a crisis in the traditional authority structures

of the indigenous communities of Chiapas that opened them to the influence of various radical


political projects. The indigenous communities of Chiapas and the indigenous-campesino

movement that emerged from the communities thus became a crucible in which these globally

circulating currents converged to produce the “provocative cocktail” that is Zapatismo.

The result of this convergence was the creation first of a layer of organic indigenous

campesino intellectuals and then of a broader collective revolutionary political subject, a

revolutionary people, a large fraction of the indigenous population that came to see a sweeping

revolutionary transformation of social relations, not only in Chiapas, but in Mexico and the

world, not just as their only real hope for a better life, but as a larger purpose of their lives. The

EZLN became the vehicle through which this revolutionary people in turn synthesized the

different elements in the discourses and practices of the different currents with their own

practical experiences to elaborate the distinctive politics of Zapatismo.

This process should not be understood simply in terms of the linear development of a

single unitary movement or organization. Rather it should be understood in terms of a complex

political ecology in which diverse and sometimes antagonistic currents and organizations,

occupying different niches and playing different roles, all contributed to the emergence of a

revolutionary people. Similarly it is a mistake to imagine this process as a discrete one confined

to, or explicable within, the internal dynamics of the indigenous communities of eastern Chiapas.

Rather the emergence of Zapatismo should be understood as a moment within a larger global

revolutionary process in which global political economic transformations and the global

circulation of diverse oppositional ideologies continuously produce new articulations of what

Badiou has called “the communist hypothesis” (2010) in the form of new revolutionary subjects.

In this chapter I will develop the theoretical framework, sketched roughly above, that will

inform the rest of this study. The chapter is organized into five sections. In the first section I


discuss the relationship between revolutionary theory, that is to say theory developed within

revolutionary movements, and theories of revolution and other forms of contentious politics as

they have developed within the institutionalized social sciences. In the second section I look at

how the sociology of revolutions has developed since the work of Theda Skocpol, (1979) paying

special attention to debates within it over the role of revolutionary ideology in revolutionary

processes. In the third section I describe what I call the crisis in revolutionary theory that

emerged in the context of the worldwide wave of revolutionary upheaval of 1968 and that I argue

shaped Zapatismo. In the fourth section I locate the autonomist theories of Hardt, Negri, Cleaver

and Holloway as a response to the crisis in revolutionary theory and consider their attempts to

“theorize Zapatismo” that I argue have had an important influence on how the Zapatistas are

understood by actors in anti-systemic movements worldwide. In the sixth and concluding section

I synthesize the results of these discussions into a framework for the rest of the study.

3.1 REVOLUTION AND THEORY

Both the modern practices of contentious politics and the contending (revolutionary and

social scientific) theorizations of those practices are products of the distinctive dynamics of the

capitalist world system. In this section I consider the relationship between the practices of

contentious politics as they emerged in the context of the consolidation of capitalism as a world

system, the tradition of revolutionary theory that has sought to constitute around those practices

new political subjects able to realize the revolutionary supercession of capitalism, and the social

scientific study of contentious politics which constitutes those practices and actors as objects of

knowledge and control mainly within the framework of the capitalist university. I thus locate

both revolutionary theory and the perspective of the social sciences towards the various forms of


contentious politics within the dynamics of world capitalism that have made contentious politics

a more or less permanent feature of modern life.

Contentious Politics and the Dynamics of the World Capitalist System

While previous forms of class society gave rise to often explosive political antagonisms,

it is only with the establishment of capitalism as a world system that several things occur. First,

as Tilly (1978) has demonstrated, repertoires of contention begin to circulate transnationally

following the channels of communication carved out by the ever denser commodity flows of the

world market. Second, intellectuals, broadly defined, begin to articulate revolutionary ideas that

legitimate these repertoires, align them with the constitution of new political subjects, and

advance visions and strategies for revolutionary social transformations. Third, the newly

institutionalized social sciences seek to reconstitute these new subjects and practices as objects

of knowledge and control.

The modern capitalist world system possessed two distinctive features that made all these

developments possible. The first was the establishment and continual expansion of a North

Atlantic-centered world market that, beginning in the 16th

century, drew an ever larger fraction

of humanity into accelerating global circuits of commodity exchange and capital accumulation.

The second was the revolutionizing of production processes and the attendant processes of

urbanization, industrialization and proletarianization. By establishing ever denser and faster lines

of communications between once isolated regions of the world, by enabling the accumulation of

previously unheard of concentrations of capital, and by globally synchronizing both longer-term

processes of economic development and shorter-term market cycles, these features of the

capitalist world system produced new transnational class forces and subjectivities. The first of


these were, of course, the urban propertied classes – the merchants, manufacturers, bankers,

lawyers and the like – who were the principal protagonists in the American War of

Independence, the French Revolution, and the Latin American independence struggles. These

were, however, quickly joined by various fractions of the lower classes – slaves, sailors,

mechanics, peasants, and so on – swept into political life by revolutionary events and infected by

new ideas of political freedom and equality that promptly acquired enlarged meanings and in

turn generated conflicts with the newly ascendant bourgeois forces.

We see in the first half of the 19th

century, then, the emergence of two distinct bodies of

theory. The first of these is revolutionary theory that conceives of itself as part of a revolutionary

process, that assists in the constitution of revolutionary subjects, that serves as a guide to action

on their part. The second is what eventually came to be called the sociology of revolution, that is

to say theoretical accounts of the causes and outcomes of revolutionary processes articulated

largely within the newly emerging social sciences preoccupied with containing the new

revolutionary forces within frameworks consonant with the interests of the politically ascendant

propertied classes. With respect this Wolin (1973:345–347) notes that:

For more than a century there has existed a distinct tradition of revolutionary writings,

flourishing, for the most part, outside academic and scholarly communities. These

writings are typically labelled ‘revolutionary doctrines,’ ‘revolutionary ideologies’ or

‘isms,’ in order to distinguish them in quality, content, and purpose from the writings of

political and social scientists. Examples of the genre include Marxism, Leninism,

Maoism, Castroism, and the like. …

Tracing its origins back to the 19th

century, Wolin argues that this distinct tradition of

revolutionary thought

has flourished in a symbiotic relationship with revolutionary action. It is this fact of a

tradition that is worth reflecting upon. By a tradition I mean a body of knowledge,

organized by distinctive concepts and theories, that has been consciously cultivated and

extended over time. The tradition includes more than Marxism. It begins with such


writers as Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen and goes on to

include Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Michael Bakunin, and many others.

Eventually it was dominated by Marxism, or, more accurately, it was Karl Marx who, in

a sense, created the tradition.

I would only add that at the heart of this “tradition of revolutionary thought” is what

Badiou has called “the communist hypothesis.” (2008:34-35) which he defines as follows,

In its generic sense, given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the

logic of class – the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the

arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity – is not inevitable; it can be overcome.

The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one

that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private

appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear.

The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a

necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will

see it withering away.

‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual representations. It

is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme. It is

foolish to call such communist principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them

here they are intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure Idea

of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since the beginnings of the

state. As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice,

rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts—the slaves led

by Spartacus, the peasants led by Müntzer—might be identified as practical examples of

this ‘communist invariant.’

Badiou suggests, however, that the fragments of the hypothesis can only be gathered

together into a whole with the consolidation of the capitalist world system. For the first time in

history as capitalism brings the whole of humanity into sustained intercourse and begins to

produce the sort of surpluses necessary to make a world without want practicable, communism is

transformed from its fragmentary form into a real force, if not yet a fully self-conscious one, in

human affairs. The emergence and expansion of the world market as a defining feature of the

modern world system, with its logic of accumulation and the corresponding constant

revolutionizing of technology and social organization, thus raises for the first time in human


history the possibility of a radically new way of life, no longer characterized by alienated labor

nor governed by the capitalist law of value. It is this possibility, and the evident fact of its non-

realization, I am arguing, which comes to inform, consciously or not, all contemporary forms of

political contention beginning with the revolutionary upheavals of the late 18th

century. The

communist movement is precisely the process through which this at first largely unconscious

force becomes conscious of the real possibility of a radically better world and apprehends and

embraces its own role in bringing that world into being. In The Class Struggles in France: 1848

to 1850 Marx specifically contrasts this notion of communism with what he calls the “utopian

doctrinaire socialism”

which at bottom only idealizes present society, takes a picture of it without shadows, and

wants to achieve its ideal athwart the realities of present society; while the proletariat

surrenders this socialism to the petty bourgeoisie; while the struggle of the different

socialist leaders among themselves sets forth each of the so-called systems as a

pretentious adherence to one of the transit points of the social revolution as against

another – the proletariat rallies more and more around revolutionary socialism, around

communism, for which the bourgeoisie has itself invented the name of Blanqui. This

socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of

the proletariat as the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally,

to the abolition of all the relations of production on which they rest, to the abolition of all

the social relations that correspond to these relations of production, to the revolutionizing

of all the ideas that result from these social relations. (1993:122–123)

The modern idea of communism, as distinct from earlier forms of primitive and proto-

communist thought, first appears in the course of the French Revolution with Babeuf’s

“Conspiracy of Equals” but also, I would argue, with the rising of the enslaved African labor

force of San Domingue. So, while the dream of “a world turned upside down” is arguably as old

as class society itself, it is “with the French Revolution,” as Badiou explains, (and with it, the

Haitian, I would add) that “the communist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political

modernity.” (Badiou 2008) It is subsequently forced underground but continues to gather


strength and coherence over the course of the early 19th

century until it simultaneously erupts in

1848 in words in the form of The Communist Manifesto and in deeds in the independent political

action of the European proletariat in the course of the wave of revolutionary uprisings that swept

the continent that year.

Revolution and the Science of Order

If the emergence of revolutionary thought animated by the communist hypothesis was a

response to new possibilities posed by the accomplishments of the capitalist world system, the

institutionalized social sciences should be understood in large part as a response to the threat that

the fusion of this current of revolutionary thought with the movements of the increasingly unruly

lower classes posed to that system and to those most interested in its preservation

The revolutionary upsurges of the late 18th

and early 19th

centuries gave birth to a science

of society that had as its central mission the development of knowledge that would facilitate the

channeling of recently unleashed and tumultuous revolutionary energies into more orderly and

manageable processes of social change. Sociology was to be a “science of order.” As Wolin

explains,

The phrase, “science of order,” was coined by the founder of modern social science,

Auguste Comte, who viewed it as the antithetical alternative to all theories which

maintained that progress and justice could be promoted by revolutionary means. In

Comte’s system, revolution had no meaning except through the concepts which explained

and defined the nature of order. There was no science of revolution, only a science of

order. (1973:349)

Comte’s positivism, which foreclosed all consideration of a radical rupture with presently

existing reality, was a direct repudiation the principle of negation represented by the work of

Hegel. Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, as Marcuse (1999) and Buck-Morss (2009) have


respectively argued, was deeply rooted in the spirit of the French and Haitian Revolutions and

would, through Marx, come to deeply inform the tradition of revolutionary thought.

In spite of continued revolutionary upheavals and the rise, over the course of the 19th

century, of a revolutionary-minded workers movement, “Comte’s formulation” would be

accepted by the two greatest social scientists of the early twentieth century, Max Weber

and Emile Durkheim, who went even further. They retained order as the focal point of

social science, but practically eliminated the subject of revolution. … Both Weber and

Durkheim helped to develop a tradition of social science which has been rich in the

language of order. One thinks of Weber’s discussions of bureaucracy, organization, and

authority, as well as of Durkheim’s notions of solidarity and collective representations.

But concerning revolution, there was no corresponding richness, only silence. (Wolin

1973:349–350)

This silence would ultimately prove unsustainable. The challenges posed by actual

revolutions to any science of order demanded the systematic study of revolutions and their

causes. The sociology of revolutions can be retrospectively traced back to Tocqueville’s

treatment of the French Revolution, (1983) Marx’s studies of the revolutions of 1848 and of the

Paris Commune, (1963; 1988) and Engels (1967) study of the German Peasant Wars. While

these works concerned different revolutionary episodes they can all be seen as attempts to come

to terms with the revolutions of 1848, and in the case of Marx’s later work, the Paris Commune

of 1871. The systematic treatment of the phenomena within the disciplinary structure of the

institutionalized social sciences, however, only begins to take shape in the wake of the 1917

Russian Revolution with the appearance of what Foran (1997) has called the “natural history

school” of revolution most closely identified with Brinton. (1965) It was only in the wake of the

Chinese Revolution and the wave of anti-colonial movements following the Second World War,

however, that a more theoretically robust sociology of revolution emerges in the work of Moore,

(1966) Wolf, (1969) and arguably Huntington. (2006)


Enter the Peasant.

For Marx and the first generation of revolutionary theorists after him, the only genuinely

revolutionary class under capitalism, the class that represented the possibility of a communist

future, was the industrial proletariat. The largely agrarian character of the Chinese and other

Third World revolutions and anti-colonial struggles compelled both revolutionary theory and the

sociology of revolutions to rethink the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. In the sociology

of revolution this finds its first fully formed expression in the work of Moore who identifies the

structural determinants of “three routes to the modern world”: the democratic route, revolution

from above, and revolution from below. Moore suggests (1966:414) that these are not simply

alternative, but rather successive routes to modernization, both informed by the earlier

experiences and conditioned by the consequent existence of already modernized competitors.

Moore embraced the historical materialist emphasis on the centrality of class struggle to the

process of modernization (and therefore social revolutions), but rejected the orthodox Marxist

emphasis on the struggle between the urban bourgeoisie and the proletariat, instead identifying

the class struggle in the countryside as the real source of revolutionary upheavals and

transformations and the presence of a regime of repressive labor control as a critical determinant

of the potential for “revolution from below.” It would be the question of the causes of

revolutionary peasant movements “from below” that would seize the imagination of the theorists

that followed in Moore’s wake.

Wolf’s (1969) study of peasant participation in six revolutionary conflicts examines the

workings of agrarian social structures in order to identify the social location and conditions that

specifically characterize those peasants that have served as a base for revolutionary movements.

Wolf argues that


(p)oor peasants and landless laborers … are unlikely to pursue the course of rebellion,

unless they are able to rely on some external power to challenge the power which

constrains them

and that ultimately

(t)he only component of the peasantry which does have some internal leverage is either

landowning ‘middle peasantry’ or a peasantry located in a peripheral area outside the

domains of landlord control. (1969: 290-291)

Wolf identifies middle peasants who possess their own land and both poor and middle

peasants occupying peripheral lands outside effective control of the authorities as the “tactically

mobile peasantry” that has constituted a critical base of support for agrarian revolutionary

movements in all six of the cases that he studied. He notes that this is the same “peasantry in

whom anthropologists and rural sociologists have tended to see the main bearers of peasant

tradition” but that paradoxically, “it is precisely this culturally conservative stratum which is

most instrumental in dynamiting the peasant social order.” (1969:292)

Of special interest in the Zapatista case, Wolf further notes the frequent importance of

ethnic and/or linguistic distinctiveness as a source of enhanced solidarity and, in the case of

linguistic distinction, as providing “for an autonomous system of communication” (1969:293).

For Wolf, the disruptive social effects of the integration into the world capitalist market

of the countries he studied was a common factor in precipitating revolutionary movements.

Revolutionary activity on the part of the peasantry in each of the cases was the product of the

distinct concrete historical circumstances of that society, but that in each case

[t]his historical experience constitutes, in turn, the precipitate in the present of a great

overriding cultural phenomenon, the world-wide spread and diffusion of a particular

cultural system, that of North Atlantic capitalism. (1969: 276)


The intrusion of this new cultural system, the integration of colonial hinterlands into the

circuits of global commodity markets, the ensuing disruption of traditional social relations that

had previously been a source of stability, all contributed to a world-wide wave of peasant-based

revolutionary movements in the 20th

century. While Wolf describes some of the particular effects

of this intrusion, he does not specify any further when such intrusions would and wouldn’t

precipitate revolutionary movements, directing his main attention at the internal agrarian class

relations as ultimately determinant.

Paige (1975) argues against Wolf that it is precisely agricultural wage laborers who have

constituted the core rural base of support for revolutionary movements. Responding to what he

sees as the inadequacies of simple typologies of export agriculture. Paige presents a theory of

rural class conflict that looks at rural class relations along two main axes. These are the main

sources of income respectively for the dominant non-cultivator class (land or capital) and the

subordinate cultivator class (land or wages). This produces four general types of rural class

relations each with its own characteristic economic and political relations and dynamics. It is

only where the dominant class relies on wage labor (typically in the form of sharecropping or

migratory labor), but the lack of capitalization leaves them little room to offer concessions, Paige

argues, that the conditions favor the emergence of a revolutionary movement genuinely rooted in

the countryside.

Indigenous Movements in Latin America

While there is some discussion of Wolf and Scott of ethnic and linguistice identity as a

factor in agrarian revolt, all of these works were published well before the upsurge in indigenous

movements in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s forced a rethinking of indigeneity. While


there have been a number of important studies of these movements, (Becker 2008; Cott 2004;

Warren 1998), so far Yashar (2005) has advanced the the most theoretically robust explanation

of their common structural causes which she sees as rooted in the transition from corporatist to

neo-liberal regimes. In her comparative study of several such movements, Yashar identifies three

factors as necessary for their emergence. These are: “changing citizenship regimes that

challenged local autonomy, transcommunity networks, and political associational space.” Yashar

goes on to argue that

neo-liberal citizenship regimes, setting out to shatter corporatism’s class-based model and

social rights and replace them with a more atomized or individuated set of state-society

relation, in fact challenged the indigenous local autonomy that corporatism had

unintentionally sheltered. (2005:55-57)

Central to this process, Yashar argues, has been the dismantling of agrarian reform measures:

[T]he indigenous character of the contemporary movement, however, extends beyond

material concerns for land as a productive resource. The potential loss of land also affects

the viability and autonomy of local indigenous political institutions that had operated in,

and assumed, a relatively well-defined and stable geographic space. (2005:68)

The associated restrictions on “community rights and de facto local autonomy” have

caused the communities to demand official state recognition on the basis of their indigenous

identity. This process is not automatic, however, but rather depends on the development of the

communities’ organizational capacities, which should not be assumed to exist. Indeed, Yashar

argues, given the physical distances that commonly separate indigenous communities and the

historical legacy of strong local identities, the organizational obstacles to launching a protest

movement are considerable.

It is only where “transcommunity networks” provided by “states, unions, churches, and

more recently NGOs” existed that indigenous communities have been able “to forge broad

indigenous movements.” (72) These networks “enabled indigenous communities to transcend


localized identities and to identify commonly trusted leaders” and develop “literacy skills and

cross-community social capital that enabled indigenous leaders to move between communities,

build support, and develop frames that resonated within and across communities.”(75)

While the experience of the indigenous communities in Chiapas conforms generally to

Yashar’s model, she does not consider the possibility that transcommunity networks might be

supplied, at least in part, by the revolutionary left and in her brief discussion of Chiapas does not

discuss the military dimension of the EZLN. Both of these considerations, I would like to

suggest, gave the indigenous awakening that occurred in Chiapas a quite distinctive character.

While the work of Moore, Wolf, Paige, and Yashar will inform the discussion of the structure of

agrarian relations in Chiapas in Chapter 5, it is the work of Skocpol (1979, 1994) that forcefully

raised the question of the role of ideology, which is at the heart of this study. It is to this question

that we will turn in the next section.

3.2 REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF REVOLUTION

In this section I will look at the question of the role of ideas and culture in general and of

revolutionary ideologies in particular in how the sociology of revolution has come to understand

the sources of revolutionary challenges and outcomes. I will do this mainly by looking at the

work of Theda Skocpol and the debates that it generated within the field. Special critical

attention will be given to the work of Timothy Wickham-Crowley, who applied Skocpol’s views

to the particular experiences of revolutionary guerrilla movements in Latin America.

The sociology of revolution began with the largely unexamined assumption that

revolutionary ideology, and the organizations that were the bearers of ideology, would be

important elements in explaining the causes and outcomes of social revolutions or attempted


social revolutions, even when it often treated ideology generically, that is to say without

particular attention to its content. The assumption of its importance, however, was challenged by

Skocpol (1979) who rejected the common assumption of previous theorists, which she

characterized as “voluntarist.” Skocpol summarized those assumptions as follows:

… changes in social systems or societies give rise to grievances, social disorientation, or

new class or group interests and potentials for collective mobilization. Then there

develops a purposive, mass-based movement – coalescing with the aid of ideology and

organization – that consciously undertakes to overthrow the existing government and

perhaps the entire social order. Finally, the revolutionary movement fights it out with the

authorities or dominant class and, if it wins, undertakes to establish its own authority and

program. (1979:14–15)

In opposition to this perspective Skocpol inisists that the key to explaining social revolutions lies

in offering an account of the conditions, both in terms of internal relations and of competition

between states within the international state system, that favor state breakdown. Skocpol rejects

accounts of the causes of revolution that rest on “class consciousness or hegemony for translating

objective conditions into actual revolution.” (1979:15) Rather she argues that a process of state

breakdown produced by once-strong states

caught in the cross-pressures between intensified military competition or intrusions from

abroad and constraints imposed on monarchical responses by the existing agrarian class

structures and political institutions.(1979:285)

While coming to dominate the sociology of revolutions, Skocpol’s positon also sparked a

lively debate on the role of revolutionary ideology and organization in revolutionary processes

that continues to the present.

Skocpol (1979) is perhaps best known for her commitment to “bringing the state back in”

and recognizing the state as an actor with interests that are variably autonomous from those of

the economically dominant economic class. In this respect her approach echoes Tocqueville.

Here again she is critical of Moore, but also of Marxists in general for their insistence on viewing


the state either crudely as an instrument of the dominant economic classes or as an arena of class

struggle instead of as “a set of administrative, policing, and military organizations headed, and

more or less well coordinated by, an executive authority.” (1979:29)

State institutions, in Skocpol’s view, have their own logics and interests that can be in

competition or conflict with dominant economic interests, at the very least in the appropriation of

resources or wealth. For Skocpol, the competition between states in the international system is a

major source of pressure on states leading to state breakdown and thereby precipitating

revolutions. She argues that

Transnational relations have contributed to the emergence of all social-revolutionary

crises and have invariably helped to shape revolutionary outcomes. (1979:19)

While it has been criticized from several different perspectives Skocpol’s state-centered

approach remains dominant to this day and is substantially upheld in the work of Wickham-

Crowley (1991a, 1991b), Parsa (2000) and Goodwin (2001) even while they qualify other

elements of Skocpol’s structuralism.

The Question of Ideology

While Skocpol’s attention to sources of state breakdown is a major contribution to any

serious analysis of the causes of successful revolutions, her dismissal of the role of ideologically

motivated revolutionary organization is more problematic. As Wolin argues, it is a

… widely acknowledged fact that, ever since the Puritan revolution of the seventeenth

century, ideology has been a recurrent feature of revolutionary outbreaks and that, if

anything, it has become even more evident in twentieth-century revolutions. This

suggests that some important relationship has come to obtain between belief and action, a

relationship that cannot be accounted for if a certain type of belief, that is, a certain type

of ideology, is categorized as a ‘value,’ or as a ‘subjective preference,’ or as the

expression of ‘alienation.’ Nor perhaps can revolutionary action be accounted for if it is

analyzed as the product of ‘frustration,’ which then somehow finds its appropriate


ideological ‘rationalization.’ What needs to be investigated is the relationship between

thought and action, or, more accurately, the new relationship signified by the fact that

modern revolutions have tended increasingly to be accompanied by revolutionary

ideologies. Stated in this way, however, the full force of the fact is lost because it implies

a parallelism between revolutionary actions and ideologies, whereas what is involved is a

constitutive relationship. In a constitutive relationship action is inseparable from its

meaning. An ideology such as Marxism is not only a system of meanings, but one which

conceives action as expressive of that system. An actor who is, so to speak, informed by

that system of meanings understands what he is doing or what is happening to him and to

others by virtue of a coherent prior understanding of what revolutionary action means.

(1973:347)

This still leaves the question of what precisely we mean when we speak of “ideology.”

Here I find Geertz’s (1977:193–233) discussion of ideology as a kind of “cultural system”

enormously helpful. After critiquing the prevailing, and pejorative, sociological understandings

of ideology as either an expression of “interest” or “strain,” Geertz argues that

The function of ideology is to make an autonomous politics possible by providing the

authoritative concepts that render it meaningful, the suasive images by means of which it

can be sensibly grasped.

Ideology then, is a system of symbols and meanings consciously constructed in response to the

failure of inherited traditional culture to provide sufficient guidance in the face radically altered

social circumstances. It is as Geertz explains,

precisely at the point at which a political system begins to free itself from the immediate

governance of received tradition, from the direct and detailed guidance of religious or

philosophical canons on the one hand and from the unreflective precepts of conventional

moralism on the other, that formal ideologies tend first to emerge and take hold. […] It is

when neither a society’s most general cultural orientations nor its most down-to-earth,

‘pragmatic’ ones suffice any longer to provide an adequate image of political process that

ideologies begin to become crucial as sources of sociopolitical meanings and attitudes.

As will become apparent in the chapters to come, this is exactly what occurred in the



In their astute critique of frame theory and argument that social movement theory must

engage the question ideology Oliver and Johnston offer their own tentative definition of ideology

as

a system of meaning that couples assertions and theories about the nature of social life

with values and norms relevant to promoting or resisting social change. (2000)

While not as developed as Geertz’s definition, Oliver and Johnston’s has the virtue of

recognizing the distinction within ideologies between, on the one hand, value components, and

on the other, social theory and they suggest, importantly, that the development of the latter “be

understood as part of intellectual history.”

In short, while ideologies must be understood as emerging out of particular cultural

contexts, insofar as they are responses to the failure of local traditional culture systems to

adequately account for transformations arising from integration into the capitalist world system,

they are often portable and potentially prone to circulate far beyond their points of origin. They

are culture systems in their own right and as such combine normative and analytic elements. As

consciously constructed and propagated culture systems, the process by which groups come to

embrace any ideology invariably involves the exercise of some form of political leadership, and

indeed all ideologies also thus entail implicit if not explicit theories of leadership.

The evident importance of revolutionary ideology, leadership, and organization in the

successes and failures of would be revolutionary challengers thus becomes the for both theorists

like Goodwin, Parsa and Wicham-Crowleywho otherwise accept Skocpol’s state-centered

approach and those like Walton, Selbin, and Foran who regard it more critically. Goodwin seeks

to distinguish between taking a state-centered approach and embracing a structuralism that

denies the role of purposive action or culture, arguing that his


state-constructionist approach is indispensable for understanding how radical ideologies

and strategic repertoires sometimes resonate with and diffuse among broad masses of

people. (2001:53)

Goodwin reminds us that state actors are often just as ideologically motivated in the

courses of action that they pursue as revolutionary challengers. What is state-centered in

Goodwin’s approach is his view that it is the posture of the state, by constituting the terrain on

which it must contend and attempt to build alliances, that determines whether or not a particular

ideological challenge to the state is likely to win adherents.

Walton further problematizes the insistence since Moore on looking exclusively at agrarian class

relations, arguing for closer attention to the relationships between urban and agrarian social

conflicts and even challenging the characterization of many revolutionary episodes as “peasant

revolts.” Walton carefully demonstrates in each of his three cases the important role played by

urban classes, whether laborers or traders, that found themselves in opposition to the state and

turned towards the countryside in search of allies and/or a space into which they could retreat

from repression in the cities.

Walton also rejects Skocpol’s disregard for the role of consciousness, arguing that the

“essential ingredient for revolt … is a dawning awareness that the established order of things in

all of its authority is not inevitable.” Walton equates this “sense of non-inevitability with

political consciousness” and, echoing Geertz, argues that “both have their origins in cultural

practice.” (1984:154) He continues to argue that

the making of revolution … does not follow spontaneously from the system of

underdevelopment or the machinations of the state. It is only as these interact with

cultural practice that political consciousness finds its theme and expressive vehicle.

(1984:156)


Selbin’s (1999) study of the trajectories of four Latin American revolutions is concerned

with understanding the revolutionary process after the political victory of the revolution and

distinguishes two parallel processes: institutionalization and consolidation. Institutionalization is

essentially the process of establishing stable state structures and mechanisms while consolidation

is the process of involving and investing the populace in carrying out the goals of the revolution.

While many theorists have recognized the importance of institutionalization, Selbin argues, they

have largely ignored the question of consolidation. For a social revolution to be successful,

Selbin argues, it must carry out both. Each process, however, calls for different kinds of

leadership. The process of institutionalization requires what Selbin calls “organizational

leadership” able to establish new institutions, whereas consolidation requires what he calls

“visionary leadership” able to inspire mass participation.

All of these insights, from Goodwin’s attention to the ideological content of state action

to Walton’s emphasis on the relations between urban and rural conflicts and actors to Selbin’s

distinction between organizational and visionary leadership will illuminate important moments in

the development of Zapatismo.

Can Peasants Think?

Walton raises a critical question that lies at the heart of this study, which is the

relationship between peasant participants in revolutionary movements and the specific

ideological content of those movements. Timothy Wickham-Crowley’s study of revolutionary

guerrilla movements in Latin America deserves special attention here for several reasons. It

represents, in spite of serious weaknesses, the most comprehensive attempt to theorize the

success and failure of revolutions and revolutionary movements within the region. More critical


for the purposes of this study, is that Wickham-Crowley’s analysis is strongly echoed in the work

of the anti-Zapatistas. While none of the anti-Zapatistas specifically cite Wickham-Crowley,

their arguments would be stronger if they did. They portray an urban university-educated

leadership utilizing social networks (the organization of catechists and family connections

between communities) rather than ideological appeals to recruit an indigenous campesino base,

and have consistently portrayed the Zapatistas as subordinating the indigenous-campesino

movement to the urban university-educated mestizo leadership of the FLN. All of which accords

with Wickham-Crowley’s model, especially in its understanding of the role of revolutionary

ideology.

Wickham-Crowley identifies five conditions for the historical success of revolutionary

guerrilla movements in Latin America (1991b:322). The first is that an attempt is made, and the

second is the extent of peasant (or rural worker) support. Following Skcopol, another condition is

regime weakness in the form of a Patrimonial or Praetorian regime. Another is the military

strength and effectiveness of the guerrillas, whom Skcopol would presumably regard as a state in

formation. The final consideration is the withdrawal of U.S. support for the regime. Drawing on

Paige’s emphasis on the role of sharecroppers and migrant laborers (to which he adds squatters)

and Scott’s emphasis on the violation of the peasant’s moral economy (to which he adds physical

dislocation) Wickham-Crowley attempts to identify the sectors of rural workers most likely to

respond to the revolutionary appeals of a guerrilla movement. He is less interested, however, in

the specific economic pre-conditions for rural insurgency (which are presumed to be both

heterogeneous and widespread), and more interested in the conditions that favor the fusion of

effective revolutionary leadership (drawn from urban university-based radical movements) with


a peasant base of support and the political circumstances under which such an alliance might

successfully overthrow an existing state apparatus.

While his treatment of the structural conditions of revolutionary successes and failures in

Latin America is illuminating it is Wickham-Crowley’s account of the relationship between

urban leadership groups and their peasant support bases (1991b:130-153) that commands the

attention of this study. Here he argues that peasant-based Latin American revolutionary guerrilla

movements should be understood as attempted alliances between, on the one hand, educated

urban middle and upper class left-wing youth, drawn largely from the universities and left-wing

political parties, and, on the other, peasants motivated by their own supposedly non-ideological

agrarian interests. There is a strong element of rational choice theory in his account of how these

alliances are constituted. Wickham-Crowley explicitly rejects the importance of the ideological

content of the appeals of would-be revolutionary leadership groups and argues that peasants join

guerrillas movements on the basis of rather narrowly defined self-interest. (While it is beyond

the scope of this study, see Wood’s (2003) treatment of campesino participation in the FMLN for

a brilliant dismantling of the “free-rider problem” so beloved by rational choice theorists .)

The role that conscious ideology plays in the motivations of the urban leadership is filled

for the peasant rank-and-file of the guerrilla movement by a pre-existing “rebellious culture”

constituted by previous historical experiences of rural unrest. Urban leadership groups are able to

establish significant peasant support then when they are able to tap into rural social networks in

areas that already possess a rebellious culture. For the purpose of understanding revolutionary

guerrilla movements at least, urban leaderships seem to have “ideas,” while peasants have

“cultures.” There are many problems with this account, but one that stands out is that what


precisely defines a culture as rebellious is precisely that it involves an embrace of ideas that

consciously reject the assumptions of unconsciously inherited traditions.

Wickham-Crowley critiques the assumptions of would-be consciousness raisers, whether

Leninist or Freirean in inspiration, and by extension the social scientists who take seriously

consciousness raising efforts among peasants by urban intellectuals in their accounts of the

success of revolutionary organizing efforts. While recognizing the importance of the ideological

commitments of the urban youth as a motivating factor he places considerable emphasis on their

supposed psychological roots in the extended adolescence experienced by university students.

Peasant participants in guerrilla movements, in contrast, are supposedly recruited first on the

basis of appeals to more immediate self-interest, and are only subsequently won over to the

ideological orientation of the movement. He identifies and objects to several propositions of

consciousness-raising: that there are “higher” and “lower” levels of consciousness, that peasants

generally suffer from a lower level of consciousness, and that only by having their

consciousnesses raised through interaction with revolutionary intellectuals can they come to

“understand the reality of their own social world” and take radical action to transform it.

Drawing on Peter Berger, he asserts the “equality of all empirically available social worlds”

(1991a:107) and rejects the supposedly inherent arrogance in any epistemological privileging of

one over another, insisting that a consensus among scholars of peasant revolt has been

established that:

social and political constraints, rather than ‘false consciousness’ inhibit collective radical

action of the peasantry; to paraphrase Mae West, consciousness has nothing to do with it.

(1991a:110)

Rather than “raising” the consciousness of peasants, university-educated guerrilla leaders

are instead, according to Wickham-Crowley, engaged in a process of converting peasants to their


revolutionary ideology after recruiting them on the narrower and more self-interested basis of

immediate grievances and by means of previously-existing social networks (1991a:126-131;

1991b:138-151) and “rebellious cultures.” (1991b: 131-137) The claim that the embrace of a

comprehensive revolutionary ideology follows rather than precedes recruitment to the

organization espousing it is thus critical to Wickham-Crowley’s overall argument.

Even while critiquing the supposed arrogance of would-be consciousness raisers, within

Wickham-Crowley’s model they remain the only source of any revolutionary ideology that any

peasants embrace. The object of criticism here then is not really the consciousness-raisers belief

that they can bring about a change in the worldview of peasants, since Wickham-Crowley freely

concedes that this happens, but rather the proposition that the revolutionary ideology that they

are converted to gives the peasants an understanding of “the reality of their own social world”

that is superior to their previous worldview. Indeed, Wickham-Crowley strongly suggests that it

offers them an inferior understanding when he argues:

Socialist revolutionaries have consistently demonstrated that [a program of land to the

tiller] is incongruous with their view of socialism. Therefore, calls for ‘the land to those

who work it’ should not be considered rapprochement with peasant interests unless the

revolutionaries evince a serious commitment to a type of land reform congruent with

peasant desires, which clearly rules out collectivization: no peasantry, pace Communist

Chinese claims, has voluntarily collectivized itself in modern history.(1991a: 122)

Leaving aside for now the merits of the claims and reasoning in this passage, it should be

clear that not “all empirically available social worlds” are actually equal in Wickham-Crowley’s

view and that peasants who embrace an ideology that isn’t “congruent with peasant desires” are

implicitly victims of a socialist false consciousness. Apparently, pace Mae West, sometimes

consciousness does have something to do with it. Wickham-Crowley presumes here that peasant

desires and interests are essentially static and predictable. I will argue that if we acknowledge


that “social and political constraints … inhibit [the] collective radical action of the peasantry,” it

is then reasonable to presume that those same “social and political constraints” act on the

consciousness of the peasantry as they choose whether or not to engage in radical collective

action. In other words, the social and political constraints of a particular social order don’t just

restrict what is possible, but by ideological means also what seems possible, and those horizons

in turn inform and constrain peasant desires.

When peasants embrace (or, as I will describe in the rest of this study, participate in

articulating) a revolutionary ideology that posits the possibility of overcoming social and

political constraints through radical collective action, peasant desires and interests do not stand

still. As peasants join revolutionary movements, their horizons change. While the immediate

promise of land to the tiller may contribute to participation in an insurgent movement, the larger

vision of a new society in which they have a political voice and access to agricultural credits or

clean water, medical care and schools for their children, opens the door to reimagining the

organization of production. The division of the land into individual plots and forced-march

collectivization need not be the only options on the table. In Chiapas, for example, the

communities aligned with the EZLN often have several decades of experience with various

forms of cooperative production, in many cases preceding their recruitment to the EZLN.

(Santiago Santiago and Omana Reyes 1999)

While Wickham-Crowley does not make explicit use of frame theory as it developed

within social movement research, (Snow, Rochford, and Benford 1986; Snow and Benford 1988)

his account of the process of peasant recruitment to guerrilla movements is remarkably

consonant with a frame theory approach. As Oliver and Johnston note, (2000; but see also Snow

and Benford 2000) framing has become the main conceptual vehicle through which the study of


social movements deals with the role of ideas in contentious politics. Peasants, according to

Wickham-Crowley, are recruited to guerrilla movements not on the basis of the revolutionary

ideology of the guerrillas but rather on an appeal to grievances articulated in terms consonant

with the peasants’already established beliefs and values. This is what would be called within

resource mobilization theory a model of strategic framing by social movement entrepreneurs.

The resonance of Wickham-Crowley’s model with frame theory, however, is in my view an

indication of its explanatory inadequacy, at least in the case of the origins of the EZLN. As

Oliver and Johnston argue in their critique of the displacement within social movement research

of the more political concept of ideology with the social psychological concept of framing:

Frame theory offers a relatively shallow conception of the transmission of political ideas

as marketing and resonating, while a recognition of the complexity and depth of ideology

points to the social construction processes of thinking, reasoning, educating and

socializing. (2000:37)

My concern in this study is not merely with how the grievances of the indigenous

communities came to be framed or by whom, but rather with the process by which a whole

counter-ideology that rejected or reconfigured important elements in the traditional worldview of

the indigenous communities as well as the dominant worldview of the ladino elite and the PRI

party-state came to be constructed and embraced by the communities. This in turn demands a

theory of ideological formation.

Despite his stated regard for their agency, implicit in Wickham-Crowley’s position is a

fundamental skepticism concerning the capacity of peasants to constitute themselves as a

collective historical subject capable of acting efficaciously to not simply resist, but to transform

the social, political and economic regime over them. While rebellious peasants may play a

critical role in the emergence and success of revolutionary challenges, in this view they are


considered unable to develop a revolutionary ideology of their own and are therefore ultimately

dependent on and therefore, insofar as they participate in revolutionary movements, subordinate

to the leadership of urban and mainly university educated left-wing youth. If would-be Marxist

consciousness raisers deny the rationality and hence the agency of peasant conservatism when

they characterize it as an expression of “false consciousness,” Wickham-Crowley’s position

mirrors this error, refusing to see peasant agency in the embrace of revolutionary ideology that

goes beyond the demand for land to the tiller.

The Dialectic of Ideological Leadership

While he does not address the specific question of peasant consciousness, Parsa offers an

alternative to Wickham-Crowley’s account of ideologically motivated leadership groups. Like

Selbin, Parsa is critical of structuralist approaches that underemphasize the role of ideology in

the emergence and outcomes of revolutionary movements. Parsa’s study of revolutionary

movements in Iran, Nicaragua and the Philippines combines insights of the state-centered

approach with a greater appreciation of the role of ideology in the emergence of revolutionary

challenges. Parsa also draws more extensively on social movement theory than many other

sociological theorists of revolution. All three of the regimes studied by Parsa – those of the

Shah, Somoza and Marcos – could be characterized as patrimonial. All three relied heavily on

U.S. support and when that support was called into question were confronted by popular

upsurges that swept all three regimes from power, but with widely divergent ultimate outcomes.

Parsa’s most interesting contributions, however, involve the role of ideology. Parsa argues that,

contrary to Skocpol, revolutions are in fact initiated by ideologically motivated actors, but that in

order to understand the influence of ideology it is also critical to grasp “the social origins of


ideologies and their relations to social structures.” (2000: 9) Towards this end, the bulk of

Parsa’s study consists of a comparison of the role of students, clergy, workers and capitalists

respectively in each of his three cases.

A critical source of the underestimation of ideology, according to Parsa, lies in the failure

to treat student movements seriously as an important constituent element in revolutionary

coalitions. Where Wickham-Crowley acknowledges university students as a source of future

leaders of guerrilla movements, Parsa sees students qua students as an important force in their

own right as well as a consistent source of future leadership. Precisely because the social role of

students implicates them in the reproduction of ideology student movements tend to be highly

ideological. It is because they have such strong ideological inclinations that students consistently

play a vanguard role in challenging exclusive regimes, opening the way for other actors. Clergy,

Parsa argues, are similarly entangled in processes of ideological reproduction. In each of his

three cases, clergy found themselves increasingly marginalized by the exclusive state with the

result that a minority became radicalized. While clergy were less prone to radicalization than

students they generally enjoyed an even higher degree of immunity from repression as well as

access to resources of value in challenging a regime. In addition to access to churches and

mosques as a meeting place outside of state control, clergy were well placed to turn localized

challenges into national ones.

While ideology is central to Parsa’s account, its influence is hardly a linear one. Workers

and capitalists both tend to be less ideologically motivated than students or clergy, but because of

their respective potential for exercising economic power, either in support of or in opposition to

the regime, their ideological orientation and development is ultimately even more important.

Parsa’s interest is in untangling the complex and dialectical interplay between the actions of the


state and the ideological development of each of the major actors listed above and the

consequences for the prospects of forming alliances and on what basis they can be formed. The

resulting relative strength of the respective sectors then informs the distinctive outcomes of each

of the three revolutions: a socialist regime in Nicaragua, a theocratic state in Iran, and the

persistence of elite rule sans Marcos in the Philippines.

Cultures of Resistance

The most empirically ambitious challenge to Skocpol’s structuralism comes from Foran.

(2005) Foran undertakes a comparative analysis of the full range of Third World revolutions and

non-revolutions, grouped into six categories: the great social revolutions, the great anti-colonial

revolutions, reversed revolutions, attempted revolutions, political revolutions, and non-attempts.

Foran holds that while the process of what he calls dependent development is the main source of

grievances of participants in Third World revolutions, that a “political culture of opposition and

resistance” is critical to the coalescence of an opposition.

Such political cultures of opposition may draw upon diverse sources: formal ideologies,

folk traditions, and popular idioms, ranging from ideas and feelings of nationalism

(against control by outsiders), to socialism (equality and social justice), democracy

(demands for participation and an end to dictatorship), or emancipatory religious appeals

(resistance to evil and suffering). (2005:21)

Absent such a culture, the other structural determinants of revolution will not produce

one. Foran presents a model in which “organizational capacity, lived experience, culture and

ideology come together to produce revolutionary political cultures” (2005:21) which in turn

facilitate the establishment of revolutionary challengers and the construction of broad coalitions.

Foran views the incorporation of this concept as “a necessary corrective to structural analysts”


and the basis for his insistence “on the irreducible role played by human agency and meaning in

the making (or not) of revolutions.” (22)

Unfortunately Foran’s methodology precludes a satisfactory consideration of the real

significance of “revolutionary political culture.” In the model he advances it is reduced to a

binary variable – either present or absent – to be plugged into a Boolean algebra to determine the

necessary and sufficient conditions for successful revolutionary challenges. This is clearly

inadequate and Foran clearly seems to know this. It comes out in his evident frustration with the

gap that he finds at the heart of sociological theorizing on revolution. He quotes Teodor Shanin

to this effect:

Social scientists often miss a centre-piece of any revolutionary struggle – the fervour and

anger that drives revolutionaries and makes them into what they are. Academic training

and bourgeois convention deaden its appreciation. The ‘phenomenon’ cannot be easily

‘operationalised’ into factors, tables, and figures. Sweeping emotions feel vulgar or

untrue to those sophisticated to the point of detachment from real life. Yet without this

factor, any understanding of revolutions falls flat. That is why clerks, bankers, generals,

and social scientists so often fail to see a revolutionary upswing even when looking at it

directly.

At the very centre of revolution lies an emotional upheaval of moral indignation,

revulsion and fury with the powers-that-be, such that one cannot demur or remain silent,

whatever the cost. Within its glow, for a while, men surpass themselves, breaking the

shackles of intuitive self-preservation, convention, day-to-day convenience, and

routine.(Shanin 1983:30–31 in Foran 2005:12)

Marxism as a Scientific Research Program

This frustrating disconnect has its roots, of course, in the fundamental division that exists

between revolutionary theory and sociology as a science of order, which in turn has its roots in

the structural antagonisms of the society itself. If revolutionary theory is the means by which

subalterns constitute themselves as collective political subjects, the academic study of

contentious politics is the means by which they are constituted as objects of systematic


knowledge within the institutional apparatuses of capitalism. Academic conceits of neutrality and

objectivity notwithstanding, universities and associated institutions (journals, book publishers,

professional associations, research foundations, etc…) are firmly embedded within and

profoundly shaped by the logics of capital. As centers of both research and the training of the

large professional and semi-professional strata of advanced capitalist societies, they fulfill

important functions in larger processes of ideological reproduction and are governed

accordingly. The constitution of disciplines and sub-disciplines, the definition of acceptable

theoretical and methodological approaches and the identification of legitimate research questions

all occur within this framework.

A suggestion of a solution to this deeper methodological frustration is offered in

Burroway’s (1989) critical comparison of the methodologies employed in Skocpol’s States and

Social Revolutions and Leon Trotsky’s 1906 Results and Prospects. Accepting Skocpol’s

characterization of her own method as one of induction, Buroway argues that Trotsky’s theory of

the Russian Revolution is best understood as an example of what Imre Lakatos called a

progressive research program. As Buroway explains,

Research programs emerge out of the attempt to protect the premises of earlier scientific

achievements against refutation. Scientists define certain hard core postulates, which they

accept by convention. According to the methodological principle Lakatos calls the

negative heuristic, refutations of the hard core are not allowed. Scientists defend the hard

core of their research program against falsification by various strategies, some of which

lead to progressive problem shifts and others to degenerating problem shifts. Protective

strategies lead to degenerating research programs when they reduce the empirical content

of the core postulates by restricting their scope or by labelling anomalies, that is, puzzles

or theoretically unexpected outcomes, as exceptions. Progressive problem shifts, on the

other hand, resolve anomalies by introducing auxiliary theories that expand the

explanatory power of the core postulates. Here scientists follow the methodological

principle Lakatos calls the positive heuristic, which is a research policy, made up of

models and exemplars, for digesting anomalies by constructing theories consistent with

the hard core. In other words, a progressive defense of the hard core takes the form of an

expanding belt of theories that increase the corroborated empirical content and solve


successive puzzles. Scientists should not evaluate one isolated theory against another but

rather sequences of theories that make up research programs. According to Lakatos,

therefore, scientific revolutions replace degenerating with progressive research programs.

(1989:761)

Buroway contrasts this with Skocpol’s reliance on the method of induction which he

argues leads her to assume that as “members of the same class of objects” the French, Russian

and Chinese Revolutions are products of the same causal factors, thereby ruling out “the

possibility that one revolution might inaugurate new conditions for subsequent revolutions.” By

constituting in this manner the revolutions as “isolated and disconnected events in space and

time,” Buroway argues, “[t]hey are thereby wrenched out of the organically evolving world

history of which they are part.” He then procedes to show how the same inductive methods

“leads to an account of the factors of social revolutions but not the social processes that make

those factors causes.” Skocpol thus “comes to the conclusion that revolutions ‘happen’ because

her method suppresses how they are ‘made,’ because it collapses necessary and sufficient

conditions.” While Buroway allows that “Skocpol spends a great deal of energy describing the

processes of revolution” he argues that “[s]he has no theory of how antecedent conditions lead to

revolutionary acts.” (1989:769-771)

In contrast with Skocpol’s reliance on inductive methods Buroway argues that Trotsky

grounds himself in a Marxist research program that he elaborates in the light of

anomalies, leading him to predictions, some of which are corroborated and others refuted.

But refutation does not lead to the rejection of the Marxist research program but to the

construction of new theories on the same Marxist foundation. By throwing up anomalies,

history is continually forcing the reconstruction of Marxism, leading, in turn, to the

reconstruction of history but also of possible futures. In this conception the historian

stands in the midst of history, caught between the future and the past, entering a dialogue

with a developing research tradition about the potentialities of the surrounding world.

(1989:763-764)


In short, while the positivist and inductive methods employed by Skocpol, and that

prevail within the sociology of contentious politics, are productive of some important middle-

range insights they are unlikely to generate a satisfying theoretical account of “how antecedent

conditions lead to revolutionary acts.” Marxism, by contrast, in Buroway’s view has retained its

character as a progressive research program, but must now address a number of accumulated

anomalies through “the elaboration of Marxist theories of state socialism, shedding a light on

earlier struggles for socialism.”(1989:791) In the next section of this chapter I will consider how

these anomalies in fact produced a severe crisis in revolutionary theory that would play a critical

role in the genesis of Zapatismo.

3.3 THE CRISIS IN REVOLUTIONARY THEORY

Revolutionary theory is in crisis. The praxis developed in the course of the Russian

Revolution, embodied most clearly in the organizational form of the Leninist vanguard party

and, where successful in achieving state power, the unitary party-state, amended and applied

over the course of the 20th

century chiefly in the largely agrarian and imperialized countries of

Asia, Africa and Latin America, has (with some noteworthy exceptions in South Asia) seemingly

exhausted its once enormous appeal as an instrument for the liberation of oppressed people.

While it is certainly possible to identify numerous earlier signs of this crisis, its depth was

revealed most clearly in 1968 by a number of roughly simultaneous events – the deadly failure of

Ché Guevara’s adventure in Bolivia, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the militarization of

the Cultural Revolution in China, and the response of the French Communist Party to the events

of May 1968, widely regarded as treacherous by the participants in those events. At precisely the

moment when the whole world seemed drawn into revolutionary upheaval, much of the


theoretical and organizational apparatus ostensibly elaborated to facilitate the revolutionary

emancipation of humanity revealed itself in multiple instances as instead a fetter on such a

process. As Badiou argued, the “sequence” initiated by the Russian Revolution had become

“saturated.” (2008) But of course the saturation of the sequence did not mean that the reasons

for revolution, or the need for coherent revolutionary theory as a guide to action, had

disappeared. On the contrary, it was precisely the intensification of both that exposed the

exhaustion of what had already been built.

Nor did the saturation of the sequence immediately produce a viable revolutionary

alternative to the Leninist forms and praxis, which still retained considerable prestige in the wake

of the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, and the ongoing communist-led liberation struggles in

Vietnam, Africa and Latin America. As a consequence, many of the most dedicated

revolutionary-minded members of the 1968 generation were nonetheless drawn to the sometimes

more and sometimes less orthodox Trotskyist, Guevarist or Maoist variants of Leninism and

many dedicated themselves over the course of the 1970s to building organizations based in such

politics and to efforts to root them amongst the urban and rural poor and laboring classes. These

efforts notwithstanding, the crisis in revolutionary theory only deepened. As the popular

upsurges of the late sixties and early seventies gave way to right-wing backlashes and neo-liberal

restructuring in the 1980s, few of these groups were able to organize effective resistance much

less to regain the offensive. An exception to this pattern, of course, was the EZLN, and this is

precisely what makes it of special interest.

Of course many members of the 1968 generation wanted nothing to do with any sort of

Leninist politics, choosing instead to infuse a variety of feminist, ecological, community-based

and other “new social movements” with the libertarian and participatory democratic ethos they


had taken from their experiences in the upheavals of 1968. These movements were, to varying

degrees, able to win reforms and advance processes of cultural change, but ultimately also found

their horizons constrained in the face of the neo-liberal onslaught. Having already rejected the

revolutionary pursuit of state power, they found it increasingly difficult to break out of the limits

imposed by the new neo-liberal dispensation. Once broadly radical imaginaries increasingly gave

way to the cramped thinking characteristic of turf battles as activists accommodated themselves

variously to the logics of the academic and non-profit sectors or factional jockeying within the

declining parties of the center-left.

Here and there, in squatter communities and other counter-cultural outposts, a smaller

fraction of the 1968 generation was able to carve out a space for a more militant but also

libertarian oppositional politics that preserved key elements of the spirit of 1968, but with no

serious prospects of, or even strategy for, defeating the capitalist state. Thus, while many

activists found ways to remain active and avoid the unpleasant associations attached to the

Leninist project, they did not thereby escape the more fundamental dilemma posed by the crisis

in revolutionary theory of constituting a serious revolutionary alternative.

The Problem of the State

At the heart of the crisis in revolutionary theory lies the problem of the state. The

Leninist project placed the capture of state power by a highly disciplined vanguard party at the

center of revolutionary strategy. The socialist transformation of capitalist society and the

preparation of the conditions for realizing communism demanded the overthrow and destruction

of the capitalist state apparatus and its replacement with a new kind of state based in the forms of

political self-organization already developed by the working class – the councils (or Soviets) of


workers, peasants and soldiers. Initially, in theory at least, this new kind of state was conceived

of as something much more participatory and democratic than any previous form of

representative liberal democracy, a state based in popular assemblies of those classes that

constituted the vast majority of the population and that had previously been effectively excluded

from the exercise of political power. In practice in Russia it quickly came to be dominated by a

single political party, the Bolsheviks, that first banned the other left-wing parties in the Soviets

and then banned factional debates within their own party, producing an increasingly monolithic

concentration of power in the party’s leading bodies (the Central Committee and the Politburo)

and finally, under Stalin, in the hands of its General Secretary. The reasons for each of the series

of decisions that ultimately produced a dictatorship of the party rather than a vibrant proletarian

democracy understandably seem considerably less compelling in light of the subsequent

development of the Soviet Union. They are, however, critical to understanding that development

in terms consonant with the hopes raised by the Russian Revolution itself.

A proper discussion of this history is beyond the scope of this study, so I will confine

myself to a brief statement of, rather than an argument for, the perspective on this history that

informs this work. Serge’s account (1992) of the first year following the October Revolution

remains critical for understanding how the logic of trying to maintain the gains of the revolution

in the face of rapidly unfolding events explain the resort to various repressive measures. It does

not, however, offer an adequate account of the theoretical grounding of the Soviet state that

emerged from this process. Bolshevism or Leninism first emerged as a distinct praxis in the first

years of the 20th

century as a response to the inability of the Marxism of the Second International

to adequately comprehend the revolutionary movement that was developing in Russia at that

time. The Marxism of the Second International was grounded in a determinist reading of Marx’s


work that posited a simple and inevitable progression of modes of production from feudalism to

capitalism to socialism and finally communism that was driven by the development of the forces

of production understood in narrowly technological terms. As Corrigan, Ramsay and Sayer

(1978) argue, Bolshevism represented an important but incomplete rupture with the determinism

of the Second International. It was a rupture because it recognized and relied on the

revolutionary agency of the proletariat to carry forward a socialist revolution when the theorists

of the Second International insisted that only a bourgeois revolution was possible. It was

incomplete because it retained the conviction that the technological development of the

productive forces on essentially the lines pioneered by capitalist development elsewhere, rather

than the transformation of the social relations of production through class struggle, was the

central task of the new socialist regime. A whole set of practices and policies flowed from this

conviction. One-man management of enterprises, the forced collectization of agriculture, and a

reliance on the law of value as a supposedly rational instrument for the allocation of resources all

both reflected this orientation and undercut the popular and democratic foundations of the

revolution. As Bettelheim (1977, 1978) has argued the forced collectivization of agriculture

during the first Five Year Plan, which fatally shattered the already strained alliance between the

peasantry and the industrial proletariat that was the necessary foundation for any socialist

democracy, reflected a mistaken continuation of the Second International’s contempt for the

revolutionary potential of the peasantry. It is important to emphasize here that despite other

serious differences this general orientation was shared by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin and indeed

the whole Bolshevik party.


In the rich, urbanized, and industrialized countries, the initial exhilaration initially

generated by the Russian Revolution progressively gave way to a recognition that the Leninist

party form was fundamentally inadequate to the tasks of making revolution in such contexts.

Lenin himself acknowledged the difficulties when he said:

You know that it is much harder for them to start a revolution in the Western countries

than it was for us because the workers there are in the presence not of a rotten autocracy

but of the most unified and cultured capitalist class. (Lenin 1973:348)

While Lenin clung to the hope of successful socialist revolutions in the West coming to the

rescue of the Soviet Union, it was not to be. The wave of revolutionary uprisings that swept

Europe in the aftermath of the First World War were all more or less promptly put down. The

workers in the West were not simply in the presence of a “unified and cultured capitalist class,”

but a whole array of institutions and practices that consistently blunted any revolutionary

initiative. The Leninist party may well have been ideally suited for carrying out a direct assault

on the rotten autocratic state of Czarist Russia, but it proved over and over again to be

completely inadequate as an instrument for shaking the hegemony of the capitalist class in the

West. Lukács and Gramsci both recognized and attempted to address these inadequacies at the

level of theory. While their efforts did much to illuminate the problem they did not give rise to

alternative strategies or organizational forms adequate to the problem. Instead, the Communist

parties of the West were in practice either ultimately thoroughly marginalized (as in the U.S. or

West Germany) or came to occupy the space and reproduce much of the political practice of the

Social Democratic parties (as in Italy and France), and in all cases opposing everything

genuinely revolutionary in the upsurges of the 1960s. In the West then, the question of the state

was posed in terms of the inadequacy of a political strategy that mechanically prioritized the


capture of state power to the exclusion of the transformation of culture and social relations in

civil society.

It was rather, in the poorer, primarily agrarian, colonized or semi-colonized countries of

Asia, Africa and Latin America, that the organizational forms pioneered in the Russian

Revolution revealed their real revolutionary potential to drive out foreign occupiers, overthrow

absolutist regimes, and revolutionize social relations (in land ownership, in the legal status of

women, in access to education, etc…). Nowhere was this illustrated more clearly than in China,

where the Communist victory in the Civil War that followed the Second World War signaled a

decisive end to colonial domination and a radical reorganization of social life with the abolition

of the landlord class and female slavery and a systematic assault on mass ignorance and illiteracy

unparalleled in human history. While the Chinese Communist Party diverged of course in a

number of important respects from both the practice of the Bolsheviks and the Comintern’s

codification of the experience as “Leninism,” there were also significant continuities, as there

were with the Cuban, Vietnamese and other cases.

While a characterization of the resulting regimes is beyond the scope of this study, they

produced a wide variety of ambitious experiments in social reorganization and were quite clearly

perceived by the dominant capitalist powers not simply as competitors within the world capitalist

system but as a threat to the system itself.

The problem of the state in these countries is posed not by the failure of the Leninist

party to plausibly contend for power, but rather by its success in capturing power followed by its

failure to produce a socialist polity that was also democratic, and therefore, in the long run,

viably socialist.


Outside the socialist countries themselves, this problem arguably presented itself to the

left in Mexico earlier than in many other countries. This was a consequence of Mexico’s own

experiences with both a revolution and the rule of a party-state. When the 1968 generation in

Mexico, embraced various strands of Marxism Leninism, they generally maintained a significant

measure of skepticism towards the party-state as an instrument of emancipation. In considering

why Zapatismo (or something like it) emerges first in Mexico, rather than somewhere else, then,

the complex legacies of the Mexican Revolution undoubtedly play a part.

The problem of the state expresses thus itself in two main ways in the crisis in

revolutionary theory. In the first instance it takes the form of a skepticism that a strategy focused

on the capture of state power can actually prevail within an advanced capitalist society or even

adequately addresses the fundamental problems posed in such a society. In the second instance it

takes the form of a skepticism that a successful party-state can exceed the limits of capitalism.

I would like to suggest that the intervening decades have produced a convergence of

these problems in the form, on the one hand, of the urbanization, industrialization and the uneven

consolidation of formal, if not substantive, liberal democratic norms in much of the Global

South, and, on the other hand, the hollowing out of the more substantively democratic features of

political life in the advanced capitalist countries in the course of their neo-liberal restructuring.

The problems that confronted the Leninist party form more or less immediately in the advanced

capitalist countries have now become generalized in most of the Global South as well.

The Subject in Question

Another aspect of the crisis in revolutionary theory revolves around the question of the

revolutionary subject. The identification of the proletariat as the unitary revolutionary subject by


Marx, and the identification of the vanguard party as its political expression by Lenin were

profoundly unsettled by the actual unfolding of revolutionary and other anti-systemic movements

over the course of the 20th

century. The tsunami of anti-colonial struggles, signaled by the

Chinese Revolution and in which the peasantry played the main part, proved to be only the first

of several major challenges to Marxist orthodoxies. If Leninism was able to give a political

account of the importance of national liberation movements it proved considerably less able to

speak to the cultural and psychological dimension of decolonization, a problem that emerges

more sharply in the course of the decolonization of Africa, especially with regard to those

countries with large European settler populations as well as in the course of anti-racist struggles

inside the United States and other advanced capitalist countries. The complex and contradictory

relationship between national cultures and the decolonization of people’s minds was almost

completely unanticipated by Leninism. Similarly the emergence in the 1960s of powerful

movements based among students and youth, women and sexual minorities, and many others

(the “new social movements”) and the comparative quiescence in most cases of the industrial

proletariat, led to a questioning of what was increasingly viewed as Marxism’s fetishization of

labor and the figure of the industrial worker.

It is against this backdrop of a crisis in revolutionary theory revolving around the

questions of the state and the revolutionary subject that a radical critique is articulated, first in

Althusser (1969, 1971; 1971) of any notion of a revolutionary subject and then in Foucault and

others of any politics that identifies control of the state as a concentrated expression of power

and therefore legitimate object of struggle. While this critique was initially articulated in France

in the aftermath of the 20th

Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 and

the Sino-Soviet split in 1960, its deeper significance really only became apparent in the wake of


the events of 1968. The rise of this critique in the early 1970s, however, coincided with the

launching of a counter-offensive against the movements of the 1960s, that we have since come to

call neo-liberalism, which sought precisely to fracture anti-systemic movements by an assault on

the whole range of social guarantees conquered by popular movements not just in the 1960s but

over the whole course of the 20th

century. Insofar as the post-structuralist critique of the

universalist claims of Marxism provided a theoretical valorization of more narrowly conceived

identity-based political struggles it simultaneously contributed to the welcome emergence of a

multiplicity of new subjects while it legitimized a fracturing of struggles that on their own had

little prospect of seriously challenging the power of the capitalist state. The price to be paid for

this fracturing became apparent when, in the triumphalist aftermath of the collapse of Soviet

Union, the United States shook off its case of “Vietnam Syndrome” and launched the First Gulf

War.

Lenin and the Russian Revolution

To fully appreciate the political consequences of these developments it is useful to

reconsider the problems that the Leninist party form sought to answer. As already noted,

following Marx’s death a more determinist reading of Marx’s theory of revolution would come

to dominate the thinking of the Second or Socialist International. In this reading, the very

processes of capitalist development themselves would ensure the ultimate victory of the socialist

revolution. Accordingly there was more and more emphasis on the tasks of building up the

apparatuses of the unions and the party and less and less attention to developing the

consciousness of the workers beyond the sort of catechism needed to be a proper member of one

organization or another. Thus a determinist reading of Marx fostered what Russian Social


Democrats would come to critically refer to as “economism,” the view that the revolutionary

consciousness needed by the proletariat would arise automatically out of its economic struggles

with capital and that the chief taskof revolutionary intellectuals was to facilitate the organization

of those struggles.

It is Lenin who strikes at the determinism and economism of the Second International.

Lenin grasped that economic struggles alone, even when they erupted into fierce strikes, would

not produce in the working class the consciousness necessary to take hold of society. This

required rather, revolutionary agitation and education around all the political questions of the

day, in particular around questions of war and peace. Participation in parliamentary politics

might or might not provide a useful arena for this work depending on circumstances, but under

no circumstances was this political work to be confined to the parliamentary arena.

Lenin’s famous comment that “workers left exclusively to their own strength can

cultivate only a trade union consciousness” (1969) and that revolutionary consciousness must be

brought to them by members of the intelligentsia is frequently cited as an example of Lenin’s

supposed elitist contempt for the intellectual capacities of ordinary workers, but as Lih (2008)

has shown, Lenin is actually arguing here with other socialist intellectuals about their

responsibilities to take the consciousness of the workers more seriously and that it was rather in

fetishizing the spontaneous consciousness of the workers, Lenin argues, that condescension was

really shown for their capacity to grapple with the great political questions that they would need

to fully understand if they were to run the world.

Lenin’s theory of the vanguard party has frequently been linked with the earlier

conspiratorial traditions of the Jacobins, Blanquists and Narodniks as reflecting an elitist vision

of “revolution from above.” I would argue that, on the contrary, it reflected a major advance in


the development of a dialectical understanding of the relationship between political leadership

“from above” and the emergent revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat “from below.” The

vanguard party, by Lenin’s lights, enables the proletariat to realize its revolutionary subjectivity

not in some automatic way via participation in economic struggles but rather as a result of its

development through conscious political struggle. As Lenin explains,

all worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of

“the conscious element”, of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of

whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of

bourgeois ideology upon the workers. All those who talk about “overrating the

importance of ideology,” about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc.,

imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an

independent ideology for itself, if only the workers “wrest their fate from the hands of the

leaders”. But this is a profound mistake. […] why, the reader will ask, does the

spontaneous movement, the movement along the line of least resistance, lead to the

domination of bourgeois ideology? For the simple reason that bourgeois ideology is far

older in origin than socialist ideology, that it is more fully developed, and that it has at its

disposal immeasurably more means of dissemination. (1969)

As we will see, the reasons for the persistent domination of bourgeois ideology are not

quite as simple as Lenin suggests here. But their subsequent elaboration only further reinforces

his central point with respect to the spontaneous tendencies of the movement and the consequent

critical role of “the conscious element.”

The Russian Revolution challenged not only the determinism and economism of the

Second International, but also the privileged place of the mature industrial proletariat of the

advanced capitalist countries. The first proletarian revolution in Europe was not made by the

English or German workers who had built up such an impressive array of working class

organizations and experiences over several decades, who had supposedly matured through their

participation in parliamentary politics. On the contrary it was made by the very recently

proletarianized peasants of Russia herded into newly minted giant factories and acting in concert


with their peasant sisters and brothers in the countryside and the armed forces, a proletariat

arguably closer in its profile to the participants in the Revolutions of 1848 or the Paris Commune

than the well-fed and disciplined German trade unionists of 1914.

Lenin’s theory of imperialism also provided an explanation of sorts for why it was the

Russian and not the German proletariat that took the lead in making revolution. The super-profits

of imperialism constituted the material basis of opportunism within the European workers

movement. By various means, including the influence of a “labor aristocracy” the European

proletariat had come under the ideological domination of its respective national bourgeoisies.

The economic backwardness and brutality of Russia meant that the Russian proletariat was the

“weak link” in this system and therefore the first to rise to the challenge of making a proletarian

revolution. While there is undoubtedly an element of truth in this explanation it misses even

more fundamental obstacles. As a consequence, while Lenin’s repudiation of the determinism

and economism of the Second International and his recognition of the primacy of the political

struggle for the consciousness of the working class represented a critical theoretical advance of

universal significance, the particular form of the vanguard party developed under conditions

quite particular to Russia would ultimately prove incapable of carrying forward social

revolutions in the advanced capitalist countries.

Revolutionary Roots of Western Marxism

The task of drawing out the theoretical implications of both the unexpected success of the

Russian Revolution and then the unexpected failures of socialist revolutions in the more

advanced capitalist countroes would be taken up in post-World War I Europe by Georg Lukács

and Antonio Gramsci. Both of these thinkers seized on and then elaborated the theoretical


implications of Lenin’s break with the economism and determinism prevailing within Second

International Marxism.

In History and Class Consciousness, (1972) Lukács locates the roots of the opportunism

of the parties of the Second International in the reified consciousness produced by the dominance

of commodity exchange over the social life of the proletariat. In a similar vein, Gramsci explains

the apparent stability of the more advanced capitalist countries through the exercise of the

intellectual hegemony of bourgeois thought over the subaltern classes. In Lenin: A Study on the

Unity of His Thought, (1998) Lukács makes the philosophical case for Lenin’s view that only a

disciplined revolutionary organization that concentrates and represents the revolutionary

consciousness imputed to the proletariat can potentially overcome this reified consciousness.

The bourgeoisie does, indeed can not, rule simply by direct domination. Rather it depends

on having secured through a protracted historical process leadership of a bloc of heterogeneous

class forces that enables it to exercise intellectual hegemony over the rest of society. While

Lukács and Gramsci give different accounts of how capitalism secures the intellectual

dependence of the working and other oppressed classes their explanations can be seen as

complementary attempt sto further develop Lenin’s initial insights with respect to the dilemnas

of developing the intellectual independence of the working and other oppressed classes within

the context of the various mechanisms that produced and reproduced their dependence. It is

critical to emphasize here that for both Lukács and Gramsci the revolutionary vanguard party

form pioneered by the Bolsheviks is key to overcoming these dilemnas. Thus Gramsci argues

that it is only through a disciplined revolutionary party (the “modern prince”) that the proletariat

can elebaorate its own organic intellectuals and contend for hegemony by constituting a new

popular-national historic bloc of classes and class fractions under its intellectual leadership.


Every single one of the revolutionary uprisings that followed in the wake of the First

World War went down to defeat. It was against this backdrop that Lukács was officially

chastised within the Third or Communist International and the determinist reading of Marx was

effectively restored as the philosophical foundation of the official Soviet state ideology of

Marxism-Leninism. Gramsci’s heresies, of course, escaped the fate of Lukács’s only by going

unpublished until after his death and the military defeat of his fascist jailers.

Lenin, Lukács and Gramsci’s view of the relationship between the party and the emergent

political subjectivity of the working class was thus replaced by Stalin’s more instrumental

approach, articulated most succinctly in Foundations of Leninism, where in his discussion of the

requirements of “the method of Leninism” he speaks of “the restoration of the disturbed unity

between theory and practice, the healing of the rift between them” (1970:22) and concludes his

chapter on The Party with a portrait of the party as a monolith devoid of factions accomplished

through a succession of purges of “opportunist elements” that bears little resemblance to the

contentious internal political life of the Bolshevik organization under Lenin’s leadership. While

Stalin dutifully attacks the theory of productive forces embraced by the Second International, the

model of socialist development that he pursued rested firmly on its presumptions.

In the aftermath of the failed revolutions in Western and Central Europe in the 1920s a

chasm opened up between Marxism and revolutionary politics broadly in the West and in the

colonized and semi-colonized countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. The International

Communist Movement dominated by the Soviet Union and the Soviet experience, which might

have bridged this divide, instead came to reinforce it.

The efforts of Lukacs and Gramsci to theorize the revolutionary failures in Europe had as

their object the development of a new revolutionary praxis appropriate to the conditions of more


advanced capitalist countries with more robust civil societies. If Gramsci’s death in a fascist

prison seems in retrospect more dignified than Lukacs’s life in a Stalinist university, both

poignantly underscore the failure of this project. Their project would not be carried forward by

the Western Communist Parties, (though Gramsci would be appropriated as the first theorist of

Eurocommunism in the 1970s) but rather by the broad theoretical current known as Western

Marxism distinguished by an increasingly sophisticated critique of the role of culture and

ideology in advanced capitalist society but also by a fundamental pessimism with regard to the

prospects for its revolutionary supercession.

Revolutionary Theory in the Third World

Just as the close of the First World War briefly opened the floodgates of revolutionary

challenges across Europe, the close of the Second World War opened up the floodgates of

revolution across the Third World. This time the revolutionary challengers encountered

considerably greater success. And just as the unfolding of a revolutionary situation in Russia

demanded a confrontation with the determinism of the Second International, the wave of

revolutions across Asia, Africa and Latin America demanded a reckoning with Soviet Marxism’s

determinism. Both successful and failed revolutions carried out on three separate continents

produced a number of distinct theoretical breaks with Soviet Marxism, each revolving around

the persistent questions of revolutionary subjectivity. To varying degrees all the major

revolutionary movements in the Third World embraced the Leninist analysis of imperialism and

some variation on the vanguard party as the appropriate organizational model. At the same time

their experiences were as heterogeneous as the conditions that obtained in Asia, Africa and Latin

America. And thus so were the resulting contributions to the development of revolutionary


theory. While we will have the opportunity to consider in more or less depth the specific content

of several of the theorizations of thesese xperiences, here it will have to be sufficient to note that

despite their considerable heterogeneity, the works of José Carlos Mariátegui (2006; 2009;

Mariategui 1959), Mao Ze Dong (2002; 1967a, 1967b, 1971a, 1977a), Ernesto “Ché” Guevara

(1969; 2002; 2006), Frantz Fanon(1994a, 1994b, 2005, 2008), and Paolo Freire (2000) all

involved pointed challenges to Soviet Marxism’s determinist elevation of supposed laws of

capitalist development over the role of the culture, consciousness and ideology in the

revolutionary process.

Of these theorists, only Mariátegui appears to have been exposed to the critical current

represented by Lukács and Gramsci, and this in the form of Gramsci’s less developed pre-prison

writings. At points Mariategui seems to go further in the role he accords conscious leadership

than even Lukacs or Gramsci, advocating for a socialist use of myth that shows the influence of

Sorel (2010) on his thinking. An important concept developed by Mariátegui was that of the

critical role of the mistica revolucionaria or revolutionary spirit of would-be leaders, an idea that

would come to be closely identified with the heroic image of Che Guevara and that played an

important role in the political culture of the revolutionary left in Latin America broadly and of

the FLN and the EZLN in particular. It would not be until the 1960s when they were published in

Cuba that Mariategui’s writings gained a significant readership outside Peru. They are of special

significance for a couple reasons. The first is that they form a sort of abandoned bridge between

the current of critical European Marxism of Lukacs and Gramsci and the Third World Marxisms

that rose up mainly in the context of post-war anti-colonial movements. A second is that they

anticipate by several decades the decisive emergence of “the indigenous question” in the 1980s

which obviously played an important role in the genesis of Zapatismo.


The important point here is to indicate that where living revolutionary movements

emerged they all inevitably came into conflict with the positivism and determinism of Soviet

Marxism which acted as an obstacle or brake on their organic development. Out of this conflict

arose a variety of efforts to develop theory that articulated these movements’ lived revolutionary

subjectivity and recognized the critical role played by culture and ideology in the constitution of

that subjectivity. Each of the thinkers noted above did this in a different way, drawing on quite

heterogeneous theoretical resources, and producing quite varied and distinct results. If no one of

them succeeded in identifying and resolving all of the problems confronting revolutionary

theory, taken together they reveal a great deal about the extent of those problems but also the

breadth of the efforts to overcome them. They also indicate something of the range of ideological

options available to the generation of young people simultaneously radicalized by the events of

1968 and confronted with the crisis in revolutionary theory. Much of this study will consider

precisely how Zapatismo emerged from a synthesis of tseveral of these different currents in the

crucible of the indigenous-campesino movement in Chiapas.

3.4 VISIONS OF AUTONOMY

The Zapatista uprising touched a nerve among radical left activists and intellectuals

around the world and spoke to the intense feelings of impotence and frustration on the left in the

wake of the events of 1989 and the First Gulf War. The timing of the uprising to coincide with

the implementation of NAFTA gave the revolt a certain immediate international resonance.

Among these currents, one emerged rather quickly as dominant within the transnational Zapatista

solidarity network. That is the current with its historic roots in Italian autonomous Marxism and

represented most visibly within the transnational Zapatista solidarity network initially by Harry


Cleaver and John Holloway, and subsequently in the alter-globalization movement by Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri. This current would alsofind a strong echo in the work of a number of

Latin American theorists who attempted to bring autonomous Marxist ideas into conversation

with post-colonial thought. Most prominent among these are Gustavo Esteva, (1998; 1995) Raul

Zibechi, (1995) and Walter Mignolo. (2002) I will concentrate here, however, on the works of

Cleaver, Holloway, Hardt, and Negri, not because their arguments are neccesarily any stronger,

but because of their greater influence on the alter-globalization movement, especially outside

Latin America. Taken together these four thinkers articulated an analysis that identified

Zapatismo chiefly as a response to major political-economic transformations in late 20th

century

global capitalism.

Cleaver played a critical role in the early dissemination of information about the

Zapatistas by helping establish the multi-lingual Chiapas-95 internet list. In a series of articles,

(1994a, 1994b, 1998a, 1998b) Cleaver advances several influential theses. In a widely reprinted

article written only six weeks after the uprising (1994b:5-17) Cleaver notes the extraordinarily

rapid circulation of information about the Zapatista revolt and the no less rapid broad

mobilization of solidarity with an armed organization previously not even known to exist.

Cleaver responds in the negative to his own question of whether the Zapatistas were “just

another foredoomed repetition of earlier, failed Leninist attempts to organize the peasantry to

join the party and smash the state.” Rather, linking the Zapatistas to the then recent cross-border

movement against NAFTA, and the role of the internet within that movement, he argued that

the process of alliance building has created a new organizational form – a multiplicity of

rhizomatically linked autonomous groups – connecting all kinds of struggles throughout

North America that have previously been disconnected and separate.


Cleaver draws a connection between what he characterizes as the horizontal, non-

hierarchical networks built up by indigenous and campesino groups in Mexico, “sometimes

based on traditional ethnic culture and language” and the similar networked organizational forms

associated with the internet.

Later Cleaver elaborates on these themes and links the emergence of the new

organizational forms associated with the Zapatista uprising with the supposed decline in the

power of the nation state. He also argues that the Zapatistas themselves have played a critical

role in the constitution of what he calls “an alternative political fabric.” After describing the

growth of the networks of NGOs and other civil society organization as a result of their use of

the internet, Cleaver claims that

no catalyst of that growth has been more important than the indigenous Zapatista

rebellion … and the widespread political mobilization to which it has contributed.

(1998a)

Cleaver supports this claim with detailed accounts of the ways that information about the

Zapatista revolt drew together previously disconnected online circles of scholars and activists

interested in quite disparate issues. He also corrects the popular image of the Zapatistas

themselves as savvy cyber-activists sending out communiqués by internet from the Lacandon

Jungle. What is important about the Zapatistas is rather their capacity to rapidly adapt to this new

terrain, to make effective use of the academics, NGO workers and activists who were circulating

reports on the Zapatistas around the world, and to recognize the ways in which this new terrain

demanded a radical reconception of their strategic orientation.

Holloway, a Professor of Sociology at the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades

of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico, was a member of the editorial

committee and frequent contributor to the Spanish-language journal Chiapas. With Eloina Peláez


he also edited an English-language collection of articles on the Zapatistas (1998) and is the

author of the Change the World Without Taking Power (2002), an influential work among alter-

globalization activists which relied heavily on the Zapatistas as an example of a movement that

is supposedly “making the world anew without taking power.”(2002:20)

Holloway argues that the global significance of the Zapatista revolt derives from the

universality of its demand for “dignity” in opposition to both the “authoritarian discipline which

has characterized so many revolutionary movements of the past” and the fragmented

particularities of identity politics. The Zapatistas, according to Holloway, are “reinventing

revolution” by waging “a struggle, not for power, but against it.” (1998:1-18)

Arguing that “the idea of dignity has not been invented by the Zapatistas, but [that] they

have given it a prominence that it has never before possessed in revolutionary thought”

(1998:160) Holloway finds that the importance of the idea of dignity resides in its potential to

constitute a unity of the diverse struggles against global capitalism that the classical Marxist

attempt to subordinate all struggles to the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the

proletariat had manifestly failed to achieve.

Holloway insists, however, that “dignity is a class concept, not a humanistic one.” He

rejects what he characterizes as the orthodox Marxist concept of class based on the subordination

of the working class to capital in favor of a relational one based on “the relation

insubordination/subordination.”(1998:182) The principal antagonism in society does not exist

then between two groups of people but rather between different ways in which human social

practice might be organized:

Class struggle does not take place within the constituted forms of capitalist social

relations: rather the constitution of those forms is itself class struggle. This leads to a

much richer concept of class struggle in which the whole of social practice is at issue. All


social practice is an unceasing antagonism between the subjection of practice to the

fetishized, perverted, defining forms of capitalism and the attempt to live against-and-

beyond those forms. There can thus be no question of the existence of non-class forms of

struggle. (1998:183)

This reconceptualization of class struggle is central to Holloway’s attempts to resolve the

a problem which he regards as “at the heart of any concept of revolution,” namely:

How could it be possible for those who are currently alienated (or humiliated) to create a

world of non-alienation (or dignity)? If we are all permeated by the conditions of social

oppression in which we live, and if our perceptions are constrained by those conditions,

shall we not always reproduce these conditions in everything we do? (2002:185)

Counter-posing the Zapatista’s practice of “mandar obedeciendo” to the Leninist notion

of the vanguard party, which he characterizes as a “deus ex machina” non-solution to the

problem, Holloway argues that only a politics that starts from the contradictory nature of our

existence under capitalism, from the resistance that arises from our conditions of oppression, can

possibly produce a resolution to this fundamental problem. But this in turn invovles a

reconceptualization of revolution as “simply the constant, uncompromising struggle for that

which cannot be achieved under capitalism: dignity, control over our own lives.” (186)

Cleaver and Holloway’s themes have been taken up and repeated so widely that they

have become a kind of common sense within the alter-globalization movement, a common sense

that did much to prepare the reception of the works of Hardt and Negri, also rooted in autonomist

Marxism. Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) makes only passing references to the struggle in

Chiapas. Multitude, (2004) however, much more explicitly and repeatedly invokes the Zapatistas

as representative of the transformations they seek to analyze, describing them as

the hinge between the old guerrilla model and the new model of biopolitical structures

and as


demonstrating in the clearest possible terms the nature and direction of the postmodern

transition of organizational forms. (2004:85)

Multitude argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new revolutionary subject,

the multitude, in conjunction with the establishment of the new imperial sovereignty posited in

Empire. The multitude is the product of the newly hegemonic forms of immaterial labor and the

organization of immaterial production in the non-hierarchical form of distributed networks.

Supposedly unlike previous historic attempts to constitute a revolutionary subject (the proletariat,

the people, etc…) the multitude draws strength from its diversity rather than attempting to

suppress it through the establishment of a new sovereignty.

The emergence of the multitude signals the possibility for the first time in history of an

enriched and global democracy on the basis of the greatly enlarged “common” – that which the

various singularities that make up the multitude share, or rather produce, in common as a result

of their common participation in immaterial labor (which produces ideas, knowledge, affects,

relationships, etc…) . The appearance of the multitude is the product of a prolonged geneology

of resistance

which demonstrates a tendency toward increasingly democratic organization, from

centralized forms of revolutionary dictatorship and command to network organizations

that displace authority in collaborative relationships. (2004:xvi)

Multitude is a sweepingly ambitious political philosophical investigation into the

emergent and distinctive logic of global capitalism at the beginning of the 21st century and its

implications for the possibilities of its revolutionary overthrow. It identifies and theorizes many

of the profound changes associated with globalization and considers their impact on the

constitution of new subjectivities in the course of resistance to capital. While Hardt and Negri

remind us twice that they are not advancing a particular program or strategy for contemporary


social movements, the sweeping character of their claims for the possibilities of a global

democratic and anti-capitalist revolution and their rejection of the historic models developed by

liberalism and Leninism inevitably raise questions about the programmatic implications of their

argument.

Here their argument rests heavily on supposed examples of the multitude in action. Hardt

and Negri cite a number of contemporary movements and struggles as expressions of this new

revolutionary subject. These include the White Overalls movement in Italy, the militant

demonstrations against the various international summits in Seattle, Quebec, Genoa, Cancun and

so on, as well as some an assortment of land and environmental struggles occurring around the

world. But no single contemporary struggle, however, gets the attention awarded the Zapatistas.

It is worth quoting their first appearance in the book at some length:

The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), which first appeared in Chiapas in

the 1990s, offers an even clearer example of this transformation: the Zapatistas are

the hinge between the old guerrilla model and the new model of biopolitical network

structures. The Zapatistas also demonstrate wonderfully how the economic transition

of post-Fordism can function equally in urban and rural territories, linking local

experiences with global struggles. The Zapatistas, which were born and primarily

remain a peasant and indigenous movement, use the Internet and communications

technologies not only as a means of distributing their communiqués to the outside

world but also, at least to some extent, as a structural element inside their

organization, especially as it extends beyond southern Mexico to the national and

global levels. Communication is central to the Zapatista’s notion of revolution, and

they continually emphasize the need to create horizontal network organizations rather

than vertical centralized structures. One should point out, of course, that this

decentered organizational model stands at odds with the traditional military

nomenclature of the EZLN. The Zapatistas after all, call themselves an army and are

organized in an array of military titles and ranks. When one looks more closely,

however, one can see that although the Zapatistas adopt a traditional version of the

Latin American guerrilla model, including its tendencies toward centralized military

hierarchy, they continually in practice undercut those hierarchies and decenter

authority with the elegant inversions and irony typical of their rhetoric. (In fact, they

make irony itself into a political strategy.) The paradoxical Zapatista motto

“command obeying,” for example, is aimed at inverting the traditional relationships

of hierarchy within the organization. Leadership positions are rotated, and there


seems to be a vacuum of authority at the center. Marcos, the primary spokesperson

and quasi-mythical icon of the Zapatistas, has the rank of subcomandante to

emphasize his relative subordination. Furthermore, their goal has never been to defeat

the state and claim sovereign authority but rather to change the world without taking

power. The Zapatistas, in other words, adopt all the elements of the traditional

structure and transform them, demonstrating in the clearest possible terms the nature

and direction of the postmodern transition of organizational forms. (2004:85)

The Zapatistas are thus not simply a good illustration of the multitude in action, they are

an important point of reference for other cases. In a discussion of the Italian movement known as

the White Overalls, Hardt and Negri claim that “the reawakened European metropolitan

proletariat needed a new politics … and they found it in the jungles of Chiapas.” (266) Although

they are careful to offer caveats, Hardt and Negri have the Zapatistas doing a lot of the heavy

lifting when it comes to demonstrating the reality of their new revolutionary subject.

While the autonomists reading of Zapatismo has been enormously productive, it suffers

from two major deficiencies. First, in their attention to the extensive development of networked

organizational forms, locally, nationally and globally, in the wake of the Zapatistas’1994

urprising, the autonomists deprecate the critical function of more centralized and disciplined

organizational forms in facilitating the development and maintenance of those networked forms,

chief amongst these being the military command structure of the EZLN itself. At the end of the

day the EZLN remains a disciplined and hierarchically organized military-political organization

and it is difficult to imagine it accomplishing a fraction of what it has without the advantages

offered by that organizational form. Similarly, while eschewing the pursuit of state power at the

national level, the Zapatistas have, in effect, constituted themselves as a state within a state with

all of the attendant capacities for tax collection, law enforcement, adjudication of disputes and so

on. Without these capacities, their construction, and maintenance over more than a decade, of

autonomous spaces would quite simply have been impossible.


Second, the autonomists read the development of the disitinctive ideology of the

Zapatistas simply as a repudiation of the various Leninisms of Unión del Pueblo, Política

Popular and the FLN in favor of their own semi-anarchist views of organization, leadership and

democracy. This reading rests on a caricature of these earlier organizations that flattens out both

the considerable differences between the FLN and the Maoists as well as the contradictions

within each group. I would argue, for example, that the supposedly most libertarian practices of

the Zapatistas are strongly anticipated in the participatory democratic ethos of the decidedly non-

orthodox Maoism of Unión del Pueblo and Política Popular (despite the subsequent trajectories

of some of their leaders and members) and the mass campesino organizations they helped build

in the 1970s, but that those practices were not sustainable in the face of intensified state

repression beginning in the early 1980s. It was precisely for this reason that the communities

were won to the necessity of a more militarized organization advanced by the cadres of the FLN

in the form of the EZLN. A closer examination of the FLN I believe will also show that it does

not conform to the caricature of it implied by the autonomist Marxist reading of this history.

Rather the politics of the FLN evolved in response to the experiences of it and other Mexican

guerrilla groups in the 1970s in ways that enabled them to productively fuse with the

communities that had initially experienced mass radicalization under the leadership of the

Diocese and the Maoists.

Hardt and Negri betray little knowledge of this critical pre-history of the EZLN and treat

the statements of subcomandante Marcos about the internal regime of the EZLN completely

uncritically. It is certainly true, for example, that the autonomous civilian governance structures

developed by the Zapatistas after 1994 have experimented with the rotation of leadership, but

the composition of both the civilian comandancia of the EZLN and its military officers has


remained quite stable and the claim that there is “a vacuum of authority at the center” of the

EZLN is sheer nonsense.

In sharp contradiction with Cleaver, Hardt, Negri and Holloway’s faith in the

spontaneous generation of revolutionary consciousness, I am arguing that in fact highly

disciplined and centralized organizations (the diocese, the Maoist groups, and the FLN),

pursuing ideological objectives, played a critical role at each step in this process contributing to a

deepening of the conscious collective self-activity of the communities.

If the international support structure that arose in the wake of the 1994 uprising takes the

form of a distributed network, it is still critical to understand that the EZLN itself did not, could

not have, and should not have, taken such a form. Indeed, if one were searching for an example

of an organization that more closely resembled the distributed network form it would be the

ejidal unions built by the communities with the assistance of the the Maoists in the 1970s. As I

will show in this study, it was precisely the inadequacy of this more horizontal form that led the

communities not to abandon them, but to supplement them by embracing the decidedly vertical

political-military project of the EZLN.

Similar problems attach to Hardt and Negri’s claim that:

This subordination of the military to the political is indeed one of the principles of the

Zapatistas in Chiapas. In many way the Zapatistas have adopted the tradition of Latin

American guerrilla armies with an ironic twist. They do call themselves an army and

have commandants, but they invert the traditional structure. Whereas the traditional

Cuban-model poses the military leader dressed in fatigues as the supreme political

power, the Zapatistas insist that all military activity must remain subordinate, at the

service of the political decisions of the community. (2004:343)

As we shall see, this “inversion” is a far more contradictory matter than is suggested here.

The EZLN’s leading body, the Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine Committee – General

Command (CCRI-CG) while composed of ostensible civilian “representatives” of the various


regions and ethnic groups that make up the EZLN’s support bases, was only established a year

prior to the 1994 uprising and there is no reason to believe that its members were “elected” by

the communities. The Zapatistas themselves make no such claim. The members of this body are

all or mostly all experienced veterans of the clandestine life of the political-military organization.

While perhaps not all involved in military matters, the distinction is a blurry one in a clandestine

revolutionary organization. Contrasting the EZLN’s structure with the “Cuban-model” makes it

seem more innovative than would comparing it to the Chinese or Vietnamese models in which

the military structure of the popular army was always subordinated to the civilian authority of the

Communist Party. The point here is not that there aren’t differences between the EZLN’s

structure and other structures, but rather that there is a continuum of structural solutions to the

problems of military and civilian authority, suggesting a generalized hybridity and not the tidy

dichotomy between authoritarian and anti-authoritarian forms advanced by Hardt and Negri.

Indeed, I am arguing that it is precisely the fact that the EZLN is, in fact, organized along

the traditional lines of a hierarchical political-military vanguard organization that has enabled

them to survive the often intense repression directed at the communities that are their base and to

secure a political space in which the distributed network forms that the autonomists are so fond

of, could actually survive and develop.

The autonomists self-inflicted blindness on theses matters reflects, I believe, an

underlying methodological flaw in their still valuable approaches. This flaw is to treat a new

tendency in capitalist development as if it weren’t subject to the effects of counter-tendencies or

internal contradictions. The new forms of immaterial production may very well generate

distributed network forms of organization which in turn have some of the effects attributed to

them. But the emergence of these forms is not the end of the story. The contradictory nature of


capitalism generates contradictory organizational logics which interpenetrate and produce hybrid

results. Rather than an absolute tendency towards more and larger distributed networks, we are

just as, or even more, likely to encounter distributed networks tasked with certain responsibilities

but subordinated to disciplined hierarchical structures empowered to make big decisions.

Software companies, for example, use distributed networks of developers to solve problems

within architectures determined by leading teams who answer to strategies developed by

business management. The proliferation of distributed networks has also brought in its wake a

proliferation of hierarchical surveillance technologies and regimes.

If Hardt and Negri’s insight that the appropriate revolutionary organizational forms of an

era parallel the organization of production, then the acknowledged hybrid character of the

Zapatista’s organizational form might be better understood as keeping pace with the logic of

global capital rather than as a transitional form between the “old” hierarchical forms of the

Leninist party and the “new” distributed network form of the multitude. If this is the case it

would suggest the need for a radical reappraisal of the real implications of the processes that the

autonomists have done so much to illuminate. The autonomist authors considered here have all

identified important emergent phenomena in the workings of global capital and the resistance to

those workings. Their insistence on the critical role of resistance in informing the strategic

transformations in the organization of capital and their appreciation of how the new

organizational forms arising from immaterial production inform the new organizational forms

that resistance takes make for fruitful analyses of the Zapatistas in particular and contemporary

social movements in general. Unfortunately, their accounts are insufficiently dialectical in their

failure to grasp the contradictions internal to the tendencies they have sought to explicate. These

contradictions are real and exercise a powerful influence on both the organization of capital and


that of any resistance that seriously seeks to challenge capital. Since their theory has the ambition

of not simply identifying, but also assisting in the constitution of, a new revolutionary subject, its

failures in this regard have more than academic consequences. A closer and more historically

grounded examination of the Zapatistas, who figure prominently in their arguments, reveals the

limitations of their approach and is suggestive of important ways in which their central theses

might be reconceived.

3.5 RETHINKING REVOLUTION

History is at its least automatic when it is the consciousness of the proletariat that is at

issue. The truth that the old intuitive, mechanistic materialism could not grasp turns out

to be doubly true for the proletariat, namely that it can be transformed and liberated only

by its own actions, and that “the educator must himself be educated.” The objective

economic evolution could do no more than create the position of the proletariat in the

production process. It was this position that determined its point of view. But the

objective evolution could only give the proletariat the opportunity and the necessity to

change society. Any transformation can only come about as the product of the – free –

action of the proletariat itself.

Georg Lukács

History and Class Consciousness

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which

reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which

abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the

premises now in existence.

Karl Marx, The German Ideology

The Zapatista uprising did not just happen. It was made. While it is undoubtedly possible

using the methods and models developed within the sociology of contentious politics to identify

the main antecedent conditions that predisposed the indigenous communities to rebel, those

methods and models will not give us a satisfactory explanation of how come the politics of the

rebellion took the distinctive form that they did. In order to develop such an explanation we need

to understand how the cultural and ideological formation of new revolutionary subjects responds,


not just to local social conditions, but to the global development of the larger revolutionary

process of which they are a part.

While I will describe in the next chapter the social conditions that I believe favored the

organization of an indigenous revolt in Chiapas it is not my intention here to argue for any of the

particular available models of the causes agrarian revolt nor to advance one of my own. I am

seeking only to establish the general context in which the revolt emerged so as to inform the

discussion of why it took the form that it did, which is to say why the people who made it did so

the way that they did.

Zapatismo is not simply a conveniently cobbled together justification of the self-

interested actions of the indigenous campesinos who make up the ranks of the EZLN. Nor is it,

as Wickham-Crowley might suggest, an expression of the psychological frustrations of

university-educated left-wing youth, adopted wholesale by the EZLN’s campesino base for their

own instrumental reasons.

It is rather, I will be arguing, an expression of the global development of communism as

“the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” Sociology and the other social

sciences have generally quite happily appropriated to themselves much of Marx’s critical

analysis of capitalism, integrating it into a methodology that remains still largely positivist. What

has been, for the most part, left to the side, as if it were some sort of indigestible piece of gristle,

is Marx’s understanding of communism, which is judged to be either too normative or too

speculative to have any place in serious social science.

If, however, as Buroway suggests, Marxism still functions as a progressive scientific

research program, I would argue that the idea of communism must be regarded as a critical


component of its hard core of assumptions, not as an extraneous element that can be discarded

while leaving the rest intact.

As Marx argues, communism is not an ideal in the minds of a group of people. It is rather

an objectively existing movement that arises “from the premises now in existence,” that is to say

from the premises of the modern capitalist world system that first began to take form in the 16th

century. If it first expresses itself unconsciously in seemingly spontaneous outbreaks of revolt, it

strives from the start to become conscious of itself, because it is only as it becomes conscious

that its potential become realizable.

Revolutionary theory in general, and Marxism in particular, are thus to be understood as a

continuously evolving product of this striving. The development of revolutionary theory is

nourished by the real struggles of oppressed peoples against their oppression, and its

development is driven first and foremost by the problems posed in the course of those struggles.

Revolutionary theory does not arise, however, out of some abstract general global state of affairs.

It arises rather under various particular local circumstances which are themselves expressions of

the uneven character of capitalist development and which inevitably mark it. Marxism didn’t just

happen to be born in the 19th

century Europe. It was a response to processes of development

within a European-centered capitalist world system, in particular the appearance for the first time

anywhere of the figure of the industrial proletariat and its then still quite primitive and spasmodic

revolts against the not yet fully consolidated rule of the bourgeoisie. The subsequent

development of revolutionary theory, which is to say of the self-consciousness of the actually

existing communist movement, consists of a series of greater and lesser modifications of the core

ideas developed by Marx and Engels, in the face of contradictions arising in the course of actual

historically specific revolutionary struggles.


These modifications are not simply adjustments to new circumstances and different

national settings, but also responses to a continuous process of drift as the organized expression

of the movement (in leagues, parties, fronts and so on) are inevitably subjected to the reifying

influence of daily existence in bourgeois society. In theoretical terms this process of drift has

historically expressed itself in the forms of determinism, positivism, economism and

opportunism. The challenge facing each fresh revolutionary outbreak, then, is for it to correctly

identify and digest what is universal in the accumulated lessons of previous movements, while

also recognizing not only what is particular and therefore perhaps not applicable in other

circumstances, but also what is in fact an expression of the dominant ideology.

This pursuit of theoretical clarification occurs primarily through processes of ideological

struggle, that is to say in the concrete competition between more or less developed intellectual

leadership groups for the consciousness of particular larger social groups. As such it also always

has its own cultural specificity which is to say that it occurs within a particular cultural context

characterized by its own dynamics. If we accept Geertz’s notion of ideologies as cultural systems

that arise in response to the failure of traditional cultural systems we should be able to also

understand that the ideological struggles that have characterized the whole process of the

development of revolutionary theory have also always occurred within the context of

disintegrating, but still influential, traditional cultural systems.

Zapatismo then, I will argue, is a local product of a global process. It is a recent chapter

in the much longer story of the oppressed majority of humanity’s striving to realize the

communist idea made real by the emergence of the capitalist world system. While it had recourse

to the proto-communist thought of the indigenous communities which has roots going back at

least to the immediate aftermath of the conquest in the 16th

century, its global resonance derives


primarily from its creative response to the deep crisis in revolutionary theory that revealed itself

most clearly in the course of the revolutionary upheavals of the 1960s. As such the story of its

genesis has the potential to illuminate a number of problems posed by that crisis.

I am arguing that Zapatismo is a synthesis of several distinct currents of communist

thought. That synthesis did not occur in a single moment, but rather over the course of roughly

thirty years. While it is of course impossible to trace every shift in the thinking of every

participant in this process it is possible to identify a series of nodal moments when key groups

underwent important transformations in their political outlook.

The first of these moments is the development of what I am calling a proto-communist

consciousness within the indigenous communities in the wake of the conquest and their radical

reorganization by Dominican missionaries animated by a Lascasian Christianity that challenged

the central organizing principle of the Spanish colonial empire, namely the racial subordination

of the indigenous people to their new colonial masters. This current of thought coexisted with

others and expressed itself openly only episodically in the form of major indigenous revolts, but

was nonetheless nurtured and passed from generation to generation into the 20th

century.

The second moment was the crisis in the whole traditional worldview of the communities

in the post-Second World War period, when radical transformations in the political economy of

Chiapas exposed the inadequacy of that worldview and made them receptive to a wide range of

competing modern ideological projects including evangelical Protestantism, liberation theology,

Maoism, and finally the left-wing revolutionary nationalism of the FLN.

The third moment, and arguably the most critical one, was the elaboration of a layer of

organic indigenous campesino intellectuals in the course of the training of indigenous catechists

by the Diocese of San Cristóbal. It was the appearance of this group that gave the communities to


which the catechists belonged the potential for intellectual independence that was a condition for

their constitution as a self-conscious collective political subject. This process was not

foreordained and in fact developed very unevenly from community to community, but where it

brought the proto-communist thought present in the communities into protracted conversation

with the most radical currents within the liberationist church it nurtured into existence the

nucleus of a new and highly creative political force.

The fourth moment in this process was the constitution of the indigenous campesino

movement through which this nucleus established itself as the leading element of a much larger

social group. This moment was facilitated by the arrival of several waves of Maoist asesores

who deepened the communities critical analysis of capitalism and their own place within it and

greatly developed their organizational capacities.

The fifth moment was the constitution of a fraction of the indigenous campesino

movement as a revolutionary people which no longer simply saw itself pursuing its own

particular interest but which rather identified itself deeply with a larger project of human

emancipation. This coincided with a crisis in the indigenous campesino movement precipitated

by the exhaustion of the Maoist project, the leadership of which was collaborating more and

more with elements in the ruling party at the very moment that the indigenous campesino

movement was facing intensified state repression.

The sixth moment is effective fusion of the political-military organizational project of the

FLN with a deeply radicalized fraction of the indigenous campesino movement leading to the

founding of the EZLN in 1983 and its subsequent expansion to incorporate much of the larger

movement. The revolutionary people had found their organizational expression in the form of a

revolutionary army.


The seventh moment, and from the perspective of this study the final one that concerns

us, involves the overthrow of the ladino leadership of the FLN and the decision on the part of the

communities to launch the uprising.

The identification of these nodal moments helps us see the simultaneous and interwoven

processes through which a new revolutionary subject was constituted, both theoretically and

practically, over the course of several decades. Insofar as they reflect particular struggles with

problems that confront anti-systemic movements more generally I am suggesting that a closer

look at each should enrich our understanding of the sources of Zapatismo’s global resonance and

give us a much fuller appreciation of the lessons that Zapatismo has to offer such movements

than a simple reading of the Zapatistas post-1994 political discourse and practices ever will.

Below I discuss in somewhat greater detail the theoretical perspectives that will inform the

consideration of several of these nodal moments.

The Making of Organic Indigenous-Campesino Intellectuals

Gramsci argues that the elaboration of organic intellectuals is a necessary condition for

any group to constitute itself as a revolutionary historical subject. More specifically Gramsci

argued that the proletariat’s political party must elaborate its own organic intellectuals in the

course of its development into a class fit to rule society. The elaboration of a strata of organic

proletarian intellectuals (who may or may not individually be of proletarian origin) is also a

condition for the alliance of diverse class forces under proletarian leadership. (Gramsci 1971:3–

23)

I am arguing that the pre-history of the EZLN that I will present in the rest of this study

suggests an enlargement of Gramsci’s framework in which it is possible, at least under certain


conditions, for a peasantry, or fraction thereof, to elaborate its own organic intellectuals. I am

further suggesting that this enlarged Gramscian framework establishes the basis for a much more

satisfactory account than Wickham-Crowley’s model of the actual relationship between urban

university educated leaders and the indigenous communities that came to constitute the support

bases and main source of recruits for the EZLN. In contrast to a rational actor model that

presumes that peasant perceptions of their interests are static, this framework provides for a

dynamic process of emergent political subjectivity.

The emergence in Chiapas of a stratum of “organic indigenous-campesino intellectuals,”

while not primarily proletarian in origin, very much represent what Gramsci calls a “new social

type” (1971: 6) that corresponds to a new revolutionary subject. In Chiapas one of the chief

mechanisms of the reproduction of what Gramsci calls traditional intellectuals, namely the

Catholic Church, was transformed into a vehicle for the constitution of organic indigenous-

campesino intellectuals through the training of indigenous catechists. In this way, the indigenous

communities were able to progressively constitute themselves as a new collective historical

subject. This was a process of emergence in which the Diocese facilitated the subsequent

acquisition of experience through political struggle with the landed elite and the state, which in

turn nourished a series of struggles with the authority of the Diocese, of the Maoist advisers and,

finally of the ladino leadership of the FLN.

I am arguing that it is because of the elaboration of a strata of organic indigenous-

campesino intellectuals prior to the encounter between the communities and urban university-

educated members of the FLN that the case of Chiapas confounds Wickham-Crowley. My

argument is that the conditions which may once have prevented the elaboration of a strata of


organic peasant intellectuals, are no longer insurmountable and that the constitution of such a

strata in Chiapas demonstrates this.

This framework privileges the revolutionary ideology that the organic indigenous

campesino intellectuals articulated and that the indigenous communities came to embrace over

the traditional outlook of the communities which, while it enabled them to survive centuries of

crushing racist oppression and exploitation was by the 1960s entering into terminal crisis.

Adherents to the new ideology obtained a more accurate picture of their actual place in the larger

world, a more dignified vision of their potential place, and a program for realizing that vision.

This ideology facilitated a cultural revolution within the communities, breaking down age and

gender hierarchies that concentrated power in older men, preventing the communities from

effectively resisting depredations by landlords and the government. This ideology promoted

more equal relations within the communities, helping community members to imagine

themselves not just as full and equal citizens of Mexico but as agents of a larger social

revolutionary process that would transform not just Mexico but the whole world.

Global Circulation of Counter-Systemic Ideologies

While local conditions and processes importantly mediated the emergence of Zapatismo

and it can not be understood without attention to those local conditions and processes, it is no

less critical that we understand how these conditions and processes were embedded in global

processes and conditions. These include not only the global political economic transformations

touched on above, but perhaps more importantly for our purposes here, the global circulation of

counter-systemic ideologies and their respective associated political practices.


The indigenous-campesino movement that emerged in Chiapas in the 1970s was very

much a part of the global upsurge of counter-systemic social movements and insurgencies that

erupted following the conclusion of the Second World War and that reached its climax in 1968.

If I am arguing that the Zapatista case confounds Wickham-Crowley’s model of the

relationship between urban university-educated leadership groups and peasant-based

insurgencies, I do not deny the important role of outside actors or of their role in introducing

counter-systemic or revolutionary ideology into the peasant milieu. Indeed I am arguing

precisely that the exposure of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals to not one, but several,

globally circulating counter-systemic ideologies in the form of a succession of distinct political

projects, was critical in the development of the political independence of the communities that I

am arguing underpins Zapatismo.

The Diocese, the Maoists and the FLN trained literally thousands of indigenous

campesinos in more and less sophisticated Marxist critiques of their social conditions and

experiences in struggle. The disputes between (and within) the different political projects, and

the communities own experiences of the concrete limitations of each, in turn sharpened their

ability to creatively synthesize elements from theoretically diverse sources for their own

purposes.

Zapatismo is not simply a mixture of elements drawn from diverse sources. It is rather the

product of a particularly rich experience of contestation between several counter-systemic

ideologies, each one of which was itself the product of revolutionary processes in other parts of

the world as well as of the crisis in revolutionary theory discussed previously. The indigenous

communities of Chiapas were thus drawn into a whole set of debates taking place within the

revolutionary left coming out of the 1960s. If initially their judgements were informed primarily


by the immediate results of the competing political projects in their own lives, they became

increasingly conscious of the larger national and international context in which their seemingly

local struggles were occurring. The US defeat in Viet Nam, the trial of the Gang of Four in

China, the Nicaraguan Revolution and the civil wars in Guatemala and El Salvador, the

emergence of Solidarnosc in Poland, the challenges to the military dictatorships in the Southern

Cone countries of Latin Aerica, the fight against Apartheid in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin

Wall – all of these events came to color their understanding of their own struggles and were

critical in their constitution as a “revolutionary people” who were not simply fighting for title to

this or that piece of land but rather for a different world.

Out of this process of ideological contestation the indigenous communities acquired not

only an appreciation of the practical strengths and weaknesses of each current, they acquired a

radically transformed sense of their own place in the world and the meaning of their lives. If they

retained, or more precisely reclaimed and reasserted, their cultural identities as indigenous

peoples, they did so in a manner that radically reconceived the meaning of those identities

bringing to bear, first anti-colonial and class analyses, and later ecological and feminist thinking,

that identified them as agents of global social transformation. If the full extent of this process

would not become apparent until after the 1994 uprising it is nonetheless possible to

retrospectively trace it back several decades.

Radicalization of the Communities

The crisis in the traditional authority structures of the indigenous communities, the

production of organic indigenous-campesino intellectuals, the experiences of the indigenous-

campesino movement, and the influence of several globally circulating counter-systemic


ideologies, all had the effect of generating a continually deepening process of political

radicalization in many of the indigenous communities. By radicalization here I mean an

increasing attention to, and sophistication in analyzing, the root causes of the conditions

confronting the communities, as well as a growing understanding of the extent of the social

transformation necessary to adequately address those conditions. Specifically it meant a

developing a critical awareness of the legacy of colonialism in the subordinate status of the

indigenous peoples and the persistence of semi-feudal social relations between them and

Chiapas’s landed oligarchy. It also meant developing an analysis of Chiapas’s place within the

world capitalist system and of how transformations within that system were in turn effecting

Chiapas. Finally it meant a growing awareness of the necessity not just of collective action, but

of revolutionary change if these transformation were to be stopped from destroying the

indigenous communities.

This process of radicalization was a protracted one. It involved both continuous processes

of political education as well as several nodal moments that produced significant leaps in the

political outlook of different fractions of the communities and movement. A particularly critical

one of these moments occurred in 1983 when the Maoist advisers to the main campesino

organization operating in the Cañadas region of the Lacandon Jungle were expelled from the

indigenous communities and several months later the EZLN was founded in the heart of the

jungle. These two events marked the culmination and convergence of two previously distinct

processes. The first was the exhaustion of a strategy, promoted by the Maoists, of seeking

alliances within ruling circles and prioritizing demands aimed at increasing the productivity and

profitability of indigenous lands through access to credits and other forms of support over more

socially explosive struggles demanding the redistribution of lands in the hands of the landed


oligarchy. The second process was the political maturation of the FLN that enabled them to

finally succeed where previously they, and many others in Mexico, had failed, by establishing a

guerrilla nucleus ultimately able to win over significant enough popular support to transform

itself into a genuine people’s army. We will now look a little more closely at each of these

processes.

The Exhaustion of Economism

The Zapatistas draw on Lenin’s arguments in What Is To Be Done and elsewhere when

they describe the strategy pursued by the Maoists as one of “economism.” By economism, Lenin

meant the faith that through their trade union, or economic, struggles, the Russian proletariat

would arrive more or less spontaneously at a revolutionary socialist political perspective. Lenin’s

objection to the strategy of the economists was that it abdicated responsibility for the specifically

socialist political education of the working class, thereby confining the workers to the narrower

and therefore reformist political horizons of those struggles. The story of how a layer of students

radicalized by the violent suppression of the 1968 student movement and inspired by the

example of the Cultural Revolution in China came to counsel an increasingly militant

indigenous-campesino movement to refrain from land takeovers and to instead attempt to build a

credit union and ultimately to align themselves with the neo-liberal wing of the PRI is critical to

understanding the origins of Zapatismo. Central to this story is what the Maoists referred to as

the “mass line method of leadership,” which was pivotal to their successes in building up mass

independent campesino organizations and deeply informed the subsequent political culture of the

communities that participated in those organizations. It also proved to be their undoing, leading


to their eventual expulsion from the communities and the communities embrace of the political-

military strategy of the EZLN.

The Testing of the FLN

While the Maoists in Mexico were building up mass organizations based among the

residents of poor urban neighborhoods, industrial workers and campesinos, another wing of the

radical left was clandestinely attempting to build for or carry out revolutionary armed struggle.

Over a dozen urban and rural guerrilla groups emerged in the 1960s and early 1970s. With the

important exceptions of the guerrilla movements led respectively by Lucio Cabañas and Genaro

Vazquez in the state of Guerrero, these groups failed to develop bases of popular support. All of

them, including the groups based in Guerrrero, became the targets of a little known “dirty war”

and virtually all of them were effectively destroyed by the late 1970s. One exception to this was

the FLN, which rejected spectacular actions such as kidnappings, bombings and bank robberies,

in favor of a “silent accumulation of forces.” The FLN made several costly failed attempts to

establish a guerrilla presence in the Lacandon Jungle before the founding of the EZLN in 1983.

In 1974 the organization was almost destroyed in a series of police and military operations

against its urban and rural bases, that resulted in the death or imprisonment of many of its

leading members. These failures, as well as close study of the experiences of other Mexican

guerrilla groups, progressively led the FLN to reconceive its original orientation in a manner that

enabled them to finally establish a strong organic relationship with the indigenous-campesino

movement. By 1983 they had recruited a cohort of young indigenous activists who were

prepared to establish a new guerrilla nucleus and who would become the organization’s bridge to

the communities.


Indigenous Awakening

Although the Zapatistas represent themselves as the inheritors of longstanding traditions

of indigenous resistance going back to the Spanish conquest, the role of the indigenous identity

and cultural traditions of its members in the development of the EZLN is complex. While the

catechist movement had its initial roots in the initiative of the traditional authorities of the

communities in response to Protestant evangelization, the training of catechists and their

privileged access to the resources of the church quickly gave rise to a complex antagonism

between them and the traditional authorities. The catechist movement was very much a

modernizing movement. Its emphasis on the written word, its attacks on the ritual use of alcohol,

its opposition to “superstition,” and its elevation of women and youth were all experienced as

profound attacks on the power of the traditional authorities. As the pastoral staff of the Diocese

became more conscious of the historic role of the church in the suppression of indigenous culture

they shifted their discourse and sought to reconcile the younger catechists with the older

authorities. Similarly, both the Maoists and the FLN, at least initially, viewed the oppression of

the indigenous communities in purely class terms and saw the assertions of ethnic identity as

retrograde features of the indigenous-campesino movement to be overcome.

It is also important to recognize here the recent origins of a consciously indigenous

identity. While the several indigenous ethnicities corresponded to varying degrees with one or

more pre-conquest polities, for most of the nearly 500 years of post-conquest history there were

no institutional structures that knit together all of the Tzeltales or Tojolabales much less any that

encouraged a common identification between the different ethnicities. This is not to suggest that

there were never before any expressions of pan-indigenous solidarity or recognition of a


common plight, but rather that they were transient and usually the product of unusual

circumstances. Under normal conditions until the last decades of the 20th

century the social

horizons of the most of the Mayan Indians of Chiapas did not typically extend much beyond the

handful of villages or fincas immediately surrounding their own.

Which is to say that the indigenous political identity advanced by the Zapatistas must be

understood as a modern political construction that may draw deeply from traditional sources but

is profoundly structured by contemporary conditions and developments.

3.6 CONCLUSIONS

The sociology of revolutions can illuminate some of the structural causes of the Zapatista

rebellion. It is, however, considerably less prepared to account for its distinctive politics.

Zapatismo, like other revolutionary ideologies, is organized around a core set of social

theoretical claims and analyses. An account of the distinctive politics of Zapatismo demands a

serious engagement with those claims and analyses and an understanding of their significance

within the overall historical development of revolutionary theory, which in turn must be

understood in relation to the global revolutionary processes which give rise to it.

Zapatismo therefore can not be understood simply in terms of the social conditions that

existed in eastern Chiapas and that nurtured the rebellion. It must also be understood as a

rearticulation of what Badiou has called the “communist hypothesis” in the context of a global

crisis in revolutionary theory that made itself apparent in the global revolutionary upsurge of

1968. That crisis, arising from the success of revolutionary movements in capturing state power

in several countries, revolved around the character of the revolutionary subject, its organizational

form and its relationship to the state. While it took different forms in different contexts, in every


situation it involved a fundamental tension between the respective roles of revolutionary

leadership and mass democracy in the revolutionary process. The several major ideological

influences on the indigenous campesino movement and on the EZLN, that is to say Liberation

Theology, Maoism, Guevarism and radical indigenismo, should all be understood as themselves

partial responses arising in different ways out of this crisis.

Zapatismo thus emerged out of the intersection and convergence of several globally

circulating counter-systemic ideologies and the struggles of the indigenous communities of

Chiapas to deal with the effects of several major political-economic transformations that

threatened their survival and produced a crisis of legitimacy for the traditional authorities of the

communities and their worldview.

This resulting complex process of political development first produced a layer of organic

indigenous campesino intellectuals who in turn constituted themselves as the leadership of a

broad-based indigenous campesino movement. As this movement was radicalized by the

exhaustion of certain essentially reformist projects it resulted in the development of a

revolutionary people, a fraction of the indigenous communities that largely fused with and made

its own the political-military project of the EZLN.

This whole process must thus be understood as one of an emergent revolutionary

subjectivity in which a series of subjective responses to particular objective or structural

conditions produced a continuous expansion of the political subjectivity of the indigenous

communities culminating in the launching of the 1994 uprising. This process of emergent

revolutionary subjectivity will be described in much greater detail in Chapters 4, 5 6 and 7.

Before we can go there however we must first establish the larger socio-historical context in

which this process occurred. That will be the subject of the next chapter

Gunderson 145

PART II

SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS

AND DEVELOPMENT OF ZAPATISMO


CHAPTER 4: NEITHER GOD, NOR KING – THE DEEP ROOTS

OF INDIGENOUS RADICALISM

Worldly, ambitious men who sought wealth and pleasure placed their hope in

obtaining gold and silver by the labor and sweat, even through very harsh slavery,

oppression, and death, of not only innumerable people but of the greater part of

humanity; they devised a means to hide their tyranny and injustices and to justify

themselves in their own light.

This is the way they worked it out: to assert falsely that the Indians were so

lacking in reason common to all men that they were not able to govern themselves and

thus needed tutors. And the insolence and madness of these men became so great that

they did not hesitate to allege that the Indians were beasts or almost beasts, and publicly

defamed them. Then they claimed that it was just to subject them to our rule by war, or to

hunt them like beasts and then reduce them to slavery. Thus they could make use of the

Indians at their pleasure.

But the truth is that very many of the Indians were able to govern themselves

inmonastic, economic, and political life. They could thus teach us and civilize us,

however, and even more, would dominate us by natural reason as the Philosophersaid

speaking of Greeks and barbarians.

Fray Bartolome de Las Casas

De Unico Vocationis Modo

This position of the plebeians is sufficient explanation as to why the plebeian

opposition of that time could not be satisfied with fighting feudalism and the privileged

middle-class alone; why, in fantasy, at least, it reached beyond modern bourgeois society

then only in its inception; why, being an absolutely propertyless faction, it questioned

institutions, views and conceptions common to every society based on division of classes.

The chiliastic dream-visions ancient Christianity offered in this respect a very

serviceable starting-point. […]

This anticipation of coming stages of historic development, forced in itself, but a

natural outcome of the life conditions of the plebeian group, is first to be noted in

Germany, in the teachings of Thomas Muenzer and his party. Already the Taborites

showed a kind of chiliastic community of property, but this was a purely military

measure. Only in the teachings of Muenzer did these communist notions find expression

as the desires of a vital section of society. Through him they were formulated with a

certain definiteness, and were afterwards found in every great convulsion of the people,

until gradually they merged with the modern proletarian movement. Something similar

we observe in the Middle Ages, where the struggles of the free peasants against

increasing feudal domination merged with the struggles of the serfs and bondsmen for the

complete abolition of the feudal system.

Friedrich Engels

The Peasant War in Germany


Almost three centuries before the Zapatista uprising, a multi-ethnic indigenous army,

declaring “Now there is neither God nor King!” rose up in revolt against the Spanish colonial

authorities. The 1712 Tzeltal rebellion, as it is widely known even though Tzotzil and Chol nd

towns avillages also participated, was probably the most significant, and certainly the most

radical, indigenous rebellion in colonial Meso-America. If the poorly armed rebels were

ultimately defeated and the participating communities cruelly punished, the events, their causes

and their consequences, illustrate both important persistent features of the colonial social order in

Chiapas as well as the subterranean currents of resistance and rebellion that belied the

appearances of social peace for much of its history.

In this chapter I look at the historical development of a racialized social order in Chiapas

from the Spanish conquest at the beginning of the 16th

century to the Mexican Revolution at the

beginning of the 20th

. The chapter is divided into four sections. In the first section I provide a

brief description of the physical geography of Chiapas and its regions, the stage on which much

of the drama in the remainder of this study will unfold. In the second section I give an account of

the conquest and colonization of Chiapas and the emergence there of a distinct racialized social

order, culminating with the Tzeltal Rebellion of 1712. The third section considers the

development of that social order in the period separating Chiapas’s independence from Spain and

annexation by Mexico in the early 1820s up to the eve of the Mexican Revolution, focusing on

the the effects of the liberal Reforma and the so-called “Caste War” in Chamula in 1868-69. In

the fourth and concluding section I describe in greater detail the social order in the state on the

eve of the Mexican Revolution paying special attention to racial and ethnic divisions, land tenure

and labor relations, and the integration of two major export enclaves into the capitalist world

market.


4.1 THE TERRAIN

Chiapas is the southernmost state of Mexico. Consisting of two departments (Soconusco

and Chiapa) of the Audiencia of Guatemala in the colonial-era, it was formally annexed by

Mexico in 1824, shortly after Guatemala declared independence from Spain in 1821. Chiapas

borders Guatemala to the south and east; and the Mexican states of Tabasco, Veracruz, and

Oaxaca to the north, northwest and west respectively; and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest.

The state is divided into several distinct regions: Soconusco consists of a thin strip of

fertile volcanic soil that runs between the Pacific Coast of the state and the rugged Southern

Sierra Madre mountain range. Its largest city is Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala. To

the northeast of the Southern Sierra Madre mountain lies the Central Valley defined by the Rio

Grijalva and its tributaries. The hot Central Valley concentrates much of Chiapas’s better

agricultural lands and is the site of the state’s modern capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Northeast of the

Central Valley run the temperate Central Highlands. The largest city in the central Highlands is

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, formerly known as Ciudad Real, and the colonial-era capital of the

Guatemalan department of Chiapa. The highlands gradually slope down towards the tropical

plains of the Tabasco coast to the North and towards the Lacandon Jungle, the largest tropical

rainforest in the Western Hemisphere outside the Amazon, to the east. The Northern Zone, which

borders Tabasco, includes the site of the Mayan ruins at Palenque. The cities of Comitan to the

south and Ocosingo to the east sit on a stretch of fertile lands between the Highlands and the

Lacandon Jungle that became known as “the Finca Belt” for its concentration of large haciendas,

or fincas as they are known in Chiapas. Southeast of the Lacandon Jungle lies the tropical

Marqués de Comilla, which more closely resembles the Peten forest in Guatemala.


1.Pacific coastal plains (Soconusco) 5. Lacandon Jungle

2. Sierra Madre mountains 6. Northern Mountains

3. Central or Grijalva Valley 7. Gulf of Mexico plains

4. Central Highlands

MAP 2. Location and Regions of Chiapas. (De Vos 2002:417)

The Lacandon Jungle, which would constitute the EZLN’s most important base area,

commonly refers to a large territory, much of which is still tropical rainforest, but much of which

has been cleared for agricultural purposes over the past half century. Much of it is mountainous,

cut through with canyons or cañadas by the Rio Jatate and other tributaries of the Rio

Usamacinta. The precise boundaries of the area known as the Lacandon Jungle are a matter of

some disagreement, with economic, political and environmental considerations informing the

different determinations. For the general purposes of understanding its place in the development

of the EZLN it is generally sufficient to locate the jungle in the three southeastern municipalities

(an administrative unit roughly the equivalent to a U.S. county) of Las Margaritas, Altamirano,


and Ocosingo plus the southern reaches of the municipalities of Chilon and Palenque and the

eastern reaches of La Independencia.

Ecologically speaking the Lacandon Jungle consists of the tropical and semi-tropical

portion of the basin of the Rio Usumacinta that falls on the Chiapas side of the border with

Guatemala. This consists of the mountains and valleys that feed the Rio Jatate and its tributaries

as its proceeds southeast from the city of Ocosingo (over 1000 meters above sea level) in the

northwest until it reaches the flatlands (less than 300 meters above sea level) around Laguna

Miramar and almost touches the southern border with Guatemala where it runs into the Rio

Lacantún. The Rio Lacantún then runs northeast and joins with the Rio Chixoy to flow into the

Rio Usumacinta which flows northwest until it passes into the state of Tabasco where it drains

into the Gulf of Mexico. The Usumacinta and Chixoy constitute both the border between

Chiapas and Guatemala and the eastern limit of the Lacandon Jungle which on the Guatemalan

side become the considerably flatter Peten. The southeastern corner of the state, wedged between

the Rios Lacantún and Chixoy, is known as the Marqués de Comillas.

Once largely the preserve of the modern Lacandon Indians, who today number roughly

700, much of the Lacandon Jungle was settled in a process that began in the 1930s and

accelerated until the 1980s. Fleeing the oppressive conditions on the fincas as well as religious

and land conflicts in their own communities, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Chol and Tojolabal Indians cleared

and colonized much of the canyons region now commonly known simply as the Cañadas. The

Marqués de Comillas was colonized later, starting in the 1970s, with many colonists coming

from outside Chiapas, giving it a markedly different social and political character than the

Cañadas and making it much less receptive to the influence of the EZLN.


4.2 FROM CONQUEST TO COLONY: THE MAKING OF A RACIALIZED SOCIAL ORDER

The history of Chiapas can be divided into four major periods: First, the pre-conquest

period; Second, the conquest and colonial era; Third, the period from independence to the eve of

the Mexican Revolution; and Fourth, the Revolution and its aftermath. Our attention here is on

the second period.

Pre-Conquest Chiapas

As the Mayan civilization has its most ancient origins in Chiapas the pre-conquest history

of Chiapas is a long and rich one. It is, however, largely beyond the scope of this study. My

attention here therefore is on the basic outlines of the social structure of the indigenous polities

on the eve of the conquest.

Prior to the conquest the territory that is now called the state of Chiapas was home to

several politically and ethnically distinct indigenous peoples organized into their own state

structures. (De Vos 1990:9) Called provincias in the early Spanish accounts, these small states

were aligned to varying degrees with larger external powers, the Aztec Empire and larger Mayan

polities. All of these were very clearly class stratified societies ruled over by caciques or

chieftans, with the support of a class of principales or noble land-owners, who lived off tribute

extracted from the peasant majority.

Soconusco takes its name from the province of Xoconochco, which consisted of the

southern half of the costal plain and a small corner of modern Guatemala. While Aztec influence

reached into other parts of Chiapas, Xoconochco was the only genuine tributary to the Aztec

empire. Xoconochco produced cacao, a valuable commodity that would be used extensively as


money into the colonial period. The Chiapan Indians, known as particularly fierce warriors and

from whom the state takes its name, lived in the central Grijalva Valley. Their capital was at the

present-day site of Chiapa de Corzo. Occupying the most fertile lands, Xoconochco and Chiapa

were the wealthiest and most populous polities in the territory of modern Chiapas. To the

northwest lived the Zoques, descendents of the original pre-Mayan inhabitants of much of

modern day Chiapas, including Soconusco, and related to the Mixes of Oaxaca.(De Vos

1990:10) In the 1400s they retreated into the mountains as the Aztecs and other Nahua peoples

established fortified settlements on the Pacific Coast in order to control trade routes with Central

America.(De Vos 1997:42) At roughly the same time that the Aztecs were establishing control

over Soconusco, the Chiapans were enlarging their presence in the Grijalva River valley, also at

the expense of the Zoques.

The Highlands were divided between two distinct ethno-liguistic groups, the Quelenes

(now known as the Tzotzils) and the Zendales (Tzeltals) who were each in turn divided into a

number of smaller “warring principalities” including Zinacantan, Ixtapa, and Chamula. These in

turn were more or less aligned with the Mayan Chontal dynasty based in Cozumel in the

Northern Yucatan. (Wasserstrom 1983:9) The lower lying territories of the Northern Zone were

home to the Chols, while the ancestors of the modern day Tojolabals were concentrated in the

vicinity of present day Comitan and Las Margaritas. To the east, the Lacandon Jungle takes its

name from the Lacan Tum who originally lived there and who would put up the most protracted

resistance to the Spanish conquest before they were finally exterminated in the early 18th

century.

This then was the world that the Spaniards encountered when they first came to Chiapas. (De

Vos 1997)


The Conquest

The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521 radically upset the previous balance

of forces between the Aztecs and their neighbors. The defeat of the Aztecs was really made

possible by an alliance between the forces of Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes’s and the

much larger armies of Tlaxcala. The razing of the Aztec capital Tenochitlan was quickly

followed by efforts to establish effective Spanish control not just over the Aztec empire and all

of its tributaries, but also of extensive territories, like most of Chiapas, that had managed to

remain outside Aztec control. Armies composed mainly of Aztec and Tlaxcalan troops under

Spanish command set about conquering a much more extensive territory than had ever been

controlled by the Aztecs. (Prescott 2000)

The Spanish conquest of Chiapas occurred in three waves corresponding to three distinct

territories. The first wave was the conquest Soconusco. The second wave was the conquest of the

rest of Chiapas excluding the Lacandon Jungle and was not completed until 1528. The third and

final wave was the conquest of the Lacandon Jungle which would take another century and a half

to complete.

The easiest part of the conquest was securing the allegiance of Soconusco. Already an

Aztec tributary, Soconusco declared its allegiance to the Spaniards by the summer of 1523

before they had even arrived there. By mid-January 1524 that loyalty was sealed with the arrival

of the conquistador Pedro de Alvarado. (De Vos 1992:186)

The second stage of the conquest involved the patchwork of various principalities that

ruled the territory between Soconusco and the Lacandon Jungle – the Zoques, Chiapans,

Tzotzils, Tzeltals and several smaller Mayan peoples, all living in the central valley or highlands.


These were essentially frontier territories that, while involved in trade with the Aztecs and

subject to their cultural and political influence, had maintained their independence.

The establishment of a permanent Spanish presence in Chiapas would ultimately fall to

the conquistador Diego de Mazariegos, who had arrived in New Spain in 1524 and had joined

Cortes on his ill-fated expedition to Honduras. Following the failure of an earlier expedition led

by Luis Marin, Mazariegos was given 80 Spanish foot soldiers and cavalry and an unknown

number of Mexican and Tlaxcalan soldiers for the purpose of establishing a permanent

settlement in Chiapas. The conquest of the central valley and the highlands was completed by

1528 when the town of Ciudad Real (which would later become San Cristóbal de Las Casas) was

established in the Jovel valley as the seat of local Spanish power. Less than a year later, all of the

towns of Chiapa rebelled against Mazariegos. But the revolt was put down and in 1531 the status

of Chiapa and Soconusco as provinces of the Audiencia de Guatemala was finally confirmed.

(De Vos 1992:189–204)

The completion of the third and final stage of the conquest, namely of the Lacandon

Jungle and its inhabitants, would take almost another two centuries. The closing of the second

stage, however, marks the beginning of the colonial era in Chiapas. For the next three centuries

Soconusco and Chiapa would remain a province of the Audiencia of Guatemala which included

most of the rest of Central America as well.

Disease, Death and Depopulation

The comings and goings of the conquistadors, the conquest of new peoples, the

suppression of rebellions, the arrival of new settlers – all of these dramatic events took place


against a backdrop of the devastation of the indigenous population by imported Old World

diseases.

Old World diseases, in particular smallpox, were apparently first introduced into

Mesoamerica by Spanish troops from Cuba sent to support Cortes in 1520. Lacking any

immunities to these diseases they spread rapidly among the Indians. Indeed in many cases they

travelled more quickly than the advancing Spaniards themselves with the result that the peoples

encountered by the conquistadors were already in the midst of devastating epidemics when the

Spanish arrived. By the time the first conquistadors appeared in Chiapa and Soconusco in 1524,

the peoples they met had already been decimated by smallpox. In 1530-31 the area was swept by

an epidemic of measles. And in 1546 the region was devastated by typhus. The relentless assault

continued. Malaria annihilated much of the population of Soconusco in 1550, which would soon

make the importation of labor from the Highlands necessary for the survival of the Cacao

plantation economy. Other epidemics are recorded in 1545-48 and in 1576-81. In 1565 and

again in 1600-01 the whole area was ravaged by plague. (De Vos 1997:61–65)

It is difficult to establish with any precision how many people lived in Chiapas prior to

the conquest, and census records from the early colonial period are very incomplete. Nonetheless

a look at informed estimates, the records that do exist, and the testimonies of those who were

there clearly conveys the enormity of the devastation. At the beginning of the conquest Chiapas

was a densely populated region with systems of agricultural production able to support several

cities. The Chiapan capital of Socton Nandalumi, (now the site of Chiapa de Corzo) for example,

had a population of at least 4,000, and this did not include surrounding villages. (Bricker

1981:44)


It is estimated that 1,700,000 million people lived in Yucatan, Tabasco, Chiapa and

Soconusco in 1521. (De Vos 1997:57-64) In less than three decades over three quarters of this

population was wiped out. Chiapas actually came out a little better than the region as a whole.

The population of Chiapa and Soconusco alone is estimated to have been 220,000 at the

beginning of the conquest. The first reliable census, taken in 1572, records a total population of

85,468 of whom only 1,180 are recorded as Spaniards, representing a decline in the indigenous

of over 60%. The devastation didn’t end there. Of the nine major epidemics recorded in Chiapas

before 1700, five took place after this census. The 1683 census records an Indian population of

58,487, a 30% decline from the surviving population in 1572. The Indian population would not

begin to recover until 1778 by which point it had inched up to 66,488, still only 30% of the

original population.

Most of this devastation can be attributed to the effects of the new diseases imported by

the Spaniards. But the military campaigns, slave raiding, and other demands of the Spaniards

undoubtedly compounded the effects of the diseases. Troop movements and population flight in

the face of the conquering armies undoubtedly accelerated the spread of the diseases. The

transfer of enslaved Indians from one area to another would have had a similar effect. The

exhausting labors imposed on both enslaved and encomienda Indians and the famines resulting

from the disruption of planting and harvesting, further weakened the Indians already vulnerable

immune systems.

Neither should we underestimate the psychological effect of such a sudden disruption of

peoples lives. The demoralization and despair as people watched their families or their whole

village so quickly succumb to disease and conquest surely made them even more vulnerable.


There were many long-term consequences of the decimation of the Indian population. An

important one was a kind of rupture with the traditions of the past as communities were shattered

and cobbled back together and the elders who had been the carriers of tradition were often

among the first to get sick and die, seriously disrupting the transmission of traditional knowledge

from one generation to the next. This disruption was only compounded by the deliberate policies

of what can only be called cultural genocide: the prohibition of indigenous religious practices,

the eradication of their physical expressions (temples, statuary, etc…), and the near complete

destruction of written or inscribed records in indigenous languages. The indigenous cultures that

would emerge from the wreckage of the conquest were consequently radically transformed.

While many elements of the pre-conquest cultures survived, their respective meanings and place

within a larger cultural totality were frequenly altered significantly. Since elders also occupied

the positions of greatest prestige there was also a leveling of the traditional social hierarchies.

The long established social structures of the Indian nations crumbled. Old trade routes between

villages were disrupted. The royal houses that had ruled various kingdoms were destroyed,

leaving village chiefs as the highest Indian authorities. The result was that once powerful polities

were effectively reduced to what MacLeod called little more than “linguistic classifications.”

(1973:100) The conquest thus produced a traumatic and radical reorganization of social life in

Chiapas. And while certain elements of the culture of the indigenous communities undoubtedly

have pre-conquest origins, the meanings and organization of those elements were radically

reconfigured in response to both the trauma of the conquest and the demands of the colonial

order that was erected in its aftermath.


Bartolome de Las Casas and the New Laws

The first decades following the conquest threatened to completely wipe out the

indigenous peoples of Chiapas. In 1544, however, Chiapas received as its first bishop the famed

defender of the Indians, the Domincan Fray Bartolme de Las Casas. Las Casas was the

spokesman for a strong dissident current in Spanish Catholicism, that steadfastly opposed the

abuses and exploitation of the Indians by the conquistadors and early Spanish colonists and the

construction of a hierarchical racial order that they were witnessing. With roots in currents of

15th

century Renaissance humanism that would be effectively destroyed by the Spanish

Inquisition, the radicalism of Las Casas is a forceful reminder that the racialized thinking that

would dominate the world for the next four centuries, and that thereby became thoroughly

naturalized, was in fact a historical construction, the product of a process of intense struggle

within Spanish and European thought over the meaning of the newly “discovered” American

continents. (Hanke1994)

While Las Casas’s tenure in Chiapas would be brief, the Dominican friars who

accompanied him would seek to systematically reorganize the colony along lines consonant, at

least initially, with his then radical belief in the the equal humanity of Europeans and Indians.

Jan De Vos describes the meaning of this event:

For the Indians of Chiapas, colonial history is clearly divided into two periods: the first

covers scarcely twenty years; the second, in contrast, extends over almost three centuries.

The event that divides this experience so sharply into ‘a before and an after,’ was the

arrival of the Dominican friars in 1544. It was they who established the foundations of a

way of life that for the Indian population would prevail until the middle of the 19th

century. The principal means of this project of social restructuring were: to convert the

natives to Christianity, to introduce them to a ‘civilized’ way of life, and to make them

worthy and productive vassals of the Spanish crown. (De Vos 1997:77)


The Dominicans came armed with the authority of “the New Laws” proclaimed by the

Charles V in 1542 to protect the Indians from the depredations of conquistadors. The New Laws

had many provisions. These included a prohibition of the enslavement of any more Indians and

the demand that slave owners free their slaves if they were unable to prove “just title” to them.

Perhaps most importantly, the inheritance of encomiendas was banned and no new encomiendas

were to be granted. With the decline in the Indian population the encomienda system was no

longer sustainable and the crown would continue to act to erode it. The New Laws were also

given teeth. Any Spaniard who removed an Indian from their lands was subject to death. To

strike an Indian, in theory, also risked severe punishment. (Sherman 130-131) While the ban on

the inheritance of encomiendas would be lifted, in practice the New Laws marked the beginning

of the end for the system of labor control that had been used in all the newly conquered

territories of the Spanish Empire. The eclipse of these methods of labor control did not, however,

mean an end to the use of forced native labor by the Spaniards. On the contrary, slavery and the

encomienda would be ultimately be replaced by other, ultimately more sustainable, forms of

exploitation. The New Laws also prohibited encomenderos, indeed all Spaniards, from living in

the Indian villages or even staying in them for more than a few days. All Spaniards, that is, with

the important exception of members of monastic orders like the Dominicans.

The promulgation of the New Laws, the appointment of Las Casas as Bishop of Chiapas,

and his arrival with forty Dominican friars determined to actually implement the New Laws

initiated a period of intense, and at times violent, struggle between the Spanish settler population

composed of former conquistadors, their offspring and more recent arrivals, known collectively

as vecinos, on the one hand, and the new religious and civil authorities on the other.


While Las Casas and his allies felt a genuine moral revulsion at the effects of slavery on

the Indians of the Americas, a closer look at the changing conditions in Central America, reveals

that by the 1540s Indian slavery had largely exhausted its economic potential and was even

threatening the viability of the Spanish colonies, which depended on Indian labor. (Macleod

1985:110)

Such considerations presumably loomed larger in the calculations of Charles V than Las

Casas. Las Casas transformed the economic necessity of keeping the Indians alive into the

Christian virtue of saving their souls. The New Laws generated intense resistance throughout the

Spanish colonies. Encomenderos everywhere in the new Spanish colonies held Las Casas

responsible for the New Laws. If the New Laws shookup the social order established by the

conquistadors throughout the Spanish colonies, the impact was especially sharp in Chiapa where

Las Casas was appointed Bishop and was therefore directly responsible for their implementation.

The new Bishop was roundly defied by the encomenderos of Chiapa. (Womack 1999:65) He and

the Dominican friars he brought with him were ultimately, however, able to eventually eliminate

the institution and bring about a number of important and lasting changes that reduced several of

the worst evils being committed against the Indians. These changes also put into place the

foundations of a relatively stable colonial social order that would last into the 19th

century.

The arrival of Las Casas and the Dominicans marked the beginnings of the first genuine

Christian religious instruction among the native peoples of Chiapa. Priests and monks had

accompanied the first conquistadors and there had been some symbolic conversions on the part

of various caciques to Christianity, but for the most part there had been little serious attention to

genuine missionary work prior to 1544. The first clerics in Chiapa largely limited themselves to

ministering to the Spaniards and to sharing in the booty of the conquest. In contrast the


Dominincans who came with Las Casas took up residence in the Indian villages and immediately

set to work converting their new charges to Christianity and in instructing them in their rights as

subjects of the Spanish crown. (Wasserstrom 1983:16–21)

The abolition of slavery and the new restrictions placed on the encomiendas were only

the most obvious changes carried out by the Dominicans. The indigenous communities of Chiapa

and Soconusco were divided into six major pastoral “zones” corresponding very roughly with the

pre-conquest political divisions. These zones were: Soconusco, Chiapa (the central valley), the

Zoques, the Zendales (Tzeltales), the Quelenes (Tzotziles), and the Llanos (the ethnically mixed

area around Comitan that included, among others, the ancestors of the modern Tojolabales).

Within each of these zones the missionaries – mainly Dominicans, but also some Franciscans –

set out to “reduce” or congregate the scattered Indians in villages reorganized along traditional

European lines. (De Vos 1997:108)

The pre-conquest centers of Indian communities were gathering points for worship and

commerce, but not, for the most part, residential settlement. The Indians preferred to live closer

to their individual milpas in a scattered settlement pattern. Flight from the conquest and the

dramatic decline in population resulted in an even greater dispersal. This dispersed settlement of

the Indians, however, was a serious obstacle to the collection of tribute, the process of religious

conversion and the exercise of political control. It was precisely for these reasons that the

reducciones of the Indian villages was among the very first tasks undertaken by the newly

arrived friars.

If the reducciones enabled the missionaries to exercise greater control over the Indians it

also made it easier for the missionaries to defend them from the worse treatment they were

already experiencing at the hands of the first conquistadors and settlers. As the Dominicans


implemented the New Laws, freeing slaves and lifting the most onerous burdens of the

encomiendas, the initial resistance to the reducciones gave way to acquiescence. By 1560 the

Dominicans had succeeded in congregating the populations in four of the six pastoral zones that

had been placed under their responsibility.

The Dominicans left responsibility for Soconusco and the Chol-speaking northeast to the

secular clergy. The Franciscans, who only arrived in 1575, established several Tzotzil, Tzeltal

and Zoque villages in the north. Everywhere else the Dominicans dominated. The orders also

established convents in Copanaguastla, Chiapa, Ciudad Real, Tecpatan, Ocosingo,

Chapultenango, and Comitan. Other important villages were raised to the level of parish seats

with their own priests, while the smaller ones were designated as “visitas.” (De Vos 1997:110-

114)

By 1611 Chiapa and Soconusco were divided into 10 pastoral zones wich hwere in turn

divided into 40 curates (26 Dominican, 2 Franciscan, and 12 secular) which in turn presided over

136 towns and villages. These were organized in the manner familiar to anyone who has traveled

in Latin America: a church and one or more buildings representing civil administration facing

onto a central square or zocalo with the streets laid out as a grid. Many of these towns and

villages were situated on the sites of the old pre-conquest commercial and ceremonial centers.

Each was also given the name of a patron saint in addition to its original name so that, for

example, the Tzotzil town of Chamula became San Juan Chamula. (De Vos 1997:108-113)

Las Casas was followed in office by another Dominican, Fray Pedro de Barrientos, who

did much to implement Las Casas vision for Chiapas. An important innovation of his was the

introduction of the cofradia, a village level religious fraternal organization responsible for

maintaining the village saint’s shrine. The cofradias were responsible for the payment of a


variety of fees to the religious orders. Fees were paid for each office or cargo, for the various

saints festivals, and for the visitas of the bishops; all on top of the regular fees for baptisms and

other services. (Wasserstron 1983:19-31)

By the middle of the 17th

century virtually the entire male Indian population of Chiapas

was enrolled in the cofradias. (Wasserstron 1983:27-28) The cofradias were the main vehicle

through which the Dominicans imposed their religious will on the Indian communities. But they

were also the vehicle through which the communities developed their own distinctly syncretic

forms of worship, incorporating elements of their pre-conquest religious outlook and practices

within the framework Spanish Catholicism. In short, the cofradias became an arena in which the

struggle over and negotiation of indigenous identity within Spanish colonial society took place.

An early incident illustrates the subversive potential of the cofradias. The earliest and

most sincere converts to Christianity in the town of Chiapa were the principales. Among these,

Juan Atonal, the alcalde or mayor of Chiapa had been a devout Christian for 30 years when, in

1584, he was charged with a “relapse into idoloatry” by Pedro de Feria, an investigating bishop.

Atonal was accused of organizing “a cofradia of 12 Indians who styled themselves the 12

apostles” who “traveled from mountain to mountain and from cave to cave” at night. They were

accompanied by two women claiming to be “Santa Maria and Magdalena” and together they

performed “certain ceremonies, saying that by these means they … became spiritualized and

transformed into gods…” Atonal’s cofradia attracted interest and support from Zinacantan and as

far away as Ocosingo and the the Zoque village of Ocotepeque. (Wasserstron 1983:25)

The Dominicans had arrived in Chiapa with a zealous determination to defend the rights

of the Indians from the rapaciousness of the vecinos. Within a generation however, the

Dominican friars were themselves transformed into a new class of exploiters. (Wasserstron


1983:26) The order acquired sizable expanses of land and claims on native labor in addition to

the religious fees it was able to collect. Friars who had originally settled in Indian villages

relocated to Ciudad Real and other predominantly Spanish settlements. Wasserstron argues,

however, that “it would be an error to claim that Las Casas’ militant and uncompromising views,

so dangerous in their implications for colonial policy, disappeared in Chiapas without a trace.”

Rather, he continues:

Henceforth, it would be native people who in the privacy of their own lives would shield

and nurture this vision, even as their pastors pursued secular wealth and fortune.

Originally, such tasks may have fallen to native caciques and principales, who enjoyed

both a Christian education and great political influence. As these chieftains succumbed to

the greed and ambition of Spanish settlers, however, they were replaced by men whose

authority and experience derived not from noble birth, but rather from their membership

in cofradias and native cabildos. As a result, these men became bearers of a faith in God

and community over which even parish priests exercised little control. For the next 200

years, therefore, they struggled actively to protect this faith from the depradations of

colonial prelates, and to defend their right to remain Indian in a Spanish world.

(Wasserstron 1983:31)

While its character was hardly unalloyed, the cofradia became the main expression of

this practice of indigenous autonomy and cultural self-determination, the strongest evidence of

which is the cultural survival of the indigenous communities to the present day. Similarly the

cofradia became an expression of a sort of village level democracy. While its members were not

strictly social equals, the cofradia was certainly more egalitarian than either the old pre-conquest

order or the larger Spanish colonial order. It should be remembered that the devastating impact

of the conquest had a kind of leveling effect within the indigenous communities. The annual

rotation of cofradia offices did not eliminate remaining distinctions of social status. Indeed the

acquisition of particular offices became the primary expression of such distinctions. But as the

costs of fulfilling the obligations of the offices rose in relation to the status they conferred, there

was a certain redistributive outcome to the system. The elective nature of the offices also


provided for a degree of social mobility within the community that was not characteristic of the

larger society.

What was most radical about the cofradias, however, was not these formal features, but

rather, as Wasserstrom indicates, their role in reproducing from generation to generation the

Lascasian insistence on the dignity and equality of the indigenous communities and their right to

cultural survival. It is important to remember that in the context of Spanish colonial domination

and exploitation of indigenous labor, the very real inequalities that existed and were reproduced

within the communities were always subordinate to the far sharper cleavage that existed between

the Spanish colonists (with all of their own distinctions of rank) and a super-exploited and

racially despised indigenous majority population. Insofar as the Lascasian inheritance nurtured

and reproduced within the structure of the cofradias and cabildos challenged the very legitimacy

of Spanish domination it must be understood as representing a subterranean democratic or even

proto-communist current arguably no less radical than which had so recently erupted in the

German Peasant Wars. (Engels 1967)

The religious orders in general, and the Dominicans in particular, would dominate the

lives of the indigenous communities until the latter part of the 19th

century. In many instances

they would exercise greater power than the civil authorities. The latter, in any case, were

frequently drawn from the ranks of the former anyway. Beneath the surface appearance of the

monolithic authority of the Dominican hierarchy, however, a counter-current of a radical

indigenous Lascasian Christianity nourished a spirit of resistance that would occasionally erupt

into open revolt.


A Racialized Social Order

It is at this time that decrees governing marriage and residency codified for the first time

a system of racial castes. In 1543 Governor Francisco de Montejo annulled the titles of

encomiendas inherited by the illegitimate sons of the original conquistadors. (Lenkersdorf

1998:83) This move was ostensibly intended to punish those conquistadors who had left wives

behind in Spain and to encourage unmarried encomenderos to marry the Spanish women who

were finally arriving in sufficient numbers in Chiapa for such a measure to succeed. The ultimate

effect of this measure of course was to consolidate the racial character of the emerging class

structure of Chiapa. It established the legal basis of an ostensibly purely Spanish oligarchy.

While certain conditions may have favored this solution it should not be imagined that it was

preordained. Indeed the very fact that it was written into law suggests that the emergence of a

decidedly mestizo elite was regarded as a genuine possibility if not an actual threat. The

conquistadors were not unhappy with their Indian mistresses and many had settled into what

could be regarded as common law marriages with them. 15 years after the arrival of Mazariegos,

they had to be legally compelled to bring their wives from Spain or, if unmarried, to marry

Spanish women.

The Emergence of the Finca

By the middle of the 16th

century the limitations of slavery and the encomienda as forms

of labor control were increasingly apparent, especially to the Spanish crown. The New Laws can

thus be understood as an attempt to prevent the murder of the goose that was laying so many

golden eggs. While legal slavery was prohibited outright, grants of encomienda would persist

into the 17th

century, though accounting for a shrinking fraction of indigenous labor. The


encomiendas were replaced initially by a form of labor-tribute known as repartimiento in which

Indians were compelled to work, usually for several weeks or months, for little or no pay for

Spanish owned farms, mines or workshops. Indians would be assigned to work for particular

Spanish masters by local magistrates or Alcalde Mayores appointed by the crown. In contrast

with the systems of slavery and encomienda, the work was intermittent and the Indians were not

under the direct authority of their Spanish masters when they weren’t fulfilling their tributary

labor obligations. This permitted them to work their own lands and restore a semblance of the

communal existence that was so violently disrupted by the conquest and its immediate aftermath.

The authority invested in the Alcalde Mayores was also intended as a check against the

development of a strata of independent nobles of the sort that the Spanish crown had to contend

with back home.

While the system of repartimiento labor imposed limits on the exploitation of Indian

labor that undoubtedly facilitated the cultural survival of indigenous communities, it had its own

serious problems. The intermittent nature of the labor both made it inefficient and encouraged

Spanish masters to work the Indians so hard that they often returned to their villages so

exhausted or sick that they could not work their own fields. Many Indians fled their villages once

more to escape repartimiento, further complicating administration, tribute collection, and the

general maintenance of order. As a consequence, over the course of the 17th

century the system

of repartimiento gave way to the hacienda system which would becomed the prevailing form of

labor control for the rest of the colonial period and would persist in some regions, including

Chiapas, well into the 20th

century. (MacLeod 1973)

The nature of the hacienda has been the subject of a spirited debate with respect to its

feudal or capitalist character. (Semo 1993; Frank 1982; Florescano 1990) The central question in


these debates is whether the hacienda is a relic of Spanish feudalism and consequently an

obstacle to capitalist development in Latin America, or rather the particular form of capitalist

agriculture within the context of the subordination of colonial (and then neo-colonial)

development to capital accumulation in the metropolitan centers of the world system.

Recapitulating that debate is largely beyond the scope this study, but the debate is not without

implications for an understanding the outlook of the indigenous communities and the content of

their resistance to Spanish domination.

Haciendas are large estates that are largely economically self-sufficient but that typically

produce a large or small surplus of one or more agricultural or other commodities for sale. Labor

was performed by indebted peons attached to the land, part-time wage laborers often attached to

neighboring indigenous villages, and more skilled full time wage workers. The precise mix and

the extent of their involvement in commodity production and circulation varied considerably

according to geography. Haciendas established to supply food, clothing and draft animals to the

mining industry in northern New Spain tended to be both prosperous and comparatively

integrated into circuits of commodity exchange while those established in more remote regions

in southern New Spain or the Audiencia de Guatemala were considerably less so. While many

haciendas were owned by private individuals, during the colonial period the best properties were

owned by religious orders, such as the Dominicans who had the most extensive holdings in

Chiapas.

Indian labor was most often tied to the haciendas by debts that were often transferred

from generation to generation. Some of these debts may have had their origins in obligations

incurred as a result of repartimiento while others were acquired later by a variety of means not

infrequently involving trickery. While in theory an indebted peon could secure their freedom by


paying off their debts, in practice this was usually impossible and the institution was from the

perspective of the peon indistinguishable from slavery. Typically households were given a small

piece of the estate from which they were expected to feed themselves while also working for the

hacienda owner or hacendado. Relations between the hacendado and his peons certainly had

feudal aspects. Hacendados demanded, and generally received, obedience and deference in all

areas of life.

In Chiapas haciendas were known as fincas and their importance within the local

economy increased considerably between the 17th

and 19th

centuries. Bonaccorsi (1990) charts

the rise and fall of slavery, ecomienda and repartimiento in 16th

century Chiapas, while Carvalho

(1994) gives an account of the origins and development of the haciendas up to independence.

Legorreta (2008) gives a considerably more detailed account of the development of the

institution in the municipality of Ocosingo beginning with a single sugar producing property in

the hands of the Dominicans in 1697 to 57 privately owned fincas in 1885.

With the emergence of the haciendas we see the establishment of a fundamental and

persistent division within Chiapas between the comparatively free labor performed by Indians on

lands owned by their communities (known as ejidos) and the unfree labor of debt peons on the

fincas. For the Indians there was little question as to which was preferable and every exertion

was made to resist peonage. By the same token while Indian villages remained an important

source of tributary income, the fincas became the most efficient form of labor exploitation.

The “Tzeltal” Rebellion of 1712

The watershed event that separates the early colonial period in the history of Chiapas

from the later period is the Tzeltal Rebellion of 1712. Against the backdrop of the War of


Spanish Succession the social contradictions of the colonial order exploded in one of the most

significant Indian revolts of the whole colonial period. While the revolt was ultimately put down,

the underlying social antagonisms that it revealed, not just between the Indian communities and

the Spaniards, but also between different forces within the colonial apparatus, would continue to

ripen in its aftermath.

In 1712 starting in the Tzeltal town of San Juan Cancuc and spreading to other towns, a

religious movement arose among the Indians of Highland Chiapas with the appearance in May

1712 of the Virgin of Rosario to a fourteen year old girl named María de la Candelaria (De Vos

1995; Viqueira 1995). The movement took on the character of a rebellion with the appearance in

Cancuc of Sebastián Gómez de la Gloria, a native of Chenalhó, who according to De Vos

“transformed the cult of the virgin into a real church” (De Vos 1995:248). In early August 1712

leaders of all the Indian towns of Chiapas were called to come to Cancuc and to bring with them

“all the silver of your churches, and the ornaments and bells, with all the coffers and drums and

all the cofradía books and funds” (Bricker 1981:60). The response to the call was overwhelming.

With the exception of four towns, the entire Province of the Zendales responded to the call, as

did many towns in the Tzotzil districts of Las Coronas y Chinampas in the Central Highlands.

Sebastián Gómez was putting in place a kind of indigenous theocratic dual power. He

promoted a rapid break with Spanish colonial authority by replacing every significant office of

Spanish power - civil, religious, or military - with a new Indian authority.

Under Gómez’s leadership an indigenist theology was constructed that appropriated the

narrative and symbolism of the Catholic Church, but transformed them into instruments of Indian

power. Not only were religious vestments appropriated, but the very geography of the region was

reconceived. Ciudad Real (the colonial capital) was renamed “Jerusalem” and Cancuc was


renamed “Ciudad Real,” presumably establishing the basis for a crusade to retake the city from

the Spaniards who were declared to be “Jews” and therefore “barred from salvation.”

The Indian army was organized along Spanish lines (Bricker 1981:61-63). Within less

than a week after the call to rise up in arms the Indians had “secured control of all the villages of

the Province of the Zendales and the Gaurdianía of Huitiupán, with the solitary exceptions of

Simojovel and Los Plátanos”, and “by August 25 an Indian army of four to five thousand men

had reached San Miguel Huixtán, a Tzotzil town within striking distance (six leagues) of Ciudad

Real, and were preparing to attack it.” (Viqueira 1998:126)

The attack never came and eventually the Spanish authorities regained the offensive and

reconquered Cancuc in late November 1712, though mopping up operations would continue for

another seven months. (De Vos 1995:249-252)

Like the German peasant revolt in Mühlhausen led by Thomas Müntzer two centuries

earlier, the Tzeltal Rebellion was an expression of the proto-communist sentiments of its

participants. Expressed in religious terms and appropriating the organizational forms of the

colonists, the rebels of 1712 transformed the Lascasian egalitarianism preserved in the cofradias

into a militant program of action against Spanish colonial authority. While the rebellion would

be suppressed and participants in it ruthlessly punished, the memory of it, as De Vos (1995:239–

270) demonstrates, would live on in legends passed down in Tzeltal communities into the late

20th

century.

4.3 FROM INDEPENDENCE TO REVOLUTION

The Tzeltal Rebellion preceded by several decades a wave of unrest that would deeply

unsettle the Spanish Empire in Latin America. The latter part of the 18th

century saw an earnest


attempt to rescue the empire from decline in the form of the Bourbon Reforms which, among

other things, liberalized restrictions on economic development in the colonies and encouraged

the development of a nascent domestic bourgeoisie. But the Bourbon Reforms only served to

cast in sharper relief the ways that Spanish rule stood in the way of further development.

In 1821, when a liberal fraction of the military seized power in Spain and restored the

liberal constitution promulgated in Cadiz during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1812, it

precipitated a wave of declarations of independence across Latin America. In the case of Mexico,

which had already witnessed several failed attempts to achieve independence it came under the

unexpected auspices of Agustin de Iturbide, a conservative opponent of the Spanish liberals who

sought to install himself as emperor. By contrast, the movement for independence in Guatemala

occurred under liberal leadership. Iturbide sought to incorporate the provinces of the Audiencia

of Guatemala within the Mexican Empire, but, even though it was welcomed by the town council

of Comitan, this effort collapsed with the fall of Iturbide. This in turn precipitated a struggle in

Chiapa and Soconusco between liberals and conservatives over whether the two provinces would

remain part of the new, though soon to be shortlived, United Provinces of Central America or

would be annexed by Mexico. The question was finally settled in favor of annexation by Mexico

in a plebiscite of dubious legitimacy and on September 14, 1824 the “Free State of Chiapas” was

formally annexed to Mexico making it the only Mexican state that had not been part of New

Spain.

The struggles over independence from Spain and annexation by Mexico marked the

emergence of a division in Chiapas between a liberal elite centered in the fertile Grijalva valley

and a conservative elite in the eastern half of the state that has shaped politics in the state up to

the present day. This division reflected a bifurcation of the racial order established in the early


colonial period. While that order remained firmly intact in the eastern half of the state, in the

Grijalva valley and in Soconusco the original indigenous populations had largely abandoned

their indigenous language and dress, adopting a mestizo identity. This shift also reflected a

stronger orientation of production in the western half of the state towards international markets

and an overall lower level of development of the productive forces on the fincas in the eastern

half of the state. The practices of debt peonage, while hardly absent in the west were likewise far

more critical to workings of the fincas in the east.

If the declaration of independence from Spain announced the emergence of the liberals,

the decision for annexation by Mexico demonstrated the considerable power still retained by the

conservative oligarchy. As Benjamin explains,

The annexation of Chiapas by Mexico was engineered by the oligarchy of Ciudad Real

for the purpose of extending its political domination within the province, maintaining its

economic domination of the Indian population of the Central Highlands, and promoting

the commercial and business interests of the colonial elite. (1996:11)

Not only in Chiapas, but also across the rest of Mexico, independence ushered in a half

century of struggle between conservative and liberal forces. The chief object of this struggle was

the power and enormous landholdings of the Catholic Church along with the more modest

communal lands of the indigenous communities. Representing the interests of the nascent

bourgeoisie, the liberals saw the power and wealth of the church as the primary obstacle to

Mexico’s future economic development. With the ascent of Benito Juarez to the presidency in

1858 the liberals began to implement their program. Under Juarez the landholdings of both the

Catholic Church and communal holdings of Indian communities were expropriated, initiating a

process of primitive accumulation that lay the foundations for expanded capitalist accumulation.


This process became known as the Reforma. It involved considerable social upheaval

with the division between conservatives and liberals often erupting in localized armed conflicts.

A conservative revolt in 1857 intended to reverse the first steps in the process of reducing the

wealth and power of the church instead plunged the country into civil war. In the aftermath of the

war Juarez cancelled foreign debts, prompting a French invasion in and occupation in 1862,

followed by the imposition in 1864 of Maximiliano von Habsburg as Emperor. It would three

more years of guerrilla war before Mexican independence could be restored and the actual

implementation of the Reforma could begin. (Meyer, Sherman, and Deeds 2002:373-430)

The “Caste War” in Chamula

Between 1867 and 1869 the Highlands of Chiapas were shaken by a series of events that

became generally known as the “Caste War” of Chamula. (Bricker 1981; Rus 1998:43–78)

While the Caste War would be inscribed in the minds of the local ladino elite as an indigenous

uprising that menaced the citizens of nearby San Cristóbal, it can not be understood without a

recognition of the devastating effect of the expropriation of their communal landson the self-

sufficiency of the indigenous communities. Rus has argued that it is more accurate to view the

Caste War not as an indigenous uprising but rather as a paroxysm of terror directed against the

highland Indian communities in the context of their expropriation. What is certain is that the

Caste War erupted in the midst of a wholesale transfer of the landed wealth of Chiapas from the

Dominicans and the indigenous communities to the ladino elite. That elite had been, and would

remain, divided between liberals to the west and conservatives to the east, but both groups now

had a stake in terrorizing the Indian communities.


In December 1867, a girl from the Tzotzil village of Tzajalhemal in the municipality of

Chamula claimed to have found three stones that fell from the sky. The stones became the

objects of a cult that obtained the approval of Pedro Díaz Cuscat, a high-ranking Indian official

from Chamula who performed religious functions when the ladino priest was absent. Cuscat

interpreted the sounds of the stones as they banged against the inside of a box in which they had

been placed. The stones were later replaced with clay figurines, the girl was declared ‘the Mother

of God’ and by April 1868 “Tzajalhemel was transformed from an insignificant place to a

regional socioreligious and commercial centre” (De Vos 1995:250-252). The transformation of

the village into a major market struck at one of the main mechanisms by which the ladino elite

extracted wealth from the Indians of the Highlands.

By the end of 1868, the authorities of San Cristóbal de Las Casas assembled 50 troops

who marched on Tzajalhemel, trashed the temple, seized the figurines, and took the girl prisoner.

Díaz Cuscat and several of his followers were arrested a little later after the soldiers opened fire

on an unarmed crowd that was attempting to defend them. In June 1869, Miguel Martínez, the

Catholic priest serving Chamula, and three others were killed in the course of an attempt to seize

a new set of the figurines which had replaced the old ones. The killings were followed by several

others against ladino ranchers and merchants and were attributed to Ignacio Fernández Galindo,

a ladino anarchist schoolteacher who was accused of organizing an Indian Army to attack San

Cristóbal.

At this point, interpretations of events diverge. Several thousand Chamulans marched on

San Cristóbal, but instead of launching an attack, Galindo, his wife, and a student offered

themselves as hostages in exchange for Cuscat. The exchange was accepted, but the authorities

in San Cristóbal then broke the deal by arresting the three hostages and charging them with


treason. According to Jan Rus (1998) the Chamulans posted six hundred men armed with

digging sticks and machetes on the road from San Cristóbal in anticipation of reprisals. Other

accounts describe this as a larger offensive force gathered with the intent to lay siege to and then

attack the city. What is clear is that the liberal governor mobilized lowland militias which

marched on San Cristóbal and attacked the Chamulans, killing 300. According to Rus (1998), the

43 ladinos killed were largely the victims of friendly artillery fire. The ladinos waited several

days to gather more forces before attacking Chamula directly, where there is little doubt that

what occurred was a massacre. Over the next several months the militia continued to carry out

operations against people variously described as rebels or refugees.

Rus correctly challenges the ladino justifications of these massacres as a response to a

supposed “caste war” waged by the Chamulans against the ladino population. In the process he

arguably minimizes the seriousness of the challenge posed by the Chamulans and therefore of

their agency in the conflict. In organizing their own church, their own market, and ultimately

their own security forces, the Chamulans had struck at three pillars of ladino power over them. If

the ladino response seems in retrospect wildly disproportionate to the Chamulan’s actual

offenses it is perhaps a reflection of how precariousness the new order must have seemed after

ten years of foreign occupation and civil war.

The Rise of the Export Enclave Economy

The conclusion of the Caste War marked the consolidation of the Reforma in Chiapas and

the beginning of a period of intensified capital accumulation based primarily on the

establishment of two major export enclave economies. As De Vos tells us, as early as 1822 the

Lacandon Jungle had been identified as a potentially profitable source of valuable hardwoods, in


particular mahogany. It would not be until 1870, however, that the exploitation of the Lacandon

Jungle for lumber, by local operators based in Tabasco, began. (De Vos 1996:38–70)

Initially, the logging of the Lacandon Jungle was on a relatively small scale and was the

concern of about a dozen companies based in Tabasco. Between 1880 and 1895 the extraction of

wood from the jungle became a big business concentrated in the hands of a several large

Mexican companies dominated by U.S. and British capital. (De Vos 1996:71–102)

The extraction of giant trunks of mahogany from the Lacandon Jungle was a brutal

process relying on the vicious exploitation of the labor of Mayan Indian mozos from the

neighboring highlands of Chiapas who were virtual slaves under the system of debt peonage that

earned the monterias, or logging camps, international notoriety first in John Kenneth Turner’s

exposé, México barbaro (2010) and then in two novels of B. Traven’s “jungle novels,” March to

Monteria and Rebellion of the Hanged. (1994a, 1994b) The Indian laborers were marched,

usually from the Highlands or Ocosingo, deep into the jungle along treacherous paths that were

not infrequently waist deep in mud. There they were often worked to death felling giant trees and

assisting teams of oxen in dragging them to the various rivers that would ultimately carry them to

the Usumacinta and then the Gulf of Mexico from which point they entered the world market.

(De Vos 1996:173–201)

The monterías also encouraged the development of the “franja finquera,” the ring of

fincas that raised food and oxen for use in the jungle where peonage also prevailed. The fincas in

the first valley of Ocosingo had their origins in the lands owned by the Dominican order that

were expropriated in the Reforma. When those lands were sold off, the Indian laborers who

worked them largely passed over to the new owners, many of whom had been managers of the

properties when they had been owned by the Dominicans. (Legorreta Díaz 2008; Ruz 1992) The


demands on the part of the monterías saw an expansion of the fincas towards the the edges of

the jungle in Ocosingo, Altamirano and Las Maragaritas. Thus the fincas, which are often treated

as a remnant of feudalism, were in actual practice critical to the process of expanded capital

accumulation following the Reforma. Similarly, as Wasserstrom has demonstrated, the “closed

corporate communities” of the highlands, fulfilled the no less critical function of reproducing the

labor that worked both the monterías and the coffee plantations of Soconusco. This constant

circulation of indigenous labor between the highlands and the export enclaves would come to

play an important role in the development of the political consciousness of the indigenous

communities when the Mexican Revolution that broke out in 1910 finally began to reach Chiapas

several years later.

4.4 CONCLUSION

The social order established in Chiapas in the aftermath of the Spanish conquest persisted

largely intact through the whole colonial period. Following independence an emerging liberal

elite was successful in displacing the Dominicans as the dominant economic and political power

in the state. For the Indian population of the state the “reforms” of the late 19th

century were a

disaster, stripping them of their best remaining lands and compelling many to seek work either in

the coffee and lumber export enclaves of Soconusco and the Lacandon Jungle or on the fincas

that supplied them. The dislocations wrought by the Reforma set the stage for the Mexican

Revolution and subsequent upheavals of the 20th

century which would radically alter the

circumstances of the indigenous communities while nonetheless maintaining them in their

subordinate position within the larger social order. Before we proceed to the effects of the


Revolution and its aftermath in the next chapter, however, it will be fruitful to give an overview

of the social order that had emerged over the course of the previous four centuries.

The Peopling of Chiapas

The people of Chiapas can be divided between a dominant mestizo or ladino population

and several indigenous ethnic groups: the Mayan Tzotziles, Tzeltales, Choles, Tojolobales,

Kanjobales, Lacandones and the non-Mayan Zoques, with the indigenous population

concentrated heavily in the eastern half of the state. A brief discussion of each of the major

groups will illuminate their respective role in the events and processes described in the rest of

this study.

The dominant racial group in Chiapas is referred to variously as ladino, mestizo or

caxlan. Each term reflects a distinct historical experience and outlook. The term “ladino,” which

was used in the colonial-era and continues to be used in Guatemala, indicates a person or

presumptively pure Spanish or at least European descent. It is the preferred term among the

members of the dominant racial group, especially in the eastern half of the state. Technically the

term “mestizo” indicates a person of mixed-racial heritage. By the early-20th

century Mexican

elites had embraced the idea that Mexico was a “mestizo nation” and the term came to include

pretty much all Mexicans who spoke Spanish as their first language. Much of Mexico’s

“mestizo” population is in fact of pure or almost pure Indian descent, distinguished from their

indigena neighbors by the fact that some previous generation abandoned their indigenous

language and dress. The term caxlan, presumably derived from “castilliano,” is the term

generally used by the indigenous peoples of Chiapas to refer to all non-indigenous peoples.


The roughly 700 members of 66 families known as Lacandon Indians, whose recent

ancestors were the principal residents of the Lacandon Jungle prior to its settlement starting in

the 1930s, claim descent from the original inhabitants of Lacan-Tum and Sac-Bahlan. This claim

has been upheld by some of their defenders, most famously by Trudi Blom. Historical and

linguistic evidence, however, indicates that the original inhabitants of the jungle were wiped out

by the early 18th

century and that the modern Lacandon are most likely largely descendants of

individual Chols who for various reasons fled into the jungle in the 18th

and 19th

centuries where

they developed a distinctive existence as foragers and horticulturalists. (De Vos 1988, 1990) The

question of the origins of the modern Lacandon is important because in 1972 a Presidential

decree gave them title to a large fraction of the Lacandon Jungle, including lands more recently

settled and in some cases titled to Tzeltales and Choles fleeing life on the fincas. The disputes

arising from this action were critical to the political radicalization of the communities in the

Cañadas.

The Mayan Tzotzil Indians are concentrated in the western half of the Central Highlands

around the city of San Cristóbal. The highly distinctive dress, religious practices, cosmovision,

and “civil-religious” political structures of the Tzotzil municipalities of Chamula and Zinacantan

have been studied intensively by anthropologists and these studies have powerfully shaped how

the indigenous communities of Chiapas in general are perceived. (Cancian 1965; Collier 1975;

Vogt 1994) As Wasserstrom (1983) has demonstrated, for much of the 19th

and 20th

centuries the

traditional communities of the Central Highlands served to reliably reproduce a supply of cheap

labor for the logging camps of the Lacandon Jungle, the coffee plantations of Soconusco and

seasonal agricultural labor in the Central Valley. As Rus has shown, (1995:251–278) in the

decades following the Mexican Revolution the traditional civil-religious authorities in the


Highlands were effectively coopted and integrated into the PRI. In the latter half of the 20th

century the Tzotzil communities were the site of some of the most violent religious conflicts,

between Catholics and Protestants but also between “traditional” and “liberationist” Catholics.

The Mayan Tzeltal Indians are the largest indigenous group in Chiapas. Concentrated in

the eastern half of the Central Highlands, but also in the northern portion of the adjoining “finca

belt” around Ocosingo, the Tzeltals also account for the largest number of colonists in the

Cañadas. The Tzeltals were the main force in the 1712 indigenous uprising against the Spanish.

The movement to train indigenous catechists got its start and first spread among Tzeltal

communities and the “Tzeltal Zone” of the Diocese of San Cristóbal, centered in Ocosingo,

became a consistent fount of radical initiatives that subsequently spread to other parts of the

Diocese.

The Tojolabal Indians are concentrated in the southern part of the “Finca Belt” around the

cities of Comitan and Las Margaritas and have been the main colonists in the adjoining portion

of the Cañadas region. Unlike the Tzotziles and Tzeltales, the autonomous communities and

traditional civil-religious structures of the Tojolabales were largely destroyed as a result of their

near-complete incorporation into the fincas in the 19th

and early 20th

centuries. More than any

other indigenous group in Chiapas then the survival of their traditional cultural practices is

therefore a consequence of a conscious movement of cultural revival. (Mattiace 2003)

The Mayan Chol Indians have been traditionally concentrated in the northern zone of the

state which they share with Tzeltal and Tzotzil communities. This remote semi-tropical area was

largely settled in the 18th

and 19th

centuries. (Aubrey CITE)

The Mayan Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal and Chol Indians are the main protagonists in this

study. Two smaller Mayan groups, the Mames and Kanjolables, concentrated on the border with


Guatemala have played much more minor and ambivalent roles. The Zoques are a non-Mayan

people who live in the northwestern corner of Chiapas. While they have their own interesting

history of struggles they have not been a significant force in the processes this study is concerned

with. The Zoques are located almost entirely outside the Diocese of San Cristóbal and the EZLN

has never had any significant influence among them.

The Social Structure of Chiapas

On the eve of the Mexican Revolution social relations within Chiapas and between

Chiapas and the larger world, the inequalities and flows of wealth, and the consequent social

antagonisms and struggles that would shake the state in the decades that followed, are probably

initially best understood as a series of embedded unequal center-periphery relationships. The first

of these relationships is the relationship between the centers of the modern world capitalist

system and the historically subordinate, dependent and exploited Latin American or Mexican

periphery. Arrighi (2010) describes the history of the modern world capitalist system as a

succession of four “hegemonies,” (Genoan-Iberian, Dutch, English, and American), and it is not

difficult to develop a compelling periodization of the history of Mexico and Chiapas that reflects

that succession, with each hegemony characterized by a distinctive configuration of the general

pattern of domination and exploitation. The main events of Mexican history – the conquest,

Mexico’s fight for independence, the Reforma, the Mexican Revolution, and, more recently, the

Zapatista uprising – have all been struggles to one degree or another over the terms of Mexico’s

exploitation within the always evolving world system. Whether as a source of silver in the 18th

century, coffee and lumber in the 19th

, or petroleum, winter produce and cheap manufactured


good in the 20th

, the wealth of Mexico has continuously flowed towards the hegemonic centers

of capital accumulation at the expense of Mexico’s political and economic independence.

The second center-periphery relationship is the relationship between the centers of capital

accumulation within Mexico, most importantly the capital, Mexico City and the northern city of

Monterrey on the one hand, and on the other the poorer, largely rural states, especially those in

the south, like Chiapas, which by virtually every measure has been Mexico’s poorest and most

marginalized state. A continuous feature of this relationship has been the struggle of Chiapas’s

own landed elite to maintain the distinctive racist and patrimonial social relations in the state that

have been the main source of their own wealth and power in the face of pressures from the

capital to modernize production relations. These pressures, it should be noted, have been uneven

and generally tempered by a reluctance to invest in the infrastructure modernization demands

combined with a shared fear of unleashing the rebellious potential of the indigenous population.

A third center-periphery relationship exists between the wealthier and more modern

western half of the state, centered around the modern capital of the state in Tuxtla Guitierrez and

the poorer and more conservative eastern half of the state centered around the colonialcapital of

San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Benjamin (1996) emphasizes this antagonism in his study of the

political history of Chiapas in the late 19th

and 20th

century.

The fourth center-periphery relationship is that between the major cities that have been

the historic seats of the ladino oligarchy in the eastern half of the state – San Cristóbal, Comitan

and Ocosingo – and the countryside over which they have ruled.

The fifth and final center-periphery relationship is that between the fincas, ranchos and

other forms of large landholdings and the semi-autonomous indigenous communities that have


subsisted on more marginal lands but that have also been a steady source of labor for the large

landholders.

While this configuration has undergone a number of transformations over the centuries

since the conquest, its relative stability reflects the ways that Chiapas’s subordination within the

capitalist world system has defined its internal social relations. It also illustrates why, absent a

challenge to Mexico’s subordination within the world system, the local struggle with the landed

ladino oligarchy could only produce limited changes in the conditions of oppression and

exploitation that characterize the lives of the indigenous communities. As we will see later the

recognition of the necessity of a struggle for national liberation would play a critical part in the

decisions of many in the indigenous-campesino movement to join or support the EZLN.

Race, Land and Labor Control

From the early colonial period to the present, the processes of surplus value extraction

from the labor reproduced within the indigenous communities to the centers of capital

accumulation reflected in the series of center-periphery relations described above has depended

heavily on the maintenance of a distinctive racial order. The distinctive racial order that has

existed for almost half a millennia in the eastern half of Chiapas must be understood as a socially

and historically constructed set of racial categories, meanings and relationships rooted in

colonialism and intimately connected to the control of land and labor on which the wealth and

power of the ladino elite has depended. This order is not as simple as it might at first appear. Just

as the crushing and often humiliating racial subordination of the indigenous population

facilitated their super-exploitation within a succession of systems of labor control, their success

in maintaining a land base, however marginal and sometimes inadequate to even their


subsistence needs, has enabled their cultural survival when other indigenous peoples were being

assimilated into the dominant “mestizo” culture.

The question of land, therefore, must not be seen simply as one of control over the means

of economic production, but also as one of the cultural survival of racially despised peoples.

Similarly the spiritual or religious significance of the land to the indigenous peoples of Chiapas

(as elsewhere) has given land struggles there an added dimension. There is a spiritual attachment

to particular places as sources of meaning and identity as well as of physical subsistence. A

consequence of this is an elective affinity between land struggles assertions of cultural identity,

with each feeding off of the other.

While Mexico won its political independence from Spain in the early 19th

century and

thereby brought an end to formal colonialism, the persistence of a racial order that subordinated

the indigenous communities to ladino or mestizo elites reflected a continuation of what must be

understood as an essentially colonial relationship. The struggles that emerged in Chiapas on the

part of the indigenous communities in which they laid claim to certain collective rights,

including measures of political, cultural and economic autonomy, must consequently be

understood as struggles for decolonization in both territorial and cultural dimensions. While the

indigenous-campesino movement and the EZLN have decidedly not asserted a right to political

independence, but rather a right of autonomy within a pluri-ethnic Mexico, this anti-colonial

dimension remains central to any understanding of their struggle.

Forms of Indigenous Life

It is necessary to distinguish between three main forms of indigenous community life.

These are: life in the established indigenous towns and villages, the so-called “closed corporate


communities”; life on the fincas and other large ladino land-holdings; and life in the

communities carved out of the Lacandon Jungle by settlers usually fleeing either the oppression

of the fincas or conflicts in the established communities. The first two of these forms of life were

consolidated during the early colonial period. The third form would only begin emerge in the

decades following the Mexican Revolution and will be discussed at greater length in the next

chapter. Understanding the differences and relations between these forms of life is necessary to

understanding the emergence of the indigenous campesino movement and the EZLN.

If from the point of view of the exploitation of indigenous labor it makes sense to start

our analysis with the fincas, from the point of view of the social and cultural reproduction of the

indigenous communities it makes sense to start instead with the established communities. Many

of these communities can trace their origins if not to before the conquest, then to the

reducciones, the concentration of scattered indigenous settlements into a smaller number of

larger towns and villages mandated by the Spanish in the aftermath of the conquest. Others were

established at later dates. While there is considerable variation between them they are typically

self-governing communities in which authority has historically been exercised by married men

elected annually to various ranked civil and religious offices, or “cargos,” who are responsible

for the organization of various annual celebrations and other ritual functions.

The indigenous populations that lived on the fincas were to varying degrees separated

from the sort of religious life that characterized life in the established communities. Many would

return to what they regarded as their home villages to participate in special feast days and other

celebrations, and efforts were frequently made to reproduce some of the ritual life of those

villages, but life on the fincas was typically even closer to the bone than in the established

communities, more fragmented and with fewer resources and less time for such things. (Leyva


Solano 1995) Indeed, on many fincas, when the Diocese began training indigenous catechists, it

was necessary to fight for even a few hours off from work on Sundays to attend religious

services. (Juan and Miguel 2009)

The colonization of the Cañadas of the Lacandon Jungle by indigenous campesinos

fleeing the oppression of the fincas or religious conflicts and land hunger in the established

communities gave rise to new forms of community life that would play a critical role in the

gestation first of the indigenous campesino movement and then of the EZLN. While some

clandestine colonization occurred earlier, the first wave of colonization began in the 1930s. A

second and much larger wave beginning in the 1950s would transform the Cañadas into a giant

laboratory of very creative social experimentation.

Colonization of the jungle was almost exclusively the work of young men and women

who saw their prospects on the fincas or in the established communities as effectively foreclosed.

The act of pulling up roots and heading into the jungle to clear a patch of land and begin anew

was a profoundly radical act, a break with traditions that often involved or reflected conflict with

finqueros and/or traditional civil-religious authorities. Large fractions of the colonists were either

Protestants or involved with the catechist movement and the liberationist Catholicism embraced

by the Diocese of San Cristóbal. While they brought many traditions with them, the youth of the

colonists, the compulsion to consciously construct communities under very difficult and

unfamiliar physical conditions in the remote reaches of the jungle also produced considerable

innovation. The remoteness of the communities imposed a very high degree of self sufficiency

on them and placed them largely beyond the reach of municipal, state or federal authorities.

The communities established in the Cañadas often experimented with various forms of

collective or cooperative labor. The motivations for these experiments could be practical,


theological, political or any combination of the above. Starting in the 1970s some communities

also began to experiment with the participation of women and youth in the community

assemblies, in some cases meeting in separate assemblies and in others meeting in a common

assembly.

In the cases of all three types of communities, women were typically responsible for

passing on cultural traditions to children. Women are less likely to work outside their

communities and consequently also less likely to speak Spanish. Men would frequently take

seasonal work away from the communities. In the homes women were and remain the first to

awake in the morning to start fires, collect water, and prepare meals, and the last to go to sleep.

The independent organization of indigenous women and the articulation of specific demands

developed slowly and fitfully in the years prior to the Zapatista uprising. It accelerated

dramatically in the aftermath of the uprising. Even if the degree of independent organization and

specific demands seem modest in the earlier period, it is important to understand how profoundly

challenging they were within the context of the cultural traditions of the communities. But we are

getting ahead of ourselves here.

While the latter half of the 19th

century had seen the Dominicans replaced by a handful of

large landowning families and many Indian communities stripped of their communal lands, the

social order in Chiapas retained many of the features put in place during the early colonial era.

For almost four centuries the traditional religious worldview and practices of the indigenous

communities had secured their cultural survival in the face of brutal racist oppression. But the

Reforma and the subsequent establishment of export enclave in Soconusco and the Lacandon

Jungle had set in motion transformations in the processes of production and the pace of capital


accumulation that would, despite outward appearances of the persistence of tradition, begin to

turn the world of the indigenous communities upside down.

These were processes that the traditional wordldview of the communities could not

adequately account for, at least not in their entirety. This inadequacy would, as we will see,

eventually give rise to a crisis in the traditional worldview and the communal authority structures

of the indigenous communities that it underpinned. This crisis, would in turn, fuel a search for

alternative ways of understanding what was happening that would eventually produce a creative

fusion of the usually subterranean proto-communist currents of the communities with several

globally circulating currents of modern communist thought represented by a variety of non-

indigenous outside actors. The first signs of the encounter that would produce this fusion was the

still obscure role of the ladino anarchist schoolteacher Galindo and his wife in the Caste War in

Chamula.

In the decades that followed, the encounter with currents of modern communist thought

would only increase. It would take the better part of a century for a significant fraction of the

communities to embrace them, by which time these currents were themselves confronting their

own crises. Before we can consider that moment we need to first examine the impact of the

Mexican Revolution and its aftermath on the indigenous communities of Chiapas.


CHAPTER 5: THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION AND THE CRISIS

IN THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

By the 1950s the traditional worldview and lifeways of the indigenous communities of

Chiapas were in crisis. For four centuries the communities had secured their cultural survival by

passing down from generation to generation the ways of living in and understanding their world

that had been forged in the aftermath of the conquest. This was a synthesis of the elements of the

Indians’ pre-conquest culture that had survived the trauma of the conquest and the Lascasian

Christianity of the Dominican missionaries. By the middle of the 20th

century though, the

communities found themselves facing new problems for which their traditions had no ready

response. This crisis ultimately had its roots in the intensified integration of the communities into

the global circuits of capital accumulation initiated by the Reforma.

In this chapter I will examine the crisis in the traditional worldview and authority

structures of the indigenous communities that drove many of their younger members to colonize

the Lacandon Jungle and to experiment with a variety of outside ideologies. I begin with a look

at the peculiar course of the Mexican Revolution in Chiapas and the first systematic exposure of

the indigenous communities to socialist and communist politics in the 1920s and 30s. I then look

at the colonization of the Lacandon Jungle that began in the 1920s and reached a high point in

the 1970s. I then discuss the turn towards cattle ranching in the aftermath of the Second World

War and its effects, combined with population growth, on demand for land. I conclude with a

discussion of how these processes contributed to a crisis of legitimation for the traditional

authorities of the communities that found its first expression in the success of efforts of

protestant evangelization.


5.1 THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

The 1910 uprising led by Francisco Madero against the rule of Porfirio Diaz set in motion

the complex and protracted process we call the Mexican Revolution. Broadly conceived, this

process includes not just the ten years of open revolutionary warfare from 1910 to 1920, but also

the protracted consolidation of the party-state more or less completed by 1928, and the radical

reforms carried out during the presidency of General Lazaro Cardenas between 1934 and 1940.

The Mexican Revolution would produce important changes both in Chiapas and in the

relationship between the state and the central government that would significantly shape the

environment that would produce the indigenous-campesino movement and the EZLN.

How to characterize the Mexican Revolution and the regime that it produced has been

hotly debated by historians and other social scientists. It is beyond the scope of this study to

recapitulate all those debates. I take as a point of departure the work of Adolfo Gilly (2006)

who argues that while the original uprising led by Madero was a bourgeois-led multi-class

alliance committed to completing the tasks of capitalist modernization, that the ensuing civil war

between the Constitutionalists led by Carranza and Obregon and radicalized peasant and

working-class armies of Zapata and Villa produced a regime that, at least until the end of the

Cardenas administration, had to make significant concessions to subaltern groups in order to

purchase the fragile social peace necessary for continued capital accumulation. Gilly and other

Marxists have been criticized by later Mexicanists such as Knight (1990b) for their failure to

adequately account for the considerable local and regional variations in the course of the

revolution that seem to render such sweeping characterizations overly schematic. My view is that

while a general characterization of the balance of forces that defined the national state is

necessary (and that Gilly offers a compelling one), that this state nonetheless secured social


peace through a highly contradictory patchwork of local “deals” with very heterogenous social

forces. This is particularly evident in the case of Chiapas.

On the national level the uneasy balance of forces was reflected in the 1917 Constitution

which, while largely congruent with the interests of capital, promised land reform and the

protection of basic labor rights, making it arguably the most progressive constitution in the world

when it was written. Of special note was Article 27 which established the legal basis for land

reform and the guarantee of communal property through the (re)establishment of ejidos. These

promises went largely unfulfilled until the Cardenas administration, when they were only

partially realized and then at the price of the incorporation of independent campesino and labor

organizations into the corporate apparatus of the ruling party.

In Chiapas, however, as we shall see, the balance of forces in 1920 favored neither the

bourgeois Constitutionalists nor the insurgent peasant armies commanded by Emiliano Zapata.

Rather it favored the local landed oligarchy, the old familia chiapaneca, who aligned themselves

with whatever national faction was least likely to demand substantive social change. The general

consequence of this was that the oligarchy was comparatively well positioned to resist the

reforms initiated during the Cardenas years.

The Revolution Comes to Chiapas

If in other parts of Mexico, the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz faced a crisis of legitimacy

when it came under challenge from Francisco Madero in 1910, it seemed quite secure in

Chiapas, which saw no Maderista activity until the very eve of Porfirio Díaz’s flight from power

in May, 1911. This was followed by the resignation of the Porfirian governor of Chiapas, Rámon

Rabasa and the opportunist organization of “Maderista” clubs across the state by the always


feuding western and eastern elites. Rabasa’s resignation set in motion a power struggle over who

his successor would be and this was perceived by the conservative oligarchy centered in San

Cristóbal as an opportunity to reclaim control of the state. On July 3 they named their own

provisional governor, Manuel Pineda and announced the relocation of the state capital back to

San Cristóbal, setting in motion a complex struggle that only ended with the installation of

Flavio Guillén as governor by the newly elected President Madero.

The grudging reconciliation of the state’s elites was driven in large part by fears that their

feuding might create an opening for agrarian unrest or an Indian rebellion. Astonishingly, the

Cristobalense rebels raised an army of a thousand Chamulans under the leadership of the cacique

Jacinto Pérez “Pajarito” by offering them land and the abolition of the head tax. This army,

according to Benjamin (1996:108) “seized control of the indigenous highland villages, purged

opposing Chamula factions, and took revenge on certain highland ladino landlords.” Not

surprisingly this raised generalized fears, and not just among the western elite, of another “caste

war.” Accordingly, when ten Chamulans were captured by the “Sons of Tuxtla” in fighting for

control of Chiapa de Corzo, their ears were cut off to “make them examples of what would

happen when Indians fought ladinos” (Benjamin 1996:110) The fear that elite feuding might

unleash a more popular revolt was not limited to locals. In August the U.S. Consul in Tapachula

wrote:

The great danger here, is that the spread of agitation or revolutionary movement might

reach the agricultural working classes and endanger the gathering of the coffee crop. … It

is feared that should the masses awaken to the actual condition of things danger might

result to the coffee crop and even to the plantations and the planters. (Benjamin

1996:112)


While the upheavals of the Maderista phase of the revolution contributed to some

sporadic conflicts between agricultural workers and landowners and a more generalized problem

of banditry, it did not produce any significant agrarian unrest in Chiapas.

The Maderista peace was broken, however, when in February 1913, General Victoriano

Huerta seized power and had Madero killed in a coup d’etat. Huerta’s coup and the resistance it

sparked across the country set in motion a second phase in the revolution. Initially the broad

Constitutionalist opposition to Huerta came under the leadership of Venustiano Carranza, the

Maderista Governor of Coahuila. In Chiapas, however, Governor Guillen had taken a leave of

absence at the time of the coup and his replacement, Reinaldo Gordillo León, promptly

recognized Huerta. Within months, however, Constitutionalist forces were operating in Tabasco

and soon entered Chiapas.

Lacking a social base in either fraction of Chiapas’s elite, the Constitutionalists

deliberately sought to mobilize the laboring classes. The Constitutionalist General, Luis Felipe

Domínguez, marched his Usamacinta Brigade on the monterias in the Lacandon Jungle, freeing

the mahogany workers and recruiting many of them to the Constitutionalist cause. (Benjamin

1996:99–118) This was a direct assault on the interests of U.S. and British capital which was

heavily invested in the mahogany companies. The comment of a U.S. consular agent in

Guatemala reveals precisely where the interests of U.S. capital lay:

It appears these constitutionalists are determined to commit all the possible damage

before they are defeated. They have committed no end of depredations in the state of

Chiapas. (Benjamin 1996:121–122)

By the summer of 1914 the Huerta regime was defeated and Carranza had captured

Mexico City. As part of an effort to consolidate his control of the southeast, Carranza appointed

Jesús Agustin Castro as military governor of Chiapas. A young man from the northern state of


Durango, Castro was a “radical” Constitutionalist, which is to say that while he was committed

to the protection of bourgeois property he was openly hostile to the conservative social order that

prevailed in Chiapas and was determined to dismantle it. Backed by 1,200 troops distributed

across the state he attempted to accomplish this through a series of decrees, the most significant

of which, the Workers Law, abolished debt peonage, the foundation of capital accumulation in

the state. Welcome as many of these reforms were for the poor of Chiapas, this was very much a

“revolution from above.” As such it was also vulnerable to organized resistance from the landed

oligarchy.

The opening was provided by a division in the ranks of the Constitutionalists between

Carranza and his leading general, Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who enjoyed significant support on

the part of the northern working class. A National Convention was organized in October 1914 in

Aguascalientes to settle the dispute. The Convention declared itself the government of Mexico,

claiming the support not only of Villa but of the peasant army led by Emiliano Zapata out of the

southern state of Morelos. By November, Villa and Zapata’s armies had entered Mexico City and

Carranza was forced to flee to Veracruz. (Knight 1990a)

The revolution that had begun as a bourgeois liberal revolt against the autocratic rule of

Porfirio Díaz now took on in many parts of Mexico the character of a class war. This tidy

formulation however is complicated by counter-currents in places like Chiapas where the

Constitutionalists were implementing radical social reforms and the forces that were aligned

against them were largely led by the sons of the poorer finqueros.

The revolt against the Constitutionalists in Chiapas began in December with a meeting of

forty finqueros who declared their intention to drive out the Constitutionalists in the name of

Chiapanecan sovereignty. Under the leadership of Tiburcio Fernández Ruíz, who had as an


officer served in Villa’s División del Norte, the rebels identified themselves as “Villistas” but

quickly became known as “mapaches (raccoons) because they moved at night and ate uncooked

maize in the fields.” (Benjamin 1996:124) The Mapaches operated largely as guerrillas,

harassing the Constitutionalists and preventing them from exercising their authority outside the

towns in which they were garrisoned.

The Mapachado did not enjoy the unqualified support of Chiapas’s landed elite. Many

landowners, especially the better off ones, aligned themselves with the Constitutionalists, hoping

that by so doing they might protect themselves from enforcement of Castro’s more radical

decrees and that their influence might moderate the Constitutionalists. These hopes were not, for

the most part, misplaced. The fortunes of the Constitutionalists rebounded when, after capturing

Mexico City, Zapata and Villa discovered that they were unprepared to govern the whole country

and simply abandoned the capitol.

Carranza’s forces re-captured the capitol in August 1916 and by the end of the year the

Constitutionalists were in the process of consolidating power across Mexico. A new constitution

was promulgated in 1917 that laid the basis for the post-revolutionary order. While retaining

many features of the previous liberal constitution of 1857, the 1917 constitution strengthened the

central government and the executive at the expense of the states and the legislative branch. It

also incorporated provisions for land reform in article 27 and protections for labor in article 123.

(Knight 1990b)

In keeping with the calculations of the large landowners in late-1916 Carranza pursued a

strategy of cooptation in Chiapas. Colonel Pablo Villanueva was appointed interim governor and

several supporters of the Mapachado were brought into the government. Despite efforts to

negotiate a peace, however, the remaining Mapaches continued to fight and in 1918 four


thousand Constitutionalist troops arrived in the state under the command of General Salvador

Alvarado to wage a brutal war on them. The military capacities of the Mapaches were greatly

reduced by this offensive but they nonetheless survived and continued to conduct operations.

(Benjamin 1996:133-136)

In 1920 Carranza’s most powerful general and presumed successor, Álvaro Obregón,

joined a revolt against Carranza when the latter chose to promote the candidacy of a

comparatively unknowm ambassador to the U.S. as his successor instead of Obregon. Carranza

was forced to flee from Mexico City and ultimately killed. Obregón’s revolt opened the door for

a broad array of forces still in opposition to the Constitutionalists, including the Mapaches, to

finally make peace with the central government. The Mapaches declared themselves for Obregón

and were quickly joined by most of the Constitutionalist forces. In December, the Mapaches’

leader, Fernández Ruíz, ran unopposed for the governorship of Chiapas. (Benjamin 1996: 140-

142) Thus in Chiapas the Mexican Revolution seemed to consolidate the political power of

precisely the conservative landed oligarchy that it toppled in Morelos and elsewhere.

Socialism Comes to Chiapas

Even if conditions in Chiapas were not as favorable to the emergence of radical currents

within the Revolution as elsewhere in Mexico, this is not to suggest that such currents did not

emerge at all. Soconusco in particular saw the emergence of a working class movement that

would briefly give rise to the Partido Socialista Chiapaneco (PSCh) in the 1920s, and that in the

1930s would for several years become an important field of activity for the PCM. (García de

León 1997:215–356; Spenser 1988)


During the final years of the Diaz regime and the brief reign of Madero a clandestine

workers movement under the influence of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) began to emerge

mainly in the towns of western Chiapas. Under the leadership of Ricardo Flores Magon, the

PLM had effectively become a revolutionary anarchist organization and through its newspaper,

Regeneración, nurtured many of the radical forces that would emerge in the course of the

Mexican Revolution. While the PLM was unable to consolidate itself into an effective

organization able to influence the course of the revolution, many of its former members played

very important roles through a variety of formations. In 1914 in Tapachula, a group of former

Magonistas, organized as the leadership of the Juan Alvarez Club, were arrested and summarily

executed for plotting an uprising against the Huerta dictatorship. With the occupation of the state

by the Constitutionalists, more “workers clubs” affiliated with the anarchist and socialist workers

of the Casa del Obrero Munidal in Mexico City were established in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Tapachula

and Comitan and a Sindicato Central de Obreros y Campesinos was organized in Tapachula by

the surviving members of the Juan Alvarez Club. In September 1918 the Sindicato organized a

strike of twenty thousand largely migrant agricultural workers from both Guatemala and the

highlands of Chiapas.(García de León 1997:372–375)

This movement spread grew in strength into the early 1920s. In January 1920, 136

delegates mainly representing agricultural workers, gathered in the city of Motozintla inland

from the Soconusco and founded the Partido Socialista Chiapaneco (Chiapaneco Socialist Party

or PSCh). The new party was energized not only by the Mexican Revolution but by the apparent

advances of the workers movement around the world. It adopted both a maximum and minimum

program and one of its leaders, Ricardo Alfonso Paniagua, declared that communism would soon

“reign in a truly just world.” Such rhetorical flourishes notwithstanding, the party reflected the


newborn character of the movement it represented. Its real roots were in the the Constitutionalist

mobilizations of workers during the revolution. Its program was copied almost entirely from the

program of the Partido Socialista de Michoacan. In the spirit of the social-democratic parties of

Europe it was divided into a high-minded maximum program consonant with the communist

rhetoric of Paniagua and a minimum program of reforms that more accurately reflected the actual

purpose and trajectory of the party. The party was formed with a very practical end in mind,

namely contesting municipal elections in Motozintla and elsewhere where elected offices were

an important instrument in the still surving practices of enganche. Those facts notwithstanding,

the organizational and agitational activity of the PSCh, especially among the migrant coffee

workers of Soconusco many of which were drawn from the Tzotzil and Tzeltal communities of

the Highlands, would see the first systematic introduction of socialist and communist ideas to the

indigenous population of the state. (Spenser 1988)

Between 1920 and 1924, the PSCh played an important role as a significant opposition to

Tiburcio Fernandez, the Mapache Governor of the state. The party enjoyed the military

protection of forces under the command of one of its founders, Carlos Vidal, and this enabled it

to win control of the municipal government of Motozintla and to establish the Sindicato de

Obreros y Campesinos de Soconusco which affiliated with the pro-government national labor

federation, the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicano (Regional Confederation of Mexican

Workers). In 1923 the party supported the national government against a military revolt led by

Adolfo de la Huerta with the result that when the party ran Vidal for governor in 1924 it enjoyed

the support of outgoing President Obregon and incoming President Calles. When the results of

the election were disputed and threatened to provoke further conflict, President Calles arranged

the appointment of a Vidal ally, César Córdoba as provisional governor while new elections


were arranged. In the meantime prominent figures in the PSCh were appointed to various offices

and in 1925, Vidal was elected Governor. The effects of the rapid ascent of the PSCh leadership

to political power were contradictory. On the one hand, Vidal introduced a number of important

reforms to the labor laws in Chiapas and appointed party members and union leaders to posts to

enforce the new laws. On the other hand, the party lost much of its previous independence and

was effectively integrated into the still developing apparatus of the post-revolutionary state.

While the PSCh began life as a radical working class organization, by 1925 it was

effectively transformed into an instrument of the state and within a few years would be absorbed

into the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, the official state-party that would later become the

PRI. The transformation of the PSCh was hardly unique. Similar local socialist and workers

parties sprang up across Mexico in the Yucatan, Tamaulipas, Michoacan, Acapulco, and

Veracruz. They were all expressions of the mass politicization of local working classes in the

course of the revolution. At the same time they reflected the highly uneven and fractured

character of that politicization, making them vulnerable to cooptation by the emerging post-

revolutionary elite.

In 1927 Vidal resigned as governor to work of the campaign of General Francisco

Serrano and in opposition to former president Obregon who had declared his intention to seek re-

election. When Serrano made preparations to take power by military means and entered into an

alliance with the Cristero revolt, Calles moved swiftly against both his military and political

allies, including Vidal.

The repression that followed effectively destroyed the PSCh. Obregon was re-elected in

1928 but when he was assassinated by a Cristero before he could take office, Calles seized on the

situation not only to choose Emilio Portes Gil as his successor, but to force the unification of the


feuding political and military fractions into a unified political party, the Partido Nacional

Revolucionario (which would subsequently change its name first to the Partido Revolucionario

Mexicano and then the Partido Revolucionario Institucional). While the PSCh was destroyed, its

remnants were largely incorporated into the new national party and one of its leaders, Raymundo

Enríquez, who had served two terms as a federal deputy, was installed by Calles as Governor.

Enríquez continued many of the policies of Vidal, even carrying out some modest agararian

reform by redistributing the lands of some of the large foreign (mainly German) owned coffee

plantations in Soconusco. More importantly, however, he advanced the process of integrating the

unions into the corporate structure of the PNR, transforming them into powerful instruments of

control over the workers movement. Attempts to build independent unions were met with intense

repression.

The experience of the PSCh set the stage for a second wave of communist-led

organization in Chiapas. The Partido Comunista Mexicano (Mexican Communist Party or PCM)

was organized in 1919 and led a furtive existence until 1929 when it was outlawed. (Carr

2000:29–61)

In Chiapas, as García de Leon explains, the communist movement followed a distinct

course compared to the rest of Mexico. Because of the large number of Guatemalans working in

Soconusco, and in keeping with its developing anti-colonial policy, the Communist International

encouraged the formation first of a Bloque Obrero-Campesino and then of an independent

Partido Comunista de Soconusco that federated not with the PCM but with the Central American

Communist Parties of Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, all formed

between 1925 and 1929. This was a period when the Communist International was encouraging

its affiliates to develop analyses of ethnic and racial conflicts, including those involving


indigenous communities, through the lens of colonialism and struggles for national liberation. By

the early 20th

century Soconusco was much more ethnically heterogeneous than many other parts

of Mexico. In addition to the populations of Spanish and indigenous origins, including many

Guatemalans, Soconusco had a good number of German plantation owners, as well as workers,

merchants, and planters of French, English, U.S., Chinese, Japanese, Syrian, and Palestinian

origin, giving the region a sort of “primitive cosmpolitanism” in the words of an unnamed local

poet cited by García de León. (1997:369–405)

Always operating in clandestinity, and under the leadership of Carlos Mayén who had

witnessed the 1923 Communist-led uprising in Hamburg, Germany, the Partido Comunista de

Soconusco took its strength from the remnants of the PSCh and its affiliated unions that had

resisted incorporation into the new ruling party, but also from the deepening discontent of a

polyglot proletariat in the face of a global economic depression. As García de León explains,

In the world of the plantations, the communities and the fincas, this “Callista terror”

acquired particular force, and not without reason: discontent among agricultural workers

was growing; there were nuclei of Catholics that, without being Cristeros, practiced their

worship in secret; there was a network of small Chinese merchants (a population

particularly persecuted in these years); and finally, there was a powerful clandestine

syndicalist current (that called itself anarchist) que under the influence of Central

American unions (and of Guatemalan publications like El Obrero Libre, El Comunista,

and Nuestra Palabra) or of Yucatecan socialism, came each time closer to Marxist

conceptions. (1997:392)

In this hot mix, the clandestine organizational methods of the communists came into

sustained contact with the traditions of the indigenous communities from which so many of the

workers were drawn.

The campesino and artisanal unions began to share the lives of the agricultural workers

and integrated with new ideas the old world of clan associations, of old sects and cults,

revamped for new new conditions. (García de León 1997:393)


Thus the prospects for a fusion of the proto-communism of the indigenous communities

with the theory and practice of the modern communist movement that first appeared in the form

of Galindo’s support for the Chamulans in the Caster War in 1869 reassert themselves in the

early 1930s but under greatly transformed conditions. In 1931 the Partido Comunista de

Soconusco merged with the PCM, giving the latter an important social base.

In 1934 General Lazaro Cardenas was elected president and the circumstances of the

PCM were transformed almost overnight. President Cardenas toured Chiapas in February and

March, and meeting with a delegation of workers in Tapachula, the majority of whom were

communists, promised the legalization of their “red” unions. (García de León 1997:400)

The party itself was legalized shortly thereafter and experienced a dramatic growth. The

PCM exercised a brief but important influence on the indigenous communities of Chiapas in the

latter half of the 1930s. PCM cadres played important roles in the wave of campesino organizing

and land struggles that Cardenas sought to direct into the corporate structure of the ruling party.

The center of PCM activity in Chiapas was always Soconusco, but by 1936 the party was

recruiting elsewhere in the state. This process was, of course, facilitated by the dependence of the

coffee plantations of Soconusco on migrant labor from the Tzotzil and Tzeltal communities in

the Highlands. While the PCM’s organizing efforts were focused primarily on building unions

among agricultural and other workers in the export oriented enclave, they were inevitably also

drawn into land struggles as their influence extended into the Highlands and the Northern Zone.

It is during this period that a number of indigenous communities first win lands and recognition

as ejidos. Of special interest to us, in the municipality of Sabanilla, seven ejidos, including the

ejido of Lazaro Cardenas, were established at this time. With Mexico’s entrance into the Second

World War, the PCM would retreat from the role it had played under Cardenas, but as García de


Leon argues, the influence of its radicalism on the subsequent political development of the

indigenous communities would continue on its absence. While the precise impact of the PCM’s

activities on the subsequent political consciousness of the communities is unknown, it is clear

that the indigenous campesino movement that emerged in this region was particularly combative

and that the ejido of Lazaro Cardenas in particular would several decades later play a critical role

in the development of the FLN’s relations with the indigenous campesino movement.

When Cardenas assumed the Presidency of Mexico in 1934 he was immediately thrust

into a struggle with former President Plutarco Elias Calles (1925-28), who had remained the

effective power behind the throne for six years after leaving office. Cardenas skillfully sidelined

the conservative Calles and transformed the rising agitation for land reform into a stabilizing

force by finally making good on the revolution’s promises of land to the tiller but insisting that

campesinos who wanted land join the Mexican Campesino Confederation (CCM), the newly

created peasant organization of the ruling party. As independent campesino formations were

coopted into the CCM it quickly became a pillar of stability for the Mexican state. (Camín and

Meyer 1993:129–158)

It was only as a result of the land reform set in motion in the 1940s by the followers of

President Cárdenas that the agrarian and political panorama of the state really came to be

modified with the formation of ejidos, unions, and campesino organizations. Most of these,

however, would become part of the apparatus of the ruling party. Rather than displacing the old

landed oligarchy, the revolution had armed them with new mechanism of control over the Indian

communities that until the 1990s would be able to exercise absolute control over the electoral

process in Chiapas through the corporatist cooptation of leaders, organizations and movements.


At the same time the revolution had legally enshrined principles of agrarian reform that even

when they were ignored by the state, served to legitimize the land struggles of the communities.

5.2 POST-REVOLUTIONARY TRANSFORMATIONS

If the Mexican Revolution had ultimately failed to completely shake the grip of the

Familia Chiapaneca over the lives of the indigenous communities it nonetheless set in motion

several other processes that, take together, would alter the political economy and social

organization of the the state. These processes were: first, the colonization of the Lacandon

Jungle; second, an explosion in the population of the indigenous communities; and third, a shift

away from the labor intensive production techniques of the fincas towards the land-intensive

methods of large scale cattle ranching. As we will see, these processes fed off of each other in

complex ways, producing one very unambiguous effect: a greatly intensified competition for

land.

The Colonization of the Lacandon Jungle

Carlos Hernandez is a Tzotzil campesino who now lives in El Limonar, an ejido

established around 1974 in the northern part of the Lacandon Jungle. But when he describes the

conditions of his old life he could just as easily have been talking of ten, twenty or fifty years

earlier:

When I lived in El Ceibal I was like a slave, to Don Wulfrano, in El Xoc. … I sold

myself to Don Wulfrano in the finca. I sold myself to get the necessities, to pay for soap,

to get a kilo of sugar, for clothes, to take care of my mom and my sisters and brothers.

There were seven, they were still small, and they couldn’t support themselves. Me and

my brother, Benito, headed out to work at three in the morning in the finca of Don

Wulfrano, and we would stop working at six at night. … We had a little piece of land that

was my dad’s, but this land gave us no corn, because it was very bad land. … One day,


we went to look for corn because we had none at home. We were six compañeros: my

brother Carmen, my brother Benito, Miguel Angel, Mariano Gomez, Antonio Cruz, and I.

There, looking for corn, a thought came to us, an idea came to us there. We began to say:

‘Why are we suffering so, when God has provided such a big world? There is land for the

taking. There is a place that will give us corn. Why should we continue here suffering?’

That’s how we said it, that’s what we thought. In this moment we agreed: Well, lets go!”

(De Vos 2002:137)

Hernandez was not alone. His is a story that could have been told by many of the

indigenous campesinos who fled life on the fincas to carve out a piece of land and a new life in

the Lacandon Jungle.

The Cardenas presidency is remembered as the high tide of agrarian reform in Mexico. In

the 1940s his successors, Manuel Ávila Camacho and then Miguel Aleman, retreated from his

aggressive policy of breaking up large estates and redistributing them to campesinos. Camacho

and Aleman sought to redirect the clamor for land into the colonization of sparsely inhabited

parts of the country. And no area had more potential in this regard than the Lacandon Jungle.

Accordingly a policy was pursued of opening up already nationalized lands for colonization and

for nationalizing lands that remained in the hands of old logging companies. These were the

lands that had been carved up during the Porfiriato. The upheavals of the Mexican Revolution,

including the abolition of debt peonage, combined with the development of new sources of

mahogany elsewhere produced a sharp decline in the logging industry. Most of these lands were

thus available to nationalization and colonization at little cost to the national government.

Beginning very modestly in the 1920s, much of these lands would be settled over the

course of the rest of the 20th

century by successive waves of colonists drawn largely from the the

indigenous villages of the highlands and as well as the fincas. The communities thus established

would eventually constitute the core support bases of the EZLN. Thus, if Chiapas was slow to


implement the agrarian reforms promised by the revolution it was able to offer an alternative in

the form of nationally owned lands for colonization in the Lacandon Jungle.

It is impossible to establish a precise date that the process began since in its initial phases

the process was essentially a clandestine one of peons fleeing into the jungle with no expectation

of securing legal title to the lands the cleared in order to survive. But the very first colonies were

probably established sometime in the 1920s, presumably by Indians who were familiar with the

territory from their work on the monterias. The first application to the government for legal

recognition of a new settlement came in 1934 from the community of Patiwitz in what is known

as either the second valley of Ocosingo or as Estrella. The founders of Patiwitz had been mozos

who fled the Las Delicias finca into the jungle around 1914. Patiwitz was soon followed by

Prado, Suschila, and Galeana in Ocosingo and by Morelia and Belisario Dominguez among

others in Altamirano. (De Vos 2002:131)

As might be expected the first ejidos and ranches carved out of the jungle were the

closest to already established settlements on the frontier between the jungle and fincas that had

supplied the monterias. Their establishment was of a piece with the larger agrarian upheaval that

erupted in Mexico in the 1930s.

While agrarian conflict was sharper elsewhere in Mexico during the Cardenas presidency

it also touched Chiapas and contributed to the process of colonization. Prior to Patiwitz’s

application for recognition, three already established Indian villages in the vicinity of Ocosingo –

Abasolo, Tenango, and Sibacá – had already applied to be recognized as ejidos. Elsewhere in

Chiapas successful claims against large estates were being made (Reyes Ramos, 1992). It is only

in hindsight that we now look on the application from Patiwitz as representing a new


development, as something other than another application to form anejido, as the beginning

rather of a process of colonization of the Lacandon Jungle. (De Vos 2002:150–151)

Application for recognition, of course, was no guarantee that it would be forthcoming.

Patiwitz would wait twenty years to finally receive legal recognition. While other ejidos received

prompter resolutions, the experience of Patiwitz was hardly unique. Once underway, however,

the process of colonization generally did not wait for legal recognition.

At the same time that mainly Tzeltal colonies were moving southeast from the valleys of

Ocosingo deeper into the jungle, a similar process was taking place involving the largely

Tojolabal population in the municipality of Las Margaritas. In the 1930s they had established

“more than 50 colonies on lands little suited for agriculture” (De Vos 2002:157) mainly on lands

that the finca owners were willing to give up. As these lands proved inadequate to support the

growing population, the Tojolabales also began to colonize the southern portion of the jungle. By

1976 they would establish 70 communities in the jungle.

The precise motivations for colonization varied from group to group. In the case of

Patiwitz, it was flight from the crushing oppression of life on a finca. In other cases it was to

escape conflicts within Indian communities, often aggravated by a growing population and a

shortage of land. It is known, for example, that one group of a few families from the town of

Bachajón fled such a conflict to work in the remaining monterías on the Jatate and Perlas rivers.

After those jobs dried up, they established a small settlement and applied for recognition as the

ejido Lacandon (De Vos, 2002:154-155). As we will see later, religious conflicts arising from

Protestant proselytism in the highlands would also produce refugees seeking fresh lands in the

jungle.


The first colonies established in the 1930s became stepping stones towards the

establishment of newer colonies deeper in the jungle and by the early 1950s the process of

colonization was underway in earnest. De Vos makes an extended observation about the general

character of this process of colonization:

1) the principle motor of the migration was the ‘pursuit of necessity,’ not the attraction

that might be exercised by a life in a distant part of the jungle; 2) it was the neediest, that

is to say, in general the young, that decided to flee the lack of opportunities in their

communities; 3) with some exceptions, the displacement was considered like an exit

without return, that implied for the pioneers a certain break with the past, with old

customs, and with established codes; 4) it was movement in steps, in which the young

men left first and the women came once they had successfully established themselves; 5)

the exodus caused a shift in the life of the couple, since it was uncommon that both the

men and the women would be drawn with equal intensity to the same place; 6) it was a

movement under difficult conditions that extracted a high cost in human lives, not only in

transit, but in the process of adapting to the new environment; 7) these difficulties were,

in the first place, environmental, but also socio-cultural, given the differences in

geographic origin and ethnic and religious identity of the participants; 8) in cases of

different backgrounds, the group that acted as the integrating center was not generally the

most numerous, but rather that which had arrived first; 9) in almost every case, there

appears the figure of a leader who led the migration and the subsequent settlement of the

group in the chosen spot, and 10) in not a few cases, the migration took the form of a

cascade, that is to say that the receiving zones were converted in time into ejectors.

(2002:156 )

As evidence of the final point De Vos notes that the children of Patiwitz went on to found

the colonies of “Primavera, Agua Azul, San Juan, Palma, Sultana, Santa Marta, Soledad, Las

Tazas, Prado Pacayal, Galeana, Santa Elena, (and) San Bartolo” while Lacandón spawned “Santo

Domingo, El Granizo and Sibal, among others.”

The colonization of the jungle that occurred between the 1920s and 1940s involved very

small numbers of people. The first colonies were small and few in number, often consisting of a

handful of families. They are most important because they established the general pattern that

would be taken up by subsequent colonizers. The pioneers discovered by trial and error, often at

great personal cost, what was necessary to establish a viable settlement. They discovered the


dangers and potentials of the strange flora and fauna to be found in the jungle – what could be

eaten, what would make you sick, what had medicinal properties. They learned how to identify

the lands with the best potential, what sort of things needed to be done first and what could be

put off. This knowledge base greatly facilitated the work of the next generation of colonists.

Often enough the next generation were in fact, as De Vos observed, the children of the

first colonists. The first communities carved out of the fringes of the jungle gobbled up the best

lands and soon found themselves in competition with each other as they attracted new members

and had children. The swidden agricultural practices of the temperate highlands quickly began to

produce problems of soil exhaustion. The freshly cleared jungle floor at first seemed extremely

fertile. In fact the soil was generally poor and initially impressive yields quickly declined. The

predictable response to these difficulties was often to follow the example of the parents and to

head even further into the jungle and to establish new colonies. Along with the process of

intermarriage, this pattern of continuous expansion also created a web of relationships between

the colonies as they moved deeper into the jungle, a set of relations that would subsequently

facilitate the rapid spread of social movements.

The “natural growth” of the original colonies, however, could not account for the

explosion of colonization that began in the early 1950s. Many of the first colonists had some sort

of previous relationship with the jungle, either from having worked in the monterías or on the

fincas that supplied them and that often abutted the jungle. Beginning in the 1950s colonists

began to arrive from further away – from the Tojolabal communities around Las Margaritas, the

Tzotzil communities in the Highlands, the Chol communities in the north and eventually even

from beyond Chiapas. The pressures that drove these new colonists were for the most part


similar to those that motivated the first wave: oppressive working conditions on fincas and

ranches and/or a shortage of land on the part of the indigenous communities.

The Question of Cattle

The process of colonization was paralleled by another process that fuelled the process of

colonization and with which it competed. While most of our attention is rightly directed at the

colonists who established ejidal communities, the process of colonization from the beginning

also involved the establishment of cattle ranches in the Lacandon Jungle. Indeed the cattle

ranches were the inheritors of the crumbling fincas.

Many of the old fincas that had relied on large numbers of Indian laborers growing corn

and beans were converted into much less labor intensive cattle ranches. In the process large

numbers of those laborers were pushed off lands that in many cases they and their ancestors had

worked for generations, if not centuries.

The growth of cattle ranching was driven primarily by the growing domestic urban

market for beef which in turn was driven by the quantitative expansion of the urban middle and

working classes and by the qualitative improvements in their standards of living during the post-

war economic boom. The turn towards cattle ranching was also driven, at least in part, by

considerations arising from the application of agrarian reform laws. Given their need for larger

tracts of land, cattle ranches were more likely to receive exemptions from legal limitations on the

size of landholdings. Also by expelling landless laborers landowners hoped to rid themselves of

those most likely to apply for the redistribution of those lands held in excess of the legal limits.

While such applications were often rejected or allowed to drag out for decades by agrarian

reform authorities generally sympathetic with the landowners, this was by no means guaranteed.


If many of the original colonists of the Lacandon Jungle were fleeing the oppression of

the fincas, many of the later ones were instead forcibly pushed off the finca lands as a result of

their conversion to cattle ranching. In any case, the intensified competition for lands, whether

within the indigenous communities or between them and the large ladino landowners, only

served to accelerate the process of colonization of the Lacandon Jungle.

By the 1950s the colonizers of the jungle were not so much fleeing the oppression of

thriving fincas as they were victims of a process of enclosure as they were forced off lands on

which for generations they had grown corn to make way for cattle. The ejidos and ranches were

frequently in competition for the best lands and this competition would be an ongoing cause of

conflict and motor force for colonization deeper and deeper into the jungle, a sort of race to the

heart of the jungle between two distinct if interdependent modes of production. (Legorreta Díaz

1998:31–41)

Population Growth and the Question of Land

The same period also saw dramatic growth in the indigenous population which came to

constitute a majority of the population in much of eastern Chiapas. Modest improvements in

nutrition and the provision of healthcare in the aftermath of the Revolution brought down

mortality rates and produced a population explosion that strained the often marginal lands in

Indian possession. The causes of this population explosion are not too difficult to discern. Even

if by comparison to the rest of Mexico the social reforms implemented in Chiapas seem paltry,

the severity of pre-revolutionary conditions was such that even these could have a significant

impact on mortality rates. The modest redistribution of lands initiated during the Cardenas

presidency, the establishment of price supports for various agricultural products and subsidies for


basic foodstuffs, the uneven introduction of certain elementary public health measures,

improvements in communications, the expansion of new employment opportunities, and so on all

reduced mortality rates, most importantly among the very young. The decline in mortality rates

in turn resulted in a population explosion.

The expansion of cattle ranching and the growth of the indigenous population produced

intense competition over lands. This fueled a dramatic expansion in the amount of land under

cultivation in Chiapas as well as intensified conflict over title to both new and already settled

lands.

The population explosion in its turn generated increased competition for increasingly

scarce lands. This increased competition for land developed along two main lines. In the first

place it took the form of internal competition within already established communities over their

own limited land base. Secondly it took the form of competition with the owners of fincas and

rancheros either as a result of attempts to apply the agrarian reform laws to their lands or over

lands newly brought under cultivation, a phenomena in many parts of the state but most striking

in the case of the Lacandon Jungle. Thus, while at the beginning of this process Chiapas

possessed large amounts of uncultivated but potentially cultivable lands that would fuel a

dramatic expansion in agricultural production, the overcrowded and land hungry indigenous

communities were compelled to compete with largely ladino finqueros and ranchers. This

intensified competition for land, of course, served to fuel all manner of other conflicts both

within and between communities and between the communities and the larger ladino power

structure. (Ascencio Franco 1995)

These and related transformations would, in turn, generate a crisis in the indigenous

communities.


5.3 CRISIS IN THE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES

By the 1950s the processes of political economic transformation initiated in the wake of

the Mexican Revolution began to precipitate a profound crisis not just for the traditional

authorities of the communities but also for the whole traditional worldview that had sustained

their authority more or less intact since the late 16th

century.

When we speak generically of the “traditional” worldview of the communities, we use

the term “traditional” not because we believe it to embody some unchanging cultural essence

inherited from pre-conquest Mayan culture, but rather because of its own explicit appeal to

tradition as a source of legitimacy. As discussed previously, the world view of the indigenous

communities was itself the product of a very profound earlier crisis in the authority structure and

worldview of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, namely that precipitated by the conquest in the

16th

century. While certain elements of the new social organization and worldview that emerged

from that enormously traumatic event appear to have remained remarkably stable over the course

of the intervening centuries, others would undergo significant modification and the whole would

continue to evolve. As Wasserstrom has demonstrated, the worldview and the institutions and

practices that it supported changed over the centuries in response to previous major political

economic transformations, most notably the intensive reliance, beginning in the late 19th

century,

on highland communities to reproduce the labor force employed in the export enclaves of

Soconusco and the Lacandon Jungle. These changes however, all took place within the more or

less stable framework rooted in the system of cabildos and cofradías established under the

tutelage of the Dominican friars in the latter half of the 16th

century. The crisis that began to

emerge in the 1950s, however, involved for the first time a wholesale questioning and rethinking


not just of the legitimacy of individual officeholders but of the cargo system as a whole.

Similarly, while the worldview of the communities had previously involved the synthesis of

outside ideas, in particular the various teachings and ritual practices of the Catholic Church, the

post-war crisis precipitated much more radical departures from the traditional worldview. While

the crisis would take on its own dynamics it quite clearly received much of its initial impetus

from a number of dramatic political economic transformations that I will now describe.

As described in the work of Cancian (1965) and others, (Collier 1975; Vogt 1994) the

cargo system of civic and religious offices began to break down in the 1950s as population

growth caused the number of competitors for the limited number of offices to balloon and

comparatively prosperous young men found themselves denied access to the main source of

prestige in their communities.

This was not the only force that threatened the traditional authority exercised through the

cargo system. The process of colonizing the Lacandon Jungle also tended to undermine the old

system. There were several reasons for this. First, the colonists were often drawn not from the

established communities where the cargo system was well established, but rather from the fincas

where its existence was much more tenuous. (Leyva) Second, the colonists were overwhelmingly

young people and the communities they established often initially had few if any elders able to

maintain the sort of elaborate systems in place in highland municipalities like Chamula or

Zinacantan. Indeed, often enough the decision to embark on the process of colonization arose in

part as a result of conflicts with elder office holders. Thus while the colonists might attempt to

reconstruct the social system they left behind they were often not its most enthusiastic

proponents. Third, the economic conditions in the colonies were precarious in ways that did not

permit the comparatively lavish outlays for traditional dress and fiestas that were the basis for the


cargo system. Whatever surpluses the colonies produced were more or less instantly consumed

putting in place the most rudimentary institutions of community life, leaving very limited

resources for the reproduction of costly traditions. By the time a colony might have established

sufficient economic vitality to support the old system, a new one was already in place. Thus,

while many colonies would in fact eventually re-establish some of the traditional religious

offices, they would stand in very different relations with the new authority structures established

in the process of building up the colony.

The crisis in the traditional authority structure of the indigenous communities produced a

wide range of responses. These included increasing willingness in many communities to defy the

traditional authorities, often expressing itself in outbreaks of individual acts of violence as

documented by Cancian and others. Always a problem in the communities where alcohol

consumption was a critical component of much ritual life, alcoholism and alcohol-related acts of

violence began to take on epidemic proportions.

Responses to the crisis also took on more collective forms. One of these was, of course,

collective flight as represented by the continuous flow of colonists from established highland

communities to newly established communities in the Cañadas. Another form of collective

defiance of the traditional authorities was the conversion to Protestantism.

Protestant Evangelization

One of the biggest challenges faced by the Catholic Church in Latin America in the latter

half of the 20th

century was Protestant evangelization, much of it sponsored by Protestant

churches in the United States. The Indian communities of eastern Chiapas proved to be

particularly receptive to Protestant appeals with the result that Chiapas would eventually


become the Mexican state with the greatest proportion of its inhabitants adhering to one or

another Protestant denomination.

While Protestant evangelization in Chiapas began in the 1920s it would take a couple

decades before it began to bear much fruit. Like the rest of Mexico, Chiapas was

overwhelmingly Catholic when Torreblanca was inaugurated as Bishop of the Diocese which

then included the whole state. According to the 1940 census, 96% of Chiapanecos were Catholic

while less than 1% identified as Protestant. By 1990 Catholics constituted 68% of the population

and Protestants 16%. (Meyer 2000:211) Protestant evangelization was actively encouraged by

the ruling party which was deeply anti-clerical and always concerned with underming the power

and influence of the Catholic Church, especially in the aftermath of the Cristero Revolt in the

mid-1920s.

Little progress was made until the 1940s. The Protestant evangelists came almost

exclusively from the United States. While a number of Protestant denominations (as well as the

Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, and Jehovahs Witnesses) engaged in evangelical activity in

Chiapas, it would be the Presbyterians, with the support of the Summer Institute of Linguistics

(SIL) who would have the greatest impact.

SIL was founded in 1934 claiming to be a nonsectarian organization devoted the study of

linguistics and literacy work among the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In fact SIL was and

remains a front for the evangelical Presbyterian organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT),

with both entities sharing the same personnel and motivation. SIL’s real mission is to translate

the Bible into indigenous languages, and where there is no written language, creating one in

order to facilitate evangelization. Its first efforts were directed at indigenous peoples in Latin

America, but it eventually enlarged its field of activity to Africa and Asia. The version of


Christianity promoted by WBT/SIL is puritanical (condemning alcohol and tobacco

consumption) as well as aggressively pro-capitalist and anti-communist. WBT/SIL also has a

policy of cultivating close relationships with the governments in the countries in which it

operates. This orientation has made SIL an attractive instrument of U.S. foreign policy, a

function that it has not resisted. SIL has a long history of associations with the CIA and the U.S.

Agency for International Development (USAID) and has received USAID funding. (Diamond

1999)

In Mexico, SIL founder William Townsend cultivated a friendship with President Lazaro

Cardenas in the 1930s and even sought to placate U.S corporations and politicians over

Cardenas’s policy of nationalizing the petroleum and other industries. In turn SIL was contracted

by the Mexican government to carry out literacy work and conduct other social programs in

indigenous communities in Chiapas and elsewhere.

In this capacity, SIL did not hesitate to promote both its religious outlook and its political

ideology. In the case of Highland Chiapas, Diamond notes that “WBT/SIL’s Tzotzil-Spanish

dictionary eliminated the Spanish and indigenous words for ideological concepts that threaten the

status quo: class, community, conquer, exploitation, bossy, oppression, repression, revolution,

revolutionary, rebellion; most of which do exist in the native language.” And yet, as we shall see,

in an expression of the iron law of unintended consequences, the Protestant evangelization in the

Chiapas Highlands and then in the Lacandon Jungle contributed in important ways to the

ultimate emergence of radical social movements that would ultimately have an invigorating

effect on anti-capitalist sentiment not just in Chiapas but around the world.

The Presbyterians in Chiapas had as a representative a very determined missionary in the

person of Mariana Slocum who had studied indigenous languages with SIL and was prepared to


endure persecution. Arriving in 1940 she was expelled first from Tenejapa in 1943, and then

from Yochib in 1949, before settling in Corralito where she remained for the next ten years. She

quickly mastered Tzeltal and set about translating the New Testament into that language. Her

work received the support of the government through the National Indigenous Institute (INI)

which funded seven schools she founded as part of their literacy efforts. In this manner she was

able to train 150 Indian ministers and convert half of the community of Oxchuc to

Presbyterianism. (De Vos 2002:217–219)

The combination of literacy training with missionary work set in motion revolutionary

changes in many Indian communities. The population explosion in many communities made it

impossible for many young men to ever occupy the religious offices (cargos) that were both

enormously expensive and the only recognized source of social prestige. (Cancian 1965:187-

194) The Protestant evangelists offered a way out for both those who were excluded from this

system and for those members of the community who were in a position to accumulate a little

capital if the redistributive burden of the cargo system were lifted.

Similarly the prohibition of alcohol had enormous appeal to women who often had to

deal with the often violent alcoholism associated with religious festivities and offices that

frequently exacerbated the problems of already precarious household economies. Conversions to

Protestant faiths often set in motion intense struggles within the communities which were already

confronting seemingly insurmountable problems. The expulsion of Protestants became an

increasingly common way for some communities to kill two birds with one stone by

simultaneously getting rid of troublemakers and reducing the competition for scarce lands.

Whether formally expelled or simply no longer willing to endure the persecution, many

Protestants began to join the movement to colonize the Lacandon Jungle.


It was the Presbyterians again who saw in the religiously motivated expulsions the

potential to advance their evangelical mission. They founded a center in the first valley of

Ocosingo dedicated to providing Protestant colonizers with crucial support. Subsidized by North

American Presbyterians, the center offered access to medical treatment as well as assistance in

setting up new colonies, the construction of airfields, transport of materials, and other sorts of

practical assistance. This material aid gave the Protestant colonizers an initial leg up on their

Catholic competitors, increased the chances that Protestant colonies would succeed, and became

another source of attraction to Protestantism. (De Vos 2002:218-219)

5.4 CONCLUSION

By the early 1950s the traditional authority structure and worldview of the indigenous

communities of Chiapas was in crisis. This crisis had a variety of causes rooted in the political

economic transformations of the state in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution. The success

of Protestant evangelization was an indication of the seriousness of that crisis and of the

receptiveness of the communities to new ways of understanding their situation. It was also the

threat that more than anything else prompted the development of the indigenous catechist

movement that is the subject of the next chapter.


CHAPTER 6: LIBERATIONIST CHRISTIANITY AND

THE FORMATION OF INDIGENOUS CATECHISTS

In October 1974 over one thousand delegates representing several hundred indigenous

communities across Chiapas gathered in San Cristóbal de Las Casas for several days to

participate in the first Indigenous Congress commemorating the 500th

anniversary of the birth of

Fray Bartolome de Las Casas. While formally initiated by the state government, control over the

organization of the Congress had been effectively captured by the Diocese of San Cristóbal

which radically reconceived the project. The Congress was conducted employing simultaneous

translation between five languages: Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Chol, Tojolabal and Spanish. Over the

course of the Congress the delegates discussed the results of a year long process of village and

regional assemblies which had discussed the four themes now being addressed by the Congress:

health, education, land, and the commercialization of the production of the communities. By the

end of the Congress they had drafted lengthy statements critically analyzing their social

conditions and proposing a program of action to transform them.

The 1974 Indigenous Congress is generally acknowledged as the starting point for a wave

of indigenous campesino organization and collective action in Chiapas that would eventually

lead to the formation of the EZLN. (García de León 1995) But if it was the beginning of an

important organizational process, it was also the culmination of another, namely the movement

within the Diocese of San Cristóbal to train indigenous catechists.

In this chapter I tell the story of the movement of indigenous catechists that began in

Chiapas in the early 1950s and that by the late 1960s had produced a distinct group, composed

largely of young men and women, that I am characterizing as organic indigenous campesino


intellectuals. This movement, born in response to the challenges posed by the successes of

Protestant evangelization and the objective weaknesses of the Catholic hierarchy in Chiapas,

would be profoundly shaped by upheavals within the larger church and would in turn promote a

kind of cultural revolution within the indigenous communities.

Starting in the early 1950s, the Diocese of San Cristóbal undertook a process of training

indigenous catechists. First under Bishop Lucio Torreblanca, and after 1960, under the new

Bishop Samuel Ruíz García, the training of catechists became the centerpiece of the missionary

orientation of the Diocese. The movement is best understood as having two phases. While during

the first phase of this movement, from 1951 to 1968, the training became both more systematic

and more intensive over time, both the content and pedagogical methods of this training

remained essentially traditional and conservative. Beginning in 1968, however, the Diocese

experienced a profound upheaval as the traditional content and methods of catechist formation

were subjected to a radical critique by both the pastoral agents of the Diocese and the indigenous

catechists alike. In the wake of this critique both the content and the methods of the Diocese

were completely reorganized. This process culminated in the organization of the 1974

Indigenous Congress in San Cristóbal de las Casas which was followed shortly thereafter by the

formal commitment of the Diocese to “the preferential option for the poor” and to the building of

a genuinely autochthonous church.

This chapter details these processes and is organized chronologically into four parts. The

first sets the stage by describing the general situation confronting the Catholic Church in Chiapas

in the post-war period and describes the first years of the indigenous catechist movement under

the leadership of Bishop Torreblanca. The second part begins with the installation of Ruíz as

Bishop of the Diocese of Chiapas in 1960, traces the dramatic extension of the movement and its


effects on the consciousness of both the catechists and the pastoral staff of the Diocese, and

concludes in 1968 with the methods of Ruíz and the pastoral staff of the Diocese facing radical

challenges. The third part, covering the period from 1968 to the Indigenous Congress in 1974,

describes the ambitious efforts of the Diocese to transform its relationship with the indigenous

communities and the consolidation of the catechists as leaders of their communities. The fourth

part describes the role of the Diocese in supporting the organization of the indigenous campesino

movement following the Congress and other efforts to further empower the communities from

the establishment of an indigenous diaconate and the formation of a political organization of

deacons and catechists, Slohp (“Root” in Tzeltal), that would play an important role in the

emergence of the EZLN.

6.1 THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN CHIAPAS BEFORE RUÍZ

In this part I consider the local, national and international context in which the Diocese of

Chiapas (later of San Cristóbal) undertook the training of indigenous catechists. I consider here

the considerable organizational problems confronting the Diocese at the outset of the tenure of

Bishop Torreblanca in the late 1940s. I then discuss the particular challenge posed by Protestant

evangelization in the Diocese, which directly precipitated the catechist movement. Finally I will

briefly discuss the larger transformations taking place within the Catholic Church, that would

lead first to Vatican II and subsequently to the emergence of Liberation Theology in the Latin

American church.


The Catholic Church in Chiapas

As discussed in the previous chapter, in the colonial era and through the first half of the

19th

century in Chiapas as in most of the rest of Mexico the Catholic Church dominated many

aspects of life. Its monastic orders were the largest landholders and its power was effectively

almost equal to that of the state. The end of Spanish rule and the annexation of Chiapas to

Mexico in 1824 saw the opening of a period of intense struggle between pro-church

Conservatives and anti-clerical Liberals, culminating in the 1857 passage of the Ley Lerdo which

expropriated the communal lands of the indigenous communities as well as the lands of the

Church and saw the expulsion of the Dominicans and other religious orders from Mexico. This

was a period of profound upheaval during which the office of the Bishop of Chiapas was

frequently vacant and its pastoral staff reduced to a handful. Stripped of the right to extort the

Indian communities of their meager wealth, the church hierarchy largely lost interest in the

condition of their souls, in many cases effectively leaving them to their own devices for the

better part of a century. All this encouraged the consolidation, as described by Wasserstrom

(1983), of the long present but submerged and highly syncretic practices of what is called

“traditional Catholicism” in the Indian communities of Chiapas.

The Mexican Revolution saw the continuation of this pattern with the exile of Bishop

Maximo Ruíz y Flores to Guatemala in 1914 and the deportation of his successor, Bishop

Gerardo Anaya y Diez de Bonilla first in 1926 for four years and again in 1934 for another five

years. This last deportation occurred in the context of an intense campaign on the part of the

ruling party in the states of Tabasco and Chiapas against “religious fanaticism” that also saw the

destruction of the statues of saints in many churches and the expulsion of the priests of the

Diocese. This wave of persecution was famously (if tendentiously) documented in Graham


Greene’s The Lawless Roads (2006)which formed the basis for his novel The Power and the

Glory. (2003) While the bishop was eventually allowed to return he was to preside over a greatly

weakened church that ministered mainly to the ladino elite of San Cristobal and other larger

cities and that had little contact with the Indian and mestizo campesino majority. (Benjamin

1996:17, 185; Ríos Figueroa 2002)

A Church in Crisis

It was against this backdrop that Lucio Torreblanca was installed as the Bishop of the

Diocese of Chiapas in 1944. Torreblanca’s task was to rebuild the Diocese. In the absence of a

functioning hierarchy, responsibility for the maintenance of the church and its possessions had

fallen to its lay members, who in some cases were not eager to let go of their power. Lacking a

pastoral staff adequate to the needs of the Diocese, Torreblanca turned first to “intense

campaigns of preaching and celebrations of the liturgy” (Morales Bermúdez 2005) and then

towards the establishment of permanent missions under the responsibility of several religious

orders.

Despite the Diocese’s 400 year history and the at least nominal Catholicism of the vast

majority of its inhabitants, Torreblanca adopted the position that pastoral work of the Diocese

among the indigenous communities was to be essentially missionary in nature. Missionary work

in this context did not have as its aim conversion to Catholicism since the indigenous

communities had been converted four centuries earlier. Rather it meant a much more thorough

integration of the faithful into the church, starting with their religious education. If the

indigenous communities still overwhelmingly identified as Catholic, their distinctive religious

practices, which had developed largely free of supervision by the church for over a century, were


regarded as, at best, semi-heretical by both the Bishop and the missionaries he would begin to

bring into the Diocese.

Even though the residents of the Diocese overwhelming self-identified as Catholic, this

could mean a number of very different things. In his study of the religious life of a Tzeltal

community, Eugenio Maurer, a Jesuit priest trained in anthropology and based in Bachajon,

distinguished between three varieties of Catholicism practiced in Chiapas: the “Hispanic,”

practiced by the dominant ladino population and up to this point still embraced by the hierarchy

of the Diocese; the “Traditional,” which he characterizes as a synthesis of the Pre-Columbian

Mayan religion and a Lascasian version of Hispanic Catholicism; and the “Modern,” represented

chiefly by pastoral agents of the new missions that would be established in the 1950s and 60s

and by the catechists that they trained. Maurer, incidentally, rejects the common characterization

of Traditional Catholicism as “syncretic” on the liberationist theological grounds that all three

varieties of Catholism fuse expressions of the cultural particularity of their adherents with the

universal message of the church, and that therefore singling out the indigenous form as

“syncretic” wrongly suggests that it is less authentically Christian. (Maurer 1984:443–470)

Several major factors would inform the pastoral orientation adopted by Torreblanca,

which his successor Samuel Ruíz Garcia would subsequently adopt and further develop. The first

of these was the organizational weakness of the Diocese, already discussed above. The second

was the threat of Protestant evangelization that was just beginning to be felt. This was a source of

great concern to the Diocese. Father Pablo Iribarren, a Dominican priest from the Spanish

Basque country who began working in Chiapas in the late 1970s, and sought to document the

history of the catechist movement explained:


A factor that woke up the Church and which propelled it down the path of training

catechists … was the presence of evangelical Protestant groups in the zone. Presbyterians

especially. I believe that this is what woke the church up. Also at this time the church

only counted a handful of priests. (Iribarren 2008)

Indeed, according to Iribarren the Diocese had only 11 priests at the time with the Parish of

Ocosingo also responsible for the municipalities of Bachajón, Chilón, Yajalón as well as

Altamirano. A third factor was the modernizing spirit of renewal that was beginning to blow

through the church which we will now consider.

Winds of Change

The difficulties facing the Diocese of San Cristóbal were in many respects emblematic of

a deeper crisis facing the Catholic Church as a whole, especially in Latin America, and which

found itself in increasing competition with socialist and communist parties as well as Protestant

evangelists for the allegiances of the urban and rural poor and working classes. This general

crisis which first became apparent in several European Catholic countries in the late-19th

century

had produced a variety of movements among the Catholic laity initially intended to restore the

Church´s influence over the larger society, but which in turn became themselves a force for

renovation within the church. The mobilization of Catholic laity through a variety of

organizations (of women, youth, students, workers, etc…) which came to be known collectively

as Catholic Action, became part of a broader moderate progressive modernizing trend in the

church that came to be known as the New Christendom. (Smith 1991:14–15)

Catholic Action first emerged in pre-war Europe and sought to both draw Catholic

students, workers, women and the urban and rural poor into the life of the church and to mobilize

them politically in support of the church’s views on public policy. The movement was informed


by the social teachings of Popes Leo XIII (1878 to 1903) and Pius XI (1922-1939) which, while

generally anti-socialist, were also sharply critical of what Leo XIII described as “the misery and

wretchedness pressing so heavily and unjustly ... on the vast majority of the working classes.”

(Smith 1991:84) By the 1940s in many places Catholic Action came to be influenced by the

work of a group of mid-century mainly French theologians (Jacques Maritain, Louis-Joseph

Lebret, Yves Congar, Emmanuel Mounier among others) whose ideas prefigured and influenced

what would later become liberation theology. In the aftermath of the Second World War this

current grew in strength and became increasingly open in their criticism of the conservatism of

the church.

This lay movement within the church would lead eventually to Vatican II and in Latin

America the birth of liberation theology. But before any of that it would inform the pastoral

practice of Bishop Torreblanca. While Catholic Action as such played little role in the

transformation of the Diocese of Chiapas, Torreblanca’s approach and, to an even greater degree,

that of the religious orders that he would invite to work in the Diocese were shaped by the

broader spirit of renovation blowing through the church in the 1950s. It was in this context that

the Diocese undertook the training of indigenous catechists.

Origins of the Catechist Movement

The movement to train indigenous catechists in what was then the Diocese of Chiapas

began in 1951 in several villages in the parish of Tenejapa as a direct response to gains being

made there by Protestant evangelization. Mariana Slocum had already been run out of Tenejapa,

but not before she had some success in winning a number of souls to her brand of

Presbyterianism who continued her missionary work there while she operated out of neighboring


Oxchuc. The gains of the Protestants were correctly perceived as a threat by the traditional

indigenous civil-religious authorities of several Tzeltal communities who approached then

Bishop Lucio Torreblanca for assistance. Torreblanca’s response, reflecting both the Diocese’s

lack of pastoral staff and the winds of change just beginning to blow through the larger church,

was to initiate the training of indigenous catechists who could counter the influence of the

Protestants and provide elementary religious instruction in their communities. We have no more

information regarding the first few years of these efforts which, given the quite limited capacities

of the Diocese, were presumably of an ad hoc nature. This process was formalized in 1954 with

the foundation of the Mission of the Sacred Heart, under the direction of Father Teodosio

Martinez, with responsibility for the parish of Tenejapa. The new mission would pioneer the

systematic training of indigenous catechists. (Iribarren 1988:215–243; De Vos 2002)

The catechist movement had a very basic structure. Catechists, mainly in their teens and

early twenties, were recruited and trained by and met regularly with the pastoral staff and then

returned to their communities where they led small circles of the faithful. The movement spread

as much by the initiative of the catechists themselves as by the efforts of the quite Diocese’s

small pastoral staff. Catechists would identify promising candidates for training in their own or

in neighboring villages and then propose them to the pastoral staff. The greatest obstacle to the

growth of the movement in this early period was the lack of pastoral staff able to meet the

demand for continuous training.

The methods and content of catechist instruction were very traditional, involving the

memorization of articles of faith and learning religious songs that were to be sung back in the

villages. The renewed missionary orientation, however, broke with prior parish practice by

encouraging the pastoral staff to travel out of the cities and large towns and to establish closer


contact with the indigenous villages to recruit and train young catechists. (De Vos 2002:219) In

spite of the crude methods and meager resources, the catechist movement answered a real need

in the communities. In offering an opportunity for younger members of the communities to

participate in a process of religious renovation it acted as an alternative to the appeal of

protestant evangelism. The movement thus very quickly took on a life of its own spreading from

Tenejapa to the municipalities of Oxchuc, Huixtan, and Chanal.

The Diocese continued with its strategy of giving religious orders responsibility for

parishes it was unable to adequately serve. In 1958 the Jesuits established a mission in the

Tzeltal town of Bachajon northeast of Ocosingo, an area that had already been touched by the

catechist movement which they were charged with deepening. In the years that followed other

orders would be made similarly responsible for other parishes. (Bermudez 2005:91-92)

The rapid growth of the movement strained the method of individual instruction initially

employed by the Tenejapa mission. It quickly became clear that to accommodate the demand it

would be necessary to organize classes. So, in the same year, 60 students attended the first

organized course for indigenous catechists. The five-week long course, which combined

religious instruction with training as nurses assistants, set a pattern in which the spiritual

authority of the catechists was reinforced with training in practical skills of value to their

communities. The training of catechists was also coupled with a series of pilot projects intended

to promote public health, literacy and production in a number of indigenous communities in the

parish. (Irribarren 1988a)

It was also at this time that the Diocese of Tapachula was established, relieving the

Diocese of Chiapas of responsibility for the region of Soconusco on the Pacific coast. This would

be the first of two divisions of the Diocese that would enable it to concentrate its attentions on


the more predominantly indigenous eastern half of the state. All of these apparently modest

developments – the assignment of parishes to religious order, the first steps in the training of

indigenous catechists, the spread of the movement to neighboring municipalities, and the first

division of the Diocese – all prepared the ground for the much more ambitious undertakings of

Torreblanca’s successor, Samuel Ruíz García, which we will now look at.

6.2 FROM CHARITY TO LIBERATION: THE EVOLUTION OF A DIOCESE

In 1960 Torreblanca was replaced by the young new Bishop Samuel Ruíz García. Ruíz

was an unlikely candidate for the role that he would come to play. He came from a very

conservative family and at the beginning of his reign as Bishop was a fervent anti-communist

and understood his mission very much in terms of combatting communism. In 1961 he issued a

“Pastoral Exhortation” that can only be read as a rabid response to Cuban Revolution. But he

was also extremely energetic. At 37 years old he was the youngest bishop in the entire church. It

would be his energetic efforts to reach the Indians of the Diocese that would, in the end,

transform him and with him the Diocese that he led. (Fazio 1994)

Under Ruíz’s leadership, the training and organization of indigenous catechists would

become the cornerstone of the pastoral practice of the Diocese for the next forty years. In first

eight years of Ruíz’s tenure he methodically transformed the Diocese he had inherited, reducing

its size, enlarging its staff, and decentralizing its governance, all with an eye towards deepening

its missionary work in the often remote indigenous communities. (Iribarren 1988, 2003:4–5)

During this period the training of catechists was conducted largely as it had been under

Torreblanca. While the training of catechists was expanded and further systematized, the content

of the courses remained highly traditional as did the methods of instruction. (Leyva Solano


1995:392) The initial attitude of the pastoral staff towards the Indian communities and their

culture was generally patronizing. The traditional religious practices of the communities were

regarded as largely heretical and an obstacle to their economic improvement which was to be

achieved, in Ruíz’s words, by “teaching them Spanish, putting shoes on their feet, and improving

their diets.” (Fazio 1994:57)

In spite of the appearance of continuity in practice, however, the thinking of the Bishop

and of the pastoral staff of the Diocese was undergoing an important evolution under the

simultaneous influence of its increasingly close contact with the lives of the indigenous

communities and the upheavals within the larger Church which would soon find expression with

the Second Vatican Council.

As a new bishop, Ruíz was obligated to visit all of the parishes that made up his Diocese.

The process would ultimately take five years and it would have a profound personal impact on

Ruíz. Given the near-total absence of roads in much of the Diocese, much of Ruíz’s travels

would take place largely on horseback or foot, affording an opportunity to see in considerable

detail the intense poverty and misery of the indigenous population. (Fazio 1994:56-58) Much of

the pastoral staff of the Diocese would undergo a parallel process. Javier Vargas was a Marist

priest who would be charged with establishing and directing one of two schools for catechists in

San Cristóbal. He describes the effect of the work in those days :

We went to the communities, and as there were no roads in those times we had to hike

and hike. The people came to love us – because nobody else would do this. Do you know

how many kilometers we would walk on one tour? Two hundred, three hundred, a

thousand kilometers on foot, until we came to the last stop. ... I would go to their house,

we would come with the others and we would see their eyes, we saw your face, we saw

their wives, watched their children, we saw their milpa, we saw their river, we lived with

them. All so that a catechist might come from there. (Vargas 2009)


It was this previously unknown and intimate contact with the indigenous communities

that would begin to transform the Diocese. As Iribarren argues:

The motor of the evolution of the Diocese […] was the contact with the indigenous and

campesino communities, the contemplation of their situation of permanent conflict, the

humiliation and poverty of their lives, and the unanticipated events that demanded rapid

discernment. This was creating within the environment of our Diocese the basic

principles of Liberation Theology. (Iribarren 2003:5)

The pastoral staff was also greatly enlarged under Ruíz during this period, with the

invitation of various orders of the church to take up responsibility for missionary work in several

parishes responsible for large portions of the Diocese. In 1962, the Diocese established two

schools for indigenous catechists in San Cristóbal, one for men, to be run by the Marists, and the

other for women, to be run by the Sisters of the Divine Shepherd. (DeVos 2002:220) The Marists

would establish another center, La Castalia, shortly thereafter in the city of Comitan. Building on

the missions already established in Tenejapa and Bachajon, Ruíz was putting in place the

organizational means to extend the catechist movement to the whole of the Diocese. (Iribarren

2003:55-69)

There are divergent accounts as to how candidates for catechist training were selected.

Javier Vargas insists that from the beginning that this responsibility rested with the communities

themselves:

Nobody did it just because he wanted to. He would be appointed to be a catechist by the

community, by the principal. From the first day there was never a single person that did

not have behind him the the force of having been named by their community. […] The

community assumed the responsibility of caring for his family, caring for his children,

that his wife would have food, and he assumed the commitment to assist the new thinking

of community. […] The communities met and chose their people, and those they chose

were appointed by them and in agreement with the pastoral agents the people were sent to

us. (2009)


In contrast with Vargas, Juan, who was a Tzeltal teenager living in the ejido of Laguna

del Carmen Patate in the parish of Ocosingo when he was recruited, describes the decision as a

personal one between the priest and himself.

[In]1960, a Jesuit priest named Rodolfo Mandujano, working in the parish of Ocosingo,

arrived. He invited me to become a catechist, I told him that I could not because I did not

know how to read very well. I wrote but very little and I did not understand Spanish. He

told me, “If you go study. I will give you the books” so that you can go to teach the

doctrine, pray the Rosary, so that the people go to pray in the chapel. I then told him that

if he gave me the books, that yes I would accept, to study a little catechesis.

It was the continuous nature of the training that made it so effective. After a few years of simple

instruction, Juan travelled to San Cristóbal in 1963 to take a four month long course at the school

operated by the Marists.

[…] The course was to learn to read the Holy Bible and to practice doing so, because we

didn’t know very well how to read books yet, […] There were also parts that [some of us]

didn’t understand, but as there were some catechists who had already studied, from

Yajalon, Bachajón, San Juan Chamula, here in the highlands, that had already had

primary schooling and they understood more, they then translated explanations into our

language, so that all of us could understand everything equally.

In 1964 Juan began to work with the Dominicans from the United States who had been

invited to establish the Mission of Ocosingo-Altamirano. Juan would accompany the Dominican

missionaries on their visits to the communities. In 1966 he attended a second course in San

Cristóbal after which he was given responsibility for the zone that included his own community.

In this capacity he had to convince finqueros to give their workers time off for weekly religious

instruction on Sundays. He was not always immediately successful, but the movement continued

to grow. At this time there were six or seven catechists active in the zone under Juan´s direction.

Every Sunday they would hold meetings of the faithful and on the first Friday of every month all

of the catechists in the area covered by the mission would travel to Ocosingo to receive

additional ongoing training and to participate in meetings to plan their activities for the coming


month.

Where Vargas describes the catechists as enjoying the support of the principales and

other traditional authorities of the communities, Juan noted that not all of the newly established

communities had traditional authorities and insisted that in some cases the traditional authorities

would not participate in the meetings organized by the catechists. This is also in keeping with

Maurer´s observations on how the catechists came to be perceived by the traditional authorities

as a challenge to their own privileged standing in the communities. What seems most likely is

that the situation varied considerably and changed at different rates from community to

community and zone to zone depending on a variety of factors including the relative strength of

the traditional authorities, the attitude of responsible members of the pastoral staff towards the

religious practices of the traditional authorities, and the temperament of the respective catechists.

In any event, whether the catechist movement enjoyed friendly or tense relations with the

traditional authorities of particular communities, the participants in the movement were generally

experiencing a radical opening up of their world as they acquired basic literacy skills, as they

learned to interpret Bible passages, and as they developed relations with catechists in many other

communities through visits, courses, and monthly meeting. Slowly but surely the catechist

movement was producing a strata of young intellectually engaged members of the communities

who were also increasingly aware of themselves as a distinct social group able to mediate

between their communities and the larger world.

Shifting Terrain

In 1964, the Diocese of Chiapas was further divided with the creation of the Diocese of

Tuxtla Gutierrez based in the state capital. The old diocese, consisting now of roughly the


eastern half of the state of Chiapas, and renamed the Diocese of San Cristóbal, concentrated

much of the state’s large indigenous population making the Diocese itself predominantly

indigenous and enabling the Bishop and his pastoral staff to more completely concentrate their

attentions on the missionary work in the indigenous communities. (Fazio 1994:74)

MAP 3. Diocese of San Cristóbal and Pastoral Zones. (Leyva Solano 1995:388)

In 1967, the Diocese was reorganized into six distinct geographical-linguistic zones: The

Chol Zone in the North; the Tzotzil Zone in the Central Highlands; the Central Zone in and

around San Cristóbal itself; the Tzeltal Zone stretching all the way into the Lacandon Jungle; the

Southern Zone consisting of the areas immediately to the south of San Cristóbal; and the

Southeastern Zone which took in most of the Tojolabal population as well as a fair number of

ladinos and members of some smaller indigenous groups. The pastoral staff of the Diocese was

divided accordingly into teams responsible for coordinating pastoral work in their respective

zones. Previously the main sub-division of the Diocese had been the parishes which operated

under the more centralized authority of the curia in San Cristóbal. The new organization was


intended to address problems of communication and coordination in a still very large diocese

with difficult terrain and poorly developed lines of communication. The new structure effectively

decentralized the authority of the diocese, giving each team responsibility for developing a

pastoral practice in keeping with a general diocesanal plan but also reflective of particular

conditions within each zone. (Iribarren 2003:4, 54-55)

Despite generalized poverty and a largely indigenous population across the diocese, there

were significant differences between the zones in terms of their relative ethnic homogeneity,

distinctive histories, and religious traditions. The Tzeltal and Southeastern Zones, for example,

included between them the recently settled communities in the Cañadas region of the Lacandon

Jungle, while the Tzotzil Zone consisted largely of the much more traditional “closed corporate

communities” that have been the object of such extensive anthropological study. The new

organization would thus come to facilitate the development of distinctive pastoral practices in

each of the zones. This would have contradictory effects. It undoubtedly accelerated the overall

transformation of the pastoral practice of the diocese by allowing different zones to pursue new

approaches that would not have been possible if initially attempted across the entire diocese. On

the other hand, the divergent practices of each team would also contribute over time to real

divisions within the diocese.

During this whole period Ruíz’s thinking, and that of much of the pastoral staff of the

Diocese, evolved from what he retrospectively characterized as an asistencialista perspective to

a desarollista or developmentalist position. Asistencialismo sought to ameliorate the worst

effects of poverty on its victims through acts of charity, without attempting to identify, much less

proposing to do anything about, the actual causes of that poverty. Desarollismo, in contrast,


identified under-development as the cause of poverty and proposed to alleviate it by developing

the capacities of the communities through education, improved healthcare and economic

development projects. In retrospect Ruíz would come to regard desarollismo, because of its

failure to recognize the role of exploitation in maintaining the condition of under-development

and the role of struggle on the part of the poor against that exploitation, as just as misguided as

asistencialismo. None the less, in the evolution of Ruíz’s thinking, desarollismo represented

attention to the social structural causes of the poverty and marginalization of the communities,

and as such laid the ground for the more radical analysis that was soon to come. (Fazio 1994:84-

85) The desarrollista orientation, which had been bubbling up within the church in the 1950s and

was further legitimized by Vatican II, was not itself particularly radical. But by bring the pastoral

staff and lay members of the church into closer contact with the living conditions of the very

poor and encouraging them to think about their causes, it precipitated a new critical

consciousness that would go beyond the desarollista framework.

Liberationist Christianity

These sorts of intense internal struggles on the part of both active lay members and

pastoral agents of the church were occurring all over Latin America. It was a process that would

soon find a common articulation in the form of what would become known as Liberation

Theology. Liberation Theology first emerged as a distinct movement within the Roman Catholic

Church in Latin America in the late 1960s. It would fuse elements of a Marxist critique of

capitalism with the Catholic Church’s tradition of social action and became a major influence on

popular movement in Latin America in the 1970s and after. (Berryman 1987) The term

“Liberation Theology” is commonly used to refer both to a specific body of religious writings,


and to the broader transnational social movement that preceded and inspired those writings and

that Löwy has dubbed “liberationist Christianity.” (1996:2)

On first glance, the Catholic Church in Latin America which had deep-rooted

connections to the landed oligarchies and most conservative social forces in the region, might

seem an unlikely arena for mass radicalization. (Smith 1991:13) Liberationist Christianity, which

represented a rupture with that historic relationship, emerged in the early 1960s as a response to

the convergence of several processes that had begun in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The first of these was the mass migration in Latin America of rural producers to the cities

and the consequent explosive growth in shanty-towns and all the associated problems of extreme

urban poverty. (Smith 1991:89-91) The second process was the rise of Catholic Action and the

New Christendom, other moderate renovating forces within the church in response to some of

the challenges described earlier. The third process was the wave of anti-colonial and social

revolutionary upheaval that swept through much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America during this

period, with the Cuban Revolution in particular capturing the imaginations of large numbers of

Latin American students and youth, including many involved in Catholic Action. (Löwy

1996:40-41)

The convergence of these three processes set in motion a process of radicalization among

members of Catholic Action in Latin America, in particular among students and youth put in

contact with the living conditions and social problems of the urban poor. The first expressions of

this process occurred in Brazil where Catholic Action had been active since the 1920s. In 1960

several leaders of the university wing of Catholic Action, influenced by the recent example of the

Cuban Revolution, published an explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critique of Brazilian

society. Two years later many members of Catholic Action joined the Grassroots Education


Movement (MEB) which used the pedagogical methods of popular education developed by

Paulo Freire and elaborated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) to conduct literacy training and

basic education in Brazil’s most economically under-developed regions. While the MEB would

be suppressed when the military seized power in 1964, the political mobilization of the Brazilian

poor that it helped initiate had a radicalizing effect not just on the lay members of Catholic

Action, but all the way up to the leadership of the Brazilian National Conference of Bishops.

(Löwy 1996:81–93; Mainwaring 1986)

Similar processes, albeit on a more modest scale were occurring in several other Latin

American countries which saw the proliferation of Christian Base Communities (CEBs) as well

as the appearance of organizations like Priests for the Third World in Argentina. The death in

combat in 1966 in Venezuela of Camilo Torres, who had left the priesthood to join the guerrilla

National Liberation Army (ELN), had a particularly electrifying effect on many of these groups

and further inspired their deepening radicalization.

Vatican II

The missionary orientation of the Diocese of San Cristóbal and the consequent closer

contact with, and empathy towards, the plight of the indigenous communities, responded to the

particular circumstances of the Diocese, but were also very much informed by and a part of the

movement to renovate the church associated first with Catholic Action and then with the Second

Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, better known as Vatican II. Called by Pope John XXIII in

response to a widely perceived and multi-faceted crisis within the Roman Catholic Church,

Vatican II had an enormous impact on the currents within the church that would only

retrospectively be designated as liberationist christianity. (Iribarren 1988:217; Smith 1991)


Bringing together Cardinals, Bishops, leaders of the various orders, as well as observers

from other churches and advisors trained in the social sciences, Vatican II met every autumn

between 1962 and 1965 and revisited questions of church doctrine on a wide range of questions.

As much as the debates this process provoked produced a florescence of critical thought within

the church, Vatican II also encouraged the development of concrete ties between the nascent

liberationist currents. As these heretofore largely isolated currents participated in post-Vatican II

discussions they developed a consciousness of themselves as a movement and their critical

tendencies were sharpened.

All of this is evident in the experience of Bishop Ruíz. Ruíz participated in all four

sessions of Vatican II, taking an active role in discussions on ecumenicism, missiology

(especially among indigenous peoples), and social action. Ruíz drank deep of the discussions

with academics as well as clerics and made many international contacts that would come to

inform his later work. The participation of African bishops in the meetings on missiology, which

led to the production of the council document, Ad Gentes, (“To the Nations” in Latin) would

make a particularly deep impression on him.

As Vatican II’s Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church, Ad Gentes addressed

the relationship of the church to the cultural diversity of the world’s peoples. It reflected a

recognition of both the changing composition of the church, which was growing in Africa, Asia,

and Latin America while it was shrinking in Europe, as well as the wrenching processes of

decolonization unfolding as it was being drafted. While Ad Gentes addressed a range of

questions related to missionary work, its most important feature was its recognition of the

presence of God in cultures prior to their Christian evangelization and its call on missionaries to

live among the people they hoped to evangelize and to conduct their work with an eye towards


discovering within those cultures the pre-existing signs of Christian salvation. (Fazio 1994:68-

76)

There are obvious echoes of Las Casas’s arguments in defense of presence of God in

indigenous cultures in Ad Gentes. Indeed a revived interest in Las Casas was an early indication

of the liberationist turn taking place in the Latin American church. It would prove important in

the subsequent ability of Ruíz and the pastoral staff of the Diocese to eventually recognize the

Lascasian content in the traditional religion of the communities and break with their prior

dismissal of it all as essentially heretical.

Another early product of Vatican II was the document De regimine Episcoporum which

sought to decentralize the functioning of the church. Under its influence Ruíz, and the bishops of

two other poor dioceses in Mexico, Alfonso Sánchez Tinoco of Papantla and Adalberto Almeida

of Zacatecas, with the assistance of the French sociologist of religion, Fernand Boulard and

Father Riccardo Lombardi, organized the Unión de Mutua Ayuda Episcopal (UMAE) in

December 1963, with the intention of sharing resources and coordinating the pastoral activities

of the country’s poorest dioceses. Eventually growing to include 25 dioceses, UMAE would

become a major vehicle in the renovation of the Catholic Church in Mexico, challenging the

domination of the Mexican Episcopal Conference (CEM) by the country’s conservative

archbishops. UMAE organized courses that were attended by the pastoral staffs of its member

dioceses and in this manner did much to propagate the innovations coming out of Vatican II.

While UMAE would dissolve in 1971, it played a critical role in the development of Ruíz’s

pastoral practice.


Towards Liberation Theology

The official documents produced in Vatican II, the dramatic changes in the pastoral

practices of the church, and the new culture of openness and debate all gave encouragement to

the initiatives of the liberationists. In March 1967, Pope Paul VI issued an encyclical, Populorum

Progressio, which addressed issues of international poverty and development. While in many

respects Populorum Progressio remained within the prevailing developmentalist framework for

understanding these problems, it was nonetheless the most progressive statement on social issues

ever issued by the Vatican and it had an electrifying effect on Latin American bishops already

energized by Vatican II and feeling the pressures of liberationist Christianity from below. All of

these processes would crystallize at the Second General Conference of the Episcopal Conference

of Latin America (CELAM) held in Medellin, Colombia in 1968. Created in 1955, CELAM is

the conference of the Roman Catholic bishops in Latin America. It would briefly play a critical

role in the development and propagation of Liberation Theology.

In April 1968, as CELAM was making preparations for their upcoming meeting in

Medellin, a preparatory meeting was organized in Melgar, Colombia. Bishop Ruíz was invited to

attend and was particularly affected by the words of the Colombian anthropologist, Gerardo

Reichel-Dolmatoff, who argued that Christian evangelization of the indigenous peoples of the

Americas had been a process of cultural destruction and domination. For Ruíz this was a

profound challenge to his own pastoral practice and it produced considerable inner turmoil over

whether or not it was even possible to evangelize without destroying the culture of the

evangelized. Ruíz discovered the resolution to his dilemma in Gustavo Gutierrez’s reading of Ad

Gentes. While Ruíz had personally participated in the meetings that had drafted Ad Gentes, its

radicalism had come from the African Bishops and it was not until Melgar that its full


implications for the pastoral practice of the Diocese of San Cristóbal began to become apparent

to him. As a result of his participation in the meeting at Melgar, Ruíz was invited to make a

presentation on evangelization at the Medellin Conference. (Fazio 1994:84-88; Iribarren 2003:4)

The CELAM conference in Medellin sought to apply the results of Vatican II to Latin

America. The Medellin Conference marked a dramatic turning point in the history of the

Catholic Church in Latin America. It was a triumph for the liberationists who dominated the

production of the main documents of the conference and who effectively gained control of

CELAM for the next several years.(Smith 1991:150–164) Those documents articulated a

comprehensive critique of the roots of Latin American poverty in colonialism and imperialism,

condemned “liberal capitalism” and called on the church to align itself with the struggles of the

poor to become “agents of their own history” engaged in the construction of “a new society.”

Ruíz’s presentation was one of several that marked the Medellin conference and his

leading role in drafting the conference document on the theme of “Justice” further confirmed him

as a leading figure in this new movement. (Fazio 1994:89–98; Iribarren 2003:5; Womack

1999:119–128) A year after Medellin, the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Guitiérrez, would coin

the term “theology of liberation” at a conference organized by the World Council of Churches.

(Smith 1991:21)

In addition to encouraging the continued activity and radicalization of liberationist

Christianity, Medellin unleashed a wave of theological reflections on the experiences of the

movement. These included, among others, Gutierrez’s A Theology of Liberation (1988[1971]);

the Brazilian Bishop Dom Hélder Camara’s Revolution Through Peace (1971); the Argentine

Methodist Jose Bonino’s Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation (1975); the Uruguayan


Juan Luis Segundo’s The Liberation of Theology (1976)and the Brazilian Leonardo Boff’s Jesus

Christ, Liberator.(1978)

Smith (1991:27-50) identifies eight central themes that unite this body of writing:

1. theology as a reflection on actual liberatory praxis;

2. the use of social scientific tools, in particular those of Marxism, to analyze social

reality;

3. God as a partisan of the poor and the oppressed;

4. sin as not only personal, but embodied in social relations and institutions (including the

church);

5. Christ as the inaugurator of the kingdom of God not in the future, but in contemporary

struggles for social transformation;

6. the rejection of the dualistic separation of salvation from world history;

7. the necessity of the church exercising a “preferential option for the poor”; and

8. the simultaneous radical transformation of both society and humanity.

Each of these themes on its own was potentially explosive. Taken together they

constituted a revolutionary reconception of the mission of the church, an unexpected appearance,

I would argue, of the communist hypothesis within the Latin American Catholic Church. While I

have already discussed several factors that contributed to the appearance first of liberationist

Christianity and then of Liberation Theology in the Latin American church, there is another to

consider in the light of this characterization, namely the general abdication of their revolutionary

mission by the Latin American Communist Parties. While I will develop this further in the

chapters to come, suffice it to say here that the the cautiousness of the Latin American CPs

forced the revolutionary energies of the urban and rural poor that were surging forward


everywhere to find other vehicles of expression. An important one of these proved to be the

Catholic Church. In its efforts to counter the influence of communism, Catholic Action had

brought a fraction of its natural social base inside the church with the result that a fraction of the

church was transformed, under the banner of liberation theology, into a vehicle for the

revolutionary organization of the oppressed. This was, of course, a highly contradictory

phenomena. Far from every liberationist clerical or lay worker made the leap to a consciously

revolutionary orientation. But many did and they would have a significant impact.

In Chiapas, the articulation of Liberation Theology would have an considerable impact

on the consciousness of Bishop Ruíz and the pastoral staff of the Diocese, and thus also on the

indigenous catechists and their communities. It would give them a language and conceptual

apparatus with which to describe the transformations they had been experiencing but had not yet

properly named. Once they had the language they needed, the process of transformation only

accelerated.

The Spirit of ’68

1968 was a watershed for radical social struggles around the world and even the remote

Diocese of San Cristóbal did not escape the waves of rebellion reverbating everywhere else. The

Tet offensive in Viet Nam, Prague Spring and its violent suppression by Soviet tanks, the

militarization of the Cultural Revolution in China, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

and the ensuing wave of urban rebellions in the United States, the student and worker revolts in

Paris, and countless smaller outbreaks of revolt, created a dizzying sense of the world being

turned upside down. In Mexico, a national student strike against the repressive regime of the PRI

seized the nations campuses until it was bloodily suppressed with the massacre of several


hundred students at the hands of the armed forces in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the

neighborhood of Tlatelolco in Mexico City on October 2. (Katsiaficas 1999; González de Alba

1986)

The movement and the massacre would shape a generation of young Mexicans, many of

whom would commit themselves to a number of radical political projects that would emerge in

their wake. In the years that followed several waves of activists shaped in various ways by the

events of 1968 would make their way to Chiapas. But before they arrived the Diocese of San

Cristóbal would experience its own 1968. Ruíz’s participation in the meetings in Melgar and

Medellin that would mark the emergence of Liberation Theology were one aspect of this, but

another aspect would come from below.

By 1968 the process of building up and reorganizing the Diocese, the intellectual ferment

generated by Vatican II, and the accumulated experience of contact with the conditions of life in

the indigenous communities had set the stage for a radical rupture in the form and content of the

training of indigenous catechists by the Diocese. (Iribarren 2003:56) The result of this rupture

would ultimately be a transformation of the catechists into a strata of organic indigenous-

campesino intellectuals able to articulate and defend the interests of the indigenous campesino

movement, and thereby to constitute the indigenous campesino communities of eastern Chiapas

as a new, and revolutionary, historical subject.

This process of transformation in which the catechists and their communities emerged

decisively as subjects of their own history characterizes the whole period from 1968 through

1974. (Ruíz and Santiago 1999; Santiago 2009) It begins with critical comments by some

catechists in the course of an evaluation of the Diocese’s pastoral practice in 1968 and

culminates in the organization of the Indigenous Congress in 1974 in which over a thousand


delegates representing virtually all of the indigenous communities in the Diocese came together

for the first time to articulate a common set of grievances and a program for their resolution.

The qualitative transformations that were to take place in the pastoral practice of the

Diocese owed much to an important quantitative accomplishment. By 1968 the Diocese had

trained 700 indigenous catechists on whom the church now depended to carry out its pastoral

work. (Ruíz García 1993)

The creation of a layer of young literate and socially engaged indigenous campesinos,

organized into a movement that brought them into regular contact both with each other and with

the increasingly critical currents of thought circulating through the church, and that encouraged

them to draw members of their communities into these processes of discussion and reflection,

would have enormous consequences for communities that had been fractured and isolated from

each other, and that had, over the course of centuries, internalized the dominant views of their

own supposed cultural and intellectual inferiority.

1968 was the tenth anniversary of the systematic training of catechists which had begun

with the first course attended by 60 candidates. It was on the occasion of this anniversary that the

Diocese organized a systematic evaluation of its pastoral practice over the preceding decade.

This evaluation would ultimately lead to a radical reconceptualization of the whole process of

catechist training, from the selection of candidates for training, to the content of the training, to

the pedagogical methods employed. According to Javier Vargas there were two parallel

evaluations conducted. The first brought in a team of observers from outside the Diocese which,

after a cursory investigation, heaped praise on the work of the Diocese. The second evaluation

was carried out by a team of indigenous elders recruited from the communities. The elders asked

what the word “evaluate” meant and were told that it meant to determine the value of something,


in this case the work of the Diocese. For three months the elders lived with and observed the

work of the pastoral staff. Finally when the elders felt that the process was complete, a meeting

was called so that they might present the results. Before two hundred people including Ruíz and

Vargas, the elders spoke. Their evaluation took the form of three questions. Vargas recounts their

words and comments on their implications,

They say, “Brothers, we like your God very much brothers – parentheses meaning that

they had their own – what we love about your God - i.e., they didn’t like everything they

about our God – what we love about your God is that you say that he is a God who saves

and liberates, that is what we love about your God. The question that we have for you and

your God is if your God can only save our souls, and if he doesn’t know how to save our

bodies? That is the question.” […]

Second question. “Look Brothers. You have preached to us. You say that the word of

God is there in the Bible, that the word of God is there, right. Then, as we read, because

you taught us that it says there that the word of God is like a seed, and that seed is to

fruit, and that the seed is to be multiplied, and that seed is everywhere, and that it is very

powerful. The question that I have for you is do we possess this seed, and can we

cultivate it? Or are you the only ones who can carry them, are you the only ones who can

cultivate them? That is the second question.

Then came the third question, and the third question was “You call yourselves Brothers.”

We were Marist brothers, and along with the Jtatic [Ruíz] we also called each other

Brothers. “Then the question that we have is this. We don’t know why you call

yourselves Brothers, but we do know why we call you brothers. We call you brothers

because in the time that we have seen you here you have committed your lives on our

behalf .” – It isn’t that you have taught us. – “We have seen you commit your lives to us.

The question we have is for how long do you want us to call you brothers?” […]

And, the key lesson that we learned is […] that the only real evangelization is that it is we

who need to convert ourselves. […] This was our 1968. (2009)

The evaluation coincided with the publication in 1968 of a new bilingual (Spanish and

Tzeltal) catechism, Dios nos ama – Dios ya se’anotic or God Loves Us, under Vargas’s direction.

This new catechism however became an object of criticism on the part of the catechists

themselves which in turn led to a reflection on the process of its production and the underlying


pedagogical assumptions of the pastoral staff. Vargas himself would embrace the criticisms and

spearhead the production of a completely new catechism with much greater participation by the

catechists and the communities themselves. (DeVos 2002:220-222)

It is thus in 1968 that Ruíz and the pastoral staff begins to critically re-examine their

original views on the nature of the traditional religion of the indigenous communities and to

realize how, by promoting those views among the catechists they were fuelling increasingly

intense and destructive conflicts within the communities between the catechists and the older

traditional authorities, the holders of the various civil-religious cargos. (Leyva Solano 1995:400–

404)

The period from 1960 to 1968 was therefore one of considerable intellectual ferment for

both the Bishop and his pastoral staff. The training of catechists during this period, however, had

remained essentially unchanged. As Leyva notes, the instructors of the catechists

reproduced the vertical and authoritarian teacher-student relationship and, on the basis of

their Western vision, rejected the cultural forms of the tzeltales, choles and tojolabales.

(392)

While characterizing the process of catechist training as a dynamic one, Iribarren

confirms its vertical character and specifically identifies two “negative aspects” in the methods

used: the destruction of indigenous culture by the catechists themselves who came to identify

“evangelization with western Christian civilization,” and a practice of catechesis in which the

communities would become the passive recipients of the Word. In the aftermath of the events of

1968 all of that would come under attack as the Diocese moved to radically transform itself into

an instrument for the liberation of the indigenous communities.


6.3 A RADICALIZED CHURCH

Between 1968 and 1974 the practice of the Diocese underwent a profound radicalization.

This took the form of a succession of distinct projects as the church scrambled to put its new

ideas into practice. The first of these was the implementation of a Diocesanal plan known as Ach

Lekubtesel and an associated campaign of work in the communities known as Acción Paraje.

This was followed by the use of new participatory methods to develop two documents: the

Catechesis of the Exodus and the Tzeltal Declaration. These projects in turn prepared the ground

for the Diocese’s most ambitious project, the organization of the historic 1974 Indigenous

Congress.

The contradictions between, on the one hand the deepening understanding of both the

culture and the conditions of life in the indigenous communities and the increasingly critical

discourse within the larger church and, on the other hand, the conservative methods and content

of the catechist training became increasingly unsustainable for both the pastoral staff and the

catechists in training. Thus the stage was set for a radical reconceptualization of the

responsibilities of the Diocese and, in particular, its main pastoral activity, the training of

catechists.

An important figure in this period would be Jorge Santiago Santiago. Santiago was born

and raised in San Cristóbal where he entered the seminary. In 1965 he entered the Gregorian

Pontifical University in Rome with the intention of entering the priesthood. He returned to

Chiapas in 1969 where he joined the work of the Diocese but put off taking his vows. He

describes the intellectual atmosphere among the pastoral staff at this moment:

In ‘70 I read Pablo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed [...] because Paolo Freire came to

give some courses in Cuernavaca. Cuernavaca already was very important because it was,

the center of Ivan Illich. Ivan Illich had brought Paolo Freire, and compañeros with


whom I had begun to work, compañeros who had attended the seminars of Paolo Freire.

[…] Javier Vargas attended [...] and he worked the book [...] and he brought back

Pedagogy of the Oppressed which was still in Portuguese. And so I read Paolo Freire in

Portuguese and I said “that’s what I’m thinking.” It was bit like a reflection, i.e. “that is

what I was thinking.” […] We didn’t just read Freire, but the ideas excited us, and so we

started. Because our first work, already in Chiapas as part of a process of collaboration

and of “having to do what we’ve got to do” was to start doing literacy work, and we used

Freire’s method. (2009)

Ach Lekubtesel and Accion Paraje

The first expression of the new orientation of the Diocese was the development of Plan

Ach Lekubtesel, the Diocese’s first plan to take an indigenous name. (Ach Lekubtesel translates

as “new progress.”) The centerpiece of the plan was a campaign that became known as Acción

Paraje in which mixed teams including both pastoral staff and laity undertook a wide range of

projects in the communities. Acción Paraje was a departure from prior practice in several

respects. First, it actively sought the participation of the communities in determining the kind of

projects that would be carried out. These ended out including the literacy campaigns that

Santiago mentions, but also public health work, the organization of producers cooperatives, the

introduction of new crops with greater commercial potential, like coffee, into the communities,

and the first attempts at collective social analysis and consciousness-raising.

The second way that Acción Paraje departed from previous practice was its reliance on

teams in which both clergy and laity, men and women were working and living together in the

communities on a more or less egalitarian basis without respect for the formal hierarchy and

divisions of the church. Ultimately all this would prove too threatening and disruptive and

Acción Paraje was brought to a close by 1972. Nonetheless, Acción Paraje was a watershed

moment in the lives of many participants. Vargas left the priesthood in order to marry, but

continued working as a lay worker for the Diocese, relocating to Ocosingo. Jorge Santiago


decided not to enter the priesthood at all. And the egalitarian experiences would inform

subsequent initiatives that further democratized the culture of the Diocese.

Catechesis of the Exodus and the Tzeltal Declaration

This was as much a period of intense transformations for the many of the indigenous

communities as much it was for the Diocese. The ongoing colonization of the jungle, which the

church was now actively promoting and assisting, made the talk of the creation of a “new

society” a very concrete thing. Every new settlement carved out of the jungle involved a whole

set of conscious collective decisions about the physical location and design of the community,

forms of governance, the organization of production, and the prioritization of various tasks.

Vargas (2009) recounts a song written and sung in the community of Emiliano Zapata that was

carved out of the jungle at this moment:

From Sabanilla and Huitiupan

There was a group that came forth

Leaving behind their land, leaving behind their homes

Seeking a land on which to live

In the year of ‘68, I present to you

We formed a colony here in The Jungle

Naming it “Emiliano Zapata”

Naming it “Emiliano Zapata”

To start was not easy

There was much to endure

Hunger, thirst, pain, and rain!

There was much suffering

There was much suffering

We built a canoe and a house for all

We started to work our milpas

And the land produced!




The community of Emiliano Zapata was settled by Tzotzil and Chol campesinos from the

communities of Lazaro Cardenas and El Calvario, two of the small number of ejidos established

in the northern zone municipalities of Sabanilla and Huitiupan in the 1930s when the PCM was

active in the region.

The intense collaboration between the teams formed by the Diocese and the communities

involved in Acción Paraje laid the basis for an ever deeper critique of the methods employed in

the training of catechists. In a meeting called by the Ocosingo-Altamirano Mission’s pastoral

team in November 1971, the catechists challenged the traditional hierarchical methods of

instruction associated with the idea of an instructor or nopteswanejetic in Tzeltal, and advanced

in its place the idea of a tiwanej or facilitator. The role of nopteswanejetic was criticized as an

external imposition of the ladino world and a violation of the communities own traditions of

teaching and learning. Vargas (2009) describes how the catechists explained the role of Tiwanej,

“Tijel” is to touch, in this case to touch the heart or soul of another person and “Wanel”

means to have the function of. A Tiwanej is one who has the function of touching other

peoples hearts. The catechists offered an appropriately agricultural analogy for how that

was done. It require three things. First, the gathering or harvesting of the knowledge of

the communities, or Tsobel. Then to take communion, to eat, but the manner of eating is

Snael, or that is to know, to internalize, to love the word of the community. And the third

thing to do … when you already have the good news. What does the sower do? He

scatters everywhere what he has heard and what has nourished him. That is what it means

to be a catechist.

Leyva describes the conversion as follows from

nopteswanej in which everybody listens without further participation, to tiwanej, in

which the catechist, on the presumption that the members of the community had ‘the

word in their hearts,’ possessed the inherited wisdom of their elders and needed to

communicate it, and further that the wisdom was not only to be found within the elders,

but also within the children and the youth.(1995:394)

This criticism in effect synthesized several distinct notions. The first was the critique of

the cultural colonialism of the Church that Bishop Ruíz had drawn out of Ad Gentes. The second


was Paolo Friere’s critique of traditional pedagogy. The third was the catechists own critical

view of nopteswanej. This produced a lively discussion leading to the identification of four

principles that were to inform the future activity of the team:

1. To respect the cultural identity and social reality of the subjects of the catechesis;

2. To recognize the presence and value of preexisting Christian tradition;

3. To encourage the participation of the whole community in the reflection on the Word

of God; and

4. To convert the catechists and pastoral agents from nopteswanejetic into tiwanej.

(DeVos 2002:223)

What did this look like in practice? Vargas describes the change:

Out of this discussion then the pastoral staff and the catechists developed a radically new

practice. Instead of sending the catechists to their communities with a lecture, it was

decided that the catechists should instead put questions to them. The questions were

formulated in the meetings of the catechists and then posed to all the communities in the

weekly services. In this manner the communities began to speak. The catechists would

then come together themselves and discuss what the members of the communities had

said and attempt to synthesize it. (2009)

This shift in pedagogical practice would eventually have profound implications for the

social structure of the communities, calling into question traditional patterns of authority and

promoting a democratization of communal life. (Leyva 1995)

The Catechesis of the Exodus

The original bilingual catechism produced by Vargas for the Tzeltal Zone had been

rejected in 1968, but it was not until several years later that work on a new one was undertaken.

Employing the method of tiwanej the catechists and the pastoral team set out to collectively

produce a new catechism based on discussions of the faithful in the communities of selected

biblical passages and their relevance to the experiences and situation of the communities. The

story of Exodus became a central organizing metaphor in this process as the majority of


communities ministered to by the Mission were themselves the product, first, of recent flight

from what they saw as the slavery of the fincas, and then of the settlement in the Cañadas region

of the Lacandon Jungle which they viewed as their own “promised land.” Iribarren describes

how the new catechism sought to take into account the social, political, and economic totality of

both the evangelizer and the evangelized. He continues to explain how the new catechism was

produced.

This is where the panorama changed totally […] a different dynamic, a different vision,

the reality, taking in reality in its totality, taking it in and this began in ‘72 […] with a

catechism that was published in Ocosingo, “The Catechism of the Exodus” that starts

from the experience of the communities in order to come to a knowledge of God the

Father, Son and Holy Spirit and of the Church. From the experience of communities. So

that the word on this fundamental question is collected from the community and is

brought back and returned again, the word of the communities, and it is systematized.

And this is how this catechism The Tzeltals Seeking Their Freedom is produced. (2008)

This new catechism, published in 1974 as Estamos buscando la libertad. Los tzeltales de

la selva anuncian la Buena nueva or We Are Seeking Freedom. The Tzeltales of the Jungle

Announce the Good News, and the collective and communal process of its production, would

have an enormous impact not just on the pastoral practice of the Ocosingo-Altamirano Mission,

but on the Diocese and the indigenous communities as a whole. (Iribarren 1988b:19-20; DeVos

2002:224-229; see also Womack 1999:128-147 for selections)

The radicalism of this catechesis is apparent even in its title. As De Vos notes, the

Tzeltales are not the recipients of the Good News, but are rather those that announce it to the rest

of the world. They are a new chosen people, transformed from objects of missionary work into

subjects with their own mission. In the text of the catechesis itself, as DeVos argues, the biblical

concepts of the Good News, a new land, and a new people, “interpreted, traditionally, in a


universalist and spiritual manner” are “politicized, localized and democratized” to produce a

distinct and radical theology. (2002:225)

The training of catechists was reorganized at this point. As Iribarren explains, the parish

of Ocosingo was divided into regions and the regions into zones generally corresponding to the

different cañadas. Each zone was composed of between five and ten communities and each

region was in turn composed of around four zones. Courses were no longer conducted

exclusively in the the city of Ocosing, but were now also conducted in the communities in each

zone or region. Combined with the shift in padagogical methods, this shift enabled the movement

to sink much deeper roots in the communities. (2008)

According to Juan, who remained active in the catechist movement, the organization of

regions and zones and the conduct of courses in the communities involved a transfer of

responsibilities from the pastoral staff to the catechists themselves. The pastoral staff still played

a critical leadership role, but the catechists were taking more and more responsibility not just for

the logistical organization of the courses, but for their content as well. (2009)

If the development of this process began in Ocosingo, it quickly spread to other parts of

the Diocese. In each part it took on a distinctive character reflecting both differences in social

conditions between different parts of the Diocese and differences in the outlook of the various

orders and individual members of the pastoral staff. Jesús Morales Bermúdez was born and

raised in Chiapas, is the former rector of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Chiapas, and

the1986 recipient of Mexico’s National Prize in Literature for his novels dealing with the

indigenous experience in Chiapas. In the 1970s, however, he worked for the Diocese, first in the

Northern Zone in the municipalities of Sabanilla, Tila and Huitiupan, where he trained catechists,

and then in the Lacandon Jungle. As he explained (2009), the trainings were conducted mainly in


the the parish facilities in Tila or Sabanilla or in the town of San Miguel in the municipality of

Salto de Agua. The courses would begin with a discussion of the experiences of each of the

catechists in their respective communities, examining both their successes and their mistakes as

they saw them. This was followed with a discussion of a particular topic led by a member of the

pastoral staff in which they would conduct a “materialist reading” of a passage from the

scriptures. As the discussion unfolded, notes were put on a blackboard that would then be

transcribed. The notes were typically illustrated with simple drawings and then stenciled and

mimeographed so that the catechists could bring the results of the discussions back to their

communities. The discussions were also used to develop short theatrical skits around particular

issues which were then performed back in the communities.

Employing essentially the same method that had been used to develop the Catechesis of

the Exodus, Morales assisted the Chol communities in the Northern Zone in writing up a

catechism as well. He identified three main themes that ran through their catechism. The first of

these was an elaboration on the liberationist understanding of sin as a social rather than an

individual burden. To be born in sin then was to be born into and to be a product of a society

characterized by oppression and inequality. If this was a general condition of humanity it also

expressed itself in particular ways in the organization of Mexican society and in the organization

of the region. The possibility of redemption in Christ therefore resides in being done with this

oppression.

The second theme was that the process of salvation therefore involved the construction of

a new community or what they came to call a “new people” that was composed of those who

would struggle against oppression and inequality which “in concrete terms, in historic terms, is

called an organization.”


The third theme was that the resurrection was precisely the arrival of this “new people”

that could bring an end to oppression.

These values [of equality, brotherhood, and justice] are very tied to the political. Even if

it is a discursive construction in a religious key, it is described in terms that are very

worldly, very regional, very much of everyday experience. It is like saying, “your life is a

life of injustices and inequality. Let’s organize ourselves as a single people so that down

the road we will arrive at and experience the joy of liberation.”

Another significant change that occurred during this period was in the process of the

selection of candidates for catechist training. While Vargas insists that candidates were always

selected by their communities, the testimony of Juan suggests that this was at least uneven. In

any event by the early 1970s the selection of candidates by the ladino pastoral statff came to be

viewed as a further expression of ladino domination and the communities themselves were made

explicitly responsible for selecting candidates. Estrada (2009:237) suggests that more than the

shift in content and methods of instruction, the explicit shift in responsibility for candidate

selection marked a genuine transformation in the power relations within the Diocese and laid a

real basis for what was being envisioned as an autochthonous church within the larger Catholic

Church.

Parallel with the process of developing the new catechesis initiated by the Ocosingo-

Altamirano Mission and the work in the northern Zone described above by Morales, the

Bachajon Mission, under the leadership of the Jesuits, initiated the mobilization of the Tzeltal

communities in collectively drafting a statement of their grievances, the Denuncia Tzeltal. The

Denuncia Tzeltal was important for two reasons. First, becauses it represented an application of

methods that had previously been used to discuss ostensibly religious questions towards a much

more explicitly political objective, namely an articulation of the grievances of the Tzeltal

communities. The second reason it was important was because it anticipated, in both content and


methods, the even broader mobilization of virtually all the indigenous communities of the

Diocese in the organization of the 1974 Indigenous Congress to commemorate the 500th

anniversary of the birth of Fray Bartolome de Las Casas. (DeVos 2002: 229-230)

6.4 THE INDIGENOUS CONGRESS AND ITS AFTERMATH

In early 1973 the governor of Chiapas, Manuel Velasco Suárez, invited the Diocese to

assist the state government in organizing a congress to commemorate the 500th

anniversary of the

birth of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas. The initiative was in keeping with the PRI’’s attempt to

cultivate a more left-wing image under the leadership of President Luis Echeverría intended to

reestablish its popular legitimacy in the aftermath of the suppressionof the student movement and

the still unfolding “dirty war” against several guerrilla insurgencies. This orientation

undoubtedly accounts for the willingness of the state to accede to the demands of the Diocese

that the congress be reconceived as a congress of the indigenous communities. Ultimately the

Diocese was able to take control of the organization of what became known as the 1974

Indigenous Congress. The Indigenous Congress began as an initiative of the state government of

Chiapas, but passed into the effective control of the Diocese by virtue of its privileged access to

the indigenous communities of the state. Bishop Ruíz insisted that if the Diocese was to

participate, that the Congress must enable the indigenous peoples themselves to have a voice and

not simply to provide folkloric color for an otherwise purely commemorative event. (Garcia de

Leon 1994; 2002; Womack 1999:148-162; Santiago 2009)

The Diocese completely reconceived the Congress as a congress of, for and by the

indigenous communities. Building on their experience in developing the Catechesis of the

Exodus and the Denuncia Tzeltal, the Diocese sought to replicate those processes but on a much


larger scale. During the year leading up to the Congress, assemblies were organized first in

villages, then in zones and regions, and finally by ethno-linguistic group. At each stage in this

process the participants were asked to discuss four main areas of concern. These were education,

health care, land, and the commercialization of their production. On each theme the assemblies

identified grievances and proposed solutions. In this manner the methods of the catechist

movement were explicitly politicized and extended to whole communities.

The catechists that the Diocese had trained, of course, played a critical role in the

organization of the Congress. Largely responsible for the organization of the assemblies in their

respective communities and often chosen as delegates, the preparations for the Congress saw the

consolidation of the catechists as leaders of their communities. The process of catechist training

itself meant that the catechists had a greater familiarity with, and more systematic understanding

of, the conditions in other communities in their region. Combined with their greater exposure to

the critical social and political analyses circulating among the pastoral staff, this made them

uniquely qualified to articulate an analysis of their common plight and of the necessity of

common action that would resonate with and be embraced by their communities.

The organization of the congress forced the pastoral staff and the catechists to reach

beyond those communities where the catechist movement was already well established. In the

course of doing so they began to encounter for the first time the active opposition not simply of

finqueros and ranchers, but also of indigenous communities with closer ties to the ruling party,

its associated organizations (in particular the CNC) and the state. In some instances these forays

into hostile territory saw communities won over to the liberationist critique. In others it did not,

and the organizers found themselves refused food and even threatened with violence. But these

experiences too were important because they gave the movement a much more complete picture


of the society they aspired to transform, of the array of forces they were going to encounter in the

period following the congress.

The process of organizing for the Congress also pushed the staff of the Diocese to its

physical limits. As Morales Bermúdez recalls

It is a process, on the one hand very intense in human terms, but also very emotional in

terms of exhaustion, and very intense in terms of wear and tear, because there were

occasions when we had to walk forty miles daily for ten days, for example. After six days

you did not want to do it anymore, the only thing you want to do is to sit! to cry “Why

and for what am I here in these mountains?” (2009)

To facilitate the process of organizing the assemblies the Diocese appointed the

anthropologist and linguist, Antonio García de León to organize the training of indigenous

translators to handle translation between the four indigenous Mayan languages of the

communities as well as between them and Spanish. Garcia de Leon was a member of Unión del

Pueblo (UP) a clandestine Maoist organization. He brought in students of his from the University

of Chapingo who were also members of UP to conduct the training. (García de León 2002:166-

170) The full implications of this will be discussed in the next chapter, but it is worth noting here

that the Diocese was running up against its own organizational limitations and as its activities

took on an increasingly political character, it found itself looking for other forces that could

support its efforts.

Ultimately the Congress brought together 1,230 delegates from the indigenous

communities across the eastern half of Chiapas to discuss their common problems and their

solutions. The Congress itself was a transformative event for those who participated. The

participants in the Congress not only came to deeply understand the systemic nature of the

problems that confronted them, but also came to feel their collective power. It light of

subsequent developments it is not an exaggeration to say that in the course of organizing for the


Congress the indigenous communities of Chiapas constituted themselves as a collective political

subject. The documents that came out of the Congress not only articulated their common

grievances, but proposed a solution in the form of organization, thus setting the stage for the

emergence of the indigenous campesino movement that would shake the state in the latter half of

the 1970s.

After the Congress

The most important result of the Indigenous Congress was the energy it injected into the

nascent indigenous-campesino movement in Chiapas. The period following the Indigenous

Congress was characterized by the organization of the indigenous communities into a number of

mass campesino organizations. While the Diocese played an active role in supporting this

process and indeed made such support a central organizing principal of its continuing pastoral

work, the overall effect as we will see was to promote the ideological and organizational

independence of the indigenous communities. Critical to this process was the arrival of a new

group of political actors: the asesores or advisors affiliated with a variety of left-wing political

organizations who would assist the communities in building mass campesino organizations. The

first of these asesores were the members of UP who had assisted the Diocese in training

indigenous translators for the Congress. This process of intense political and organizational

experimentation, in which the communities would be exposed to a number of competing radical

political projects and would have an opportunity to see their respective programs of action tested

in the crucible of a series of struggles against big landowners and various state and federal

authorities will the focus of the next chapter. (Harvey 1998; Legorreta Díaz 1998; Womack

1999:162-190) At the same time that the communities were organizing themselves politically,


however, the Diocese itself was undergoing a number of important changes in its own structure

and in the status of the indigenous communities within that structure that deserves some attention

here.

In the remainder of this chapter I will look at the impact of the Congress and its aftermath

on the Diocese. Specifically I will look at the reorientation and reorganization of the Diocese

reflected in the formation of the Diocesan Assembly, the declaration of the Diocese for the

liberationist “preferential option for the poor,” and the organization of the autochthonous church

through the creation of an indigenous diaconate. Finally, I will briefly discuss the organization of

catechists and deacons into a clandestine political formation Slohp (Tzeltal for “Root”) that

would play an important role in the genesis of the EZLN.

The Indigenous Congress energized the pastoral staff of the Diocese and set in motion the

organization of what would become more or less annual Diocesan Assemblies of the pastoral

staff and lay members to collectively deliberate on the direction of their work. With the support

of Bishop Ruíz this was a bold experiment in the de facto democratization of church governance.

Starting with the declaration in 1975 of the Diocese’s “preferential option for the poor” the

Diocesan Assemblies would produce a series of increasingly radical analyses of the social and

political situation in Chiapas, Mexico, and Latin America and of the Church’s complicity in and

consequent responsibility for challenging that situation. Jorge Santiago describes the significance

of the declaration:

And then comes ‘75. 75 is the First Diocesan Assembly, where Don Samuel [Ruíz]

declares “the option for the poor.” If someone from the diocese is not for the poor, which

is to say for the transformation of the relations of injustice, he has no place in this

diocese. (2009)


Within the liberationist framework of the Diocese, the decision to declare its commitment

to a “preferential option for the poor” was much more than a reaffirmation of the social gospel of

the church. It was a decision to take an explicit class stand with the urban and rural working

classes and against the capitalists and the landed oligarchy and it marked a consolidation of the

position of the most radical tendencies within the Diocese.

The Diocesan Assemblies would also struggle with developing organizational bodies to

direct and coordinate the work of the Diocese between assemblies. While the minutes of the

Diocesan Assemblies reveal a Diocese basically unified in its commitment to enacting its

commitment to Liberation Theology they also reveal considerable disagreement over how

precisely to do so. Despite a general commitment to “accompany” the indigenous communities

in their own political choices whatever they might be, different pastoral agents not surprisingly

came to identify with different political projects which then contended for influence within the

Diocese as well as within the communities. (Iribarren 2003:7-54)

This period also saw the appearance of the El Caminante, the internal bulletin of the

Diocese which would appear with greater or lesser frequency between 1975 and the late 1980s.

The Autochthonous Church

Running parallel to the process of the Diocesan Assemblies was the movement for an

indigenous diaconate that became the centerpiece of the effort to constitute an autochthonous

church within the larger structure of the Diocese. The idea of an autochthonous church can be

traced back all the way to Ad Gentes. As it came to be articulated it also would look back to the

very early history of the diocese when the Dominicans, acting as protectors of the indigenous

communities saw in them the potential to create genuinely Christian communities. But the formal


process of building such a church began after a process of consultation with the communities at

an April 1975 meeting in Bachajon of catechists and pastoral staff called by Bishop Ruíz.

(Iribarren 1997)

At that meeting, a Tzeltal catechist, Domingo Gomez, responded to a hypothetical

question of what would happen if the non-indigenous pastoral staff were to disappear from the

region:

It’s a great shame that, after 15 years of work among us, you are still indispensable, such

that if you leave, everything collapses. That is to say that you aren’t working right, that

something very important is going wrong. I know that Jesus Christ worked only three

years, died, was resurrected, accompanied his disciples for 40 days and returned to his

Father. But his work has survived for 20 centuries and will continue to until the end of

times. What did Jesus Christ do that you aren’t doing? What Jesus Christ did was to leave

behind the Holy Spirit. He is what continues and strengthens the work of Jesus. But you

deny us the Holy Spirit. Its true, we receive him in baptism and in the other sacraments.

But the Holy Spirit that cares for the community, you have monopolized him. So long as

you deny us the Holy Spirit there will be no Church. Allow us the Holy Spirit, and you

will not have failed us. (De Vos 2002:215)

Bishop Ruíz responded to this challenge:

You have expressed to us how we are oppressing you. We certainly have kept you

structurally and culturally dependent. We deny you the possibility of going forward as a

church. There is a way that we can, immediately and under proper authority, bring to you

the Holy Spirit that it might take care of the community. That is the permanent diaconate,

reestablished by the Second Vatican Council. But we need a diaconate that responds to

the demands of your culture. None of us know how to do this. We are going to throw

ourselves into finding ways. The communities that want to have a deacon to be the

solemn minister of baptisms, to preside at weddings, to give the Eucharist, to visit the

sick and to be cared for by the community, choose your candidate and present them to

me. I will authorize them to begin to practice their ministry on a temporary basis. In

three or five years we will see the results of this experience. If it is positive, I will give

them the holy ordination of deacons. (DeVos 2002:231)

Thus began the movement to establish an indigenous diaconate in the indigenous

communities of the Diocese of San Cristóbal that would have the authority to administer major

sacraments and thereby allow the development of a genuinely autochthonous church. Miguel,


who was one of the first temporarily authorized candidates for the Diaconate explains the

significance of the new office:

I received the position in San Quintin. […]That is how we started to work in those years,

celebrating the Holy Mass, because now we had the Sacrament in our hands. Everyone

would now receive communion in these times. In the communities where everybody was

prepared with their penitences they would receive communion. (2009)

In gaining for the tuhunels the authority to administer communion, the communities had

secured a recognition by the church of their self-determination in the spiritual realm. The

creation of the autochthonous church was a critical moment in a larger process of the

decolonization of the minds of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas and as such an indicator of a

critical shift in the terms of their relations not just with the church but with all outside actors.

While the movement generated great enthusiasm in many of the indigenous communities,

it also provoked divisions within the pastoral staff of the Diocese, in particular between the Jesuit

Mission operating out of Bachajon and the Dominican Mission operating out of Ocosingo, both

working in the Tzeltal Zone. The source of the dispute was the permanent nature of the

diaconate. The Jesuits believed that a permanent diaconate was necessary in order to establish a

stable and therefore genuinely independent indigenous church structure. In contrast, the

Dominicans felt that the authority of the communities to genuinely select their own leaders

would be compromised by the creation of permanent offices. The Dominicans feared that

permanent deacons would become caciques and wanted their offices to be like those of the

catechists: temporary, rotating and always subject to the decisions of the community assemblies.

(DeVos 2002:231-239)

The division was a serious one. Both sides appealed to the authority of the Bishop to

resolve it and in 1981, Ruíz ordained ten candidates as deacons at the request of the Jesuits and


the communities in which they were active. In the years that followed the Jesuits continued to

pursue the ordination of permanent deacons while the Dominicans did not. By 1987 the conflict

would reach the point that the northern part of the Tzeltal Zone under the influence of the Jesuits

was separated off as a new CHAB Zone (referring to the Jesuits three main centers of operations,

Chilon, Arena, and Bachajon), while the Dominicans retained responsibility for the rest of the

Tzeltal Zone, including the Cañadas.(DeVos 2002:234) It is worth noting here that while the

Zapatistas were able to sink deep roots in the Cañadas they had much less success in the CHAB

Zone.

Slohp

The efforts to develop an autochthonous church were thus not wholly separate from the

process of political organization. This is further illustrated by the experience of Slohp. As

members of communities as well as of the pastoral staff of the Diocese became increasingly

critical of the role and orientation of the Maoist asesores, a clandestine political organization of

indigenous catechists and tuhuneles called Slohp (“root” in Tzeltal) was formed in the Ocosingo

Cañadas to contest their influence. (Legoretta 1998:183-190)

The relationship between the Diocese and the Maoists was a contradictory one. On the

one hand the Diocese played a critical role in securing the asesores access to the communities

and regarded them, at least initially, as able to fulfill functions that the church could not. On the

other they came to represent a threat to the church’s mediating role between the communities and

the dominant society, provoking mutual jealousies that would eventually break out into open

conflict.


Details about the workings of Slohp are difficult to establish. The organization did not

operate publicly. Even accounts of when it was formed vary considerably and knowledgeable

informants are generally reluctant to speak about it. It is generally acknowledged that Javier

Vargas played an important role in bringing the organization together, though Vargas himself

insists that the initiative came from the indigenous leaders themselves. (2009) What seems clear

is that Slohp was conceived as a vehicle for breaking the indigenous campesino movement’s

dependence on the Maoist asesores who played a critical role in building up the independent

campesino organizations but who came to be perceived as working increasingly closely with

forces inside the ruling party.

The development of Slohp must be understood as part of the process of accelerating

radicalization within the Diocese, amongst the indigenous catechists as well as the ladino

pastoral agents. Slohp gathered together many of the most important leaders of the indigenous

communities in the Cañadas and provided them with a forum for further developing a common

social analysis of their conditions and a political strategy for confronting those conditions.

A major influence on the Diocese at large at the time, and therefore also on Slohp, was

the experiences of liberationist Christians in the revolutionary movements in Central America.

Morales describes the electrifying effect that the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in July 1979

had on the Diocese at the very moment when the indigenous campesino movement began to

encounter increasingly violent repression as well as sharpening internal differences. The

militarization of Chiapas that occurred in this moment, in large part in response to the conflicts

across the border in Guatemala and in the rest of Central America, convinced many that Chiapas

did not just share a history with Central America, but was also subject to a similar political

dynamic and that perhaps the resort to armed struggle that had just succeeded in Nicaragua might


also represent an option for the movement in Chiapas. In the aftermath of the Sandinista victory,

Bishop Ruíz, Jorge Santiago, Javier Vargas, and many others active in the Diocese travelled to

Nicaragua to become witnesses to a revolution in which the liberationist church was a major

player.

Thus inspired in part by the role of radical priests and Christian Base Communities in the

Sandinista-led revolution in Nicaragua, and in the FMLN in El Salvador, Slohp saw itself as not

only contesting with the Maoists for influence within the Union de Uniones but also in

organizing the communities to engage in armed self-defense in the face of rising violence against

the communities on the part of ranchers, state police and federal troops. While Vargas insistently

denies that Slohp was involved in the organization of a capacity for armed self-defense, all other

sources are agreed that this was an element of Slohp’s work. Iribarren thus characterized Slohp as

follows:

Its position is precisely, to continue with the organizational pressure – social, economic,

catechist, inspired by the Word of God – and at the same time also having a body capable

of armed self-defense, not to attack, only for defence. Even though all of them, those who

began to form Slohp are very committed people too, and even perhaps some of those who

originatde the armed line of the zapatista movement. (2008)

This is important because, as will be discussed in Chapter 7, Slohp’s interest in armed

self-defense would provide the guerrilla nucleus of the EZLN a crucial opening for developing a

working relationship with the communities of the Cañadas by offering them military training.

The project of organizing the indigenous communities for armed self-defense was the

product of the communities own experiences with the armed power of the ranchers and the state,

(Santiago 2009) as well as their own more limited recent experiences engaging in armed

resistance as occurred in the community of Nueva Providencia in 1977 which I will look at later.

The critical point here is that well before the FLN was to plant the guerrilla nucleus of the EZLN


in the Lacandon Jungle, catechists and tuhuneles were organizing themselves clandestinely and

thinking in terms of the necessity of some form of armed struggle to realize their larger

objectives.

6.5 CONCLUSION

The formation of Slohp by no means marked an end to the major role of the Diocese in

the process that would lead to the foundation and growth of the EZLN and the launching of the

1994 uprising. It does, however, mark a turning point. Between the early1950s and the late 1970s

the Diocese of San Cristóbal encouraged the emergence of the indigenous communities as the

subjects of their own history. This process began with the training and organization of

indigenous catechists, a project undertaken within a framework that viewed the indigenous as the

passive recipients of the church’s civilizing mission but that nonetheless offered them resources

(literacy, organization, communications, practical skills) that facilitated the development of the

catechists into a layer of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals. In 1968 this process made a

qualitative leap as both the pastoral staff of the Diocese and the catechists themselves articulated

and embraced the movement’s radical political potential. Over the course of the 1970s this

process was consolidated. The transformation in the methods of catechist training and the

development of the Catechism of the Exodus shifted the relationship between the catechists and

the pastoral agents of the Diocese. The Denuncia Tzeltal and the Indigenous Congress involved

both a turn to more explicitly political concerns and a scale shift as the catechists and the pastoral

agents of the Diocese organized the communities to collectively articulate a critique of the

conditions of their lives and a program of action for their transformation. The central theme of

the Indigenous Congress was the necessity of the communities organizing themselves and that is


exactly what happened in its aftermath. The development of mass campesino organizations and

the role of cadres of several Maoist organizations in that process will be the focus of the next

chapter. The development of the autochthonous church through the formation of an indigenous

diaconate and the organization of Slohp only further enabled the organic indigenous campesino

intellectuals to constitute themselves as an organized leadership of their communities, preparing

the ground for the embrace of the political-military project of the FLN and the organization of

the EZLN. Before we go there, however, we need to first look the formation of mass campesino

organizations in the wake of the indigenous Congress and the complex and critical role played in

their developlemnt by several Maoist organizations that emerged from the Mexican New Left of

the 1960s and the radicalization of the broader Mexican student movement following its

suppression in 1968.



1960-1994

by


VOLUME II

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Sociology in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York

2013


CHAPTER 7: THE MASS LINE AND THE RISE OF MAOISM IN MEXICO

The 1974 Indigenous Congress was a watershed moment in the development of the

indigenous campesino movement in Chiapas. Following the Congress, Chiapas became the site a

series of intense, and often lethal, fights with the state’s landowning elite and the repressive

apparatus of the Mexican state. At the heart of these struggles were several mass independent

campesino organizations, all but one of which were established in the immediate aftermath of the

Congress. While these organizations were composed of members of the indigenous communities

and drew on training and resources they received from the Diocese, they also relied on a cohort

of non-indigenous cadres from a number of radical left wing organizations began to arrive in

Chiapas in 1973 and who would play a critical role in the development of the indigenous

campesino movement. While Chiapas attracted cadres from a range of left-wing organizations

including the PCM, the Trotskyist Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (Revolutionary

Workers Party or PRT), and the parastatal Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (Socialist

Workers Party or PST), the most numerous and influential came from several Maoist

organizations that had emerged from the student movement of the late 1960s.

Building on the foundation by the pastoral work of the liberationist Diocese of San

Cristóbal de Las Casas, three Maoist organizations in particular – Unión del Pueblo, Línea

Proletaria, and the Organización Revolucionaria Compañero – would play a complex but

nonetheless key role in the political development of the Indian villages that would go on to

become the civilian support bases of the EZLN. These groups distinctive application of certain

Maoist concepts, in particular the “mass line method of leadership,” and their reliance on popular

assemblies, would powerfully inform the political culture of the indigenous campesino


movement. This influence was first evident in the work of Quiptik, which had been assisted by

cadres from Union del Pueblo since its inception in 1975. They would be joined shortly

thereafter by a larger number of brigadistas, as they called themselves, from Línea Proletaria

and a little bit later by a small contingent from Compañero.

That the Maoist organizations mentioned above, played an important role in building the

indigenous campesino movement in Chiapas is widely acknowledged. (Collier and Quaratiello

1994; García de León 2002; Harvey 1998; De Vos 2002) Determining the exact influence of the

Maoists involvement on the politics of the EZLN, however, is rendered more difficult by the

ideological interests at stake in competing narratives produced by different actors.

In the narrative told by the Zapatistas, (LeBot 1997; Muñoz Ramírez 2003) but also by

many aligned with the Diocese, (Iribarren 2008; Ituarte 2009; Morales Bermúdez 2005, 2009;

Olivera 2009; Santiago Santiago 2009) the Maoists – in particular those affiliated with Línea

Proletaria under the leadership of Adolfo Orive – were reformists, guilty of “economism,” of

collaborating with the ruling party, and of misleading the Indian communities and their

organizations. In this account the decision of the Indian communities to support the EZLN was a

response to the political exhaustion, failure and defeat of the Maoists project. (LeBot 1997;

Rubio López 2001)

In the narrative told largely by the former Maoists themselves and by the anti-Zapatistas

who rely on their accounts, (Estrada Saavedra 2009; Legorreta Díaz 1998; Oriive 2007; Tello

Díaz 2000; Womack 1998, 1999) the EZLN in effect hijacked a popular democratic movement

that the Maoists had worked to build up and that was making real improvements in the

conditions of the Indian communities, subordinating it to an authoritarian and quixotic project


that sacrificed the interests of the communities in the name of a socialist revolution in Mexico

that was neither desirable nor realizable.

While these narratives are clearly sharply at odds on the implications of this rupture, they

are both in agreement that the rise of the EZLN marked a sharp break with the political

orientation of the Maoists. It is my contention that, contrary to both narratives, the relationship

between the politics of the Maoist groups on the one hand, and the distinctive politics of the

EZLN on the other is more complex and contradictory than this. In other words, while the

decision to support the EZLN marked an important break with the previously prevailing politics

of the Maoists within the indigenous-campesino movement, that there were also some important

continuities. Inconvenient as these may be for either party to acknowledge, they are critical to

understanding the actual development of Zapatismo, and in particular its distinctive view of the

relationship between revolutionary leadership and mass democracy.

Thus, while the practices of mass participatory democracy through popular assemblies

that are such a notable characteristic of the Zapatista communities have antecedents in the

traditions of the communities and in the methods of the catechist movement, it was really the

Maoists who trained the communities in the deliberative use of the assemblies as a means of

systematically building popular political power. Since these practices have proven so important

not just to the EZLN, but to the movements around the world that have taken inspiration from

them I am arguing that understanding their genesis in Mexican Maoism will illuminate some of

the practical and theoretical issues that these practices bring forward. This chapter is therefore

focused on the origins and development of Maoism as a distinct current of the Mexican left in

the 1960s and early 1970s. The first part of the chapter is an account of the development of

Maoism as a distinct political trend both within the international communist movement (ICM)


and within the Mexican left in the period from the late 1950s up to 1968. I focus here on several

organizations, known collectively as the Sparticists, that emerged from splits with and

expulsions from the PCM beginning in the late 1950s. I then examine the emergence of a

constellation of new Maoist organizations in the wake of the 1968 student movement and their

central role in organizing urban popular movements in the early 1970s. Along the way I will

attempt to answer several questions: What attracted so many radicalized students to Maoism in

particular? What was distinctive in the brand of Maoism that emerged in Mexico and why? Why

were several of the Maoist organizations that emerged in this period so successful in building

genuine mass organization in poor urban neighborhoods, rural villages, and even in certain

sections of the organized labor movement? And, finally and most importantly, what were the

contributions of Mexican Maoism to the development of the distinctive politics of the EZLN?

7.1 THE ROOTS OF MEXICAN MAOISM

As a distinct, conscious and organized trend within the Mexican revolutionary left,

Maoism really emerges in the wake of the brutal repression of the 1968 student movement. In

order to understand its appeal and the distinctive form that Maoism took in Mexico, however, it

is necessary to consider its roots in the decade leading up to 1968. Mexican Maoism has its roots

in two distinct if interwoven processes. The first of these is the emergence of what has been

called the Mexican New Left as the result of a series of splits within and expulsions from the

pro-Soviet Partido Comunista Mexicano (Mexican Communist Party or PCM). The second is the

Sino-Soviet split and struggles within the Chinese Communist Party culminating in the Cultural

Revolution, in the course of which a distinct body of theory, officially dubbed “Mao Ze Dong


Thought” but more commonly called Maoism, was advanced in opposition to the Soviet

Marxism that had until that moment effectively dominated the ICM.

The Mexican New Left

The Maoist organizations that emerged in Mexico in the wake of the 1968 student

movement, had their roots in a collection of small revolutionary left-wing groups that had split

from the PCM over the previous decade. As Bennett notes:

While the Maoist inspired groups were new, the greater part of their militants came from

older left-wing groups; some had participated in the left inside the PCM prior to 1958,

others in the ideological debates of the Leninist-Spartacist groups in the 1960s, and others

were politicized as a result of their participation in the 1968 student movement.(1993:92)

The history of the PCM and its relationship to the Mexican state and its ruling party is a

convoluted one consisting of alternating periods of toleration, collaboration, cooptation, and

criminalization. (Carr 2000; Taibo III 1986) In the 1950s, in keeping with the Cold War

orientation of the ruling party, the PCM was banned and condemned to operate clandestinely.

Shaped by its experiences during the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas, the leadership of PCM was

eager to be re-legalized and adopted a very cautious posture, clinging to a view that, owing to its

roots in the Mexican Revolution, the ruling party contained genuinely revolutionary elements

and that the PCM should concentrate on cultivating relations with those elements in order to

secure legalization. When a series of popular movements based in different sectors of the

Mexican working class erupted in the latter half of the1950s and challenged the authority of the

PRI, however, a left-wing emerged within the PCM that concluded that the PCM’s failure to

effectively lead these struggles reflected an abdication of its revolutionary responsibilities. (Carr

2000:193–227)


The first significant challenge to the authority of the PRI occurred in 1956 when a

movement broke out within the national teachers union demanding an independent and

democratic union. The following year saw the beginning of an economic crisis that produced a

number of efforts on the part of sections of the Mexican working class to assert the political

independence from the clientelistic labor union structures established by the PRI. The most

significant of these was a militant movement among the railway workers beginning in 1958 and

culminating in a nationwide strike in 1959. The strike was repressed by federal troops resulting

in the loss of several lives, the firing of thousands of workers, and the arrest of roughly ten

thousand workers. (Alonso 1990; Brambila 1998:35–42; Cedillo 2008:63–67)

The expression of mass working class militancy by the railroad workers and its disastrous

defeat sparked sharp debates within the PCM over its failure to provide the strike with effective

revolutionary leadership. These debates resulted in a series of expulsions of supporters of the

left-wing from the party. What came to be called the Mexican New Left had its roots in these

debates and expulsions. (Bennett 1993:90) In 1960, one of the party’s leading intellectuals, José

Revueltas, and several party cells sympathetic to him were expelled from the PCM and

constituted themselves as the Liga Leninsta Espartaco (LLE), taking their name from the famed

leader of the slave revolt in ancient Rome as well as the German Sparcticists, led by Rosa

Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who had defied the reformist leadership of the German Social

Democratic Party and spearheaded the failed German Revolution in 1919. Several other small

groups were also established as a result of splits and expulsions from the PCM in this period.

These included the Asociación Revolucionario Espartaco del Proletariado Mexicano, the

Movimiento Espartaquista Revolucionario based in the city of Monterrey, the Partido Comunista

Mexicano (Bolchevique), and the Partido Revolucionario del Proletariado. (Barbosa 1984:120)


These groups came to be known collectively as the Sparticists. (Their common name

notwithstanding, it should be noted that these organizations had no connection to the U.S.-based

Trotsykist organization, the Sparticist League.)

Revueltas published a critique of the PCM, Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza

(Essay on a Headless Proletariat) (1980) would come to inform the politics not just of the LLE

but of the Mexican New Left broadly. In it he applied a sophisticated reading of passages from

Marx’s The Holy Family to the history of the Mexican working class to argue that the PCM had

singularly failed to constitute itself as the organizational expression of the Mexican proletariat’s

consciousness of itself as a class with a revolutionary mission. He identified this failure with the

PCM’s Stalinism and framed a set of theoretical problems involving the relationship between the

leadership function of the party and the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class as a

whole that would preoccupy the Mexican New Left until 1968. In 1963, however, Revueltas

publicly sided with the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet split and this both led to his expulsion

from the LLE and marked the alignment of the LLE and other New Left groups with the Chinese

Communist Party. (Revueltas, Rodrigo, and Philippe 1980:25–26)

The various organizations of the Mexican New Left functioned largely as small political

sects, based almost exclusively on campuses where they engaged in intense debates within their

own circles on seemingly obscure questions of political line. These debates occurred, however,

against a backdrop of increasing political ferment. The Cuban Revolution in particular had an

energizing effect on the Mexican left, inspiring the organization in 1961 of a broad, if ultimately

unstable Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional (MLN), under the official leadership of former

President, General Lazaro Cardenas. In 1963 the PCM was able to take advantage of the opening

created by the MLN to launch a modest left-wing electoral challenge to the PRI, as well as an


independent mass campesino organization and an independent national student organization, the

Central Nacional de Estudiantes Democraticos (CNED).

In 1964 a national movement broke out amongst doctors and medical workers

culminating in a series of strikes that, once more, were forcefully repressed. The leadership was

jailed, hundreds of medical workers were fired, and in Mexico City hospitals they wre replaced

by military medical personnel. (Cedillo 68-71)

The small “Leninist” splinter groups from the PCM played little significant role in these

struggles. They did, however, benefit from a steady trickle of new recruits who saw the need for

a militant, disciplined, and revolutionary organization but who couldn’t see those qualities in the

aging and ossified PCM. After expelling Revueltas, the LLE fused with several of the other

Spartacist organizations in 1966 to form the Liga Comunista Espartaco (LCE). (Bennett

1993:91) While the LCE remained in many respects still a sect, the new name marked an

important political evolution from what it regarded as an orthodox Leninist conception of a

vanguard party that had characterized its predecessors to a view of “the masses” rather than “the

party” as the revolutionary subject. While this shift was influenced initially by the writings of

Rosa Luxemburg, it would soon find resonance in the Maoist theory of the “mass line” method

of leadership. The original anti-Stalinism of the Sparticists and their interest in Luxemburg,

would lend their subsequent Maoist turn a distinctively libertarian cast.

The debates within and the expulsions from the PCM, while motivated significantly by

political developments in Mexico, also occurred against the backdrop of emerging divisions

within the international communist movement, in particular the Sino-Soviet split. It is in this

context that a distinctly pro-Chinese current began to emerge within the international communist


movement, finding support in Mexico within the ranks of the Sparticist groups. As Barbosa

explains,

Beginning in the 1960s a number of propositions began to flow from Peking [Beijing]

that quickly caught fire among young students, stimulating their impatience and

inflaming their revolutionary ardor: “the inevitability of war,” “the impossibility of the

peaceful road to socialism,” among others, in those early years. A collection of groups,

parties, unions, etc. gathered around these propositions that were the local expression of

the global “Marxist-Leninist” movement, a term that they added to their names to

emphasize their principled opposition to those who, renouncing the “dictatorship of the

proletariat,” defending the fable of the “state of the whole people,” and “the party of the

whole people” capitulated in the name of “peaceful coexistence.”(Barbosa 1984:122–

123)

Initially this identification with China marked the Sparticists as upholders of a Stalinist

orthodoxy that in their view had been betrayed by Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev. With the

outbreak in 1966 of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, however, it became increasingly

clear that the thinking of Chinese Communist Party, and in particular that of its chairman, Mao

Ze Dong, represented something quite distinct from a mere defense of Stalin-era orthodoxy. If

we are to understand the role that Maoism would play in the organization of popular movements

in Mexico in general, and in the indigenous-campesino movement in Chiapas in particular, we

first need to understand precisely what Maoism is.

The Emergence and Appeal of Maoism

Maoism, or “Mao Ze Dong Thought” as it was called by the Chinese Communist

Party (CCP) began to emerge as a distinct and dissenting trend within the Soviet-dominated

International Communist Movement (ICM) in the late 1950s. The extent and nature of its break

with Soviet Marxism would not, however, become fully apparent until the outbreak of the

Cultural Revolution. Some of the features that distinguished Maoism from Soviet Marxism,


however, can be traced back to the earliest years of the CCP. (Meisner 2008) Mao’s heterodox

views on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry find their first expression in his 1927

Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan. (1972:23-39; but see also

Schram 1972) Tensions had characterized relations between the Soviet and Chinese Communist

Parties since the late 1920s when the strategy of allying with the Nationalist Party and

concentrating on the organization of the urban working class led to disaster in the form of the

massacre of communists and workers at the hands of the Nationalists in Shanghai in 1927.

(Bianco 1971; Chesneaux 1980) When the survivors of the massacre were compelled to flee to

the countryside it initiated a period of struggle inside the CCP that culminated in 1935 in the

defeat of the Soviet-trained “28 Bolsheviks” and Mao’s ascent to leadership at the Zunyi

Conference in the midst of the Long March. The subsequent military and political successes of

Mao’s distinctive strategy of “protracted peoples war” (Mao 1977b:113–194) culminating in the

victory of Communist-led People’s Liberation Army (PLA) victory over the Chinese Nationalists

in 1949 established Mao as a major theorist and strategist within the Soviet-centered

international communist movement (ICM).

During the first years of the Peoples Republic, China deferred to Soviet leadership of the

ICM and received substantial financial and technical assistance from the Soviets. Differences

began to sharpen noticeably after Stalin’s death and Nikita Kruschev’s consolidation of power

and Kruschev’s 1956 speech to the 20th

Congress of the CPSU sharply criticizing Stalin and

advancing his own theory of “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist countries opened a rift

between the parties. Kruschev’s advocacy of “peaceful coexistence” between the capitalist and

socialist blocs was viewed by Mao as a betrayal of basic revolutionary principles, and the abrupt

withdrawal of 3,000 Soviet technical advisers and other critical assistance from China in 1960


was regarded as an act of deliberate sabotage of China’s economic development. By 1963 there

was a complete break in relations between the two countries with the CCP denouncing the CPSU

as “revisionists” and by 1964 arguing that a counter-revolution had occurred and that capitalism

was being restored in the USSR.

The breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations occurred in the context of a struggle inside the

CCP in the wake of the failures of the Great Leap Forward, that saw Mao’s replacement as

President of China by Liu Shaoqi in 1959. This struggle involved radically different conceptions

of what it meant to build socialism in China. For Mao and those aligned with him, the Great

Leap was an attempt to break with the Soviet model of development which viewed the

countryside chiefly as a source for the primitive accumulation of capital to be invested in

building up an urban-centered base of heavy industry. In opposition to this model Mao proposed

the development of lighter industries in the countryside alongside a process of collectivization

and intensified agricultural production. At the heart of this difference was an emphasis on Mao’s

part on the development of both the productive and the political capacities of the peasantry who

constituted the vast majority of the Chinese population as well as the main historical base of

support for the Chinese Revolution. Mao saw in the antagonistic relationship between the CPSU

and the Russian peasantry an important factor in the rise of what he would later characterize as a

“new bourgeoisie” within the CPSU and was determined to prevent a repetition of that

experience in China. The Great Leap Forward, however, was followed by two years of famine

and came to be widely regarded as a disaster, a summation that constituted a political victory for

Mao’s opponents whose vision hewed more closely to the Soviet model. The underlying political

differences that it brought forward, however, would re-emerge in a new form in 1966 with the

eruption of the Cultural Revolution.


The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as it was officially dubbed, is almost

universally characterized today by both Western academics and the present Chinese regime as an

unmitigated disaster for China brought on by a pathological desire on Mao’s part to reclaim and

hold on to power. (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals 2008; but see also Clark 2008; Perry and Xun

1997; Di, Zhong, and Zheng 2001; Gao 2008; Han 2008; Andreas 2009) While there are

important questions over matters of fact at issue in this characterization it is important to

recognize that it represents first and foremost a political stance. As French philosopher, and

former Maoist, Alain Badiou explains:

The dominant historiographical version was compiled by various specialists, especially

by sinologues, as early as 1968, and it has not changed since. It was consolidated by the

fact that covertly it became the official version of a Chinese state, headed by Deng

Xiaoping and dominated after 1976 by people who escaped from and sought revenge for

the Cultural Revolution.

What does this version say? That in terms of revolution, it was a power struggle at the top

echelons of the bureaucracy of the party-state. That Mao’s economical voluntarism,

incarnated in the call for “the Great Leap Forward,” was a complete failure leading to the

return of famine to the Chinese countryside. That, after this failure, Mao finds himself in

the minority among the leading instances of the party and that a “pragmatic” group

imposes its law, the dominant personalities of which are Liu Shaoqi (then named

president of the republic), Deng Xiaoping (general secretary of the party), and Peng Zhen

(mayor of Beijing). That, as early as 1963, Mao attempted to lead some counter-attacks,

but that he failed among the regular instances of the party. That he then had recourse to

forces foreign to the party, be they external (the student Red Guards) or external/internal,

particularly the army, over which he took control again after the elimination of Peng

Dehuai and his replacement by Lin Biao. That then, solely because of Mao’s will to

regain power, there ensued a bloody and chaotic situation, which until the death of the

culprit (in 1976) never managed to stabilize itself.

It is totally feasible to accept that nothing in this version is, properly speaking, incorrect.

But nothing gives it the real meaning that can come only from a political understanding

of the episodes, that is, their concentration in a form of thinking still active today. (483-

484)

It is well beyond the scope of this study to attempt a comprehensive historical political

analysis of the Cultural Revolution. If, however, we are to make sense of Maoism’s resonance


among radicalized youth in Mexico and around the world in the late 1960s as anything other than

some inexplicable moment of mass hysteria, it is necessary to grasp at least in broad outline the

main theoretical justifications for the Cultural Revolution as articulated by Mao and his

supporters and taken up internationally by an important fraction of revolutionary-minded youth.

The central proposition underpinning the Cultural Revolution was that of the continuation

of the class struggle under socialism. Mao argued that, even after the seizure of political power

by the Communist Party, capitalist ideology and social relations would continue to reproduce

themselves and that a “new bourgeoisie” would attempt to establish itself within the Communist

Party itself. In order to defeat this “new bourgeoisie” he argued that it was necessary to mobilize

the masses from outside the party apparatus to rebel and “bombard the headquarters” in order to

defeat those in the leadership of the party who would lead the country down “the capitalist road”

(from which the derogatory “capitalist roader” is derived). While the terminology used may seem

stilted, especially to contemporary American ears, if we want to really understand its appeal it is

critically important to recognize the radical break that these terms represented with the political

culture of deadening bureaucracy and total obedience to leadership that had characterized the

pro-Soviet Communist Parties. As Barbosa explains:

If Maoism is an internationally influential current of socialist thought, it is because it

suggested an orientation and offered some very attractive examples. We will then

consider one of these teachings and their applications in Mexico. In its criticism of the

‘new brand of bourgeois dictatorship’ developing in the USSR it put on the table for

discussion the issues of contradictions between party and masses, the criticism of

‘bureaucratic methods of leadership,’ the need to ‘correctly resolve contradictions among

the people’ and the need to ‘appeal to the initiative and enthusiasm of the masses.’ Thus

was born what was called the ‘mass line.’ (Barbosa 1984:126)

For young people drawn into the revolutionary upheavals of the period, the Soviet Union

exercised little of the appeal that it had over previous generation of revolutionaries. Rather it was


a problem that had to be solved. One of those activists describes how Maoism offered a solution

to that problem:

For us [Maoism] represented the following: the Russian Revolution had been betrayed

and we put Soviet social imperialism on the same side next to Yankee imperialism. And

if for Latin America, the Yankees are the main enemy because they are right here, for the

Chinese, the main enemy is the Soviet Union. There was this breakdown between the

Chinese Communist Party with the CPSU, and with respect to this arises the theory of the

third world of Mao Tse Tung, and this ‘third way,’ that between Soviet social

imperialism, American imperialism and Mao’s proposal represented the path of the

revolution, but not from the perspective of party of the Soviet Union. That is going to

generate a conjuncture in the 60s between the youth revolution and the creation of

movements of national liberation in Asia, America and Africa. And that is going to click

in Europe, that’s going to click in the United States, that’s going to click in Latin

America. That would be the explanation in general political terms of a separation with the

policy of the Soviet Union and the CPSU and the impossibility of the revolution under

the form of the CPSU, which was also certainly true. The CPSU was neutralized. And in

that sense Maoism was the possibility of a revolution that we had in that moment.

(Morquecho 2008)

Obviously this was all very contradictory. The cry of “Its Right to Rebel” coexisted with

a massive cult of personality around Mao. Mao never called into question the leading role of the

party as such, and after 1968 supported the repression of some of the very same forces he helped

unleash. In its contradictoriness, however, the Cultural Revolution nonetheless contained

important elements of a new conception of the relationship between revolutionary leadership and

mass or popular democracy. This was central to the appeal of Maoism to young revolutionaries

around the world, including Mexico.

In practice, as we will see, this new generation of revolutionaries was by no means

immune to the very sins that Maoism attacked. These predictable contradictions notwithstanding,

the Cultural Revolution was perceived as both a genuine rupture with what was rotten in Soviet

Marxism and as an important development in revolutionary theory and practice with

international implications. This perception would find very early expression in Althusser’s


anonymously penned article On the Cultural Revolution, published in the first months of the

Cultural Revolution:

The C.R is not, first of all, an argument: it is first and foremost an historical fact. It is not

one fact among others. It is an unprecedented fact.

It is not an historical fact reducible to its circumstances, it is not a decision taken “in light

of” the Chinese Communist Party’s struggle against “modern revisionism” or in response

to the political and military encirclement of China. It is an historical fact of great

importance and long duration. It is a part of the development of the Chinese revolution. It

represents one of its phases, one of its mutations. It plunges roots into its past, and readies

its future. As such, it belongs to the International Communist Movement in the same way

the Chinese Revolution does.

It is therefore an historical fact that must be examined for itself, in its independence and

depth, without pragmatically reducing it to this or that aspect of the current conjuncture.

It is moreover, an exceptional historical fact. On the one hand, it has no historical

precedent and, on the other hand, it presents an intense theoretical interest.

Marx, Engles and Lenin always proclaimed it was absolutely necessary to give the

socialist infrastructure, established by a political revolution, a corresponding – that is,

socialist – ideological superstructure. For this to occur, an ideological revolution is

necessary, a revolution in the ideology of the masses. This thesis expresses a fundamental

principle of Marxist theory. (2010)

It was this perception that the Cultural Revolution was an exceptional development and

the evident importance of Mao’s writings in the Cultural Revolution that drove many in the

Mexican New Left to read or re-read Mao much more closely. While the whole body of “Mao Ze

Dong Thought” coming out of China would inform the thinking of Mexican Maoists, there is

little question that the single most important element was the theory of the “mass line” method of

leadership. While different aspects of this theory are elaborated in several works of Mao, the

most concise statement of what “the mass line” means can be found in his short essay, Some

Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership:

In all the practical work of our Party, all correct leadership is necessarily “from

the masses, to the masses.” This means: take the ideas of the masses (scattered


and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into

concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and

explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them

and translate them into action, and test the correctness of these ideas in such

action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to

the masses so that the ideas are persevered in and carried through. And so on,

over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct,

more vital and richer each time. Such is the Marxist theory of knowledge.

[…] Many comrades do not see the importance of, or are not good at, drawing

together the activists to form a nucleus of leadership, and they do not see the

importance of, or are not good at, linking this nucleus of leadership closely with

the masses, and so their leadership becomes bureaucratic and divorced from the

masses. Many comrades do not see the importance of, or are not good at,

summing up the experience of mass struggles, but fancying themselves clever, are

fond of voicing their subjectivist ideas, and so their ideas become empty and

impractical. Many comrades rest content with making a general call with regard

to a task and do not see the importance of, or are not good at, following it up

immediately with particular and concrete guidance, and so their call remains on

their lips, or on paper or in the conference room, and their leadership becomes

bureaucratic. In the present rectification movement we must correct these defects

and learn to use the methods of combining the leadership with the masses and the

general with the particular in our study, in the check-up on work and in the

examination of cadres’ histories; and we must also apply these methods in all our

future work. (Mao 1971b)

“The masses” here refers to the various sectors of the people (whether workers, peasants,

students, etc…) who are thought to have the potential to participate in a revolutionary movement

but who are not (at least not yet) themselves conscious organizers or leaders of such a

movement. The conscious leaders are presumed to be gathered together within a communist

party or within an organization that aspires to eventually form such a party. The mass line, in

other words, is a recognition of the role of the experiences of the masses themselves in the

development of the ideas that are to guide the revolutionary movement. It is a rejection of the

notion that the revolutionary leadership already has all the answers and need only figure out how

to convey them to the masses. The mass line method does not reject the need for revolutionary

leadership or deny the importance of already developed revolutionary theory, but it does


radically reconceive it. The primary role of leadership is thus to assist the masses in clarifying

their own understanding of their conditions and the means by which they might be transformed

through a continuous process of distilling out of the contradictory tangle of their ideas the most

“advanced” elements and then making those the basis for the next round of reflection. Properly

applied, the mass line should produce a dynamic feedback relationship between leadership and

masses that transforms both and that breaks down the divisions between them by developing the

critical analytical skills and leadership capacities of more and more people, transforming the

masses into active, conscious collective subjects able to revolutionize the society from which

they are emerging. Implicit in all this is both a recognition of the uneven development of human

subjectivity, of the existence of more and less developed forms of social consciousness, and a

determination to systematically overcome the inequalities that arise from this unevenness

through a process of developing and generalizing the capacities of ever broader sections of the

people to analyze and lead. Arguably the theory of the mass line describes the actual practice,

whether conscious or not, of any successful revolutionary movement. In this view Mao did not

so much invent or even discover the mass line as he articulated, elaborated and codified it in a

manner that assisted would-be revolutionaries in navigating between the dangers of sectarian

irrelevance and the opportunist liquidation of their revolutionary politics.

Clearly Maoism has no monopoly on these ideas. Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the

Oppressed, for example would have a profound influence on the methods used by pastoral agents

across Latin America to put the ideas of liberation theology into practice. In the case of Chiapas,

as discussed in the last chapter, the pastoral agents of the Diocese of San Cristóbal discovered an

important resonance between Freire’s ideas and the distinction in Tzeltal between the idea of an

instructor or nopteswanejetic, considered an external imposition of the ladino world, and the idea


of a tiwanej or facilitator. Of course Freire’s own thinking was directly informed by the Cultural

Revolution and Mao’s writings on the mass line. (Freire 2000:36,74,75)

Another important element in Mao’s thinking was his political-military strategy of

“protracted peoples war” (Mao 1977b) in which guerrilla forces would cultivate and rely on

popular support, especially among the peasantry, to first gain control over the countryside before

surrounding and capturing the cities. While in theory the success of a strategy of protracted

people’s war can not be separated from the application of the mass line, in practice, as we will

see, these two aspects of Mao’s thinking would capture the imaginations of distinct groups

emerging from the radicalization of the Mexican student movement. We will therefore return to

the question of revolutionary military strategy in the chapters dealing with the development of

revolutionary armed struggle in Mexico.

7.2 1968 AND ITS AFTERMATH

The significance of Maoism and the mass line method of leadership would emerge

starkly in the course and aftermath of the 1968 student movement in Mexico. As in much of the

rest of the world, 1968 was a turning point in Mexico. The Tet Offensive against US forces by

the National Liberation Front of Viet Nam, the urban rebellions following the assassination of

the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States, and the May student and worker revolts in

Paris, among many other events, captured the imaginations of many Mexican students and made

them receptive to calls to take to the streets themselves. (Katsiaficas 1999)

The movement, which was particularly strong in the universities and preparatory schools

of Mexico City, was focused primarily on opposition to political repression and calls for the

release of political prisoners including Valentin Campa and Demetrio Vallejo, leaders still


imprisoned for their role in the 1958 railroad strike. On July 22 a violent police response to a

fight between students from rival preparatory schools affiliated with the Instituto Politecnico

Nacional (IPN) and the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM) sparked a call for

a July 26 demonstration by members of the Federación Nacional Estudiantil Tecnico (FNET) of

the IPN, an official student organization affiliated with the ruling party, that was then endorsed

by students at UNAM. The demonstration coincided with and ultimately fused with another

smaller demonstration that day organized by the PCM-led student organization, the Central

Nacional de Estudiantes Democraticos in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. The combined

body of students was brutally attacked by the police and this event sparked the call for a nation-

wide student strike. As the movement grew it rapidly came to be perceived by the ruling party as

a serious threat to its political hegemony. The conflict intensified on July 29 when soldiers fired

a bazooka at the entrance of the Instituto Nacional Politecnico (IPN). By early August a Consejo

Nacional de Huelga (National Strike Council or CNH) was coordinating the movement and

organizing multiple demonstrations involving hundreds of thousands of students. The

government responded to the growth of the movement on September 18 by sending troops to

occupy the UNAM campus. (González de Alba 1986; Guevara Niebla 2004)

In response to the increasing repression directed at the campuses the CNH called on its

supporters to form “brigadas,” small groups that would take the message of the strike off the

campuses and into the poor and working class neighborhoods of the city. The political

orientation of the briagadistas varied considerably, but this initial experience of “going to the

people” had an important influence on many participants in the student movement and many of

the brigadas would become the nuclei of new political formations in the aftermath of the student

strike and its repression.


On the evening of October 2, 1968, ten days before Mexico City was to host the Olympic

Games, soldiers opened fire on student protesters gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in

the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City. The shooting lasted for hours into the night. Soldiers

pursued students fleeing into the surrounding apartment complexes which they proceeded to

systematically search, making mass arrests. While precise figures still remain difficult to

establish, it is widely accepted that the death toll ran into the hundreds, and that thousands of

students were arrested and imprisoned. (González de Alba 1986; Guevara Niebla 2004;

Poniatowska 1968; Ramirez 2008)

The Tlatelolco massacre marked the effective end of the rising wave of mass student

street protests that threatened the ruling party and the state. It did not, howeveal, arrest the

political development the participants in the movement. Rather the repression of the 1968 student

movement both enlarged and accelerated a process of political radicalization among the young

that had been taking place since the early 1960s. The examples of revolutionary movements

around the world, the experiences of the MLN, the medical workers struggle and others produced

a stream of radical and revolutionary-minded young activists that grew steadily over the course

of the decade. The 1968 student movement drew a much broader section of students into this

process, a great many of whom emerged from it personally transformed and determined to

dedicate their lives to the revolutionary transformation of Mexico. The Tlatelolco massacre and

the arrest and imprisonment of thousands of students, while successful in suppressing the strike,

greatly accelerated this process of political radicalization and turned a whole fraction of a

generation of Mexican students towards explicitly revolutionary politics.


Gaspar Morquecho was an 18 year old high school student who was swept up in the

movement in July and arrested the day after the Tlatelolco massacre. He spent three months in

Lecumberri Prison which, as he explains, became a virtual school for revolution:

And the prison, as well as the massacre of October 2, the prison makes the authoritarian

regime very concrete. A lot of the kids, we were charged with ten offences when we

hadn’t committed one, and in this way they played with our freedom [...] To accuse us of

ten offences, then to let us go free, dropping seven but releasing us on bail for the others,

it was an act of political control. To release us on bail meant also to keep us under

control. Inside the prison you got to know, in general, the political forces. Above all the

compañeros that were representatives of the General Strike Council, or those who were

leaders of the Mexican Communist Party, and the people from the base, la raza, the

activists. It was very clear there the groups that we were in, and we learned in a very

general way from the struggles between the groups. (2008)

In this transformed situation, small revolutionary groups were thus suddenly swamped

with new recruits and wholly new groups of every imaginable political stripe sprang up

everywhere. If similar processes were occurring in many other countries, the deadly nature of the

repression directed at the Mexican student movement added urgency to the search for a correct

revolutionary political orientation and strategy. In the aftermath of the Tlatelolco massacre

thousands of young Mexicans found themselves grappling with the practical and strategic

question of what it would take to overthrow the Mexican government and to carry forward the

revolutionary transformation of the country.

Two Main Paths

While the appearance of dozens of new projects and organizations reflected the rich

variety of answers to this question, almost all of them can be divided into two main approaches

or paths. A comparatively small number of students, inspired by the examples of guerrilla

struggles in Cuba, Algeria, Viet Nam, and elsewhere formed around twenty small clandestine


political-military organizations, several of which would carry out a wave of spectacular

bombings, kidnappings and bank robberies over the course of the 1970s. One of these, the

Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN), would eventually initiate the organization of the EZLN

in the depths of the Lacandon Jungle in 1983. This experience will be discussed in chapters 9 and

10.

A much larger fraction of the students radicalized in 1968 would, under the auspices of a

number of radical left parties and organizations, join in a movement of “going to the people” in

which former student activists poured into the poorest urban barrios, into industrial jobs, and into

the countryside with the intention of assisting in building up mass democratic popular

organizations with the power to challenge the system that they as students alone did not possess.

While this movement was ideologically heterogeneous, including the adherents of every stripe of

radical or revolutionary thought, the dominant ideological trend within it, and the one that

encountered the greatest success in actually building popular democratic movements and

organizations, was Maoism.

Before proceeding further it is necessary to comment on the use of ideological

designations to characterize the two main expressions of revolutionary politics to emerge from

the 1968 student movement. The political-military or guerrilla groups that emerged in this period

are sometimes all tidily designated as “Guevarist” on the grounds of the influence of the example

of the Cuban Revolution and Ernesto “Ché” Guevara’s theories of guerrilla warfare on their

theory and practice. Similarly the groups that “went to the people” are commonly designated as

Maoist, because in most cases they designated themselves as such, but also because of the

evident influence of the mass line method of leadership on their theory and practice. Tello (2000)

in particular uses these designations in his characterization of the groups active in Chiapas in the


1970s. This shorthand, however, has tended to encourage an overly facile understanding of the

often considerably more complex ideological currents and cross-currents that shaped the always

evolving outlooks and practices of dozens of distinct national organizations and countless

smaller projects and collective.

So, while the Cuban Revolution was an important point of reference for most of the

political-military organizations, and this is especially clear in the case of the FLN, these groups

were also influenced in varying measures by a variety of political and military experiences and

theories from the Mexican Revolution to the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences of protracted

peoples war, and later by the experiences of revolutionary guerrilla warfare in Central America,

that differed in important respects from the theory of the guerrilla foco associated with Guevara.

Similarly it is important to recognize that the radical and revolutionary left in Mexico in

general in this period operated under conditions of intense repression compelling it to function

largely in clandestinity and to adopt quasi-military security practices even where their work did

not have an otherwise explicitly military character. For many also, the choice of “going to the

people” did not necessarily reflect any principled opposition to eventually waging revolutionary

armed struggle, but rather a strategic view of the necessity of establishing bases of popular

support by sinking deep roots among the masses before doing so. Furthermore, the popular

democratic struggles taken up by these groups were often very militant and necessarily involved

the organization of forms of collective self-defense, as for example occurred with many of the

land takeovers by the urban poor that established the colonias that were a primary base of

popular support for the Maoist-led urban popular democratic movements.

Thus, while it is necessary to make a distinction between, on the one hand the political-

military organizations explicitly oriented towards immediate preparation for and waging of


guerrilla war, and, on the other, the main groups that would take the lead in building popular

democratic movements, the ideological influences on each group were myriad and their practices

often showed elements of hybridity. This can be seen, for example, in the case of the Ejercito

Popular de Liberación Unido de America, a guerrilla organization that emerged out of the

Maoist-inspired Colonía Ruben Jaramillo in the town of Texmico, Morelos. (Castellanos

2007:238–240; Perez 1999) Another case that is of particular relevance to this study is that of

Unión del Pueblo, an organization that became notorious nationally in Mexico for its bombing

campaigns. In the early 1970s Unión del Pueblo underwent a split and the fraction that

established itself in Chiapas largely abandoned its guerrilla pretensions and oriented itself

towards building mass campesino organizations. Tello characterizes Unión del Pueblo as

divided between a Guevarist (guerrilla) faction and a Maoist (mass organization) faction, but this

characterization misses the question of the complex articulation between Maoist military

doctrine and the mass line method of leadership that is of critical importance in fully

understanding Unión del Pueblo’s particular influence on the communities that would become

the support bases of the EZLN. Similarly the FLN, while initially quite orthodox in its adherence

to a focoist strategy, would eventually embrace, by way of the Sandinistas, a strategy of

protracted peoples war that would lead them to develop a greater appreciation of the role of mass

organizations.

It is also important here to note how the conditions of clandestinity imposed generally on

the Mexican left in the 1970s favored a generalized resort to a revolutionary vocabulary often

obscuring important political differences between and even within organizations. With the offer

of amnesty to guerrillas and the legalization of left-wing political parties beginning in the late

1970s these suppressed differences began to come forward more clearly. Many organizations


that had adhered to seemingly revolutionary politics, including the major Maoist organizations

that are the focus of this chapter, would respond to these opening by moving in a decidedly more

reformist direction.

The Formation of Maoist Organizations

The events of 1968 not only drove large numbers of young people to embrace

revolutionary politics, they also had a transformative effect on already existing revolutionary

groups. In particular 1968 produced a political crisis within the Sparticist grouplets which,

despite being largely campus based, had limited contact with or influence on the student

movement. The effect of this crisis on the largest of these groups, the LCE, was to cause it to

break up. A small fraction of LCE members would make their way into the armed movement.

The leadership core of the LCE, however, followed a different course. It was based in Mexico

City and called the Ho Chi Minh section or simply “the Ho.” Unlike the rest of the LCE, which

remained pretty much trapped within the university context, the Ho had been able to establish

some links with and engage in some mass organizing work with “militant workers in small

factories in Mexico City, campesino groups in Morelos and Guerrero, and militant teachers in

Hidlago, Tlaxcala, Oaxaca, Guerrero and the valley of Mexico.” (Bennett 1993:91–92)

The Chinese Cultural Revolution that had begun in 1966 had led a number of members of

the LCE, especially the members of the Ho, to undertake a new and closer reading of Mao’s

writings more centered on the practice of the mass line than their prior reading which mainly

echoed Mao’s rejection of the theory of “peaceful coexistence”:

They found that a new reading of the materials of the Cultural Revolution along with the

the previous works of Mao offered the keys to resolving those issues. Mao said in his

celebrated Red Book: “from the masses to to the masses [...]take the ideas of the masses


and concentrate them, then go to the masses, persevere in the ideas and carry them

through, so as to form correct ideas of leadership.” Some of his most dedicated disciples

proclaimed that these postulates were “the most important principle of Maoism.” In

addition to the Ho Chi Minh section, this inspiration prompted the appearance in the

seventies of Línea Proletaria, Politica Popular, the editorial team of Hoja Popular […]

Servir al Pueblo and and Causa del Pueblo (Barbosa 1984:128)

The members of the Ho were also deeply affected by the significant support that had been

shown by the urban poor for the student movement in 1968, support that stood in notable

contrast with the often hostile stance of industrial workers organized in pro-government unions.

The combined impact of the ideas emerging from the Cultural Revolution, the sympathy for the

students among the urban poor, and critical reflection on their own marginal role in the student

movement led the Ho (and others who had undergone similar experiences) to radically reorient

their political activity. This reorientation grounded in the idea of the mass line enabled the Ho

and other groups to rapidly resolve a series of interconnected problems that had previously vexed

the LCE. As Barbossa (1984:126–127) explains,

Initially aimed at correcting the tendency in any vanguard to distance itself from the

masses and to substitute for them in their decisions, it was probably elaborated for the

first time by the Ho Chi Minh section, already in the process of breaking with the LCE in

the course of the movement of 1968, as a theory that could be used to solve the main

problems that the grouplets had been debating for the previous decades, problems which

had been permanent headaches and an inexhaustible source of disputes and schisms.

[These were]:

How to link up with the mass movement and what relations to maintain between

their spontaneous organizations and ‘the party.’ ‘The fusion of scientific socialism

with the spontaneous workers movement’ as it was said in the sixties.

The problem of program, that is to say, the knowledge and the characterization of

the national reality and the proposal of alternative projects.

The problem of communist organizational forms appropriate to national

particularities.


Breaking decisively with their prior sectarianism, the former members of the LCE and

similar groups decided very deliberately to root themselves among “the masses,” that is to say

mainly the urban and rural poor. Morquecho, who went on to join La Organización

Revolucionaria Compañero (or simply Compañero as it came to be more commonly called),

explains:

For us the people were in the barrios, in the countryside, in the factories, in the

universities, and in contrast with struggles led by a caudillo, the mass line implied the

work of masses, among the masses, with the people, wher they were, to live, fight and die

together with the people.

This shift in outlook and practice rather quickly began to bear fruit. The act of physically

relocating themselves to poor rural and urban communities combined with the shift in their

theoretical understanding of the role of revolutionary leadership and its relationship with

processes of the mobilization of, and development of the consciousness of, the masses, had a

striking effect on the Maoist veterans of the student movement. As Bennett explains:

The praxis demanded by Maoism produced immediate results. Embracing the Maoist

‘mass line,’ the students left behind the universities in order to live in urban and rural

communities. Sometimes they weren’t able to form the kind of relations that they wanted,

but other times they were. In the most successful cases, their organizing activity brought

about the formation of social movements with themselves at the head. The students were

able to successfully constitute their leadership in part because of their education and their

capacity to move between different social classes and to negotiate with government

officials. They were also committed to dedicating their live to the mass movements,

being professional militants who received training and stipend from their political groups,

allowing them to dedicate themselves full-time to the new social movements. (1993:92)

The embrace of the mass line not only meant a rupture with a particularly inaccessible

style of Marxist jargon, but with much of the conceptual apparatus that had given rise to that

jargon in the first place. Barbosa describes the results of this break:

The practice of the ‘mass line’ led to some surprising results. It tended to put aside all the

characteristic conceptual baggage of the Marxists and with which they had previously

sought, with very poor results, to woo the masses. Presenting themselves stripped of

clichés and with the sole purpose of ‘serving the people,’ starting at their level, and not


by advancing their own programs or propaganda, they were easily welcomed in the

struggles and the organizations that the movement itself was producing. […]The besieged

Juliet finally fell into the arms of Romeo, but only when he abandoned the convoluted

language traditionally used in the siege. (1984:127)

The successes that the Maoists encountered did not, of course, derive exclusively from

the superiority of their new methods of organization. In the colonias where the Maoists

experienced their most impressive organizational successes they arrived at a particularly

propitious moment. As Bennet notes:

The Maoist cadres moved into the poorest and most peripheral areas of the cities at

precisely the moment when conditions there were reaching a critical level as a result of

massive migrations from the countryside. (1993:93)

In the view of Barbosa (1984:113) the rise of popular movements at this moment

corresponded with a generalized disintegration of the PRI’s control over urban and rural masses.

The clentilistic structures established in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution and

consolidated under President Cardenas were less and less effective in channeling popular

discontent in a Mexico that had undergone dramatic changes in the intervening decades. Just as

the student movements of the 1960s were in part a response to the massification of higher

education, the urban popular movements of the 1970s arose in response to a process of very

rapid urbanization.

The migration of so many people from the countryside to the cities created a rupture in

the clientilist structures on which the ruling party depended for popular support. These were

simply unable to absorb the tidal wave of migrants. In desperate need of housing, the migrants to

the cities took to invading and occupying undeveloped lands, dividing them into lots and erecting

simple shelters, forming new colonias, which were then faced with the need to both defend

themselves from eviction and to secure various necessary services such as electricity, running


water, roads, sewers, transportation, and schools. Entering into this process the Maoist students

found that they had much to offer.

In general the organization of the colonos, the residents of the colonias, took on the

character of closed, lightly armed groups of residents prepared to physically defend their homes

and persons from eviction or attack. The culture of colonias such as Comuna Roja and Tierra y

Libertad in Monterrey, Colonia Ruben Jaramillo in Morelos, Campamento 2 de octubre in DF,

or Colonia Francisco Villa in Chihuahua were characterized by self-governance through popular

assemblies which the Maoists played an important role in organizing. The popular assemblies

commonly prohibited cantinas, pulquerías and prostitution and other anti-social behavior that

threatened the already precarious position of the colonias. They also organized collective

kitchens for the unemployed, independent schools such as the Escuelas Populares Mao Tse-Tung

(as the grade school in Campamento 2 de octubre was called); consumer cooperatives, and days

of collective labor (called Red Sundays in Tierra y Libertad).

The organization of the colonias captured the imaginations of many sympathetic

intellectuals. Speaking to reporters from the newspaper unomasuno who accompanied him on a

visit to Campamento 2 de octubre, for example, Henri Lefebvre declared that it was “the only

authentic socialist experience” that he knew of. (Barbosa 1984:112)

The Maoist students themselves were deeply affected by these experiences. As Bennett

notes, “The experience of living among and organizing the poor profoundly transformed the

internal life of the groups that adopted the mass line.” (1993:93) What occurred is best

understood as a process of mutual transformation between leaders and led. Barbosa describes

how the act of planting themselves in these communities produced a deepening of their

understanding of what the mass line entailed:


The ‘mass line,’ elevated to a fundamental principle, tended to privilege the mass

movement over the party. It inverted – or better, subverted – the traditional forms of the

Leninists (first to construct the brain of the class, the ‘head of the proletariat,’ in the

words of Revueltas who spoke to us an ‘intrauterine’ stage, before submitting to the test

of practice). […] The ‘mass line,’ as we’ve noted, also produced a total displacement, a

one hundred eighty degree turn in the kind of concerns or issues that animated the

internal life of the small groups of the sixties: [These concerns had been] the ‘national’

program, the study of reality as the indispensable step prior to practice that would avoid

‘spontaneism,’ ‘practicism’ or ‘artisanal’ methods, providing us with the ‘scientific

instrument’ which would orient future action. Instead, the important things were now the

‘minimum programs’ which were emerging in most cases reduced completely or

constrained to the narrow environment in which the front or coordinating committee

operated. […]

It is a layer that ceases to be groupuscular when its leaders discovered the philosopher’s

stone that the groupuscules had so eagerly sought for decades; that is to say in studying

that experience they discovered in it a mixture (the dosage of which remained secret) of

economism, anti-statist moderation, flexibility in negotiation, [and] anticharrismo4 that

knew when to retreat and bow to spontaneity, which previously had been criticized so

severely by the Orthodox as a great sin. (Barbosa 1984:126-130)

The variety of Maoism that emerged in Mexico in the aftermath of 1968 strongly

emphasized the anti-bureaucratic elements in Mao’s thinking, giving a sometimes quasi-

anarchist cast to its political practice. As we will see, some the same tendencies that enabled the

Maoists to lead militant mass movements in the 1970s would, in the 1980s, facilitate their

effective liquidation into the ruling party. For a period, however, between their rejection of the

sectarianism of the Sparticists in 1968 and their subsequent cooptation by the PRI, the Maoists

facilitated the emergence of an impressive array of independent and radical popular movements

across Mexico.

4 Charrismo refers to the practices of the corrupt and unaccountable leaders of unions affiliated with the ruling party.

It refers to the president of the railroad workers union, Jesús Díaz de León, installed by the PRI in 1948 over the

opposition of the membership and known as “El Charro” (the Cowboy) because of his affinity for cowboy regalia.


Política Popular

The largest and most influential of the Maoist organizations to emerge in the aftermath of

1968 was Política Popular. Política Popular had its roots in the first efforts of the student

movement to “go to the people,” namely the student “brigades” that fanned out from the

universities to conduct agitation and propaganda work in the poor barrios of Maxico City. The

organization took its name from a pamphlet, Hacia una política popular, (To Make a Peoples

Politics) published by the Coalición de Brigadas Emiliano Zapata in November 1968. The

pamphlet articulated a critique first of the Mexican state and then of the respective errors of what

it characterized as the reformist and adventurist strategies then being advanced by various

currents. In opposition to these approaches, Hacia una Política Popular argued for a strategy,

based in its reading of the mass line, of going to the people and building popular mass

organizations. (Política Popular 1968)

The pamphlet served to rally students sympathetic to that orientation. Over the course of

1969 the loose collection of forces attracted to Hacia una Política Popular were gathered

together and by 1970 had constituted themselves as an organization, Política Popular (PP) with a

group of professors and students, drmainly from the Economics Departments at the UNAM and

the Instituto Politecnico Nacional (IPN), at its core and deliberately excluding members of the

PCM. (Barbosa 1984)

After some initial internal struggles and splits Aldolfo Orive Berlinguer, a young

economics professor, emerged as the group’s leading figure. Orive taught at both UNAM and the

IPN. He had been born into Mexico’s political elite, his father having served first as the Director

of the National Irrigation Commission and then as Secretary of Hydraulic Resources under

President Miguel Aleman. He was politically active as an undergraduate and then studied in


France under the political economist Charles Bettelheim. Bettleheim, who had previously been a

long-term supporter of the Soviet Union had become by this point a convinced Maoist. As

Bettelheim’s student, Orive witnessed the May 1968 events in France and came under the

influence of French Maoism.

The consolidation of Política Popular under Orive’s leadership was followed by a period

of serious cadre training and the relocation of cadres out of Mexico City to other areas where

they continued to call themselves “brigadistas.” Unlike many other groups formed at the same

time, Política Popular did not rush to constitute itself as a new political party. Rather the

formation of a party was postponed in favor of a temporary coordinating body to guide and

support the militants in their first organizing efforts, with the idea that with time the actual

leadership of the party would emerge not from the brigadistas but from the ranks of the mass

organizations. (Bennett 1993:94-95)

Orive initially sent Política Popular cadres slowly but surely to the countryside. Cadres

were asked to make a life-long commitment and were not informed where they were being sent

until they had. The majority of the brigadistas were first sent to rural zones in Durango,

Zacatecas, San Luis Potosi, Tlaxcala, Nayarit, and the State of Mexico which were experiencing

a reinvigoration of independent agrarian activism. The efforts to establish bases in rural areas,

however, ultimately proved less successful than those directed at poor urban areas. In 1973,

Política Popular cadres were forced to leave Nayarit where they had assisted in building the

Union Ejidal Valle de Banderas. Efforts to organize campesinos in Durango also failed.

Meanwhile Alberto Anaya, who had worked previously in Durango, joined Hugo Andrés Araulo

in Monterey where they assisted the first land invasions in the suburbs of the city. (Araulo would

later become the leader of the PRI-affiliated Confederación Nacional Campesina, the CNC.) By


1972 Anaya was a recognized leader of the rapidly growing urban popular movement in

Monterrey. (Bennett 1993:95)

By 1976 Política Popular was leading one of the most important urban-popular

movements in Mexico, the Frente Popular Tierra y Libertad which represented 26 colonias. As a

member of Compañero, Morquecho visited Monterrey to witness the movement there.

In addition to establishing links with the movements that were already there, in the cases

of Durango, Zacatecas, and Monterrey they invaded the lands. From there began a

process of organization involving participating with the people in assemblies. And in this

manner they developed a very strong practice based in the people making decisions in

assemblies. Almost every day there were assemblies in a colony, that is of sector, of

young people, of women, that is of the Women’s League, if this, ythat or the other. You

could call it asambleismo, but I believe that there was no other process of discussion,

analysis, reflection and decision-making in the country like what they did.

The success of the organizing work among the urban poor contributed to a crisis in the

leadership of PP. Orive initially opposed the shift and its success undermined his standing within

the group. By 1973, however, Orive was himself compelled to move to Monterrey in the wake of

the collapse of the work he had been leading in Nayarit. At this point a dispute broke out within

the organization over whether the movement should continue to concentrate itself in the colonias

or should reorient itself towards the also restive industrial working class as Orive was now

advocating. Orive did not argue for simply pulling up stakes, but rather held that the work in the

colonias should be reconceived as in support of organization at the point of production.

In 1976, an incident in Monterrey brought the tensions within Política Popular to a boil.

In the course of a confrontation six people in the colonia under Orive’s leadership were killed by

the police. The incident led to both Orive’s effective expulsion from the city and a split in the

organization, with Araulo and Anaya holding onto the larger part of the organization and Orive

taking a smaller fraction with him. While both groups continued to identify themselves by the


name, Política Popular they became known by the names they used describe their respective

political lines with Línea de Masas led by Anaya and Línea Proletaria led by Orive.

In the wake of the split in Política Popular, Línea Proletaria cadres in Monterrey

relocated to the Laguna region around the city of Torreon in the states of Coahuila and Durango

and concentrated their work there in the labor movement, chiefly among miners and metal

workers in Monclova, Coahuila, and among telephone workers, and teachers. (Bennett 1993:97)

Enrique Arreguin Rodriguez was a young metal worker recruited by Línea Proletaria in

Monclova shortly after the split. As in Monterrey, Línea Proletaria’s first activity in Monclova

was in organizing the urban popular movement. Following Orive’s strategy, the group earned a

reputation for effective and militant action in the urban popular movement and then used that

reputation to secure a base among the industrial working class. Arreguin’s own involvement in

efforts to democratize the metal-workers union led first to his recruitment to Línea Proletaria,

and then to his further political development:

It was strange how in the union I was transformed. Before I was very shy, rather than shy,

I would say that the term is introverted. I kept the opinions that I had to myself. no one

knew that I read El Viejo Topo [The Old Mole, a left-wing periodical], because I didn’t

talk about it with anybody, my family knew, but I didn’t participate in anything, but I

was receiving this ideological nourishment from different sources that I sought out

myself, when I found Línea Proletaria.[…] I didn’t speak . This helped me in the

beginning, when we had an issue to discuss. Of everything that people said before , I

pulled out the best of this one and that one and was able to integrate and systematie it

easily. I would make a proposal that wasn’t my own, that was enriched by everybody.

Perhaps my virtue was to pull something together and give it some cohesion, to structure

it in a more comprehensible way and not so vague as this or that one had put it.

As the split in the organization unfolded Orive advanced a proposal for what he dubbed

the Organización Ideologica Dirigente (OID or Leading Ideological Organization). In theory the

function of the OID would be to coordinate the work of the brigadistas without dominating, in


the manner associated with other left-wing parties, the various mass organizations that they were

advising. The problem was real enough and Politica Popular was certainly not immune to it. The

situation was contradictory. On the one hand the Maoists were successful in encouraging the

organization of poor communities and in facilitating the political development of community

members and their emergence as local leaders. On the other hand this process was inevitably

uneven and never eliminated the dependence of the communities on the knowledge and skills of

the university-educated Maoist brigadistas which became even more important as the popular

movements exploded. As Bennett explains:

Even though the cadres of Política Popular might adopt a line of making decisions by

means of mass assemblies and committees that would represent the bases, reality

imposed the consolidation of a strong leadership. All of the first movements began with

land invasions, an activity which required rapid decisions and gave little time for the

process of mass assemblies. The training and the highest level of education of the cadres

of Política Popular led to them being quickly accepted as leaders of the masses, who

were were, furthermore, accustomed acostumradas to the Mexican tradition of the

cacique or caudillo. Nonetheless, the leaders were completely devoted to the popular

movement, in the majority of cases putting their roles as leaders ahead of the professional

careers for which they had studied before joining Política Popular. (1993:98)

If in theory the OID was supposed to resolve this contradiction between revolutionary

leadership and mass democracy, in practice, Bennett argues, it “tended toward an extreme

centralization in the person of Orive.”

While Línea Proletaria maintained some of its work in the urban-popular movement in

Durango, after 1976 this movement came to be dominated by Linea de Masas and Companero.

This was the situation on the eve of Línea Proletaria’s involvement in the indigenous campesino

movement in Chiapas. But before we can continue with that story, we need to look at the

activities of another organization, Unión del Pueblo.


Unión del Pueblo

While Línea Proletaria would become the most influential Maoist organization in

Chiapas, the first Maoist group to establish itself in the state arrived by a somewhat different

path. Unlike Politica Popular, Unión del Pueblo was first organized as an clandestine political-

military organization.

The exact origins of Unión del Pueblo are unclear. Or rather there are competing

accounts, none of which seem entirely trustworthy. Zamora’s study of the organization’s

activities in Guadalajara (2006:26–34) has the most detailed review of these. In an 1986

interview with Eleazar Campós Gomez, a leader of the group, Campós claimed that the Uni{on

del Pueblo had its roots in social struggles going back to the late 1950s. According to Zamora,

the first cell of what would become Unión del Pueblo was organized in 1964 and the

organization itself was probably launched sometime in 1967 bringing together groups based in

Mexico City, Oaxaca, and Guadalajara. An important base of the organization was at the

Universidad Nacional de Agricultura located in the town of Chapingo in the state of Mexico

where Hector Zamudio, a professor in economics and leader of the organization was based.

Another important figure in the organization’s early history was José María Ortiz Vides, a

Guatemalan who had received political and military training in Viet Nam and who fought in the

Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias in Guatemala before taking responsibility for the military

training of Unión del Pueblo.

Among the various guerrilla groups to emerge in the late 1960s, Unión del Pueblo was

distinguished by its early theoretical embrace of the Maoist military strategy of protracted

peoples war. (Castellanos 2007: 205, 229) By 1971 however, UP was already divided into at

least two distinct fractions (García de León 2002:313n) One faction would pursue a military


strategy, initiating several bombing campaigns. This fraction would fuse several years later with

a remnant of Lucio Cabañas’s Partido de Los Pobres (see Chapter 9) to form the Partido

Revolucionario Obrero Campesino Unión del Pueblo (PROCUP). In 1996 PROCUP would fuse

with several smaller groups to launch the Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (Revolutionary

Peoples Army or EPR).

It was cadres from the other fraction of Unión del Pueblo, however, who established

themselves in Chiapas in 1972. Without abandoning their long-term intentions to eventually

wage guerrilla war, this faction was oriented primarily towards the political development of a

leadership based in the popular movements. The distinctive outlook of this faction would be

articulated in a long programmatic document entitled Qué significa apoyarse en el pueblo

(Unión del Pueblo 1974) or What Does it Mean to Serve the People? This piece argued against

what it characterized as reformist and focoist deviations, the latter represented by the faction of

the organization that would become part of PROCUP, and in favor of “the current of peoples war

and the mass line” that

is a development of the Leninist theory of the party, in keeping with the experiences of

the Chinese and Vietnamese peoples in their revolutionary and anti-imperialist

struggles.(Unión del Pueblo 1974:89)

While Qué significa apoyarse en el pueblo still insisted that the class struggle in Mexico

had acquired “the character of a peoples war” (90) that demanded the construction of a

clandestine revolutionary organization with a military capacity, it also argued that while military

methods might still be appropriate in some parts of Mexico, citing the state of Guerrero in

particular, where the guerrillas led by Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vazquez had secured genuine

bases of popular support, that in others, the proper emphasis should be on the development of

popular mass formations and the use of other forms of struggle.


It is important here to emphasize the hybridity of Unión del Pueblo’s position because of

what it says about their early success in working with the indigenous communities. While they

would subsequently merge with Línea Proletaria and follow them on their more reformist

trajectory, the members of Unión del Pueblo that trained indigenous translators for the 1974

Indigenous Congress and that worked with Javier Vargas to build the first ejidal union in the

Cañadas, Quiptik Te Lekubtesel, were members of a clandestine polital military organization, a

fact that we will see would be reflected in the particular combativity of Quiptik Te Lekubtesel.

Maria Teresa García Móises was a 19 year old student of economics at UNAM in 1974

when she joined the fraction of Unión del Pueblo that was active in Chiapas. The organization

operated according to the norms of clandestinity and she joined first as a sympathizer. Step by

step she was given more demanding tasks until she was admitted as a full-time militant, relocated

to a small mountain village in the state of Puebla where she joined a six member cell of the

organization. Operating under the cover of a government program that some of the cell members

worked for, she began work with the village’s campesinos, identifying those most potentially

sympathetic with Unión del Pueblo’s revolutionary politics, involving them in processes of

political education, and producing “materials that would be accessible to the people, explaining

to people how they were important and how they were… how they could be historical subjects.”

She explains the impact of this work on her own political development

I remember the first time that I went before an ejidal assembly, where I had to go in front

of two hundred campesinos. I was learning little by little. At first I spoke to them as if

they were little children and I was their teacher. Later I advanced and began to have a

better understanding and to progress. This was period of learning, it was when we began

to read Marx, Lenin and Mao more, there was a discipline, a spirit, a commitment and

trust in each other, a dream that was fed every day, and this was something that I only

lived then, that I have never lived in another situation … an this was when I wentto work

for the organization, still Unión del Pueblo, in the Lacandon Jungle. (García Moises

2009)


While the fraction of Unión del Pueblo that García Móises joined was involved

increasingly in building mass formations, the organization still conceived of itself as a political

military organization preparing for eventual revolutionary war. Accordingly, in addition to her

work with campesinos, García Móises also received training in the use of firearms, an aspect of

the organization’s work for which she later admitted she was ill-suited.

Unión del Pueblo had already been active in Chiapas for more than three years when

García Moises arrived. An initial group composed of several students from Chapingo began

working in Chiapas in 1972. In 1973 Antonio García de León, an anthropologist who had studied

and spoke Tzotzil and Chol and also a member of Unión del Pueblo, was charged by the Diocese

with the training of indigenous translators for the upcoming Indigenous Congress. In this

capacity he used the opportunity to introduce several other UP cadres into the preparations for

the Congress. (García de León 2002:175, 313n)

Working with the clergy and catechists, the cadres of UP, the most prominent of which

were Jaime Soto, René Gómez and Martha Orantes, the latter a daughter of a large land-owning

family in the state, promoted the use of popular assemblies to carry out discussion and analysis

of the themes of the Congress, and striving to distill from them the most advanced thinking in the

communities. This approach had the effect of ensuring that the proceedings of the Congress

would be regarded widely in the indigenous communities as a legitimate expression of their

collective will.

UP advisors also trained the young multi-lingual members of some of the communities as

scribes and translators to facilitate the Congress. This activity in particular served to initiate a

process of cadre formation among the translators, many of whom would go on first to become


leading figures in the independent campesino organizations that would proliferate in the wake of

the Congress and then in the EZLN.

7.3 CONCLUSION

Maoism emerged as an important current on the radical left in Mexico because it

addressed a constellation of problems that had confounded other currents. Its roots were in the

Sparticist splits from the PCM that had come to see the practice of that party as irretrievably

reformist. The Chinese Communist Party’s denunciations of the Soviet Union’s embrace of

“peaceful coexistence” with U.S. imperialism resonated with the Sparticists. But it was the

Cultural Revolution and the popularization of the mass line method of communist leadership that

enabled the Sparticists first to break out of their own sectarian isolation, then to attract a large

cohort of students radicalized by the events of 1968, and to play a leading role in building mass

independent organizations among the urban and rural poor of finally Mexico. They had already

had considerable success elsewhere when they began to arrive in Chiapas and assist in the

organization of mass independent indigenous campesino organizations. It is to that experience

that we turn in the next chapter.


CHAPTER 8: THE INDIGENOUS CAMPESINO MOVEMENT IN CHIAPAS

It was the middle of the night on July 8, 1977 when several hundred indigenous

campesinos armed with a handful of hunting rifles and a larger number of machetes silently

crossed the Rio Jataté in the heart of the Cañadas. They were members of an independent

campesino organization, Quiptik Ta Lekubtesel, who had been meeting in San Quintin. They

were headed to La Nueva Providencia, or as it was simply called, La Nueva. Legally established

as an ejido, in practice La Nueva functioned more like a finca under the control of a ladino

rancher, Polo Aguilar, and his family. Faced with a revolt from the other members of the ejido,

Aguilar had arranged for 11 federal soldiers to patrol the community on his behalf and had taken

an older member of Quiptik from another village prisoner. In the early morning hours of July 9,

the members of Quiptik arrived in Nueva Providencia to protest the presence of soldiers in the

community and to demand the release of their captured compañero. Aguilar responded by

opening fire and chaos ensued. The soldiers were the next to open fire but without really aiming.

Then the members of Quiptik counterattacked. When the smoke cleared ten of the soldiers had

been killed. The eleventh soldier was wounded but was able to escape with Aguilar and one of

his sons aboard a small plane.

As mentioned previously, the 1974 Indigenous Congress ignited a massive wave of

indigenous-campesino mobilization and organization across Chiapas. While the years prior to the

Congress had seen some sporadic land struggles, most notably around Venustiano Carranza and

Simojovel, (Harvey 1998:91–117) what followed was more like a dam bursting, with new

struggles breaking out and new organizations being established very rapidly all over the eastern

half of the state. In this chapter I will look at several important instances of this large and


heterogeneous movement, paying special attention to the complex and contradictory roles of the

Maoist organizations, Unión del Pueblo and Línea Proletaria, in its gestation and development.

While the Indigenous Congress played a critcal role in igniting this upsurge in Chiapas, it should

also be seen as part of a broader nation-wide increase in agrarian struggles in the 1970s.

8.1 AGRARIAN CRISIS AND CAMPESINO RESISTANCE IN MEXICO

By the latter half of the 1960s it was increasingly apparent that Mexico was confronting a

major crisis in its agricultural sector. This was rooted in a national model of economic

development pursued since the 1930s which drained capital away from the countryside to

finance rapid industrialization in the cities. This overall underinvestment in agriculture produced

several effects that would contribute to the re-emergence of a nation-wide campesino movement

in the 1970s. The first of these effects was a generalized stagnation in agricultural productivity

with the result that domestic production became inadequate for domestic consumption and

Mexico became a net importer of agricultural products, primarily in the form of grains. The

situation was compounded by the fact that the most developed sectors of agricultural production

(coffee, cotton, produce) were overwhelmingly oriented towards production for export which

made the sector as a whole very sensitive to price fluctuations in the international market. During

the latter part of the 1960s the relative stability of export prices served to obscure the lopsided

character of Mexicos national development. Rising food prices were offset in part by increased

demand for agricultural labor. In the early 1970s the prices for exports fell precipitously while

those for imports continued to rise. The effect was, first an aggravation of the conditions of

agricultural labor, and then a generalized eruption of campesino struggles across the country

unparalleled since the 1930s. (Bartra 1985; Rubio 1987)


The eruption of the campesino movement coincided with the beginning of the

administration of President Luis Echeverria. Echeverria was preoccupied with the task of re-

establishing the popular legitimacy of the PRI party-state in the aftermath of the bloody

suppression of the student movement in 1968 and in the face of theongoing armed rural

insurgencies in the state of Guerrero led by Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vazquez. It was in this

context that Echeverria implemented a number of populist initiatives and adopted a more anti-

imperialist rhetoric. The main center of the campesino movement in the first couple years of the

Echeverria administration was in the northern part of Mexico where it mainly took the form of

landless workers demanding the redistribution of large mainly export-oriented capitalist land-

holdings. This demand rather neatly coincided with the economic need to shift production

towards domestic consumption as well as the ideological need to relegitimize the party-state. It

was presumably with both of these considerations in mind that Echeverria moved to expropriate

and redistribute large landholdings in the Yaqui and Mayo Valleys in Sonora and the Culiacan

Valley in Sinaloa.

If these actions had the desired effects in those regions they also had the additional effect

of enlarging and emboldening the campesino movement across the whole country including

many areas where the party-state was much less inclined to make similar concessions. Further

complicating matters for Echeverria and the PRI was that sections of the campesino population

had become much less willing to see their struggles channelled into the official campesino

organization of the PRI, the CNC. By 1973 the movement was active in every state in the

country and in most places took the form of independent organizations which were in the process

of uniting into regional and eventually national formations, often with the active assistance of

radical left-wing parties and political organizations. (Rubio 1987:23–30)


8.2 THE MOVEMENT COMES TO CHIAPAS

This was the national context in which the indigenous campesino movement emerged in

Chiapas. Compared to the rest of the country the campesino movement in Chiapas erupted rather

late. When it did, however, it took on a special character owing to the indigenous composition of

much of the campesino population and highly repressive and racialized labor regime that existed

in much of the state.

The most important export crop in Chiapas was coffee and the most important coffee-

producing region was Soconusco on the Pacific Coast where the plantations had historically

relied on migrant Tzotzil labor from the Central Highlands. The response there to the decline in

in coffee prices was an overall reduction in the demand for labor from the Central Highlands and

a turn towards the even cheaper labor of Guatemalan migrants. This in turn precipitated a serious

deterioration of living conditions among the landless and land-poor Tzotzils in the Highlands. As

they had in the 1930s, developments in the export oriented zones of Chiapas became a motor for

discontent in other parts of the state and the dislocations of waged agricultural workers fueled

renewed struggles over land.

Rebellion in San Andres

One of the earliest eruptions of the new movement occurred in the Highland municipality

of San Andres Larrainzar, and in portions of El Bosque and Bochil, in the spring of 1974. Half a

year before the Indigenous Congress, the conditions described above provoked a brief, bloody

and ultimately effective wave of land invasions that took on a decidedly ethnic character. On the

evening of April 16 a crowd of Tzotzil from San Andres,


shooting off fireworks, emboldened by liquor, playing flutes and drums, … [and] armed

with flags, machetes and rifles … attacked Pamalwits and other haciendas in the

hotlands of their muncipality. (García de León 2002:163)

The Indians were remorseless, killing the finqueros and their families and sometimes

their Indian servants, mutilating their bodies, and destroying houses and furniture, livestock and

tools. Less than two weeks later the landowners and merchants based in the town of San Andres

were violently driven from the town by 400 Indians.

The initial response of the government was to send in the army in pursuit of the rebels,

but, as García de León explains,

The violence only ended when President Echeverria decided to stop the government’s

counter-attack and to personally negotiate a peaceful surrender, mediated by the Diocese

and witnessed by the Secretary of Agrarian Reform, the ladino authorities and the officers

of the Tuxtla Military Zone. (2002:166)

While by appearances the movement was brought to heel and six supposed instigators

were held responsible for the uprising, the result was the replacement of the long-established

ladino elite of San Andres by a layer of indigenous caciques, and the effective transformation of

San Andres into an almost entirely indigenous municipality. While the events in San Andres

would not be repeated in the same dramatic manner elsewhere, they initiated a general process,

involving various methods of struggle, in which the seats of a number of municipalities were

transformed into Indian towns. In light of this history, it was no accident when, in 1995 San

Andres was chosen as the site of negotiations between the EZLN and the government on the

questions of indigenous rights and culture. While brief and seemingly isolated at the time, the

intensity of the rebellion in San Andres was a measure of the potential combativity of the still

very embryonic movment.


Venustiano Carranza

The largely Tzotzil municipality of Venustiano Carranza, near the Rio Grijalva and

roughly equidistant between San Cristobal and Comitan became a major and early center of

agrarian conflict in the 1970s. The Tzotzil campesinos of Carranza had benefitted from an

unfinished process of land reform in the 1930s, but still had several major outstanding land

disputes with local ladino landlords. This situation was complicated by the establishment of an

ejido, Vega del Chachí, closely tied to the Orantes, a powerful ranching family. (Harvey

1998:59–60) In 1965 the indigenous community had been granted over 50,000 hectares by a

presidential resolution after years of petitioning. As is common, receiving the presidential

resolution only meant the beginning of another prolonged struggle to have it implemented.

Implementation required a survey of the lands involved, but government surveyors were bribed

or threatened into leaving the work unfinished and the comisariado who took on the task of

pursuing the matter was himself promptly killed. Six years later in 1971 a new comisariado,

Gaspar Díaz Reyes, and his secretary were killed as well. Following these last murders and with

the assistance of some student advisors, the comuneros organized themselves and under the

leadership of a new comisariado, Bartolomé Martínez Villatoro, established the Casa del Pueblo

as an organizing center. (Harvey 1998:99-100)

By 1974, Martínez had survived multiple attempts on his life and half a year in prison

pursuing a strategy centered on legal action. As the limitations of that strategy became

increasingly apparent, the struggle began to radicalize. Harvey describes what happened:

In the spring of 1974 four students arrived to promote an independent organization in

Carranza. They included one of the sons of Gaspar Díaz Reyes, Ishmael, who had been

imprisoned in Lecumberri prison in Mexico City after the 1968 student movement. He

argued that it was necessary to use force to get Martínez Villatoro out of jail. They tried


to organize a guerrilla movement in Carranza and some comuneros went to the camp for

training but returned after only a month. (1998:100-101)

The would-be guerrilla group was short-lived. The group was infiltrated before it could

take action and over seventy people were rounded up and arrested. Instead of processing the

arrestees though, they were taken to a private farm and tortured. Ultimately four campesinos and

the five students were imprisoned. Of this group, three simply “disappeared” while the other six

were eventually released. After the repression of the guerrilla group, however, Martínez was

released and embarked on organizing joint demonstrations with other organizations that resulted

in recognition by the state of some of Carranza’s communal lands and compensation for lands

flooded by the large Angostura dam on the the Rio Grijalva. The sense that the tide had turned,

however, was short lived. The community was awaiting final approval from Mexico City of the

agreement secured by Martinez when, on August 1, 1975 he and the driver of the car he was in

were ambushed and killed.

Martínez’s death provoked an escalation in the militancy of Casa del Pueblo which,

according to Harvey, became determined to “run out the caciques and occupy the land.”

(1998:103) In the first half of 1976, one of Carranza’s two main caciques, Carmen Orantes, fled

Carranza while the other, Augusto Castellanos, was killed on May 8. Three days later the town

was invaded by the Mexican Army. In the ensuing shootout, seven soldiers and two comuneros

were killed while a hundred comuneros were arrested. Harvey describes the effects of these

events on the subsequent political orientation of the community:

By 1976 the Casa del Pueblo had learned two important lessons that would leave an

imprint on its strategic choices in subsequent years. First, the state was no longer

perceived as a neutral arbiter in the struggle for land but as the direct enemy of the

comuneros and an ally of the caciques. The strategy of mass arrests and intimidation led a

new generation of comuneros to adopt a more radical oppositional stance toward the

state. This position was encouraged through the personal networks that linked the


struggle in Carranza to other peasant movements in Chiapas in these years. Second,

attempts to repress the movement had relied mainly on attempts to murder or imprison its

leaders. From 1976 onward the Casa del Pueblo would be characterized by the absence

of a single leader, a decision that although initially was a purely pragmatic measure, soon

became part of the organizational structure in that it opened the way for broader

participation. (1998: 103-104)

The Northern Zone

During this same period an even bloodier struggle erupted across several of the

municipalities that make up the Northern Zone of Chiapas, in particular those of Simojovel,

Huitiupan and Sabanilla. The struggles in this region are of special interest as this is where the

FLN would eventually recruit the indigenous members who would participate in the founding of

the EZLN in 1983. Unlike Carranza, the Northern Zone had benefited very little from land

reform under Cardenas and social relations there were arguably as close to feudalism as

anywhere else in Mexico or at the very least they were as García de León described them, “living

relics of the 18th

and 19th

century.” (2002:177)

Almost all of the arable land in these municipalities was still monopolized by fincas

owned by a handful of families. The fincas mainly grew coffee using a combination of seasonal

wage labor and peons granted small plots of land in exchange for their labor. The lands granted

to the few ejidos in the area were inadequate to the needs of their members, compelling most of

them to also work on the fincas. As noted in Chapter 5, these conditions had attracted the PCM

to the region in the 1930s with the intention of organizing the agricultural proletariat. While

those efforts were not successful, they had left behind elements of what might be called a

subterranean communist political culture.

The center of the struggles in the Northern Zone was the municipality of Simojovel

which witnessed a wave of land invasions starting in 1971 when the peons on the Santa Cruz


finca laid claim to its lands. The reponse to this mobilization was the killing of the leader of the

movement and his son. While the murder succeeded in stopping the movement for a while it also

set the tone for the struggle when it re-emerged in early 1974 when the peons in Las Laminas

rose up and executed a finquero known for his brutality. (García de León 2002:178)

The movement in the North began to take on a more organized form as a result of the

organization of the Indigenous Congress. In June 1974, before the Congress, an initial organizing

meeting occurred in the ejido of Lázaro Cardenas in the municipality of Huitiupan that brought

together Tzotziles from several villages in Huitiupan and Choles from the adjacent muncipality

of Sabanilla. By this point Lázaro Cardenas had been patiently seeking recognition of its land

claims for 42 years and the preparations for Indigenous Congress facilitated their contact with

other communities. Shortly after the Congress these communities decided to constitute

themselves as the Organizacion Independiente de Campesinos del Norte, often simply called La

Organizacion. (García de León 2002:178-179)

Reflecting the history of communist activity in the region decades earlier, the discourse

of the La Organizacion is striking in its radicalism calling for a struggle against the “bourgeois

order” and the “government of the rich” and for the establishment of “socialism.” La

Organizacion grew rapidly and in early 1975 the campesinos of Lázaro Cárdenas decided to

invade the lands for which they had been petitioning for so long. “The only problem” as García

de León explains, was

that these were all held by an Army Captain, Mariano Ruíz, who chose to retreat before

the ejidal offensive, but at the same time began to organize a coordinated action between

the Army and the gunmen of the fincas. (2002:180)

In the months that followed and before Captain Ruíz could organize a response, however,

the action of Lazaro Cardenas inspired a whole series of further land occupations across the


region. One of the fincas occupied in this wave was that of Vista Hermosa in the neighboring

municipality ofHuitiupan where the previous fall the army had burnt down the homes of the

peons. The movement was met with violence on the part of both state police and guardias

blancas, but the campesinos proved able to give what they got and several finquero gunmen

were executed as well. By 1977 La Organización had grown to include 37 groups of eijidatarios

as well as peons and landless workers and was active in four municipalities. By June La

Organización had chosen to affiliate with the Central Independiente de Obreros Agricolas y

Campesinos (CIOAC), the national campesino organization aligned with the PCM and identified

more with struggles to unionize agricultural workers than with fights for land.

This would prove to be the high tide of this wave of activity. In July the movement would

become the target of massive violent repression. The circumstances of that repression however

require that we first look at what was happening in an even more remote region of Chiapas.

(García de León 2002:179–181)

The Cañadas

The organization of the Indigenous Congress arguably had its greatest impact in the

Tzeltal Zone of the Diocese of San Cristóbal which included much of the Cañadas. As discussed

in the previous chapter, the Tzeltal Zone and the Cañadas had been the site of some of the most

radical initiatives of the pastoral staff of the Diocese and these set the stage for the rapid

organization of Quiptic Ta Lecubtesel (Tseltal for “Our force for progress”), a union of ejidos

based in the Cañadas. (Legorreta Díaz 1998)

The Echeverria administration had called for the creation of unions of ejidos as another

element in its populist politics. These were intended, of course, to serve as vehicles for


reintegrating discontented campesinos back into the apparatus of the PRI, but the call created an

opening to legally establish independent campesino organizations. This is precisely what

occurred in the Lacandon Jungle. With the advice and assistance of Javier Vargas, who was

working with the Diocese, and Jaime Soto, the leading member of Unión del Pueblo in Chiapas,

the communities of the Cañadas used that opening to build a potent organization that would later

prove to be a critical foundation for the growth of the EZLN.

Organizing day long courses of political education in any ejido that would have him, Soto

helped lay the foundations for the formal launching of Quiptic on December 12, 1975 by

delegates representing 18 ejidos. Only a few months later another 25 ejidos from the neighboring

canyons would join Quiptic. (Legorreta Díaz 1998:74) Soto had by this time taken up residence

in the community of Emiliano Zapata which had been established in 1968 by colonists from the

Tzotzil community of Lazaro Cardenas and the Chol community El Calvario in Huitiupan.

Most of the ejidos that were among the first to join Quiptic were among those targeted

for eviction from their lands by the decree establishing the Lacandon Zone. This threatened

eviction, signed by the president of the country, had a profound impact on the members of the

affected communities. While some of the communities had actually been given title to their

lands, most of them were still awaiting resolution of their applications, which in most cases had

been pending more than ten years. In one stroke the president had legally deprived the

communities of the lands they had personally carved out of the jungle, with no apparent hope for

appeal. Needless to say this made many of them receptive to the revolutionary politics of Unión

de Pueblo. In 1976 the federal Secretariat for Agrarian Reform carried out the relocation of 8

Chol and 15 Tzeltal communities in compliance with the decree. The eviction of these


communities had the unintended effect of driving many communities not yet affiliated with

Quiptic to join the organization. (Legorreta Díaz 1998:79–84)

It was in February 1976, shortly after the formation of Quiptic, that Maria Teresa García

Móises was relocated by Unión de Pueblo from Puebla to the Lacandon Jungle to work under the

leadership of Soto building Quiptic. According to her, the work of building Quiptic followed the

logic of Unión del Pueblo’s conception of preparations for protracted peoples war of developing

both the mass political consciousness and mass organizational apparatuses that would “in the

long run permit the seizure of power.” This orientation in turn coincided “with the most

vanguardist or most left or most revolutionary part of the Catholic Church” represented by Javier

Vargas who worked closely with Soto in the process of organizing Quiptic.

García Móises joined other Unión del Pueblo cadre living in the community of Betania

which she described as

The school of what Jaime [Soto], Ana and all those who were there had done, so that we

could learn and we would be able to replicate it, to do it in other places, that we had

already been assigned to. (2009)

Thus, shortly after the establishment of Quiptic a similar organizing process was

undertaken in the neighboring municipality of Las Margaritas, again with members of Unión del

Pueblo, acting as advisors. The result was the creation of the Unión de Ejidos Lucha Campesina

with participation by 14 communities. Whereas the communities constituting Quiptic were

largely Tzeltal, those making up Lucha Campesina were mainly Tojolabal and mestizo.

8.3 LÍNEA PROLETARIA COMES TO CHIAPAS

1976 was also the year that Línea Proletaria was invited by the Bishop Ruíz to send

cadres to work in the communities of Eastern Chiapas. The relationship between the Diocese and


Línea Proletaria developed when a priest who was working with the group in Torreon was

imprisoned and Bishop Ruíz travelled there to speak out for his release. According to

Morquecho, the decision to invite Línea Proletaria to work with the indigenous communities in

the Diocese of San Cristóbal arose from the legal prohibition against the involvement of the

church in Mexican politics. The invitation came at the very moment that Línea Proletaria was

compelled to pull its cadres out of Monterrey wit the result that many of the brigadistas that

went to Chiapas came out of Línea Proletaria’s work in Monterrey.

The Fusion of Unión del Pueblo with Línea Proletaria

Línea Proletaria’s arrival in Chiapas also coincided the decision of Unión del Pueblo to

merge with the larger organization. This reflected their view that Línea Proletaria had developed

a more sophisticated understanding and application of the mass line. Within only a few months

of the latter’s arrival in Chiapas then, the organizations had fused, with the members of Unión

del Publo joining the OID. (Legorreta Díaz 1998:94–97)

According to Móises Garcia there was some resistance to the fusión which had been

organized by the leadership of Unión del Pueblo without any discussion with the membership,

but that for her it was an overwhelmingly positive development:

They had a a visión of the work, and a method of work, that we didn’t have. We really

wanted to work with the people, but political strategy I learned from Política Popular.

Through Línea Proletaria she was introduced to strategic concepts that would guide the Maoists

work with the ejidal unions over for the next seven years. Among the most important in her eyes

was the idea of avoiding direct confrontation with the capitalist state, but instead attempting to

“break off the fingers of the enemy one by one.” Another critical idea was the important


distinction between the economic situations that people found themselves in and the political

positions thay actually took:

It wasn’t enough to be indigenous to have the revolutionary genome, one had to have a

position. Neither was it enough to stigmatize the rich because in Política Popular you

had friends or people who were militants in Política Popularwho came from the

bourgeoisie.

Perhaps most important was Línea Proletaria’s substitution of the idea of a “protratcted

people’s struggle” for the Mao’s notion of a “protracted people’s war.” For García Moises the

significance of this was that it shifted the strategic focus from some future military confrontation

to the immediate work of building up the political capacity of the masses. In truth it represented

something more, of course, which would be the effective abandonment on the part of the Unión

del Pueblo cadres of any military component to their work at all.

With the addition of the Línea Proletaria cadres the process of mass organization

accelerated. Quiptic grew to include 75 ejidos and 20 ranches and Lucha Campesina grew to 22

communities. A third ejidal union, the Unión de Ejidos Tierra y Liberta, consisting of 31 Chol

communities, was organized and three other smaller ejidal unions were also established, drawing

in another 44 communities.

The culmination of this process would be the merger in 1979 of the various ejidal unions

under the umbrella of the Unión de Uniones. (Legorreta Díaz 1998:96–97) The Unión de

Uniones would be the largest of the independent campesino organizations to emerge out of the

upsurge of the 1970s.

The Maoists of UP and LP had a profound impact on the communities of the Lacandon

Jungle and beyond. This impact was not limited simply to their impressive organizational

accomplishments. They trained leaders in at least 200 Indian communities as political thinkers


and organizers, many of whom would go on to play important roles in the development of the

EZLN. While the Maoists had much in common with the political orientation of the diocese they

also constituted an important alternative pole that challenged the Church’s monopoly of

influence within the communities. In particular, the Maoists promoted a more radical vision of

democracy than was consistent with the still hierarchical organization of the church.

Incident in La Nueva

This would also prove to be a source of conflict. Before those tensions could emerge

however, the incident in La Nueva Providencia described briefly at the beginning of this chapter

occurred. It would have major consequences beyond the Cañadas and that would become an

important point of reference when many of the communities made the choice to support the

EZLN’s project of preparation for armed struggle.

The community of La Nueva Providencia in the cañada of San Quintin, was legally

organized as an ejido, but in reality functioned as a finca under the control of rancher Javier

Aguilar and his family. The presence of La Nueva was widely resented by the surrounding

indigenous communities for whom it was an ugly reminder of the world they had fled to settle in

the Cañadas in the first place. In early 1977 a group of mestizo Jehovah’s Witnesses living in the

community were expelled for refusing to contribute to the construction of a Catholic chapel and

approached Quiptic for support. Even though the communities that made up Quiptic were

indigenous and Catholic, the organization accepted the request with enthusiasm and the

community became the focus of an increasingly tense struggle for political control. In response,

Aguilar secured a small detachment of soldiers who began patrolling the community, harassing

and sometimes robbing residents who opposed Aguilar’s rule. The situation finally came to a

head on July 8, 1977, when several hundred indigenous campesinos affiliated with Quiptic


gathered in nearby San Quintin in anticipation of a visit by Bishop Ruíz for the purpose of

ordaining the first Deacons or Tuhunels. News arrived in San Quinitin that evening that an older

man from another neighboring community, Santa Rosa El Copal, also affiliated with Quiptic, had

been taken prisoner by Aguilar.

The coincidence of the ordination of Tuhunels’s and the meeting of Quiptic concentrated

a large number of important actors, from rank and file catechists to Bishop Ruíz, in one of the

more remote corners of the Lacandon Jungle. Móises Garcia and other members of Unión del

Pueblo were living in Betania at the time. Jaime Soto was living in Emiliano Zapata which

directly bordered San Quinitin.

Gonzalo Ituarte was a Dominican priest who had simply decided to travel to Chiapas for

vacation.

I went there on vacation to visit the two missions, to see the little Indians, to take photos.

That was my mentality. (2009)

Ituarte was invited to accompany other members of the pastoral staff to Betania. What he

witnessed there would ultimately convince him to relocate to Chiapas, where he would

eventually become Ruíz’s closest advisor.

Miguel, a Tzeltal catechist, was participating in a meeting of catechists with Bishop Ruíz

in Betania, also in the same cañada, in anticipation of the ordination ceremony, when news of

the situation in La Nueva arrived. Along with others, he immediately set off for San Quintin

where preparations were already underway for an attempted rescue of their captured compañero.

(2009)

Thus, in the middle of the night several hundred members of Quiptic, armed mainly with

machetes and similar weapons, but also with a handful of hunting rifles, quietly crossed the Rio


Jatate that lay between San Quintin and La Nueva. Arriving in the very early hours of July 9,

Miguel and the other members of Quiptic caught Aguilar and the small group soldiers by

surprise. They responded by panicking. According to Miguel, Aguilar fired the first shot, but was

soon joined by the soldiers who opened fire but without taking very effective aim. A number of

the members of Quiptic were wounded, and some headed immediately for cover, but a large

contingent were able to fight back.When the smoke cleared six soldiers were dead, either from

gunshots or hacked to death with machetes. Aguilar, one surving soldier and most of Aguilar’s

family, were able to escape in a small plane, but his son was left behind barricaded in his house

and still holding the original hostage. The members of Quiptic eventually prevailed on the

younger Aguilar’s wife to open the door and they promptly overpowered him and rescued the

hostage. (De Vos 2002:197–205)

Another Tzeltal catechist, Juan, remained overnight in Betania with Bishop Ruíz. As is

customary in the communities, they woke very early.

The brothers of Betania served us coffee. It was around 6 in the morning. It was when

Tatic took the first sip of his coffee that we heard the gunfire there in Providencia. […]

“Let’s go” he said. He grabbed a horse and took off. We, the pre-deacons, were still

carrying all the things, backpacks, everything that they needed to sleep. We got the

horses ready and we left later with the sisters.(2009)

Astonishingly, the incident at La Nueva did not prompt a repressive response from the

state. Instead, Bishop Ruíz was able to intercede with the governor to ensure both the return of

the bodies and the satisfaction of the demands of the ejidatarios of La Nueva.

The incident at La Nueva would have a number of lasting effects on the indigenous-

campesino movement in Chiapas. For the members of Quiptic it confirmed the power of their

new organization both in their own eyes and in those of other indigenous campesino


communities considering joining the movement. It clearly contributed to Quiptic’s continued

growth and to the eventual unification of the ejidal unions two years later.

It also suggested the potential effectiveness of taking up arms. Indeed, the weapons

captured were never recovered by the state, but were rather adopted for ritual use within Quiptic.

As the movement confronted increasingly violent repression in the years that followed, the proud

memory of what happened in La Nueva was potent evidence that possession of an organized

military capacity could dramatically change the balance of forces in their struggle with both the

big landowners and the state.

Back in the Northern Zone

While the ejidatarios of Quiptic waited for a military response that never came, the

communities in the Northern Zone found themselves the targets of a brutal offensive. On July 11,

radio news from the state capital in Tuxtla falsely reported that campesinos in Simojovel had

ambushed a state police patrol, killing eight. Using this false report as a pretext, 16 ejidos in

Simojovel, Huitiupan and Sabanilla were simultaneously attacked by 800 Mexican Army troops

commanded by General José Hernandez Toledo and evicted from lands for which they had been

given legal title as well as those they had recently invaded. General Toledo was a veteran of the

Tlatelolco massacre. García de Leon describes the events:

The campesinons did not resist the surprise assault in any manner, fleeing into the

mountains with their families and belongings while 250 men, women and children were

detained in the fields and then transported with excessive violence to the state capital.

The army evicted San Isidro, Pauchil, Naquem, San Antonio and Las Laminas, burning

houses and stealing money and possessions from the ejidal stores. Troops also entered

Castillo Tielemans, Chanibal, Ramos, Planada, Almandro and other villages, ejidos and

fincas, destroying municipal agencies and schools. During the flight in San Isidro, in the

course of crossing rivers cresting from heavy rains, three children and an adult died from

drowning. According to an official statement broadcast by radio, a a couple of Tzotzil


leaders “fell” from a helicopter belonging to the State Attorney General, and ten others

died during the attack … (2002:184–185)

This massive military operation against unarmed campesinos on false pretenses in the

Northern Zone would confirm the movement there in their abiding distrust of and hostility

towards the state and in their conviction that the government and the armed forces existed only to

serve and protect the landlords. The simultaneous decision of the state not to respond to the

armed actions of the members of Quiptic in the Cañadas and the brutal military assault on the

unarmed members of La Organización in the Northern Zone taught an unmistakeable lesson to

the movement in both regions. The events were not percieved as disconnected for the simple

reason that several of the communities involved in Quiptic had been established by colonists

from the Northern Zone who retained close family ties with the communities they had left. The

mixed Chol and Tzotzil village of Emiliano Zapata in particular had been a center of Quiptik. As

noted in the previous chapter Zapata was established by colonists from the muncipalities of

Sabanilla and Huitiupan in the Northern Zone, and in particular from the communities of Lazaro

Cardenas and El Calvario, which had played a leading role in initiating and building La

Organización. Zapata had been a center of activity on the part of the Diocese as well and as we

will see the connections between these communities in the Northern Zone and the Cañadas

would prove critical in the process leading to the establishment of the EZLN.

Repression and Cooptation

After 1977 the situation for the indigenous-campesino movement in Chiapas became

much more difficult. There were two main aspects to these difficulties. The first was an

intensification of state repression directed at the movement. The second was the complex role

that would be played by the Maoists, in particular those associated with Línea Proletaria.


Línea Proletaria relocated an important fraction of their cadre from their work in the

urban popular movement in Northern Mexico to Chiapas at this point. The “norteños,” as they

came to be known, rather quickly sought to insert themselves as advisors into the movement

wherever they could. These efforts met with different results in different parts of Chiapas.

It is critical here to understand what initially made Línea Proletaria so attractive to the

Diocese, to the indigenous communities, and to other local activists. The norteños brought with

them a body of organizational experience based on a particular reading of the mass line method

of leadership and on the organization of popular assemblies. Their approach appeared to offer an

alternative to the top-down methods identified with the CPM and other organizations. Línea

Proletaria produced, in the form of pamphlets, internal bulletins, newspapers and other

publications, a steady flow of theoretical work based in reflections on their experiences in

various popular struggles that seemed, at least initially, useful in orienting the work of

indigenous-campesino organizations. All of this is important in understanding their invitation to

work in Chiapas from the Diocese, their absorption of Unión del Pueblo , their success in

establishing themselves as advisors to multiple organizations, and their recruitment of already

established local activists.

Juan González Esponda was a young student activist in Chiapas active in support of the

struggle of Casa del Pueblo in Venustiano Carranza when he was briefly recruited to Línea

Proletaria in 1978. He worked full-time with them for several months in several indigenous

communities. He describes the impact of their arrival in the state:

[Línea Proletaria] didn’t propose revolution, they didn’t propose war; But yes they did

propose social change, social justice for all peoples. It was a discourse that coincided a

lot with the work of the Church. Línea Proletaria brought a lot of cadres and distributed

them all over the state, particularly in indigenous regions. They took advantage of the

work of the Church and the work of other organizations, as in this case Unión del Pueblo,


and something that nobody or very few people took into account: that the villages had

already organized themselves. There were villages like Carranza, for example, that

because they had been a village since the colonial era, had their own practices, they had

their own rules for operating, and they also had developed their own strategies of

struggle, resistance, and for the recuperation of their lands. What those in Línea

Proletaria came to do, was to join these experiences and this force with their

organization. And overnight Línea Proletaria was in Venustiano Carranza, Villa Las

Rosas; they were in the Lacandon Jungle, in the Chol area, in Simojovel, Huitiupan,

everywhere within a fraction of months. Not so much as a result of their own work, but

by means of alliances with the Church, and directly with Don Samuel [Ruíz].(2009)

Mercedes Olivera was working as an anthropologist in Chiapas and was already active as

an advisor to and supporter of the indigenous-campesino movement, especially in the Northern

Zone when she also briefly joined Línea Proletaria in the late 1970s. Olivera already had a long

prior history of radical left political activism going back to her involvement with the PCM from

which she was expelled along with José Revueltas in 1959, although she did not follow him into

the LLE. In the early 1970s she worked with the Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres in Guatemala

where she gained a systematic exposure to Maoism. After rejoining the PCM to work with

CIOAC she briefly became involved with the norteños. She describes the appeal of the group,

On the organizational question their approach was very interesting, it was novel, of how

to structure these groups articulated among themselves, and with a very horizontal

participation by the groups themselves. This to me seemed very interesting, Because in

the structures of the Communist Party there was never such an approach to a campesino

structure. Rather it was that the leader came from the party or from CIOAC, it was a mass

without any form, and without any possibility for organized participation. Thus this other

approach was interesting, because there was already a structure within the campesino

bases. This was what interested me, and why I approached them and I was thinking that

this was taken from Maoism.(Olivera 2009)

If Línea Proletaria’s approach to the mass line resonated with many in and around the

indigenous campesino movement, other aspects of their political orientation and practice quickly

became a source of tensions within the movement. To understand these terms it is important to

understand how the organization was responding to larger national political developments.


In the late 1970s the PRI made a conscious strategic decision to pursue a process of

modest democratization, legalizing many organizations and extending electoral registrations to

several left wing political parties. The repression of the student movement and the dirty war

against the guerrilla groups that also emerged in the 1960s and early 70s had proven damaging to

the PRI’s legitimacy. The legalization of political parties coincided with the extension of a

general amnesty to participants in the guerrillas groups during the first half of the decade. Taken

together they represented a strategy of relegitimation and channeling popular discontent into

legal electoral forms where it might be more readily managed. Against the backdrop of this

opening, Línea Proletaria’s reading of the mass line ultimately favored a sharp reformist turn.

The democratic opening offered popular movements a chance to secure concessions and, in some

cases, even political office. It also offered the university educated cadres of left-wing

organizations an opportunity to resume careers that they had abandoned when they opted for

revolutionary politics in the wake of the repression of the student movement. The result in any

event was what the ruling party had hoped for, an embrace of the possibilities of reform within

the framework of the existing order and a de facto abandonment of any real commitment to

making revolution.

The reformist turn of Maoism in this moment was not simply a response to this

democratic opening. It also coincided with a situation of generalized confusion amongst pro-

Chinese forces internationally following the death of Mao Ze Dong in China. The arrest of

Mao’s wife Jiang Qing along with Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Wang Hongwen, the so-

called Gang of Four, and the re-emergence of once disgraced “capitalist roaders,” of whom

Deng Xiaoping was was only the most notorious example, generated intense debate, division and

demoralization amongst adherents to “Mao Ze Dong Thought” around the world. While some


groups were quick to declare their allegiance to the CCP’s new leadership, others, especially

those engaged in or preparing for armed struggle, such as the Communist Party of the Phillipines

and the Communist Party of Peru (Sendero Luminoso) rejected them as “revisionists.”

Línea Proletaria appears to have followed neither path. After re-printing an exchange of

letters between Neil G. Burton and Orive’s mentor Charles Bettelheim (1978), Línea Proletaria

appears to have accepted a critical verdict with respect to the “excesses” of the Cultural

Revolution without explicitly embracing the return to power in China of the forces that the

Cultural Revolution had been directed against. The developments in China and the fracturing of

international Maoism nonetheless facilitated Línea Proletaria’s its former revolutionary

commitments and a more open embrace of reformist objectives and methods.

In Chiapas, however, this reformist turn was obstructed by the fundamental antagonism

over the question of land. La familia Chiapaneca, which dominated the ruling party in the state,

had no intention of making any meaningful concessions to the demands of the indigenous

communities. For their part, the radicalized leadership of the communities had no intention of

retreating from those demands. While there were currents within the national leadership of the

PRI that undoubtedly regarded the landed oligarchy as an obstacle to the necessary

modernization of agriculture in the state they also regarded the indigenos campesino movement’s

demands for land as a threat to political stability and inconsistent with their vision of capitalist

modernization. These concerns for political stability were only compounded by the revolution in

Nicaragua and the ongoing civil war in Guatemala. The PRI’s solution to this dilemma was to

forcefully reject demands for land while promoting the extension of agricultural credits to the

communities to more productively work the lands to which they already had title.


Reflecting ties to elements in the PRI, by the late 1970s the brigadistas of Línea

Proletaria were arguing that the independent campesino organizations should give up land

occupations that brought them into direct conflict with the state and should instead demand

agricultural credits in what they called “the struggle for production.” Thus, while Línea

Proletaria insisted on their commitment to the principle that the political direction of the

indigenous campesino movement must come from the masses and through their democratic

organization in popular assemblies, in practice they used all their powers, including their

privileged access to resources and people in positions of power to redirect the movement away

from its central demand for the redistribution of land, which threatened the interests of the state’s

landowning elites, and towards demands for agricultural credits and other supports for increased

production that coincided with national agricultural development objectives.

Línea Proletaria’s practice at his point was informed by two key strategic concepts

articulated in pamphlets written by Orive, the first of them being “pretexts and objectives” and

the second “the policy of two faces.” (Línea Proletaria 1978) In brief, “objectives and pretexts”

referred to the view that particular popular demands and struggles should be understood as

“pretexts” for accomplishing the more fundamental “objectives,” which consisted of the

development of the political and organizational capacities of the masses. While this formulation

reflected an important insight about mass organizing in general, it proved very problematic when

applied to the struggle for land which for the indigenous communities was regarded as much a

struggle for cultural survival as it was for an improvement in their economic conditions. For the

communities the fundamental objective was to secure the lands that they regarded as critical to

their future survival as indigenous peoples. The mass organizations they were building were in

this view chiefly a means to that end. The theory of pretexts and objectives reversed this


relationship and regarded the land struggle instrumentally as more or less interchangeable with

the struggle for any other demand so long as it built up the organizational capacity of the

communities.

The theory of pretexts and objectives underpinned what Orive called the “policy of two

faces” which argued for presenting a “real” and revolutionary face to the masses and a reformist

face when making demands on the government. In this manner, they argued, the mass

organizations could avoid being the targets of violent repressions and could secure concessions

and access to resources that would advance their organizational capacities. The strategic viability

of the “policy of two faces,” of course, depended on the willingness of at least elements within

the Mexican state apparatus to make some concessions and to offer resources to the

communities.

As it turned out, the leadership of Línea Proletaria, in particular Adolfo Orive, had

relations with elements within the PRI that were very much prepared to do both of these things.

Especially well placed were two brothers, Raul and Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The two came

from an upper class family with strong historic ties to the left. Their uncle, Eli de Gortari was a

well known left-wing philosopher who had been imprisoned in the aftermath of the student

movement in 1968. Both were students at UNAM when Politica Popular was established and

Carlos studied economics with Orive. Both had maintained relations with Orive and apparently

quietly supported his political activities while they pursued their own careers within the ruling

party. From his position as Director of Rural Roads in the Ministry of Buildings and Public

Works, starting in 1977, Raul was able to make a variety resources available to the brigadistas of

Línea Proletaria. Florentino Lara, a leading brigadista involved with the Tierra y Libertad


squatters movement in Torreon who moved to work in Chiapas in 1978, maintained that Línea

Proletaria was financed by Raúl Salinas and other figures in the ruling party. (Jáquez 1995)

On completing his doctorate in Political Economy and Government at Harvard’s

Kennedy School of Government in 1978, Carlos Salinas took a position as chief advisor to

Mexico’s Director of Economic Planning (and future president), Miguel de la Madrid. The

question inevitably arises at this point as to which of Línea Proletaria’s “two faces” was in fact

the real one.

With such well-connected friends, it is hardly surprising then that García de Leon would

later say of Línea Proletaria that,

This organization was not in reality […] a political group oriented towards the work of

revolutionary organization – but rather an ambitious project of the state to neutralize

various outbreaks of worker and campesino struggles around the country. For this

purpose they organized a network of activists, in their majority sincere and committed to

the social movement, that articulated a superficial leftist and “Maoist” discourse, but

whose principal leaders operated within the logic and under the protection of the federal

government. (2002:194)

This perception of a difference between the largely sincere ranks of the brigadistas and the more

cynical or opportunistic orientation of the leadership of Línea Proletaria is echoed by

Morquecho who believed that Orive’s relationships with currents in the ruling party were

longstanding, but that

The brigades, the brigadistas, the cadres that were engaged in the popular movement,

they were for a change. Because I knew those bastards, and that was what they were for.

Fucking Orive, well that is something else.(2008)

Barbosa describes the transformation in the political orientation of the Maoists in

somewhat more dispassionate terms:

In the end, when groups such as Línea Proletaria detached themselves from their roots

and passed over to possibilist discourse, aliancista, of respect for institutions, a

reformulation of the ‘historic alliance’ with the state, (which put them in a position of


maintaining two faces: on the one hand with their old coreligionists, and on the other in

bed with the charros and the businesses), or an economist practice combined with a

radical discourse […], they were only revisiting for themselves the same practical

education acquired by the leaders of the working class in this country. (1984:130)

The “practical education acquired by the leaders of the working class” in Mexico was, of

course, an education in corruption, cooptation and class collaboration. It was precisely what the

Mexican New Left and its Maoist inheritors had originally rebelled against. And it had been their

refusal of these cynical lessons that had accounted in large part for their initial appeal to the


In a similar vein, Bennett reports rumors that officials from the Echeverria administration

and the private sector financed Politica Popular’s activity “as a safety valve” from early on.

(1993:92n) While it is impossible to evaluate whether such rumors were true, several things

seem quite clear. First, the vast majority of brigadistas were sincere in their revolutionary

convictions. Second, members of the organization were in fact targets of serious political

repression from other sectors of the ruling party. Third, the leadership of the organization was

drawn in part from, and consequently had close personal ties to, members of Mexico’s ruling

elite. Fourth, with the democratic opening in the late 1970s the organization’s strategy was

increasingly oriented around alliances with elements in the state apparatus.

In the end the question of Orive’s personal connections with the Salinas brothers should

be regarded as secondary to the political line his leadership of Línea Proletaria represented and

that the brigadista rank and file of the organization accepted. The particular difficulties that arose

from the application of the theory of “pretexts and objectives” and “the policy of two faces” were

rooted in Línea Proletaria’s political orientation of forming an alliance with elements within the


party-state. The revolutionary intentions of individual brigadistas, thus, did not prevent their

work from being channeled to the benefit of currents within the ruling apparatus.

It should also be noted here that Línea Proletaria’s efforts encountered somewhat

different results in different regions of the state. Thus they were succesful in establishing

significant influence in the Cañadas where they were able to build on the prestige earned by the

work of Unión del Pueblo and where some of the sharpest land struggles were not directly with

the state’s landed oligarchy but rather for recognition of title to national lands appropriated from

the logging companies in the decades immediately following the revolution. Recognition of

legal title to lands already cleared and settled by the communities might thus plausibly set the

stage for the extension of agricultural credits. Línea Proletaria had considerably less success

however in the Northern Zone where the lands the communities were demanding were precisely

the ones they had worked as peons or wage workers for the finqueros and where the brigadistas

were expelled from the communities within a year of their arrival, but only after sowing discord

between the communities and CIOAC.

Military Repression

The use of Línea Proletaria to channel and co-opt the indigenous campesino movement

in Chiapas was not, of course, the only tactic used to counter the movement. The coordinated

military operations against the movement in the Northern Zone marked the beginning of a period

of intensified repression. A little more than a month after the 1977 military assault on

communities across the Northrn Zone, gunmen claiming to be judicial police attacked the

campesinos occupying the Naquem finca, confiscating a large amount of their coffee harvest.

Several days later the army moved the Tzotzil campesinos of Naquem, Pauchil and Chanibal


from the region altogether, forcibly transferring them to lands in Socoltenango and in the vicinity

of the Pujilitic Dam to the west of Comitan. (García de León 2002:185)

In March 1978, 3,000 Mexican Army soldiers conducted military exercises that began

around Tila and Tumbala and expanded into the Lacandon Jungle. (García de León 2002:191)

On November 14, 1978 the army occupied the Xoc finca in Sabanilla in order to break up a

union being organized among the peons that worked there. Flown in on airplanes contracted by

the finquero, the soldiers seized money and documents, and burned the shacks of all the peons.

They arrested 30, of which 16 were tortured on the spot and three women were raped in an

apparent effort to compel them to denounce their leaders. This action, however, only provoked

the peons to surround the soldiers who were then compelled to free the captives. In the end,

however, the peons were forced to accept transfer to the Marqués de Comillas where they too

established a new ejido. (García de León 2002:186–187)

Wololochán

The resort to repression did not, however bring the movement to a halt. Starting in 1979

the indigenous campesino movement experienced something of a revival with the outbreak of

several new areas of struggle as well as some organizational consolidation in areas that had

already been the sites of struggle. In April 1980 the Tzeltal community of Amatenago del Valle

invaded the lands of several neighboring fincas. While the army attacked and 38 comuneros were

arrested, this action succeeded in sparking a new wave of land occupations. In May and June,

campesinos invaded 68 different fincas in different parts of the state. (García de León 2002:210-

211)


Amongst these was the finca of Wololchán in the municipality of Sitala. Wololchán,

which means “snakes nest” in Tzeltal, was invaded by three groups of Tzeltal Indians who had

been waiting 19, 24, and 28 years respectively for a response to their petitions for the lands

occupied by the finca. The organization of the occupation had been assisted by the Partido

Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST), an organization generally known for its subordination to

the PRI. On June 15, a group of heavily armed soldiers, police and uniformed finqueros evicted

the Indians using tear gas, grenades, machine guns and even a flamethrower, resulting in a

masaacre in which twelve people were killed. The Indians were not even allowed to retrieve their

dead, whose bodies were instead incinerated. The General who commanded this operation,

Absalón Castellanos, was a leading member of la fanilia Chiapaneca. Two years later he would

be selected to serve as Governor of the state. (García de León 2002:205–212)

The massacre in Wololchán attracted national and international attention to the human

rights situation in Chiapas and in particular towards the repeated use of the army against the

indigenous-campesino movement. As a consequence of this attention, the army would not in fact

be used directly in this capacity again. It would be a mistake, however, to think that this reflected

a retreat from the use of violent repression. Indeed, the repression of the movement in the years

following the massacre was, if anything, even bloodier. What really occurred was a in the

personnel responsible for repression, with the dirty work now left to the state police and the

guardias blancas organized by the landowners. While there was no repeat of the massacre itself,

the resort to violent, often murderous, repression was a constant feature of land struggles in

Chiapas through the 1980s as was documented at the time in reports by Amnesty International

(1986)and other human rights organizations.


In spite of this wave of repression, the communities continued to organize. In the

Northern Zone, CIOAC achieved a reconciliation with the communities and organized the

Sindicato de Obreros Agricolas Miguel de la Cruz (Miguel de la Cruz Agricultural Workers

Union). On October 26, 1980, the union launched a regional strike, and the following year strikes

were organized on 36 fincas in Simojovel. (García de León 2002:187, 214)

Meanwhile in Venustiano Carranza, the Casa del Pueblo faced continuing physical

attacks by members of the community aligned with the caciques as well as a concerted effort by

the government to divide the organization itself. In April 1981, two comuneros and two advisors

loosely associated with Compañero were arrested after an attack on the Casa del Pueblo resulted

in the death of one of the attackers. The four “were held incommunicado for two days during

which time they were beaten and tortured.” (Harvey 1998:110; Morquecho Escamilla 2008)

Shortly thereafter, arrest orders were issued for 40 members of Casa del Pueblo. Casa del

Pueblo was not the only indigenous campesino organization with leaders behind bars. As Harvey

explains, the incarceration of key leaders of Casa del Pueblo in Cerro Hueco, the state prison in

Tuxtla, actually served to put the movement in Carranza in much closer contact with struggles in

other parts of the state. The relations forged between local leaders in Cerro Hueco would lead,

over the following year, to the formation of Organización Campesina Emiliano Zapata (OCEZ)

and its affiliation with the national independent campesino organization Coordinadora Nacional

Plan de Ayala. (Harvey 1998:110-116)

Rumble in the Jungle

Further complicating matters, in the Cañadas, the growth of the ejidal unions and the

concomitant growth in the influence of the Maoists precipitated a breakdown in the working


relationship between the diocese and the Maoist advisors living in the communities. While many

villages would only see a priest once or twice a year, the Maoists immersed themselves in the

daily lives of the communities in which they lived. Their visible commitment to the poor coupled

with their often explicit atheism undermined the authority of the church hierarchy.

The problem came to a head in 1978 when the advisors associated with Unión del Pueblo

with the deepest roots in the communities participated in an “exchange of experiences “ with

their new comrades in Línea Proletaria by temporarily relocating to Torreon to participate in

their work among the urban poor while brigadistas from Línea Proletaria took their places in the

indigenous communities. If the purpose of this exercise was to strengthen the ties within the

newly enlarged Línea Proletaria, the actual effect was to seriously damage the close relations

cultivated over half a decade between Unión del Pueblo and the communities. Overnight, trusted

members of Unión del Pueblo who had been living in the communities were replaced with

brigadistas with little or no experience working in rural, much less indigenous, communities.

To make matters worse, the newly arrived brigadistas were in the midst of what they

called a “struggle to the death against social-democracy” rooted in the factional struggles that

had just split Politica Popular. “Social democracy” was the term used by Orive to describe those

practices which supposedly supplanted the power of masses to direct their own movements.

Directed initially at the Alberto Anaya and the cadres that would constitute Linea de Masas, in

the Cañadas this struggle would be directed at the catechists and tuhuneles who had emerged as

leaders in their communities and who were now accused by the newly arrived brigadistas of

constituting themselves as new caciques. García Móises explains the thinking behind this

campaign:


We were developing an organization in which the masses, unlike every other

organizational chart in the world, were in front. We said this is our administrative

proposal: the protagonists of their own history are the base. It’s not the other way around.

So when in in different ejidos, communities and trade unions, a reverse process process

began, in which a few would decide for the rest, those few were the “social democrats.”

Thus, “the struggle to the death against social democracy” was a call to struggle against

them and their practices of control and domination. […] Thus, “the struggle to the death

against social democracy” is the call to struggle against those that won’t permit you to be

the subjects of your own history. (2009)

Not surprisingly this campaign backfired on the brigadistas. Whatever element of truth

there might have been in some of the brigadistas criticisms, the catechists and tuhuneles enjoyed

considerable prestige in their communities, often earned through prolonged and difficult struggle

and self-sacrifice. The brigadistas, in contrast, were recent arrivals from far more comfortable

origins than even the most corrupt village boss in the Cañadas. The actual balance of power

revealed itself when the villages sided with the catechists, who of course enjoyed the support of

the Diocese, and expelled the Maoists. García Móises was among those expelled.

At a meeting of they pulled their machetes on us and threw us out of the jungle! At a

meeting the Social Democrats, against whom we had launched the slogan of “fight to the

death against social democracy,” they turned on us and threatened to kill us with

machetes, and so we had to get out of the jungle.

The Maoists were then compelled to walk all of the way out of the jungle and prohibited

from even visiting communities along the way. It was a bitter moment.

Before we had travelled through the jungle from community to community and the

people gave us food to eat and water to drink. But when we were expelled, the people

closed their doors to us, in all of the communities.

The unanimity of the action convinced García Moises and the other Maoists that the

action was ordered by Bishop Ruíz.

The only existing possibility is that the people did this under orders from Don Samuel.

There is no other. I had cured their children. Because of me, their children had lived.

Why did they close their doors on me? By order of God – Don Samuel. (2009)


The expulsion of the advisors was limited to one zone (albeit the most important one) and

did not bring an end to the active participation of the Maoists as advisors to Quiptic or the other

ejidal unions. While some of the advisors, especially those who had been members of Unión del

Pueblo with deeper roots in the region, were eventually allowed to return, the expulsion marked

the end of the formal collaboration between the leadership of the Diocese and Línea Proletaria.

The two would go subsequently go in very different directions. While Línea Proletaria would

collaborate more and more with elements in the ruling party, the Diocese looked increasingly to

the example of the liberationist church in Central America.

Pajal Ya Kaktic

Starting in 1980, the newly created Unión de Uniones set itself on the course of building

a credit union to enable the communities to escape the usurious terms of credit that were

available to them. The initiative for this project came from Orive and the project was initially

taken up with considerable enthusiasm by all the ejidal unions. The demand to form a credit

union conformed quite clearly with the strategy of redirecting the movement’s demands away

from land and towards support for production. As it moved forward, however, it became

apparent that there were significant differences both within the Unión de Uniones and among the

Maoists, reflecting both the divergences in their own thinking as well as the conditions

confronting the different zones in which they operated. A split soon developed between, on the

one hand, the members of Quiptic and the Unión de Ejidos Tierra y Libertad, and, on the other,

Lucha Campesina and the smaller groups.

Reflecting their still unresolved dispute over the Lacandon Zone, the first group had a

more radical view of the centrality of the land struggle. They did not oppose the creation of the


credit union but rather regarded it as an instrument for developing the economic independence of

the communities from the party state and as part of a larger project. The latter group had a more

conventional view of the purposes of the credit union. These differences, of course, also reflected

the respective influence of Línea Proletaria within the different ejidal unions. While Quiptic had

been formed with the assistance of advisers from Unión del Pueblo, Lucha Campesina and the

smaller ejidal unions had been advised from the start by the brigadistas of Línea Proletaria.

On August 11 and 12, 1982, four communities affiliated with Quiptic were attacked by

neighboring campesinos affiliated with the CNC. The attackers set fire to 139 homes, took 58

people hostage and killed a 90 year old man and a three year old child. It was a moment of truth

for Línea Proletaria. This was precisely the sort of firect confrontations the policy of two faces

sought to avoid. When Quiptic demanded support from the other ejidal unions, only Tierra y

Libertad answered the call. It was in the wake of this escalation in the struggle over land, and the

failure of the other ejidal unions to offer substantial solidarity, that Quiptic and Tierra y Libertad

became increasingly critical of the emphasis on the credit union at the expense of other forms of

struggle. These conflicts became a formal split in the Unión de Uniones in January 1983 when

the other ejidal unions formally established the credit union without the participation of either

Quiptic or Tierra y Libertad. Subsequently the latter groups would maintain the name Unión de

Uniones while the former maintained their identities as separate ejidal unions, but collaborated in

the operation of the Pajal Ya Kactic Credit Union.

The formation of Pajal Ya Kactic coincided with theffective dissolution of Línea

Proletaria as an independent political actor as its personnel were being effectively absorbed into

various state and parastatal apparatuses. (Legorreta Díaz 1998:190–194) Morquecho describes

the practical political effect of the decision to form the credit union:


The problem is that the abandonment of the political project became the rout of the

cadres of LP. That is the political effect of creating the credit union was the dismantling

of the organization. (2008)

Shortly thereafter the cadres of Línea Proletaria were expelled again from the Cañadas.

Some would return again, but only after abandoning the pretense of revolutionary opposition to

the rule of the PRI, in some instance returning as agents of the CNC, or working for the state-

subsidized food company CONASUPO or later for the anti-poverty programs administed

through PRONASOL, in some cases securing very successful personal careers for themselves.

Indeed, after the Zapatista uprising, Orive himself would serve as an advisor in the

administration of President Ernesto Zedillo as he waged a counter-insurgency campaign against

the communities that Línea Proletaria had once helped organize into the Union de Uniones, but

that now were support bases of the EZLN. (Cano 1998) He would also later serve as a deputy

representing the Partido del Trabajo (PT) led by his old rival for the leadership of Política

Popular, Alberto Anaya.

The expulsion of Línea Proletaria in 1983 reflected a deep crisis in the forms of mass

indigenous campesino organization developed in Chiapas since the 1974 Indigenous Congress. If

this crisis expressed itself in a particularly sharp way within the Union de Uniones, it was not

limited to that organization. CIOAC, OCEZ and many smaller formations would find it difficult

to effectively counter the combination of very violent, indeed frequently murderous, political

repression with the sophisticated mechanisms of cooptation for which the PRI was notorious.

The situation was made all the more difficult by the dramatic neo-liberal turn in state policy

following Mexico’s default on its international debt obligations in 1982 and the election that

same year of Miguel de la Madrid as President of Mexico. De la Madrid’s election marked the

rise to power within the PRI of a fraction widely known the “technocrats” distinguished by their


commitment to a neo-liberal restructuring of the Mexican economy. The technocrats were

opposed by the so-called “dinosaurs” whose derived their power chiefly from the PRI-aligned

labor, campesino and other “popular” organizations. De la Madrid’s election also saw the

elevation of his campaign manager and former advisor Carlos Salinas as Minister of Budget and

Planning.

The election of De la Madrid brings into focus the real significance of Línea Proletaria’s

inability to respond coherently to events in China several years earlier. If it wasn’t apparent at

the time, in retrospect the political defeat of Maoism and the restoration of Deng Xiao Ping and

the “capitalist roaders” to power in China marked the real beginning of the neo-liberal era which

was now arriving in Mexico. (Harvey 2007) Thus even if Línea Proletaria did not explicitly

embrace Deng’s restoration to leadership in China, the development of their subsequent alliance

with the the Salinas brothers and the neo-liberal technocats of the PRI was no less an affirmation

of the politics that Deng represented. The “Maoists” were no longer in any meaningful sense

really Maoists anymore.

1983 was therefore a turning point in the the development of the movement in Chiapas.

Shortly after the departure of Línea Proletaria, a small guerrilla group would establish itself in

the depths of the Lacandon Jungle and declare the formation the Zapatista National Liberation

Army. The EZLN’s subsequent success in attracting the support of so many of the communities

affiliated with the mass indigenous campesino organizations was an indication of the exhaustion

of those forms and their inability to adequately respond to the new circumstances confronting

them. It was also a consequence of the complex process of political development, also going

back to the 1960s, on the part of the clandestine political-military organization that would launch

the EZLN, the Fuerzas de Liberacion Nacional. We will turn to that process in the next chapter.


Before that however, a brief balance sheet on the legacy of the Maoist intervention in Chiapas is

in order.

8.4 THE DOUBLE LEGACY OF MAOISM IN CHIAPAS

The Maoist intervention in Chiapas between 1973, when Unión del Pueblo assisted in the

preparations for the Indigenous Congress, and the expulsion of Línea Proletaria from the

Cañadas in 1983, left behind a complex and contradictory legacy.

On the one hand it is undeniable that the Maoists played a critical role in assisting the

formation and growth of the largest indigenous campesino organization in the state. In the course

of doing so they did much to develop the organizational capacities of the communities, training

hundreds of catechists and others in organizational methods and techniques that they would use

later in the service of other projects. More than this, they also trained them politically, exposing

them often for the first time to a worked out Marxist analysis of the particular social class

formation to be found in Eastern Chiapas and its place within the capitalist world system. They

also popularized an understanding of the struggles in Chiapas as part of a worldwide struggle

that could learn from the revolutionary experiences of China, Vietnam, Cuba and the

revolutionary movements in Central America. If the pastoral agents of the Diocese informed by

Liberation Theology were imparting similar notions, the more focused, secular and systematic

presentation of the Maoists and the inevitable differences between their respective readings of

texts and events greatly enriched the process and deepened the resulting transformations in the

consciousness of members of the communities. The simple addition of one or more ideological

poles competing with the Diocese had the objective effect of drawing the communities into a set


of globally circulating debates between different currents of revolutionary or anti-systemic

thought.

The mass line method of leadership of the Maoists, while anticipated by the Freirean

techniques of popular educaton adopted by the Diocese, and consonant with the indigenous

notion of tiwanej, connected these methods with an explicitly revolutionary political project,

even as the Maoists themselves were moving in a more reformist direction. While the

communities had their own prior historical experiences with ejidal and community assemblies of

various sorts, these had previously commonly functioned as vehicles for legitimizing the de facto

power of caciques aligned with the ladino elite and the party-state. The Maoists in effect

appropriated the traditional practice and promoted a deepening of their democratic aspects by

transforming the assemblies into spaces of genuine collective reflection and deliberation. They

also promoted the opening up of the assemblies to women and young (unmarried) men. This

produced in the communities a robust if uneven culture of direct and participatory democracy

that would subsequently become a major strength and resource of Zapatismo.

On the other hand, the Maoists also disrupted and divided the movement in important

ways and promoted a strategy of alliances with the very forces within the PRI party-state that

would spearhead the neo-liberal restructuring of Mexico that would have such devastating

consequences for the communities. While the communities organized into the three major

independent campesino organizations would by 1983 all break decisively with the Maoists, the

confusion that they sowed and the divisions they promoted would have lasting consequences. It

would contribute in the early 90s, for example, to the inability of the movement to effectively

oppose the revision of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution which effectively eliminated the

legal basis for further land reform. And in the wake of the Zapatista uprising it would be the


communities organized by the Maoists after 1983 into Solidaridad Campesino Magisterial

(Campesino Teacher Solidarity or SOCAMA) that would become the fertile recruiting grounds

for the paramilitary organizations at the heart of the government’s counter-insurgency strategy of

low-intensity conflict.

Zapatismo would inherit both sides of this contradictory legacy. The techniques of

organization and analysis learned from the Maoists would become an integral part of the political

culture of the EZLN and an important part of the foundation for its practices of autonomy. At the

same time the process of fusion between the political-military project of the FLN and the large

fraction of the indigenous campesino movement that would join the EZLN involved a struggle

and reckoning with the economism and reformism that were the hallmarks of the Maoists

strategic orientation. This process would confirm the communities that would become the

Zapatistas support bases in their revolutionary hostility towards the party-state and the larger

capitalist world system and would consolidate them as what I have already referred to as a

revolutionary people. It is to this process then that we now turn.


CHAPTER 9: ARMED STRUGGLE IN MEXICO

On September 23, 1965, 13 members of the recently formed Grupo Popular Guerrillero

(Popular Guerrilla Group or GPG) launched an assault on the Federal Army barracks in the city

of Madera in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua with the hope of capturing arms and

delivering a symbolic blow to the Mexican state. Even though another 17 guerrillas were

supposed to participate in the assault, the leader of the group, Arturo Gamiz, decided to launch

the attack anyway. It did not go well. All but one of the attackers were either killed or captured.

the attack on the Madera barracks marked the beginning of a wave of clandestine political

military organization and revolutionary guerrilla warfare in Mexico that would continue into the

1970s. During this period, mainly young left-wing activists involved in a variety of popular

movements, thwarted by often deadly political repression, and inspired by the example of the

Cuban Revolution, as well as other guerrilla insurgencies, formed themselves into a number of

small clandestine political military organizations that sought to overthrow the Mexican

government by force of arms. Most of these organizations announced their existence to the larger

world by undertaking armed attacks of various kinds – assaults on police and military

installations and personnel, bombings, kidnappings, bank robberies and so on. Almost all of

these groups would be successfully crushed or dispersed by the mid-1970s, victims of a “dirty

war,” similar to but smaller in scale and much less well known than the “dirty wars”waged

against the left in Brazil, Argentina and Chile.

One of the political military organizations to emerge during this period, the Fuerzas de

Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Forces or FLN), however, largely refrained from these

spectacular sorts of armed actions. Instead, the FLN dedicated itself instead to the slow, patient,


and secret accumulation of forces. As a consequence of its distinctive approach, the FLN was

able to survive into the 1980s and in 1983 six members of the group, acting under its discipline

and in accordance with its larger political military strategy, would establish a guerrilla

encampment in the Lacandon Jungle and proclaim the formation of EZLN.

In this chapter, I will look at the emergence of a clandestine armed revolutionary left in

Mexico in the 1960s and early 1970s and then specifically at the political military organization

known as the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Forces or FLN) that was

established in the city of Monterrey in 1969 and that would initiate the EZLN fourteen years later

in the Lacandon Jungle.

While the legacy of the armed left in Mexico is a complex one, I will argue that in its

uncompromising attitude towards the Mexican state, it was, at its core, an expression of the real

movement to realize the communist hypothesis. The armed left recognized that any movement

that did not ultimately develop a capacity to confront the state’s monopoly on violence would

ultimately remain confined to forms of action acceptable to that state and it treated the question

not as an abstract matter for the distant future, but as a concrete and immediate question. This is

not to say that it correctly resolved the problems posed, only that it correctly understood them as

critical to any possibility of a genuinely socialist transformation of Mexico. Indeed in the

strategies they pursued most of the armed groups that emerged clearly misapprehended the

relationship between securing a base of genuine popular support and developing a military

capacity. But by posing the question concretely they laid the basis for the eventual development

of a more sophisticated praxis.

In the course of its development the armed left confronted a series of sharp internal

contradictions, arising from an overly militaristic understanding of revolutionary warfare


expressed principally in the influence of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara’s theory of the guerrilla foco,

that most of the armed revolutionary organizations in Mexico were unable to overcome. In

contrast to this general tendency, the FLN, by avoiding early on certain militaristic errors, was

able to survive the repression that destroyed other groups, and to eventually modify its own

strategic orientation such that it could become the kernel around which the most radical forces

within the indigenous campesino movement constituted themselves as a revolutionary people.

The chapter is divided into three sections. In the first I briefly review the long history of

guerrilla warfare in Mexico prior to the 1960s. In the second I consider the impact on the

Mexican left of the Cuban Revolution in general, and the thoughts and actions of Ernesto “Ché”

Guevara in particular. In the third part I give an account of the new wave of guerrilla groups that

was initiated by the GPG’s attack on the Madera barracks described above, focusing on two

groups whose experiences would have the most impact on the EZLN, namely the GPG and the

Partido de los Pobres led by Lucio Cabañas in the state of Guerrero.

9.1 MEXICO’S LEGACY OF ARMED STRUGGLE

The Zapatistas are close students of, and see themselves as a continuation of, Mexico’s

long history of popular guerrilla warfare. The EZLN itself has direct organizational roots in the

wave of guerrilla groups that emerged in the 1960s only to be largely crushed by the mid-1970s.

For these reasons it is not possible to understand the origins of the Zapatistas without a

familiarity with the guerrilla movements that preceded them and whose experiences have deeply

informed Zapatismo.


Guerrilla Heritage

Mexico has a particularly rich history of rural insurgency and guerrilla warfare. This

history stretches back at least to the initial resistance to the Spanish conquest. It includes many

major and minor Indian uprisings that punctuated the whole colonial period and continued after

independence through the 19th

century, from the 1680 Pueblo Revolt to the 1847 “Caste War” in

the Yucatan. (Knaut 1997; Reed 2002; Salmon 1990) I have already discussed two such events

in the history of Chiapas. Guerrilla warfare played a particularly important role in Mexico’s

struggle for independence from Spain, which erupted in 1810 with the campaign of Miguel

Hidalgo and continued under the leadership of José María Morelos who made particularly

effective use of guerrilla tactics before his eventual capture and execution. Guadalupe Victoria in

Puebla and Vicente Guerrero in Oaxaca both waged guerrilla war until Mexico finally won its

independence from Spain in 1821. Similarly guerrilla warfare played an important role in both

the War of La Reforma between conservatives and liberals between 1858 and 1861 and then in

Benito Juarez’s struggle to expel the French occupation forces that had installed the Hapsburg

Empereror Maximiliano between 1861 and 1867.

Over the long course of the Mexican Revolution that erupted in 1910, the armies of

Zapata and Villa were only the largest and best known of literally dozens of smaller guerrilla

armies that each operated largely within, and responded largely to the demands of its own region

or patria chica. (Knight 1990b; Mallon 1995)

Emiliano Zapata was the Nahuatl-speaking young leader of the village of Anenecuilco in

the sugar-producing state of Morelos when the Mexican Revolution erupted. Hoping to secure

the title to disputed lands for his and neighboring villages he first emerged as a guerrilla leader

acting in support of Francisco Madero’s revolt against the rule of Porfirio Diaz and rose to


prominence when his defeat of federal forces and capture of the town of Cuautla convinced Diaz

to concede power to Madero. When Madero sided with the sugar plantation owners against the

demands of the campesinos of Morelos for the restoration of their lands, Zapata led the rebellion

against Madero and issued the Plan de Ayala which denounced Madero and articulated a more

radical vision of agrarian reform. When Madero was overthrown in a U.S.-supported military

coup by General Victoriano Huerta, Zapata’s Ejercito Liberatador del Sur (Liberating Army of

the South) quickly emerged as the most powerful expression of the revolutionary ambitions of

Mexico’s rural poor. (Womack 1970)

Francisco “Pancho” Villa was the child of poor campesinos in the state of Durango, but

emerged as an early supporter of Madero in the state of Chihuahua. As an irregular cavalry

commander he played an important role in the Battle of Ciudad Juarez. During Madero’s brief

reign, Villa operated under the command of Huerta, fighting to suppress the rebellion of Pascual

Orozco with whom Zapata was allied. When Huerta seized power, however, Villa led the

Division del Norte in revolt against him, allying himself initially with Venustiano Carranza’s

Constitutionalist forces which triumphed over Huerta when Villa successfully captured the

silver-mining center of Zacatecas.

Carranza, however, rejected the pact between Villa, Zapata and other revolutionary

generals signed at a National Convention in the city Aguascalientes and they initiated a period of

civil war between Carranza and Alvaro Obregon’s Constitucionalistas and Zapata and Villa’s

Convencionistas. (Katz 1998) While the Convencionistas were able to initially capture Mexico

City and force Carranza to flee to Veracruz, they failed to form an alliance with the capital’s

radical working class organizations, and the Constitucionalistas ultimately prevailed. On April

10, 1919, Zapata was ambushed and killed by forces loyal to Carrana in Chinameca. Unlike


Zapata, Villa outlived Carranza who was killed in 1920 by supporters of Alvaro Obregon.

Obregon proceeded to make peace with the remaining rebel armies, including Villa’s. Villa and

the couple hundred men remaining under his command were granted a large estate on which to

retire, but when it appeared in 1923 that he was interested in returning to political life and

running for president, Villa too was assassinated, presumably by forces loyal to Obregon’s

successor, Plutarco Elías Calles. (Knight 1990b:329–374)

Zapata’s Ejército Libertador del Sur and Villa’s Division del Norte thus became

persistent and potent symbols of the aspirations of Mexico’s poor precisely because they

demonstrated the potential of the rural poor to successfully wage revolutionary war and compel

the constitutional recognition of the rights of both campesinos and urban workers by the post-

revolutionary elites. The assassinations of Zapata and Villa mark the decisive suppression of the

most radical currents of the Mexican Revolution and the consolidation of a new bourgeois

regime.

In the late 1920s the Catholic Cristero revolt mobilized some of the same campesinos

who had taken up arms earlier under the banner of “Tierra y Libertad” to do so again, this time,

however, in defense of the properties and privileges of the Catholic Church.(Bartra 1985:36–57;

Meyer 2008) The Cristero Revolt effectively channeled some of the remaining but thwarted

revolutionary energies of sections of the peasantry to objectively reactionary purposes. While it

was ultimately suppressed, the Cristero Revolt revealed the fragility of the post-revolutionary

state’s legitimacy and catalyzed the formation in 1928 of a unified ruling party, the Partido

Revolucionario Nacional (renamed the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano in 1936 and finally the

Partido Revolucionario Institucional in 1946) that would dominate the state for the next seven

decades.


The memory of the Cristero revolt no doubt loomed large in the minds of Mexico’s post-

revolutionary elite when a movement of strikes and land takeovers began to sweep the

countryside in 1934. Independent campesino organizations and unions of rural workers in

Hidalgo, Jalisco, Sinaloa, Puebla, Chiapas, Veracruz, Nayarit, Michoacan, Sinaloa, and

elsewhere went out on strike and started seizing lands from big landlords. (Bartra 1985:58–65)

While these movements did not develop into open insurrectionary challenges to the state, the

threat that if unassuaged they might was a real one. The response was President Lazaro

Cardenas’s “revolution from above,” a massive redistribution of lands to campesinos in effective

exchange for their incorporation into the newly created campesino organizations of the ruling

party. Over the decades that followed, the agrarian reforms initiated under Cardenas did much to

both consolidate the legitimacy of the ruling party among the rural poor and to discourage their

resort to arms. An important exception to this general pattern, however, was to be found in the

state of Morelos, the main theater of operations of Emiliano Zapata’s army during the revolution.

Ruben Jaramillo and Los Jaramillistas

An important figure linking the tradition of Zapata and the Mexican Revolution to the

guerrilla groups that were to emerge in the 1960s and 70s was that of Ruben Jaramillo. The son

of a miner and a campesina, Jaramillo joined Zapata’s army in 1915 at the age of 15. Within two

years he had been promoted to captain and was commanding 75 men. When his forces

demobilized and claimed the lands that they had fought for, Jaramillo urged them to retain their

weapons. By the 1930s Jaramillo had emerged as an outspoken advocate for both cane cutters

and sugar mill workers in Morelos and by 1938 was able to secure the construction of what was

supposed to be a cooperatively controlled sugar mill in the town of Zacatepec. What Jaramillo


had hoped would secure the economic security of local cane cutters, however, was transformed

by the ruling party into another instrument for their continued exploitation. During this period

Jaramillo briefly joined the PCM. (Bellingueri 2003:17–68; Castellanos 2007:23–62; Glockner

2008:19–66; Hodges and Gandy 2002; Lecuona 2007)

In 1943, when workers at the Emiliano Zapata Sugar Mill went out on strike, Jaramillo

organized the cane cutters to support the strike by refusing to cut more cane. A warrant was

issued for Jaramillo’s arrest and he fled into the mountains. There he gathered a group of his

supporters and began to lead guerrilla operations against government forces, briefly taking

control of the town of Tlaquiltenango. Within a year, however, Jaramillo was convinced to

accept a negotiated peace and to pursue his political objectives by electoral means He ran for

governor twice under the banner of the Partido Agrario Obrero Morelense (the Morelos

Agrarian and Workers Party or PAOM). In 1952 Jaramillo was defeated in his second bid to

become governor of Morelos in an election that was widely regarded as fraudulent. So in 1953

he returned once more to the mountains with a group of his supporters and launched another

guerrilla campaign. This one lasted until 1958 when, once more, he accepted a negotiated peace.

The PRI’s reputation for the cooptation of its opponents was not unearned. Jaramillo’s

ability to take up arms twice and to negotiate a return to civilian life twice reflected both the

ruling party’s desire to retain its revolutionary credentials by reincorporating Jaramillo into its

framework and their conviction that this could be accomplished without jeapordizing their own

power.

By the early 1960s, however, Jaramillo was once more involved confrontations with the

Mexican Army, this time arising from a movement of land takeovers. In the short period of

several years, however, circumstances had changed in ways that would cause the ruling party to


view Jaramillo’s actions in a very different light. Before we can discuss this final chapter in

Jaramillo’s revolutionary career and its significance for the subsequent emergence of new

guerrilla formations, however, it is necessary to consider the impact of the Cuban Revolution on

the Mexican left.

9.2 CHÉ GUEVARA AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION

The Cuban Revolution and the rise of revolutionary and anti-colonial national liberation

movements across the “Third World” would, over the course of the 1960s, inspire a new

generation of radical young Mexican activists to turn increasingly towards politico-military

forms of organization and towards guerrilla warfare as a method of revolutionary struggle. The

Cuban Revolution in particular would exercise an important influence over the efforts of all of

the guerrilla formations to emerge in Mexico during this period. Not least of these would be the

FLN, whose founding members had been very active in Cuban solidarity activities. If we want to

understand then the political orientation and trajectory of these groups and their impact on the

politics of the EZLN, it is necessary to consider the general significance of the Cuban Revolution

and the particular significance of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara’s words and example, for the

generation of revolutionary minded youth that came of political age at this moment.

The Cuban Revolution began with the July 26, 1953 military assault on the Moncada and

Bayamo barracks by 159 rebels led by Fidel Castro as part of a plan to overthrow the U.S.-

backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The assault failed and Castro was tried and convicted

along with a large group of the rebels, only to be released and allowed to go into exile in Mexico

in a general amnesty for political prisoners two years later. (Thomas 1977) In Mexico, Castro

organized a group of rebels to launch a second attempt to overthrow Batista. It was in Mexico


that Castro recruited the Argentinian doctor, Ernesto “Ché” Guevara. After receiving military

training from Alberto Bayo, a Cuban who had commanded Republican troops in the Spanish

Civil War, about 80 rebels, now identifying themselves as the July 26 Movement, sailed to Cuba

where most of them were captured or killed within days. The small remaining group, however,

was able to establish itself in the Sierra Maestra mountains where they were able to regroup, to

begin recruiting and to initiate guerrilla attacks against Batista’s forces.

Within little more than two years the rebel army was able to defeat Batista’s forces,

forcing him to flee the country on January 1, 1959 and enabling the rebels commanded by Ché to

enter Havana the next day as the forces commanded by Fidel were capturing the city of Santiago

on the other end of the island. The revolution moved rapidly after that point, with the

consolidation of military power by the rebel army, the expropriation of sugar plantations

beginning in May, the nationalization of foreign (mainly U.S.) owned properties in August 1960,

and the declaration of the socialist objectives of the revolution on May 1, 1961.

The rapid success of the July 26 Movement’s guerrilla campaign against Batista and the

no less rapid radicalization of the Cuban Revolution following Batista’s fall had an electrifying

effect on the left in Latin America. While Fidel emerged clearly as the recognized leader of the

Cuban Revolution, Ché would come to take on a special significance as a model for aspiring

revolutionaries across Latin America and around the world. Ché was a romantic and heroic

figure, and his death in Bolivia in 1967 would also make him a martyr.

Ché’s standing derived from his role as a revolutionary guerrilla commander and from his

writings and speeches on guerrilla warfare, but also from his evident internationalism and

differences with the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the various pro-

Soviet communist parties across Latin America. Ché’s participation as an Argentine in the Cuban


Revolution reflected his commitment to generalizing the revolutionary process to the rest of

Latin America as a condition for the eventual unification of the continent which he believed

necessary if the region was to escape U.S. domination. His failed and ultimately fatal attempt to

wage revolutionary guerrilla war first in the Congo and then in Bolivia only cemented his image

as the representative of the internationalism of the Cuban Revolution. Ché regarded the pro-

Soviet Latin American CPs largely as obstacles to effective revolutionary action. This was a

view that found considerable resonance amongst revolutionary minded youth across Latin

America. While it would subsequently be downplayed by Fidel, this critique of the communist

parties of Latin America is critical to understanding the effect Ché would have on those who

chose to follow his example by forming political-military organizations and launching guerrilla

warfare in countries across Latin America, including of course, Mexico.

Ché’s best known writing is undoubtedly Guerrilla Warfare, essentially a tactical

handbook for would-be guerrillas based on his own experiences in the brief course of the

military phase of the Cuban Revolution. In this and other military writings, Ché both offers

concrete practical advice and elaborates a general theory and strategy of revolutionary guerrilla

warfare that became known as foquismo for its emphasis on the potential for a small guerrilla

group – a foco – to create revolutionary conditions where they did not previously appear to exist.

As a political-military doctrine foquismo would very quickly reveal its considerable limitations

across Latin America in the almost universally disastrous experiences of countless would-be new

guerrilla focos. (Guevara et al. 2002) The most pointed example of this was, of course, the brutal

defeat suffered by Ché and the band of guerrillas he led in Bolivia in 1967. We will have the

opportunity here shortly to examine several similarly ill-fated efforts in Mexico.


The tragic squandering of the lives, freedom and revolutionary energies of so many

young Latin American activists in ill-conceived guerrilla adventures has contributed to a widely

accepted narrative that casts Ché as a heroic and inspirational fighter for human liberation, but

ultimately a theoretical and strategic light-weight with little of value to offer future generations

of revolutionaries, either in the area of revolutionary military strategy or on questions

surrounding the transition to socialism. This narrative has two central themes. The first is that

Ché’s serious interests were rather narrowly limited to the question of guerrilla warfare. The

second related theme is a downplaying or dismissal of the significance of Ché’s activities as a

member of the Cuban government between the overthrow of the Batista regime in 1959 and his

departure for the Congo in 1965. Ché, in the view that emerges, was essentially a guerrilla,

tempermentally ill-suited to the administrative tasks of reorganizing Cuba’s economy. His

tenure, first as head of the Department of Industries within the National Institute for Agrarian

Reform (INRA), then as president of Cuba’s National Bank, and finally as head of the Ministry

of Industries (MININD) is regarded, in this view, as an unwelcome, and not especially

interesting, interlude between his military adventures.

It is critical to understand the political function of this narrative. It must be recognized

first and foremost not as the product of a considered investigation of Ché’s actual words and

deeds, but as an account that met the political needs of the pro-Soviet forces within the Cuban

Revolution, the pro-Soviet CPs of Latin America, and of course the CPSU itself. The narrative

psychologizes Ché’s political differences with those forces and thereby avoids a direct

engagement of their political substance. It takes advantage of Ché’s death to deflect the evident

popularity of Ché’s ideas by simultaneously transforming him into an object of essentially


religious veneration and burying those aspects of his thought that challenged the perspective of

the pro-Soviet forces.

If, however, we want an accurate understanding of the original motivations and

subsequent political development of the various guerrilla groups in Mexico inspired by Ché’s

thinking, it is necessary to go beyond Ché´s obvious romantic appeal to examine the political

reasons Ché’s proposal enjoyed the resonance that it did. And this requires dispensing with the

tidy narrative described above.

The first reason for Ché’s appeal is that his arguments affirmed what the direct

experiences of countless activists with political repression had already told them. This was that

there was an unavoidable military dimension to any serious attempt to transform their societies

and their subordinate place within the U.S.-dominated capitalist world market. In the face of

often murderous political repression that successfully terrorized people into political passivity,

Ché’s proposal argued that the resort to arms by a small but disciplined group of revolutionaries

could, by inspiring otherwise passive popular classes to join in, alter the overall balance of forces

within a country and thereby greatly improve the prospects for social revolutionary

transformation. Indeed we will see the important role played by the deadly repression of popular

mass movements in the genesis of every significant guerrilla group to emerge in Mexico in this

period.

Ché, of course, did not have a monopoly on the recognition of the political power of

guerrilla warfare. Indeed, Mao Ze Dong had argued along similar lines a generation earlier that

“Without a people’s army the people have nothing.” (Mao 1967a:296–297) And similar

arguments are advanced in the military writings of the Vietnamese revolutionaries, Vo Nguyen

Giap and Truong Chinh. The critical difference was that the example of the Cuban Revolution


represented the possibility of successful guerrilla warfare without the support of the established

communist parties of Latin America which were, unlike their East Asian counterparts, widely

regarded as irredeemably reformist. Ché articulated this explicitly in his writings and speeches.

A second reason Ché’s proposal resonated was that it identified the rural poor and

working population, rather than the urban working classes, as the main prospective base of

support for revolutionary action. Given the incorporation in Latin America of large sections of

the industrial working class into clientelist labor unions that aligned them politically with the

state, as well as the contrasting eruptions of discontent among the rural poor, this break with

Marxist orthodoxy also suggested a way to break out of the stasis that characterized much of the

Latin American left at the beginning of the 1960s. Here again Mao and the other East Asian

theorists of people´s war had come to similar conclusions. And indeed, as the limitations of

Ché´s military theories were revealed in practice, many Latin American guerrilla groups would

turn to the military writings of Mao, Chinh and Giap. But it was the example of the Cuban

Revolution more than anything else that convinced young Latin American radicals of the

viability of guerrilla warfare as a path to revolutionary change in their countries.

Finally, Ché’s proposal rested on a more general critique of the strategic orientation of

the pro-Soviet communist parties that were the main organized expressions of the left in many

Latin American countries. These parties embraced the view that the task of revolutionaries in

Latin America was to forge alliances with the “progressive bourgeoisie” which was supposed to

be opposed to U.S. domination of the region. This led in most cases to a policy of electoral

alliances with various middle class forces, a restraining of class struggles that might alienate

those forces, and a condemnation of more insurgent forms of action as “ultra-left.” In opposition

to this orientation, Ché held that the “progressive bourgeoisie” in Latin America was small,


indecisive, and in spite of the cautious policies pursued by the communist parties of Latin

America, unwilling to really challenge U.S. domination.

In this view, Ché’s humanism is the source of his radicalism. Besancenot and Löwy link

what they call Ché’s efforts to find or develop a “communist and democratic alternative to the

Stalinist model of the Soviet Union” (2009:77) with his rejection of the reformism of the pro-

Soviet Latin American communist parties. Noting the early efforts on the part of the cadres of

Cuba´s pro-Soviet Popular Socialist Party to restrain the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution

in the vain hope of maintaining the support of the country’s national bourgeoisie, they then

examine the development of Ché’s thinking in the course of the radical reorganization of Cuba’s

economy following its near-total nationalization.

A critical moment in the development of Ché’s thinking, and its propagation among

revolutionaries outside of Cuba was what was called “The Great Debate,” which took place

between 1963 and 1965 and which, as Yaffe explains, the Great Debate

has been variously interpreted as: an argument about the operation of the law of value

under socialism; a disagreement about the use of moral incentives; a dispute over the

level of financial (de)centralisation of enterprises; a conflict over the nature of Cubanidad

and the New Man in a vision of utopia; and a power struggle within the Cuban leadership.

(2009:49)

The Great Debate involved not only members of the Cuban government, but also Ernest

Mandel, the leading political economist of the Trotskyist 4th International and the French

Communist Charles Bettelheim, with the former supporting Ché’s position and the latter

supporting that of Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, the president of the Instituto Nacional de Reforma

Agraria (INRA), and a leader of the pro-Soviet Popular Socialist Party before it was dissolved

into the Cuban Communist Party. (Bettelheim it should be noted would subsequently modify his


views considerably in response to the Cultural Revolution in China and would exercise an

important influence on Mexican Maoism through his student Adolfo Orive.)

In the Great Debate the tensions that existed between Ché’s vision of socialist

construction and the considerably more conservative vision promoted by Soviet advisors and the

former members of the pro-Soviet PSP inside the new Cuban Communist Party began to emerge

into public view. These criticisms would only become sharper in his February 24, 1965 speech

before the Second Economic Seminar of Afro-Asian Solidarity in Algiers (Guevara 1969:387–

400) where he criticized the terms of trade with the established socialist countries, and his essay

Man and Socialism in Cuba,(1969:387–400) published a month later, in which he argues that in

relying on “the worn out weapons of capitalism (the marketplace as the basic economic cell,

profit making, individual material incentives, and so forth), one can arrive at a dead end.” This

was a barely concealed attack on the Soviet model of socialist construction which relied heavily

on individual material incentives and the workings of the law of value. It is not a coincidence

that Che’s last public appearance in Cuba and his preparations to fight in the Congo coincide

with the sharpening of his public criticisms of the Soviet Union.

A very illuminating document of the development of Ché´s thinking on these question is

his notes on the Soviet Manual of Political Economy. (Guevara 2010) Written between 1965 and

1966 just prior to his departure for the Congo. While they would not be published until 40 years

later, and would therefore have no direct influence on how his thinking was received by

sympathetic radical youth in Latin America these notes reveal that Ché’s critique of the Soviet

Union had only grown sharper and had begun to converge in his mind with similar criticisms

then coming out of China. (Lotta 1994; Mao 1977a)


Ché’s “heresy” thus must be placed within the larger struggles taking place within the

international communist movement, most notably the Sino-Soviet split and the struggles internal

to the Chinese Communist Party that erupted in the form of the Cultural Revolution at the very

moment that Ché was writing the Critical Notes. The “Great Debate” in Cuba thus did not occur

in isolation from the other “Great Debate” that erupted at the same moment between China and

the Soviet Union and that rippled through the international communist movement and beyond.

The Impact of the Cuban Revolution in Mexico

Well before any of these divergences would become apparent, however, the simple fact

of the Cuban Revolution had an electrifying effect on the left in Mexico as well as in the rest of

Latin America. Although it embraced the Cold War anti-communism promoted by the United

States when it came to communist involvement in labor and agrarian struggles, the PRI, alone in

Latin America, defied the demands of the U.S. that Mexico cut off relations with revolutionary

Cuba. The reasons for this stance are complex and beyond the scope of this study , but it did

create a unique opening for the radical left in Mexico. The Cuban Revolution captured the

imaginations of a broad swathe of left wing forces in Mexico both inside and outside the ruling

party. In March 1961the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN) was launched at the

initiative of former President Lazaro Cardenas. The official announcement occurred at the Latin

American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation and Peace in Mexico

City also organized at Cardenas’s initiative. (Hodges and Gandy 2002:82–87) The MLN acted as

a broad umbrella formation for popular movemenst and progressive groups – including the PCM,

a range of independent forces including Ruben Jaramillo, various parastatal formations such as

the Partido Autentico de la Revolución Mexicano (PARM) and the Partido Popular Socialista


(PPS), and the left-wing of the PRI represented by Cardenas – to both stand in solidarity with the

Cuban Revolution and to struggle for Mexico’s liberation from U.S. domination.

The opportunity to act in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution presented itself almost

immediately following the MLN’s formation with the failed U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba at

the Bay of Pigs between April 15 and 19. The MLN organized demonstrations in solidarity with

Cuba across Mexico, with eighty thousand marching in Mexico City alone. This was at the time

a considerable show of strength for the left and undoubtedly raised concerns within the PRI.

Thus the limitations of such expressions of solidarity were established almost as quickly when a

second march was broken up by the police.

Ideologically, the MLN articulated, and was defined by, a left-wing revolutionary

nationalism that proposed the organization of a broad multi-sectoral movement for Mexico’s

political, economic, and cultural independence as a necessary condition for an eventual socialist

revolution. The precise means to accomplish all this were not spelled out and it was probably

precisely this lack of specificity that enabled the MLN to initially gather the broad array of forces

that it did. It is also arguably what caused it to fall apart so quickly. While the MLN would lose

its character as a serious mass formation within a few years, and would formally dissolve in

1968, during its brief moment in the sun it attracted to its ranks many of the young people who

would subsequently emerge as leaders of different guerrilla groups and it played a critical role in

constituting new networks of activists that would facilitate the creation of those groups.

(Castellanos 2007:69–70; Cedillo 2008:67–72) If the main participating formations in the MLN

– the PCM, the PPS and the left-wing of the PRI – were largely committed to (divergent)

electoral initiatives, many dissident members of these formations, as well as various independent

forces, were convinced of the futility of such efforts and were looking to follow the path of


revolutionary armed struggle and rural guerrilla warfare blazed by the Cuban Revolution. The

MLN offered these forces both a space in which to engage in open political work and the

opportunity to make contact with each other.

The Assassination of Ruben Jaramillo

An important example of this would be the participation of Ruben Jaramillo and his

followers in the MLN. Jaramillo organized demonstration in Morelos in solidarity with Cuba in

early 1961. Later that year he secretly rejoined the PCM, along with 220 of his men. In April

1962, following Cuba’s expulsion from the Organization of American States (OAS) and Fidel

Castro’s subsequent call, in the Second Declaration of Havana, for armed struggle against U.S.

imperialism across Latin America, Jaramillo publicly declared his continued support for the

Cuban Revolution and began to make preparations for a trip to Cuba. (Hodges and Gandy

2002:54)

If Jaramillo’s involvement in the MLN indicates its importance as a space in which

revolutionary forces could engage in open political work, his fate also indicated the limitations of

that space.

Jaramillo’s popularity in Morelos, his continued involvement in militant land occupations

there in open defiance of the ruling party, his association with the legacy of Zapata, his history of

guerrilla activity, and now his embrace of the Cuban Revolution, all made him an obvious threat

in the eyes of Mexico’s ruling elite. On May 23, 1962, on the eve of his planned trip to Cuba, 60

soldiers and members of the Federal Judicial Police, operating under orders from the Attorney

General, the Minister of Defense and President Adolfo López Mateos, attacked Ruben

Jaramillo’s home. There they captured him, his pregnant wife, and their three sons shortly


thereafter. All five were executed extrajudicially and their bodies dumped to be discovered

several hours after their arrest. The only surviving member of Jaramillo’s family would be his

young daughter, Racquel who escaped from the house before she could be captured with the

others. (Castellanos 2007; Glockner 2008; Lecuona 2007; Padilla 2008) The dirty war that the

Mexican state would wage for the next two decades against its would-be guerrilla opposition had

begun before the new guerrillas even had an opportunity to fire the first shot. The assassination

of Jaramillo and his family only confirmed for many in the MLN that there would be no peaceful

or electoral path to social change in Mexico. It would not be long before they began to act on that

understanding.

9.3 THE RURAL GUERRILLAS

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s Mexico would witness the appearance of roughly

two dozen armed clandestine left-wing political military organizations that would undertake one

or another form of guerrilla activity. The new guerrilla groups can be fairly easily divided into

two distinct waves.

The first wave, beginning in the mid-60s, consisted essentially of three rural-based

guerilla groups and several less significant successor groups, all with roots in long-standing

regional conflicts over land and basic democratic rights. The three main groups of the first wave

were the Grupo Popular Guerrillero (the Popular Guerrilla Group or GPG) based in Chihuahua

and led by Arturo Gamiz García, the Asociación Civica Nacional Revolucionario (the

Revolutionary National Civic Association or ACNR) based in Guerrero and led by Genaro

Vasquez Rojas, and the Partido de los Pobres (the Party of the Poor or PdlP), also based in

Guerrero and led by Lucio Cabañas Barrientos. Of these, the experiences of the GPG and the


PdlP would come to exercise an important influence on the thinking of the EZLN’s predecessor,

the FLN.

The second wave, consisting of another twenty or so urban and largely student-based

guerrilla groups begins in earnest in 1970. Many of the groups involved in the second wave were

small and short-lived. But several managed to involve hundreds or even thousands of

participants, were able to sustain themselves for several years, and would leave their mark in

different ways on Mexican politics in general, and on the development of the EZLN in particular.

Most important of the second wave in this respect would be the Liga Comunista 23 de

Septiembre, (September 23 Communist League or LC23S), Unión del Puebl and, of course, the

FLN.

In this section I will survey these experiences. I will first look at those groups whose

experience would have the greatest influence on the politics of the EZLN, the GPG and the PdlP.

I will then briefly discuss the the second wave of urban-based guerrilla groups.

Arturo Gamiz and the Grupo Popular Guerrillero.

The first of the new guerrilla formations to emerge was the Grupo Popular Guerrillero

(GPG), based in western part of the northern state of Chihuahua. While the efforts of the GPG

were abortive, simply by demonstrating the possibility of guerrilla action in Mexico it would

become an important point of reference for the groups that were to come. Of particular interest in

this respect is an analysis of the GPG’s experience written by Mario Marcos for the FLN on the

eve of the launching of the EZLN and recently republished by the Zapatistas’ publishing arm,

Ediciones Rebeldia. (2007)


The GPG was formed in late 1964 under the leadership of Arturo Gamiz García and other

dissident members of the Unión General de Obreros y Campesinos de México (UGOCM), a

mass organization affiliated with Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s Partido Popular Socialista

(PPS). While the PPS made a rhetorical turn to the left in 1960 when it changed its name from

the Partido Popular and declared its official ideology as Marxism-Leninism, in practice it

continued to function as a minor para-statal party, often endorsing the candidates of the PRI. In

the state of Chihuahua however, the PPS attracted the support of a significant layer of students

and some professors in the state’s rural normal schools which trained young men and women,

often from peasant backgrounds themselves, to teach in rural schools. Mexico’s normal schools

had been a bastion of radical left-wing politics going back to the formation of many as part of

what was called the Socialist Education Movement under President Cardenas, and the rural

normal schools were often even more radical as a consequence of their obvious second-class

character. Normalistas and recently graduated rural school-teachers would be a major source of

the leadership of campesino organizations and guerrilla groups across Mexico in the 1960s and

70s. Along these lines, Castellanos notes that several of the normal schools in Chihuahua

were spaces where highly politicized students circulated Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban

literature amongst themselves. (2007:71)

In 1963 the PPS, the UGOCM and their supporters among the normalistas in Chihuahua

supported local campesinos in a series of land occupations and long-distance protest marches

directed at some of Mexico’s biggest landowners and their representatives in the political

apparatus. The struggle was significant enough to attract two hundred delegates from five states

to the “First Encounter in the Mountains” where the possibility of launching armed struggle was

first discussed. The response of the state and the landowners to this movement was the arrest and


imprisonment of roughly fifty normalistas and a campaign of terror against the campesinos, in

which alleged participants were hung from trees, in some but not all cases resulting in death.

The GPG was born out of this experience of repression. Made up of at least several dozen

rural teachers, students and campesinos, some of whom had participated in the MLN, the GPG

was deeply influenced by the example of the Cuban Revolution. For almost a year the GPG

operated in the mountains of Chihuahua, conducting very small scale attacks on local caciques

and security forces while building up support chiefly among campesinos and students. In early

1965 the GPG organized a “Second Encounter in the Mountains” in Gamizo’s home village in

the state of Durango. The gathering drafted five documents which elaborated the GPG’s analysis

of the national and international situation and argued for the necessity of an armed struggle that

they anticipated would take decades. From May through August members of the group received

military training from a former army captain, Lorenzo Cárdenas Barajas, who was believed to

have trained Fidel Castro when he was in Mexico. (Castellanos 2007:78-80)

The GPG captured national attention on September 23, 1965 when a small guerrilla unit,

under Gamiz’s leadership, carried out the assault on the army barracks in Ciudad Madera

described at the beginning of this chapter. The operation was plagued with difficulties. As a

result of logistical errors only 13 of the expected 31 guerrillas were able to participate in the

attack. The decisions was made to carry out the attack anyway. After a protracted fight, six

federal soldiers and eight guerrillas, including Gamiz, were dead. All but one of the five

remaining guerrillas were captured. This marked the effective end of the GPG.

In the aftermath of the failed assault, the remaining members of the group split in two

over charges that Cárdenas Barajas was an infiltrator. The group that initially raised the

accusation that he was an infiltrator, and which included Arturo Gamiz’s brother Jacobo,


subsequently constituted themselves as the Movimiento 23 de Septiembre . This group was short-

lived and most of its roughly thirty members were themselves quickly arrested, but only after

making initial contact with a young schoolteacher active in land struggles in Guerrero, Lucio

Cabañas.

The other group, renamed the Grupo Guerrillero del Pueblo Arturo Gámiz (the Arturo

Gamiz Peoples Guerrilla Group or GGPAG) and led by Oscar González Eguiarte, a student

leader who had been unable to join in the assault on the Madera barracks, were able to regroup in

the mountains where they operated until they were hunted down in 1968. (García Chavez 1994)

The GPG and its assault on the Madera barracks has commonly been characterized as an

example of the foolish imitation of the Cuban Revolutionary experience. While Mario Marcos

acknowledges the serious military errors committed by the group, he argues that, in and of

themselves, these should not discredit Gamiz and his followers’ political decision to take up

arms. In contrast with the portrayal of Gamiz as an adventurist, he argues that Gamiz and the

GPG, while young, already possessed a significant body of political experience and that the

GPG’s strategic orientation, reflected in the resolutions elaborated in two meetings of the GPG’s

supporters and written up by Gamiz, was grounded in a sophisticated analysis of the political

situation in Mexico. (2007)

Specifically, Gamiz understood that Mexico’s economic and political subordination to the

United States meant that all prospects for significant change in the miserable social conditions

afflicting the majority of Mexicans could not be resolved within the narrow space for legal

oppositional politics that was allowed under the rule of the PRI. Gamiz also saw the

revolutionary potential of the Mexican peasantry which he argued would play a determining role

at least in the first stages of Mexico’s “next revolution.” (2007: 19) If the Cuban Revolution was


an important inspiration for Gamiz and the GPG it was not only because many of the social

conditions that favored the Cuban Revolutionaries were also present in Mexico, but because so

too were many of the challenges. Gamiz recognized the seriousness of these challenges but held

that they would have to be overcome and that this could only happen by beginning the process of

organizing for and then actually carrying out armed struggle.

If the northern state of Chihuahua saw the appearance of the first of the new guerrilla

groups to emerge in Mexico, the most significant guerrilla movements would emerge in the

South, where rural Indian communities experienced the worst poverty and where the lusher

mountain flora provided more auspicious conditions for guerrilla operations than the more arid

north. The state of Guerrero, in particular, would give rise to two major guerrilla groups: Genaro

Vasquez’s Asociación Civica Nacional Revolucionaria and Lucio Cabañas’s Partido de los

Pobres. While my attention will focus on the experience of the PdlP, a brief account of the

ACNR is necessary as the PdlP was in many respects a product of the same processes that also

produced the ACNR.

Genaro Vazquez and the Civicos.

Genaro Vázquez Rojas was a veteran of the Movimiento Revolucionario Magisterial

(Revolutionary Teachers Movement or MRM). By 1960 he had emerged as the leader of a

broader formation, the Guerrero Civic Association (ACG), which demanded agrarian reform and

an investigation into the misdeeds of Raul Caballero Aburto, then Governor of Guerrero.

On December 31, 1962, police attacked a demonstration organized by the ACG in the

town of Iguala, killing 28 and wounding dozens more. In the aftermath of the Iguala massacre,

Vazquez was accused of killing a police agent. He avoided arrest by fleeing the state to Mexico


City where he participated in the MLN and made contact with various left-wing critics of the

PCM who shared his view of the PCM as irretrievably reformist. During this period Vázquez

studied the Algerian and Vietnamese national liberation struggles as well as Ché’s writings on

guerrilla warfare. He was finally able to return to Guerrero but only after former President

Lazaro Cardenas intervened on his behalf. (Castellanos 2007:114)

On his return he worked through the ACG’s Liga Agraria Revolucionaria del Sur

Emiliano Zapata (Emiliano Zapata Revolutionary Agrarian League of the South or LARS-EZ)

which united a wide range of campesinos and agricultural workers in a common struggle against

various caciques. By 1965 the ACG had created a Consejo Autodefensa del Pueblo (Peoples

Self-Defense Council) to repel attacks and Vazquez began to operate in clandestinity though he

was not yet engaged in offensive military operations.

In late 1966 Vazquez was finally captured outside the offices of the MLN and sentenced

to 14 years in prison on revived charges related to the Iguala massacre. Less than a year and a

half later, on April 22, 1968, members of the ACG ambushed a vehicle that was supposed to

return Vazquez to prison after a medical appointment. Vazquez and his liberators fled into the

mountains where the ACG adopted a four-point political program, rebaptized itself the

Asociación Nacional Civica Revolucionario and began to carry out guerrilla operations.

(Castellanos 2007:101–116)

The response of the Mexican state to the appearance of this new guerrilla organization

was a massive deployment of federal troops which, while unable to capture Vazquez, were

successful in terrorizing much of the rural population and greatly limiting Vazquez’s ability to

rely on them for support and new recruits.


The initial efforts of the ACNR between 1968 and 1970 were all unsuccessful. In 1971,

however, the ACNR was able to carry out two high profile kidnappings, the first of a bank

manager, and the second of the rector of the Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, and former

mayor of the city of Taxco. In return for its captives the ACNR received large ransoms and the

release of nine political prisoners who were flown to Cuba. The ACNR suffered a devastating

blow, however, on February 2, 1972, when Vázquez died following a supposed automobile

accident in which he sustained significant injuries. The ACNR disintegrated rapidly after this

point, with a final remnant of the group captured in mid-1973.

The ACNR, while more successful in carrying on sustained operations than the GPG, was

nonetheless ultimately unable to translate the considerable popular support enjoyed by Vazquez

and the ACG into an effective clandestine support apparatus for the ACNR’s guerrilla

operations. In contrast, the Partido de los Pobres, led by Lucio Cabañas and operating in very

similar territory, was able to achieve what neither the GPG or the ACNR could, namely the

establishment of a stable support structure among the larger populace capable of organizing

popular sympathy into effective and ongoing material support for the guerrilla force.

Lucio Cabañas and the Party of the Poor

Lucio Cabañas’ Partido de los Pobres represented an important advance in the

development of revolutionary guerrilla warfare in Mexico and marks the culmination of the first

wave of new guerrilla groups to emerge during the 1960s. While ultimately defeated as well, the

PdlP enjoyed considerably broader national sympathy than any other guerrilla group from this

period and was generally regarded as the most successful guerrilla group to emerge between the

Mexican Revolution and the 1994 Zapatista uprising.


On May 18, 1967, only a few weeks after federal police opened fire on a demonstration

of teachers, students and parents in the town of Atoyac, Guerrero, the leader of the

demonstration, a schoolteacher named Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, fled to the mountains and

established the nucleus of the PdlP.

Lucio Cabañas was born in 1939 into a campesino family in the coffee-producing ejido of

El Porvenir. His paternal grandfather had fought in the Mexican revolution in Zapata’s army and

one of his uncles had participated in a local uprising in the 1920s. Cabañas himself was

politically precocious. In sixth grade he led a successful student struggle demanding the removal

of his school’s director. Shortly afterwards he joined the PCM’s youth group and eventually

attended their cadre school in Mexico City. As a student in a rural normal school he was drawn

into the movement of the Civicos led by Genaro Vaquez, and in 1960 was arrested for

participating in a meeting organized by the ACG. Within a few years, however, the PCM had

broken with the Civicos and Cabañas was working as the Secretary General of the Federación de

Estudiantes Campesinos Socialistas, the PCM-led national organization of rural normalistas, in

which capacity he also supported the PCM’s independent campesino organization, the

Confederación Campesino Independiente (CCI), organizing a land struggle against a logging

company.

It was during this period that Cabañas began teaching, and as a result of his organizing

work was punitively transferred to the town of Atoyac. In Atoyac, however, he continued his

work and became involved in a broad movement to remove the director of the school who was

widely regarded as abusing her power. This was the context in which state police opened fire on

a demonstration with the apparent intention of killing Cabañas. Instead they killed five other

demonstrators, wounded another twenty-seven, and drove Cabañas and a group of his remaining


supporters into the surrounding mountains. It was there that they would initiate what would soon

become the Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor or PdlP) and its guerrilla arm, the Brigada

Campesina de Ajusticiamiento (the Campesino Execution Brigade or BCA). (Hipolito 1982:49)

Of all the guerrilla groups to appear in Mexico in the 1960s and 70s, the PdlP would

prove far and away the most successful in establishing a broad base of genuine popular support,

enabling it to carry out a variety of sometimes very audacious military operations until its

successful repression in 1974. The PdlP’s accomplishments would make it an important point of

reference for the FLN in its efforts to establish a guerrilla nucleus in Chiapas. As such it deserves

special attention.

Cabañas and his followers worked very deliberately to build up a support network for

their proposed guerrilla group. They travelled from village to village organizing small

clandestine assemblies where they patiently argued against the area’s long tradition of short-lived

popular uprisings in favor of the organization of a guerrilla army attached to a new political

party. Through patient work Cabañas was eventually able to assemble a force of as many as 350

guerrilla fighters, supported by an extensive clandestine network that reached into both the

mountain villages in its areas of operations as well as the cities.

The PdlP grew steadily in both political strength and military capacity until 1973. It was

able to do this in spite of becoming the main target of counter-insurgency operations by the

Mexican armed forces. In 1973 however, the group carried out a daring kidnapping of Ruben

Figueroa, the PRI candidate for Governor of Guerrero, taking advantage of an offer by Figueroa

to meet with the guerrillas to negotiate an end to the conflict. The kidnapping however prompted

the largest counter-insurgency operations against the PdlP up to that date, ultimately resulting in


Figueroa’s rescue and the effective encirclement of the guerrillas who split into two columns

before they were hunted down. Cabañas himself was finally killed in 1974.

It is worth noting here the PdlP’s orientation towards othere guerrilla groups that began to

emerge after 1970. The PdlP’s successes made it a pole of attraction for other groups hoping to

merge into an even larger formation. While the PdlP engaged in discussions with other guerrilla

groups and absorbed or temporarily incorporated members of several other groups, it ultimately

refused to participate in the unification process that would eventually lead to the formation of the

Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (September 23 Communist League or LC23S).

A remnant of the PdlP would subsequently merge with the more militarized wing of

Unión del Pueblo to form the Partido Revolucionario Obrero Campesino – Unión del Pueblo

(Revolutionary Workers and Peasants Party – Peoples Union or PROCUP). PROCUP would be

the only guerrilla group to engage in ongoing public military operations in the 1980s and in 1996

it would constitute the nucleus around which the EPR would be built.

Cabanas’ found a ready base of support among the rural poor and for that reason came to

constitute the most serious guerrilla challenges to the authority of the Mexican state in the 1960s

and 70s. In the late 1970s when the FLN was grappling with the limitations of the foquista

strategy that they had pursued until that point, the experience of the PdlP would become an

important point of reference. Before we can consider that, however, we need to look at the

second wave of guerrilla groups to emerge in Mexico. In the period following the murderous

repression of the Mexican student movement in 1968, the PdlP and the ACNR would be joined

by another twenty largely urban guerrilla groups that drew their members mainly from the

movement in the universities.


9.4 THE SECOND WAVE: THE STUDENT AS GUERRILLA

The second wave of guerrilla groups to emerge in Mexico consisted of groups that were

based largely among university students and that operated largely in urban areas. Contrary to

widespread popular perception, the origins of these groups largely preceded the repression of the

1968 student movement. The events of 1968 nonetheless clearly had a catalyzing effect on the

various circles of already radicalized students searching for a viable strategy for the

revolutionary transformation of Mexican society and greatly enlarged the pool of prospective

young recruits that would sustain their efforts.

Like the rural-based guerrillas in Chihuahua and Guerrero, the urban guerrilla groups had

roots in dissident currents coming out of the established Mexican left. These groups would

include many former members of the PCM’s youth organization, Juventud Comunista as well as

veterans of the MLN. Their origins were not, however, homogenous. In some instances they

attracted liberationist Christians and in one instance a politicized street gang. Despite important

similarities, each group had its own distinctive character in terms of its social composition,

political orientation, degree of theoretical sophistication, strategic understanding, and security

practices. The dirty war waged against these groups by the Mexican state would prove effective

in annihilating or dismantling virtually every single one of them. It was a brutal case of survival

of the fittest. The only organiations to survive, PROCUP and the FLN, were those that were able

to sink deep roots among a revolutionary minded population while taking the most robust

security measures to protect against infiltration or discovery.

The roughly 20 groups that made up the second wave were of widely varying

significance. They included: the short-lived Frente Urbano Zapatista, the North Korean-trained

Movimiento Armado Revolucionario, the Frente Estudiantil Revolutionario, the “Lacandones,”


the “Procesos,” and the Fuerzas Armadads Revolucionarios among others. The Liga Comunista

23 de Septiembre was the product of the merger of eight smaller formations. It published a

clandestine journal, Madera, named for the GPG’s attack on the army barracks in Ciudad

Madera, and was involved in a number of spectacular actions that successfully captured national

attention. Attempts were also made to unite with Cabanas’ organization, but as noted above these

ultimately failed.(Hodges 1995:128–137)

Between 1971 and 1974, these organizations carried out bombings, bank robberies, and

kidnappings that targeted Mexico’s economic and political elites.

Of all the second wave guerrilla groups, the LC23S had the greatest impact on Mexican

political life in the 1970s. The LC23S brought together veterans of Marxist student politics, a

street gang (Los Vikingos) and radicalized Christians. LC23S was also distinguished by its often

inpenetrable theoretical proclamations which it sometimes distributed at union meetings its

cadres took over at gun point in a vain effort to secure working class support. On January 16,

1974 attempted to launch an urban uprising, dubbed the “assault on heaven” in Culiacán, the

capital of Sinaloa, where the group had secured some influence among agricultural workers.

Despite (or perhaps because of) these efforts the LC23S was never able to establish a lasting base

of popular support. Its heterogeneous origins made the group vulnerable to police infiltration

which in turn fueled an increasingly paranoid internal political culture.

Along with the ACNR and the PdlP the LC23S became the target of an increasingly

brutal “dirty war” in which hundreds of their members and supporters, but also innocent friends

and family members, were captured, held without trial, tortured in secret military-run prisons,

“disappeared,” and in some case thrown from airplanes into the Pacific Ocean or summarily

executed. While the “dirty war” in Mexico did not reach the scale of the much better known dirty


wars waged contemporaneously in the countries of the Southern Cone, it had a nonetheless very

traumatic effect on Mexican politics, not least because, unlike the Southern Cone countries, it

was never followed by a serious acknowledgement of the crimes committed much less any

serious truth and reconciliation process. (Calderon and Cedillo 2011)

One other clandestine politico-military formation to emerge in this period would be the

FLN. While the FLN was the product of circumstances and events similar to those that produced

the second wave of urban university-based guerrilla groups described above, it would distinguish

itself in several ways. First, in contrast to all of the other guerrilla groups to emerge in this

period, the FLN deliberately chose not to engage in kidnappings, robberies, or bombings,

favoring instead quietly and patiently building up an extensive clandestine apparatus in

anticipation of a future moment when a politico-military formation would be needed. Second,

while the FLN would suffer much of the same deadly repression that was directed at other

guerrilla groups, it proved able to survive that repression when every other group, with the

notable exception of PROCUP, was unable to do so. Third, the FLN would eventually establish a

genuine base of popular support in the indigenous communities of Chiapas, leading ultimately to

the founding and explosive growth of the EZLN. So, while the experiences of the LC23S and

other second wave groups are certainly worthy of independent study, their significance in

understanding the origins of the distinctive politics of the EZLN is more limited. In the specific

case of LC23S the campaign of repression that their actions provoked would accidentally, catch

up and almost destroy the FLN. Unlike the experiences of the GPG and the PdlP which the FLN

came to regard as constituting a national tradition of protracted peoples war on which it would

build, the FLN regarded the experiences of the LC23S and other second wave groups as a source

of largely negative lessons.


CHAPTER 10: PATH OF FIRE

On the night of February 14, 1974 over 50 federal troops and police officers launched an

assault on a house in the town of Nepantla outside of Mexico City. Firing teargas and then live

ammunition they quickly killed five of the inhabitants and captured two others. The house was

the headquarters of the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN), a clandestine politico-military

organization committed to the revolutionary overthrow of the Mexican state and its replacement

with a socialist republic. The FLN had a network of safe-houses in several cities and the location

of their headquarters was revealed the previous day when the two other member sof the FLN

were captured in a safe-house in the city of Monterrey. The capture of the FLN’s headquarters

provided the state authorities with even more information which was then used to carry out

further arrests and to raid a guerrilla encampment established by the FLN in the Lacandon

Jungle. The guerrillas however had fled and it would take almost another two months for the

Mexican Army to hunt down and kill or disappear all of its members.

The raids on the FLN occurred in the context of the larger “dirty war” then being waged

against a number of guerrilla groups then active in Mexico. The methods of repression used were

generally effective and by the end of 1974 most of the groups were either destroyed or on their

last legs. The raids on the FLN very nearly destroyed the group that had been founded five years

earlier. Instead the surving members of the FLN were able to regroup and eventually rethink

some of the errors that had made them so vulnerable. Nine years later they would plant another

guerrilla nucleus in the Lacandon Jungle and declare the formation of the EZLN. This chapter

traces the history of the FLN and is divided into three sections. The first excavates the roots of

the organization in the Mexican student movement of the 1960s up to its founding in Monterrey


in 1969. The second section follows the development of the group through its repression in 1974.

The third and final section examines the process through which the FLN regrouped and

reconceived itself and concludes of the eve of the founding of the EZLN in 1983.

This chapter is heavily indebted to the unpublished theses of Adela Cedillo, El fuego y el

silencio: Historia de las Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional Mexicanas (1969-1974)(2008)

and El suspiro del del silencio: De la reconstrucción de las Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional a la

fundación del Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (1974-1983)as well as on primary

documents Cedillo graciously shared with me.

10.1 ORIGINS OF THE FUERZAS DE LIBERACION NACIONAL

The Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (FLN) was founded on August 6, 1969 in the city of

Monterrey in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. Like both the Maoists and the other guerrilla

groups described previously, the FLN was in large part a product of the radicalization of the

student movement over the course of the 1960s. Even before the repression of the movement in

1968 this process had produced a layer of activists convinced that the time had come for

revolutionary guerrilla warfare. Thus when the movement exploded and was then brutally

repressed in 1968 many of the newly radicalized participants in that upsurge were able to find

small circles of somewhat more experienced activists already in the process of building

clandestine politico-military organizations.

The founding nucleus and first recruits to the FLN were almost all drawn from this layer

of students and young professionals that had already been radicalized and disposed towards

armed struggle before the repression of the student movement. It is important to emphasize this

point. While the repression of the student movement gave the FLN and other political military


initiative a greatly enlarged pool of prospective young recruits, it was not, as has often been

suggested, the proximate cause of their appearance. While their seeming proliferation in the

years immediately following 1968 suggested to many that these groups arose in direct response

to the massacre in Tlatelolco, they were in fact the product of more protracted processes of

political radicalization and strategic reflection on the exhaustion of other political options. The

Tlatelolco massacre certainly underlined, and became a shorthand for, these conclusions, but it is

a misreading to think that they were arrived at overnight. This is neither to suggest that these

groups did not make serious errors nor that they did not act impulsively in the heat of rapidly

developing events. It is, however, to reject a popular but simplistic psychological account of the

motivations of those who chose to pursue the path of armed struggle in this period that sees them

primarily as a reflexive response to a single traumatic event.

In this section I will trace the origins of the FLN in the radicalized student milieu of

Monterrey, but also in the cities of Puebla and Villahermosa, from the early 1960s up to the eve

of the FLN’s founding in 1969. The founders of the FLN were themselves in fact “veterans” of a

previous guerrilla venture, the very short-lived Ejerito Insurgente Mexicano (EIM) which had

failed spectacularly in an attempt to establish itself in the Lacadon Jungle in Chiapas. Long

before their involvement in the EIM, however, the members of the founding nucleus of the FLN

were obtaining a revolutionary political education through their participation in a series of

popular struggles and movements.

Monterrey

The largest fraction and most important leading members of the group of radicalized

students and young professionals who would initiate the FLN came from the city of Monterrey in


the northern state of Nuevo Leon, which, after Mexico City is the most important financial and

industrial center in the country. While more conservative than Mexico City, Monterrey would

see a revitalization of the left over the course of the 1960s. As elsewhere, the example of the

Cuban Revolution and the consequent organization of the short-lived MLN would nurture a

revolutionary nationalist left in Monterrey out of which would emerge a cohort of young radicals

prepared to pursue the path of revolutionary armed struggle in Mexico.

A leading figure in this whole process was César Yáñez Muñoz, a law student who began

his studies at the University of Nuevo León in 1958 where he also entered the Vicente Guerrero

lodge of the Asociación de Jóvenes Esperanza de la Fraternidad (Hope of Fraternity Youth

Association or AJEF), a Masonic youth organization originally established in Cuba in 1936.

Masonic organizations have a long history of involvement in radical and revolutionary

movement in Latin America, and the Vicente Guerrero lodge was very much in this tradition,

with members studying Marxism-Leninism as well as acquiring the habits of secrecy

characteristic of Masonic orders. Both the AJEF’s prior cubanophilia and its revolutionary

sympathies were only reinforced by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Other members of the

Vicente Guerrero lodge included Carlos Arturo Vives Chapa, Mario Alberto Sáenz Garcia, and

Graciano Alejandro Sánchez Aguilar, all of whom would later participate in the founding of the

FLN. (Cedillo 2008:124)

Like many other Mexican universities during this time, the University of Nuevo Leon

was the site of often intense struggles over its direction, with more progressive and more

reactionary elements within Mexico’s ruling circles struggling for hegemony over the new and

rapidly expanding institutions of higher education. In the course of one such struggle, the

members of the Vicente Guerrero lodge under Yañez’s leadership formed themselves in 1963


into an explicitly political organization, Vanguardia Socialista (Socialist Vanguard) which

proceeded to lead a student strike and install Yañez as president of the student association of the

university’s division of law and social sciences. In this capacity the members of Yañez’s circle

made contact with the MLN in Mexico City. They promptly joined the MLN and took

responsibility for building the organization in Nuevo León. By this point the PPS had already

split with the MLN, but the PCM and its affiliated organizations in Nuevo Leon continued to

support and participated in the initiative. While their involvement in the MLN would be short-

lived as Cedillo (2008:126) notes, its “principles of revolutionary nationalism and political

frontism” would be “determinant” in the “ideological configuration” of the future founders of the

FLN.

In the next year the MLN would split over how to relate to the 1964 presidential

elections, with Cardenas supporting the PRI’s candidate, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, and the PCM

supporting the campaign of Danzós Palomino of the Frente Electoral del Pueblo (People’s

Electoral Front or FEP). In 1965 Yañez’s group would leave the MLN; several members,

including Yañez, would travel to Cuba, and the group would shortly thereafter begin publishing

an agitational newspaper, Pueblo y revolución (People and Revolution). They would also join the

Sociedad de Amigos de la China Popular (Peoples China Friendship Society) and organize

themselves as the Union Revolucionaria Socialista (URS). Over the next two years the URS

would involve itself in a wide range of initiatives including local worker and campesino

struggles, opposition to the US invasion of the Dominican Republic and solidarity with the

Vietnamese national liberation struggle. The most significant of these initiatives would be their

participation in the organization of the José Marti Institute of Mexican-Cuban Cultural Relations

(IMCRC), established in 1967 with the financial support of the Cuban embassy. By this point the


group had come to include Yañez’s younger brother Fernando, trained as an architect, and Elisa

Irena Sáenz, a kindergarten teacher. By 1968 Carlos Vives was the president of the Institute and

Elisa Sáenz was its treasurer. (Cedillo 2008:128-131)

The previous experiences of the members of the URS in the MLN, and in support of local

worker and campesino struggles, convinced them that the peaceful legal road to a socialist

Mexico was closed and that armed struggle would be necessary. The question then became, what

were the next steps. As Cedillo explains,

From before the beginning of the student movement in Mexico City, the Monterrey youth

of the IMCRC, trained through Masonry in the arts of secrecy and conspiracy, fascinated

by the Cuban Revolution, reinforced ideologically by the left-wing revolutionary

nationalism of the MLN, with experience in the frustration of open struggle and

experienced in leading a self-financed organization, became resolved that the only thing

that they lacked to launch the armed struggle was military training. (2008:131)

It was thus with the intention of securing military training that in the summer of 1968,

Carlos Vives travelled to Cuba to participate in the July 26 commemoration of the Cuban

Revolution. In Cuba, Vives sought out Giraldo Mazola, director of the Instituto Cubano de

Amistad con los Pueblos (the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the People), to request training

for his group in the methods of guerrilla warfare. Mazola indicated that given the importance of

Cuban-Mexican relations he would have to consult with his superiors and Vives never received

any further response. Despite some suggestions to the contrary by La Grange and Rico

(1998:132), there is no serious evidence of Cuban support for either the EIM or the FLN, or

indeed for any other political military organization in Mexico. (Cedillo 2008:131, 163) While

Cuba was arming, training, and financing guerrilla groups across the rest of Latin America,

Mexico remained off-limits.


Puebla and Villahermosa

A similar process of radicalization was taking place in the city of Puebla in the state of

the same name just south of Mexico City. Julieta Glockner Rossainz was first politicized as a

result of her participation in the Movimiento Carolino which swept Puebla in 1961 in opposition

to the right-wing activities of the University Anti-Communist Front (FUA). Her father Dr. Julio

Glockner had, as rector of the Autonomous University of Puebla, spearheaded a democratic

reform of the university. He eliminated symbols of elitism and proposed that the rector’s position

be directly elected by the university community. The same year that his daughter joined the

Movimiento Carolino, Dr. Glockner joined the National Liberation Movement (MLN). The

Glockner house was therefore already a center of radical political activity in Puebla in the early

1960s. In January 1963, at the invitation of the MLN, Julieta Glockner attended the All-

American Women’s Congress in Havana. Only 16 years old at the time, she was able to meet and

visit Ché Guevara in his home. It was an experience that would shape the rest of her life. (Marin

1995; Puig 1995)

In 1964, Julieta joined a movement in solidarity with small dairy farmers against a

regulation requiring the pasteurization of all milk sold in the state. The measure threatened to

drive the smaller farmers out of business. It was during this period that she and several of her

friends, including Carlos Martin del Campo whom she soon married, also joined the PCM’s

youth group, the Juventud Comunista. A year later she had her first and only child, Carlos. Her

husband, Martin del Campo, was active at the time in the clandestine Movimiento de Liberación

Latinoamericano (the Latin American Liberation Movement or MLL), which sought to, but

never succeeded in, establishing itself as a guerrilla group. In the aftermath of the Tlatelolco


massacre, however, Martin del Campo would be arrested and convicted on charges of terrorism

and sentenced to 17 years in prison. (Cedillo 2008:140)

Julieta’s older brother, Napoleon, was undergoing a similar process of radicalization. In

1966 he travelled to Cuba to attend the commemoration of the assault on the Moncada barracks

where he made contact with Dr. Alfredo Zarate, who was involved with a radical breakaway

from the MLN, the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Movement

or MRP) that was active from 1964 until it was broken up with the arrest of its leadership in

1966. (Cedillo 2008:125–132)

Villahermosa

In contrast with both Puebla and Monterrey, the student movement that exploded in 1968

at the Universidad Juarez de Tabasco in the city of Villahermosa did not have deeper historic

roots in the left. There was no independent left on the campus and student politics there revolved

entirely around factional battles within the PRI. In April 1968, however, the refusal of the state

government to act on student demands for increased spending on the university prompted a

student strike. The strike was attacked by thugs aligned with the government and a normalista

was shot and thrown into one of the city’s lagoons. This in turn sparked a mass movement that

demanded the resignation of the state governor. By late July, the movement in Tabasco was

acting in coordination with the student movement in Mexico City and on July 27 demonstrators

attempted to set fire to the state offices of the PRI and the offices of the official newspaper,

Diario de Tabasco. In the repression that followed, at least ten students were killed, more were

wounded, and hundreds were arrested. In the aftermath of the repression the official student

organization split in two and the more radicalized students formed the Federación Estudiantil


Universitaria Independiente de Tabasco (the Independent University Student Federation of

Tabasco or FEUIT) which, among other things, distinguished itself by expressing open support

for the Cuban Revolution. While the FEUIT itself would eventually be coopted back into the fold

of the ruling party, a number of its members, including one Rafael Vidal, would take up the path

of armed struggle. (Cedillo 2008:141–145)

The nucleii of young revolutionaries that had emerged independently in Moterrey,

Puebla, and Villahermosa, would soon be brought together through the formation of the ill-fated

Ejercito Insurgente Mexicano.

The Ejercito Insurgente Mexicano

At the moment that the student movement was exploding in Tabasco, Mexico City and

across the country, Carlos Vives was still in Cuba. If his attempts to secure military training from

the Cuban government were unsuccessful, his travels there were not entirely fruitless. He was not

the only Mexican on the island interested in forming a guerrilla organization, and in the course of

his trip he came into contact with Ignacio González Ramírez, a Mexico City biology instructor

and also a former member of the MLN. González was himself a recruit to the Ejército Insurgente

Mexicano, a still embryonic guerilla group formed sometime in early 1968 by the journalist

Mario Renato Menéndez, originally from Merida, Dr. Alfredo Zárate Mota from Veracruz, and

another medical doctor know only by his alias “Justo.”

Following his return to Monterrey, and with the support of his circle there, Vives

travelled to Mexico City where he made contact with Menéndez and informed him that the group

in Monterrey wanted to join the EIM. Menéndez, however, feigned ignorance of the project at

this initial meeting and Vives returned to Monterrey. (Cedillo 2008:162–164)


Menéndez had distinguished himself as a journalist writing for the newsmagazine

Sucesos by getting interviews with the Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (FAR) in Guatemala, the

Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) in Venezuela, and the Ejercito de Liberación

Nacional (ELN) in Colombia. In 1968 Menéndez began publishing his own newsweekly, Por

Que? It was a peculiar publication, a lurid tabloid that was openly critical of the PRI and clearly

sympathetic with the radical left. Though he never joined the group, Menéndez had contacts with

the MRP. The MRP’s guerrilla ambitions were cut short before they got very far when its

leadership was arrested, but it was through the MRP that Menéndez made contact with Dr.

Alfredo Zárate. (Cedillo 2008:157-164)

Cedillo believes that at the moment Vives contacted him in the midst of the 1968 student

movement that Menéndez had probably set aside his plans to build the EIM. Before its final

repression, the student movement appeared to promise the possibility of securing some sort of

democratic opening in Mexico through mass action in the form of strikes, occupations and street

protests. The wing of the organized radical left that was being drawn to armed struggle at this

time was largely caught unawares by the explosion of the student movement and scrambled to

find ways to participate. As an instructor attached to the UNAM’s Preparatoria No. 6 Ignacio

González was a visible participant in the movement. Por Que? dedicated itself to covering the

movement and this undoubtedly claimed much of Menéndez’s attentions. Indeed Por Que?

would distinguish itself as the only nationally circulated newsmagazine to publish photos of the

October 2 massacre in Tlatelcolco in its immediate aftermath. The murderous repression of the

movement, however, revived interest in the EIM’s plans to establish a guerrilla foco in the

Lacandon Jungle, not least of all among those like González who suddenly found themselves

hunted by the police for their involvement in the student movement. The project of the EIM that


barely existed and had been put on the shelf was thus brought back to life. It was in this context

that Menéndez contacted Vives, arranging to meet with him in November. In January 1969

Menéndez travelled to Monterrey where he met with Vives, César Yañez, Mario Sáenz, and

Mario and Graciano Sanchez, and the five agreed to join the EIM, making arrangements to leave

for Chiapas by way of Mexico City within the month. Raul Morales Villareal was recruited to

remain in Monterrey where he would be responsible for ongoing recruitment and the collection

of supplies. (Cedillo 2008:190–201)

Menéndez was not particularly discriminating in his methods of recruitment and was

consequently able to rather rapidly assemble roughly twenty people willing to participate in his

proposed adventure, of which five would be responsible for recruitment and support in the cities

while the rest would establish a guerrilla base in the Lacandon Jungle. In addition to Yañez’s

group this included a much less experienced group of students from Merida, several students and

one worker from Mexico City and Rafael Vidal, the radical student leader at the Universidad

Juarez de Tabasco (UJAT) in Villahermosa. (Cedillo 2008:200–205)

The EIM’s first encampment was established in December 1968 on the far eastern edge

of the Lacandon Jungle near the Guatemalan border. According to César Yañez’s younger

brother Fernando,

they thought it would be a good place to prepare for and one day launch the armed

struggle in Mexico. (Delgado 1995)

New recruits arrived in small groups between February and May. The would-be guerrillas

changed the location of their encampment frequently and otherwise engaged in various forms of

military training: marches, target practice, taking apart and re-assembling their weapons. The

level of political development in the group was very uneven and little effort was made to correct


this beyond reading and discussing the writings of Ché Guevara. Members of the group with

medical training attempted to establish relations with the neighboring, mainly Tzeltal,

communities by offering free medical exams and exchanging medicine for food. Not particularly

surprisingly, their decision to carry weapons on these rounds raised suspicions. Menéndez,

meanwhile, led a double life, continuing to publish Por Que! and visiting the encampment one

day a week. In Merida his recruitment efforts had been indiscrete and rumors of his project had

even reached the governor who initiated an investigation that obtained statements from two of

Menéndez’s prospective recruits. (Cedillo 2008: 202–212)

Poor planning and serious security lapses would have almost certainly doomed the EIM if

internal conflicts didn’t cause it to fall apart even more quickly than it had been put together. In

late May, Gonzalez, who had played such a critical role in building the group, decided that for

reasons of age and health he was not suited for the life of a rural guerrilla. He negotiated

permission to leave the group and return to Mexico City where he would organize an urban

guerrilla group that would be completely independent of the EIM.

At the same time, Menéndez’s methods were provoking general discontent within the

group, with a number of members nicknaming him “Panfilo Ganso” after the Disney cartoon

character, Gladstone Gander. When Menéndez ordered the group to establish an encampment on

the Guatemalan side of the Usumacinta River, or alternatively to relocate somewhere else in

Mexico where subsistence would be less difficult, the recruits from Merida rebelled and

demanded to leave, which they were allowed to do. Within two weeks, the remaining members

of the group relocated once more. Their ranks now included an indigenous campesino recruit,

Inocencio Cohuoc, who would soon report his experiences to the police. Before he could,

however, the group would fall apart completely. When Menéndez demanded that the group


attempt to capture the city of Valladolid in the state of Yucatan by armed assault, the remaining

members rebelled and decided to disband. Thus the EIM sputtered to an undignified end. From

the ashes of the EIM, however, a new political military formation, the FLN would emerge that

was determined not to repeat the EIM’s mistakes. (Cedillo 2008:202-212)

10.2 THE F.L.N. TO 1974

The history of the FLN can be divided into three quite distinct phases. The first is from

the group’s founding in 1969 to its near destruction in 1974. The second consists of its recovery

after 1974 leading up to the launching of the EZLN in 1983. The third phase from 1983 to the

FLN’s effective dissolution in the run up to the Zapatista uprising in 1994 will be the subject of

the next chapter.

The collapse of the EIM did not mean the end of its members aspirations to undertake

revolutionary armed struggle. Indeed two distinct urban guerrilla groups would rather quickly

emerge from the wreckage of the EIM. One of these, the Comite de Lucha Revolucionaria

(Committee of Revolutionary Struggle or CLR), based in Mexico City would come to a quick

end which we will look at shortly. The other group, the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional would

learn important lessons from the amateurishness and adventurism of the EIM that would lead it

to develop a political and strategic orientation quite distinct from that of all of the other guerrilla

groups to emerge in Mexico.

The five members of Yañez’s group who had participated in the EIM in Chiapas returned

to Monterrey in July 1969 where they were joined by Morales and César’s younger brother,

Fernando. Fernando Yañez had not participated directly in the EIM, but was charged with

securing a safe house where the group decided that they would reconstitute themselves, inviting


the other members of the EIM who had remained until the end to join them. While they were

unwilling to continue under his leadership, Menéndez was also invited to participate. In the end

Menéndez demurred and only two other members of the EIM, Alfredo Zárate and Raul Pérez,

responded to the invitation to meet on August 6 in the safe house near the corner of 15 de Mayo

and Diego de Montemayor in Monterrey. It was then and there that the eight former members of

the EIM decided to constitute themselves as a new organization, the Fuerzas de Liberación

Nacional. Also present, but not voting, as he was not yet a “professional militant,” was

Fernando Yañez. César Yañez was elected as the leader of the new organization and he in turn

selected Zarate as his second-in-command. (Cedillo 2008:218–226; Delgado 1995)

A Distinctive Politics

In many respects the political outlook of the FLN was quite similar to that of many of the

other guerrilla groups to emerge in Mexico in the 1960s and 70s that had their roots in the left-

wing revolutionary nationalism of the MLN. Its stated objectives were articulated in the periodic

internal communiqués of the organization issued under César Yañez’s nom de guerre of Pedro.

These were to build a people’s army that would fight to overthrow the government of the PRI

and to install a socialist government. Mexico’s government and ruling party were seen as

subordinate to the interests of foreign, mainly U.S., capitalist interests, and consequently

responsible for the widespread poverty and misery of the Mexican people. The PRI had, by its

repressive actions against various popular movements, closed off any possibilities for a

democratic or non-violent transformation of the country. The only path remaining was the path

of armed struggle, the effectiveness of which had been or was being demonstrated in China,

Vietnam, Algeria and other countries, but most importantly in Cuba.


In short the FLN partook of the left-wing revolutionary nationalism that animated the

MLN and came to the same general conclusions about what it would take to realize that vision as

had Ruben Jaramillo in Morelos, the GPG in Chihuahua, the ACNR and the PdlP in Guerrero

and, in differing measures, most of the political military groups to emerge in the aftermath of the

repression of the 1968 student movement.

The FLN was not in this period characterized by a particularly worked out theoretical

perspective. They imagined themselves as the precursors of what would be the armed wing of a

broad anti-imperialist front composed of diverse class forces.

An early recruit to the FLN, UNAM philosophy professor Alberto Hijar, described the

various influences on the group’s outlook:

There were no in depth discussions, but rather a relationship of sympathy with the Cuban

Revolution. You know the Yáñez brothers initiated their revolutionary activity with the

Instituto de Amistad de Mexico-Cuba in Monterrey. So this gave them have firsthand

access to materials, just as everyone had. Especially the magazine Politica published, as

a supplement, the writings of Che, or Fidel or some documents that were key. So this then

fed the certainty that, as Ché wrote, “the Cuban revolution had not been an exception.”

But again, I stress there were no in-depth discussions of all this. The writings of Mao,

along with the Vietnamese writings, promoted the concept of protracted peoples war, but

there were also years of very important guerrilla experiences across all of [Latin]

America. The magazines made by Mario Menéndez, Sucesos, Por Qué?, Por Esto …

gave an account of everything what was going on with all the reports which showed

Venezuela, the disputes within the Venezuelan Communist Party, what was happening in

Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and so on. Well, this showed quite clearly that the

Communist Party was more of an obstacle than a source of support for what happened in

Venezuela. The same with what happened with Ché, with what happened in El Salvador

in a less obvious way. So since this was known, it encouraged [us], but without a

systematic study, without any depth. (Hijar 2009b)

Beyond a certain set of rather simple propositions about the necessity of waging armed

struggle to install a socialist government, the FLN did not overly concern itself with elaborating

a theoretical analysis of the political dynamics of Mexican society. Rather it was preoccupied

with the practical tasks of building up a clandestine political-military apparatus in the cities that


it hoped would eventually be able to support a rural-based guerrilla which, it in turn hoped would

become the nucleus of a people’s army. This was still, and would remain for some time,

conceived of in very orthodox Guevarist terms of a guerrilla foco. Neither Guevara’s own recent

fate in Bolivia nor the disastrous experiences of several other would-be focos in Mexico and

elsewhere in Latin America had yet disabused the founders of the FLN of their faith in Guevara’s

strategic approach. Setbacks, including very serious ones, were to be expected. The Cuban

Revolution had supposedly demonstrated that even if objective conditions were not ripe for

revolution that, with determination, the guerrilla foco could create them.

This superficial orthodoxy, however, masked a highly pragmatic, at times even anti-

intellectual, predisposition on the part of the FLN that gave the group a non-dogmatic and non-

sectarian cast, at least in comparison with other contemporaneous guerrilla groups. As Cedillo

argues:

Even if the FLN conceived of themselves as a socialist organization, based in the

scientific principles of Marxism-Leninism and following a Castro-Guevarist military line,

their ideological groundings were to a certain point eclectic and heterodox. These

included liberal, socialist, and nationalist ideas in equal measure, such that if we were to

rigorously define the militants of the FLN, we would have to call them a sort of radical

freethinkers. […] The FLN fetishized neither the proletariat nor the peasantry: historical

experience showed that revolutions were made by diverse social classes. Indeed, in their

discourse they spoke of ‘the class’ as if there was only one that gathered together all the

oppressed equally. In this sense, the FLN were neither workerists nor peasantists, even if,

given their foquista strategic conceptions, they believed that the revolution would unfold

first in the countryside. (2008:226-228)

This is not to suggest that the FLN’s socialist convictions were not sincere or deeply held,

but rather that they were considerably less enamored with the power of the perfectly worked out

theoretical formulation than, for example, the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, which was

notorious for the impenetrability of its theoretical proclamations. An eventual consequence of


this would be an acceptance within the FLNs ranks of an unusual degree of ideological

heterogeneity.

What exactly accounts for this distinctive quality of the FLN? Three points seem worth

noting here. The first is that while the FLN recruited largely (though not exclusively) from the

ranks of university students and young university-educated professionals, the average member of

the FLN was several years older than the average member of any of the other guerrilla groups.

Unlike many other groups, at least until they started recruiting in indigenous communities in

Chiapas in the late 1970s, the FLN refused to recruit the very young.

The second point is the effect on the FLN of its founding members brief experience in the

EIM which undoubtedly served as a rich source of negative lessons on how not to build a

political military organization.

The third point is the influence of the early training that many in the founding groups had

received in the methods of secrecy through their involvement with Masonry. In the case of an

initially very small and compact organization like the FLN, these influences were able to forge a

distinctive internal political culture which then reproduced itself as the organization grew.

It was thus in the FLN’s practical decisions, rather than any worked out theoretical

formula, that it initially distinguished itself from other guerrilla groups. Over time this distinctive

practice would be theorized, but it is clear that the practice precede the theory. The first of these

practical decisions concerned the financing of the organization. The group discussed very early

on a proposal to follow the example of many other groups and to finance itself through bank

robberies and kidnappings of bankers, industrialists, prominent elected officials and similar

targets. Unlike virtually every other guerrilla group operating in Mexico at the time, however,

the FLN rejected this option. The initial reasons for this rejection were not any ethical or even


political objections, but rather simply the group’s lack of sufficient training and capacity. This

pragmatic assessment, however, is itself revealing, because in actual fact the FLN was hardly

alone in being ill-prepared to carry off such actions successfully. Indeed it was precisely the

reliance on robberies and kidnappings, and the consequent early military engagement with the

Mexican state, that would prove the downfall of many other groups. The rapid disintegration of

the PdlP as a result of the kidnapping of Ruben Figueroa would be only the best known instance

of this. In retrospect it is clear that the FLN’s assessment of its own actual capacities was more

realistic than that of other groups and that this likely contributed to their surviving, at least

organizationally, the intense dirty war that would be waged on all the armed organizations active

in this period.

The FLN opted to finance itself chiefly through the contributions of its supporters and

later by establishing small enterprises that could support its operations and give it access to

various necessary materials. While this did not entirely exclude illegal methods such as credit

card fraud, it did greatly reduce the likelihood of armed conflicts with police or soldiers. It also

meant that a great deal of the organization’s energies had to be devoted to building up their

networks of supporters willing to carry the responsibility of financially supporting a clandestine

politico-military organization.

While the initial decision not to carry out robberies and kidnappings was initially

motivated by purely practical considerations it rather quickly evolved into a matter of political

principle. By 1972 the national leadership of the FLN rejected all such actions not just on the

grounds that they were highly risky, but also that they were repugnant to the vast majority of the

Mexican people and consequently undercut any efforts to win popular support for the armed

movement. This assessment was undoubtedly informed by the overwhelmingly negative popular


reception of such actions when they were carried out by other groups. Cedillo characterizes this

stance as essentially “anti-militarist” and argues that it transformed the FLN into “the most

exceptional [group in] the Mexican armed movement.” (2008:178-179)

In contrast with other groups which saw their task in terms of launching the armed

struggle as quickly as possible, the FLN adopted a strategy based on what in other contexts has

been called the “slow accumulation of forces.” While they thought that guerrilla warfare would

be a necessary, indeed critical, component of a larger revolutionary struggle, they saw their tasks

in terms of preparing for that moment rather than in precipitating it. Indeed, between their

founding in 1969 and their dissolution in 1993 on the eve of the Zapatista uprising, the FLN

dedicated itself to building up its political and military capacities without ever initiating

hostilities against Mexican security forces. On several occasions over these 24 years the FLN

found itself engaged in combat, and suffered significant losses, but only as a consequence of

inadvertent discovery by police or military forces.

As Subcomandante Insurgente Marcoswould explain decades later, the FLN’s political

analysis

foresaw a radicalization and polarization of the different elements of Mexican society --

the state on one side, the people on the other -- and that this polarization was going to

result in a civil war. On the military plane this posed a new possibility -- that didn’t

consist of preparing for war, for initiating a war, but rather to prepare for when the war

breaks out. It’s an organization that doesn’t intend to initiate combat but rather to appear

when it becomes necessary. The idea is that, in this case, the people were going to need

an armed group to defend themselves, to fight, to resist the actions of the Federal Army,

of the government’s army. (Le Bot 124)

While the FLN devoted considerable efforts to obtaining firearms and training its

members in their use, it very consciously rejected the fetishization of guns that characterized

many other armed organizations. When the FLN’s existence eventually became known, this


cautiousness earned them a reputation among other political military formations as “fresas

armadas,” armed yuppies or middle class guerrilla wannabes without the courage to actually

engage in armed actions. Similar criticisms arose from within the FLN’s own rank as well. Hijar

regarded the FLN’s failure to engage in armed actions as a deficiency,

This justified this extreme clandestinity of the Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional, but at the

same time, it was terrible that no action was taken against the massacres that the [Liga

Comunista] 23 de September 23, and then Genaro Vásquez, and after that Lucio Cabañas

had suffered. The merit of Rafael Guillén [Marcos] is, without doubt, to have broken with

this tradition of extreme clandestinity, having broken with the Fuerzas de Liberación

Nacional. (Hijar 2009)

The FLN was also characterized by a sort of elitism. Ismael Velázquez was born into a

family in which many members, including his parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles

participated in the FLN in various capacities. According to him the group took to heart Lenin’s

famous call for “better fewer, but better” and pursued a policy of recruiting only those prospects

that they regarded as examples of what Ismael Velazquez called “moral excellence.”(2009) They

were individuals characterized by a very high level of commitment to the revolutionary project

of human emancipation and a willingness to sacrifice their lives in its pursuit. Decades later

Fernando Yañez explained the new group’s outlook:

We had nothing more than our own will and our ideals with which to do things, and the

plan of not forcing anything. One had to have a consciousness that others would take up

the guns, that they would go down this long road with the conviction, not to take up the

gun and make a fetish of guns and money.(Yañez Muñoz 2003b)

Organizational Practice

The FLN’s strategy was to build an organization that would have two distinct

components. The first was an urban apparatus composed of professional militants living in

clandestinity with networks of above-ground supporters. The second component part, which


would only be initiated when the first was sufficiently developed, was to be a rural-based

guerrilla foco. The expected function of the urban apparatus, at least in the first phases of any

revolutionary process would be to support the rural guerrilla with trained recruits and supplies.

The approach of the FLN to building this apparatus strongly reflected the negative experience of

the EIM. Rather than rushing off to establish a foco in the jungle, the FLN dedicated itself for its

first few years to building up its urban infrastructure so that when the attempt was finally made

to establish the foco, known as the Nucleo Guerrillero Emiliano Zapata (the Emiliano Zapata

Guerrilla Nucleus), the participants would be properly prepared and their urban support structure

would be sufficient for its tasks. (Cedillo 2008:231-244)

The urban apparatus of the FLN was, in turn, divided between professional militants and

members of local support networks organized into cells known as Estudiantes y Obreros en

Lucha (Students and Workers in Struggle or EYOL) which were charged with raising funds and

obtaining supplies in support of the clandestine structure.

The professional militants would live clandestinely in safe houses established in several

cities where they would train themselves in the various skills they expected to need as rural

guerrillas and otherwise dedicate themselves to developing their capacity to operate in secrecy.

In addition to training in the use of firearms and other forms of combat, they learned radio

communications, bootmaking, combat medicine, document forgery, automobile mechanics and

similar skills. The mastery of these various technical skills was elevated as a form of political

consciousness raising. In addition to securing the self-sufficiency of the organization, manual

labor was regarded as means of achieving a proletarian political consciousness.

Each of the support networks was under the leadership of a local responsable who in turn

answered to the national responsable. The local responsables were charged with the ongoing


political and military training of the members underneath them as well as securing a safe-house,

a postal box, and phone, none of which could be associated with the others. The local

responsable would in turn appoint members of the networks as commissions of information,

finances, supplies, “special operations,” and propaganda. The commission for “special

operations” was charged with harassing enemy forces, but was never in fact established.

Similarly the propaganda commission would not be established until the organization was ten

years old. This reflected a slogan promoted by César Yañez: “before propaganda, organization;

before action, preparation; before confrontation, discipline.”

First Steps

Between the founding of the FLN in 1969 and its first attempt to implant a new foco in

the Lacandon Jungle in 1972, the organization dedicated itself to the slow and patient

construction of its urban apparatus. The first of the FLN’s urban networks was established more

or less immediately in Monterrey and drew on the breadth of contacts that the founders of the

group already had in that city. Under the leadership of César’s brother Fernando and Elisa Saenz,

the network included “workers, mechanic, hairdressers, lawyers, teachers, bureaucrats,

housewives, etc… even though a majority of its members were middle class.” (Cedillo

2008:248) The second network was established between 1969 and 1970 in the city of

Villahermosa where the FLN recruited EIM veteran Rafael Vidal Jesús who, in turn, recruited

from the ranks of radicalized students at UJAT. Through the Villahermosa network, Carlos

Vives was able to secure a position as secretary to municipal president in the town of Estación

Juarez which would later serve as a jumping off point for the rural guerrilla foco. The third

network, also established in 1969, was in Mexico City and under the leadership of María Teresa


González Carmona, half-sister of Ignacio González Ramírez, who was around 40 years old. The

fourth network was based in the city of Puebla under the leadership of Napoleón Glockner

Carreto. ( Cedillo 2008:248-251)

Attempts were also made in this period to establish two other networks, one in Veracruz

and the other in the city of Chihuahua. In the case of Veracruz, the FLN was able to successfully

establish several safe houses, including in the remote and mountainous Huasteca region, while in

Chihuahua their prospective recruits opted instead to join two other guerrilla groups, the

Movimiento 23 de Septiembre and the North Korean-trained Movimiento Armada

Revolucionaria.

Among the earliest recruits to the Mexico City network was Alberto Hijar, a Professor of

Philosophy affiliated with the School of Architecture at the UNAM. Hijar had been very active

in the 1968 student movement and his office had become a center of student activism. After the

Tlatelcolco massacre he remained active, organizing clandestine meetings while the university

was under military occupation. Hijar describes the process of his recruitment:

A very dear friend invited me and I immediately said “Yes.” This was done with the

classical triangulation of security. That is to say that the person who invited you

introduced you to who would be your responsable, and the relationship was always

between the responsable and the candidate, who had joined. The activity was barely

political, because what was most important was to test ones discipline, to follow order.

Later we would joke with some compañeros “We’ll see you in so many days, bring a can

of calcium supplements, of so many batteries, of such and such size, etcetera” and this

could go on for some time, these type of orders. But as one was involved in getting other

things, and the political formation was very limited, it was constrained, it was limited to

the relationship with the responsable, to comment on the events of the day and well,

some book someone would have at hand, which could be a book by Nguyen Giap on

protracted peoples war, something that was the reading for that time, and the “What did

the Cubans do?” “What did the Vietnamese do to win such a difficult war?” “What did

Mao do?” etcetera. (2009b)


While the FLN maintained strict separation between supporters and full-time militants

who lived in its safehouses, Hijar was granted a special status.

There was always a division between the professionals, that is to say those who had gone

underground, something that I always I resisted because I believe I was much more useful

aboveground because of the relations that I have, which I have built, not only in Mexico,

but with very diverse organizations in other places. In order that I could have a constant

and disciplined participation, I would go to safe houses blindfolded and so on, and

participate in courses, meetings, there I would see leading cadres and we would deal with

some problem. In my case the division between professionals and and others, had special

characteristics. I never moved into a safehouse, but I came and went from them

frequently.

Interruptions

The initial process of building up the FLN’s urban apparatus was interrupted twice. The

first interruption occurred in February 1970 when the CLR carried out a bombing against the

offices of the right-wing Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN). The members of the CLR were

promptly rounded up and tortured with the result that the activities of Mario Menéndez and the

EIM finally came to the attention of the the national police, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad

or DFS. Menéndez and the Yucatecan participants in the EIM were arrested.

The fall of the CLR precipitated the FLN’s first “red alert.” The professional militants

were all relocated to Puebla where they were received by Julieta Glockner who organized safe

houses for them for six months until it was decided that they could safely return to their

respective cities. (Delgado 1995) As it turned out, the only member of the FLN identified and

targeted for arrest as a consequence of these events was Zarate. (Cedillo 2008:251)

The second interruption occurred a year and a half later in July 1971 when an FLN

safehouse in Monterrey was accidentally discovered by the police. (Cedillo 2008:253-258) The

frequent traffic involving out-of-state cars and the fact that the windows of the house were


always shuttered raised the suspicions of a neighbor who alerted the police. The police placed the

house under surveillance and were convinced that it was being used for drug trafficking. The

response of the police was to knock on the door and propose that the supposed drug dealers split

their stash! The two FLN militants present in the house used the “negotiations” with the police to

buy time first to burn documents and then to engineer a successful escape that involved a brief

exchange of gunfire with the police. This would be the FLN’s first experience of combat. It was

only in the aftermath of the shootout, that the police realized that they had stumbled on a

guerrilla safehouse when in addition to a cache of guns, they found a trove of

Chinese and Cuban propaganda, Marxist books, manuals on warfare, urban guerilla war,

and sabotage, instructions on changing ones physical appearance, a piece of film of a

speech by Ché Guevara, three communiqués from the National Leadership [of the FLN],

a pamphlet for translating words from Mayan to Spanish, a list of names and phone

numbers, forms, credentials, letterhead of different institutions […](Cedillo 2008:255)

and similar assorted materials. The discovery of the safehouse in turn led them to the

homes and workplaces of various members and supporters of the FLN and their families.

Eugenio Peña Garza, a lawyer and aboveground member of the FLN’s support structure who

owned the safehouse, was captured fleeing to Veracruz. He would be sentenced to five years in

prison, of which he served less than two. All of the other FLN members whose identities were

revealed were able to escape, though a number of members of the support network in Monterrey

were compelled to go permanently underground. A further consequence of the discovery of the

safehouse in Monterrey was the discovery of the location of the safehouse in Puebla that had

been used during the “red alert” in 1970.

The discovery of the safehouses also compelled the FLN in violation of its own security

norms to temporarily relocate many of its full-time members to a safehouse in Veracruz called

La Quinta where they all received training in “the use of weapons, first-aid, politics, and


Tzeltal.” If these events interrupted the FLN’s growth, the strategic retreat also appears to have

helped consolidate the group and cement its distinctive identity. Carmen Ponce Custodio and

Alfredo Zarate were married in La Quinta during this period. Three other FLN couples would

also marry in 1971. The effect of these marriages on top of existing blood ties between various

members gave the organization what Cedillo called a “family character.” The fall of the CLR and

the discovery of the FLN safehouse in Monterrey caused the FLN to become even more attentive

to organizational security. This included, among other measures, according to Cedillo, the

probable execution for desertion of two members of the FLN by their own comrades. (2008:264-

267)

According to an internal history written years later in violation of its own security norms

by 1971the FLN had 20 full-time members living in clandestinity and supported by an

aboveground structure made up of 50 aboveground urban militants. The organization would

continue to grow over the next couple years and by 1973 counted 25 full-time members, and 100

urban militants. (FLN 1979)

International developments continued to inform debates on the Mexican left that

influenced the willingness of young radicals to turn towards armed struggle. The military coup

that overthrew the Unidad Popular government of Salavdor Allende in Chile on September 11,

1973 was such a development. Allende’s election and the revolutionary changes it seemed to

herald convinced many on the left of the possibility of an electoral road to socialism in Latin

America. The U.S. sponsored coup that installed the regime of General Augusto Pinochet had

the opposite effect of convincing many young activists in Mexico, as elsewhere, that the electoral

road was closed and that armed struggle would be necessary. This, of course, improved the


prospects for recruitment to the FLN as well as the other clandestine political military formations

active at the time. (Cedillo 2008: 220)

Return to the Jungle

By 1972 the growth of the organization convinced the FLN’s leadership that they were

finally ready to make another attempt to establish a rural guerrilla foco. Cedillo believes that at

the moment of their founding the FLN was already thinking specifically in terms of a return to

the Lacandon Jungle for several reasons. First, it was an area with which they had already

acquired some familiarity. (Yañez Muñoz 2003a) Second, it offered uniquely auspicious terrain,

the largest expanse of mountainous and largely roadless jungle terrain in the country. Third, its

location near the narrowest part of the national territory held out the future possibility of

physically dividing the country and transforming the Yucatan Peninsula into a vast liberated rear

area. (FLN 1980b) Fourth, the Lacandon Jungle’s porous border with Guatemala offered

potential refuge from counter-insurgency operations. (In the early 1980s the opposite proved true

when Guatemalan guerrillas along with a large population of civilian refugees, found refuge in

Chiapas from especially murderous counter-insurgency campaign waged by the Guatemalan

armed forces.)

In attempts to understand the causes of the Zapatista Uprising the question has often been

posed of why Chiapas rather than some other part of Mexico. Most attempts to answer this

question rightly concentrate on the the character of the indigenous campesino movement that

arose in the state in the 1970s. Often ignored, however, is the thinking of the FLN which, as we

will see, was not in fact particularly attentive to the character of the indigenous campesino

movement, not least because it had not really even emerged when they made their first attempts


to establish a foco. The FLN’s calculations in choosing the Lacandon Jungle were primarily

military in nature. While the FLN expected that their foco would find willing recruits among the

indigenous campesino population of the Lacandon Jungle, there is nothing to suggest that they

had any special appreciation of the question of indigenous rights or any particular awareness of

the emerging indigenous campesino movement in Chiapas. Indeed everything suggests that on

the contrary they saw the conflicts in Chiapas in quite orthodox terms of class struggle and

national liberation.

The plan for establishing the foco was simple enough. According to Fernando Yañez,

the FLN’s plan was to establish a farm as a secret training camp from which it would

head out for other parts after having had the experience of having lived in the

jungle.(2003a)

The farmland was purchased by Nau Guichard, a businessman and landowner recruited to

the FLN through his brother Juan, a veterinary student at UJAT. The 80 hectare (roughly 200

acres) plot of land was not far from the site of the EIM’s first attempt to establish a base of

guerrilla operations. The farm, which they called El Chilar under the pretense that they were

attempting to grow chile peppers, adjoined the finca known as El Diamante near Metzabok Lake

north of Ocosingo. (Cedillo 2008:287-289)

On March 27, 1972 César Yañez, Raul Pérez, Juan and Nau Guichard founded the

Nucleo Guerrillero Emiliano Zapata (Emiliano Zapata Guerrilla Nucleus or NGEZ) on the land

that Nau had bought. Sometime later Nau was injured in an accident and had to return to

Villahermosa, but four other members of the FLN would eventually join the group. These

included Mario Saenz, Federico Carballo, and Carlos Vives. The last to arrive was Elisa Saenz in

November 1973. The group also counted on the support of Fidelino Velazquez, a local Tzeltal

campesino known from the days of the EIM.


The NGEZ dedicated itself primarily to military training and learning how to survive in

the jungle. While most immediately concerned with these tasks, the NGEZ expected that it

would eventually recruit from the local indigenous communities and consequently sought to

establish political relations with their neighbors. The indigenous population in the vicinity of El

Diamante was divided between the Lacandon Indians and more recent Tzeltal settlers. The

NGEZ focused its efforts at developing relations with the Lacandon. As Cedillo notes this choice

reflected

their ignorance or lack of analysis of the implications that the Decree of the Lacandon

Community would have (2008:293)

as well as a lack of appreciation of the cultural obstacles to winning the Lacandon to guerrilla

warfare. As discussed previously, the presidential decree granted the very small Lacandon

community title to an enormous swath of the Lacandon Jungle. While the primary purpose of this

decree was to facilitate the exploitation of the jungle’s timber by the parastatal logging company,

COFOLASA, its effect on the Lacandon Indians themselves would be to tie their interests to

those of the state and to sharpen already strained relations with the Tzeltal and other colonizers

who were carving agrarian communities out of the jungle.

Independent of the effects of the presidential decree, the orientation of the NGEZ was a

profound misreading of the respective revolutionary potential of the two peoples. Whereas the

Tzeltales were long established as campesinos and possessed a tradition of often intense struggle

with Chiapas’s landowning oligarchy, the Lacandon had survived largely by avoiding

confrontation and living a semi-nomadic existence in the more remote reaches of the jungle. In

retrospect, the FLN would acknowledge that the Lacandon Indians had “shown a profound

aversion” to the idea of armed struggle. (Cedillo 2008:293; FLN 1980c) In spite of these


considerable obstacles the members of the NGEZ were able to establish relatively strong

relations of mutual trust with their Lacandon neighbors and were nonetheless still remembered

by them in a very positive light decades later even if these feelings had little prospect for

developing into active participation in the NGEZ’s political project. (Cedillo 2008:292) -294

In contrast, the NGEZ did not have particularly good relations with their Tzeltal

neighbors. There was a dispute over the boundary between their lands and those of the

community of Nuevo Esperanza that had even led members of the guerrilla nucleus to fire shots

at two members of that community who had cleared some of the disputed land, perhaps to grow

marijuana. In the process one was wounded in the hand and causing him to file charges with the

authorities in Ocosingo.

While the NGEZ was taking the first steps towards establishing a guerrilla foco in the

Lacandon Jungle, the FLN’s urban structure was dedicated to supporting this endeavor with

materiel and personnel. In October 1973, the FLN established its national headquarters in the

town of Nepantla in the state of Mexico. The headquarters or Casa Grande was an old house

with a large yard surrounded by a two meter high wall (Cedillo 2008:271-273)

It became the focus of the urban structure’s efforts to support the foco. As Cedillo

explains,

The National Directorate intended that militants who lived in the Casa Grande would be

trained in order to be sent to the rural guerrilla camp. Thus the house in Nepantla became

a kind of cadre school in which each individual should cover a function: “Martín” forged

documents and handled the photographic equipment, “Manolo” was responsible for

repairing the cars of the nearby networks, “Gabriel” operated the mimeograph to

reproduce documents and was learning to tan leather in order to learn how to make boots.

“Santiago” operated the radio and the women were responsible for the garden (planting

alfalfa and caring for fruit trees) and the raising animals (chickens, turkeys and rabbits).

In addition, “Sol” studied electrical work and “Maria Luisa” was the second official

translator of the group (English was her second language). […]Periodically “Jaime”

carried finished weapons to Nepantla and “Federico” came at least twice a month to pick


up weapons and supplies for the rural nucleus. “Federico” also delivered and received (in

letters and recordings on cassettes) correspondence between “Santiago” and “Manuel,”

on matters of exclusive concern to the National Directorate. “Paz,” “Sergio” and “Leo”

also conferred with “Salvador” on the work of their networks. Nobody other than these

responsables (with their respective co-responsables) knew the location of the

headquarters. (2008:273)

The Dirty War Comes Home

By early 1974 the FLN had successfully avoided any confrontation with state security

forces since the discovery of their safehouse in Monterrey in 1971. For almost two years they

had operated a guerrilla training camp in the Lacandon Jungle, supplying it through an elaborate

and clandestine urban support system. The FLN’s overall strategic orientation and fastidious

security measures had effectively protected them from the ravages of the Mexican state’s dirty

war against other revolutionary guerrilla groups.

On February 13, 1974, however, this period of peace came to an abrupt end with the

discovery by the police in Monterrey of another FLN safehouse. In the days and weeks that

followed the FLN would suffer a series of blows that almost destroyed the organization. The

organization that would emerge in the aftermath of these blows would have to be almost entirely

rebuilt and would be profoundly marked by the experience of brutal repression.

The Monterrey safehouse was under the responsibility of Napoleon Glockner and Nora

Rivera. Its discovery was almost certainly accidental, the result of an intense search for a

member of the LC23S, Dr. Miguel Torres Enríquez, for his alleged involvement in an attempted

kidnapping the previous fall that had ended in the accidental killing of a prominent businessman,

Eugenio Garza Sada.

However the house was discovered, the police raid resulted in the capture of Glockner

and Rivera as well as the contents of the house, including weapons, ammunition,


communications equipment, internal documents and materials for disguises. Under torture

Glockner and Rivera quickly revealed their own identities and important information about the

FLN, including the location of the organization’s headquarters in Nepantla. They were then

flown to Mexico City and from there brought to Nepantla by a combined force of DFS agents

and military police who proceeded on the morning of February 14 to raid the wrong house.

Inexplicably no further action was taken for most of the rest of the day and Glockner and Rivera

were returned to Monterrey for the purpose of identifying captured members of the FLN’s

support network in that city. (Cedillo 2008:236-238)

By coincidence at 7 pm that same day, an urban guerrilla commando of the LC23S

ambushed, killed and escaped with the weapons of four soldiers on a train passing through the

State of Mexico en route between Puebla and Mexico City. At 10:30 pm 9 officers, and 38

soldiers attached to units involved in anti-guerrilla operations, along with 7 Federales, all heavily

armed and transported in six cars and trucks and a helicopter, arrived in Nepantla where they

blocked all entrances and exits to the town before launching their attack on the FLN’s

headquarters at 11 pm. The state forces were apparently convinced that the safehouse belonged

to the LC23S and were determined to avenge the soldiers fallen earlier that day. (Cedillo

2008:238- 240)

The soldiers first brought Nora Rivera to the door where she urged her comrades to

surrender. Speaking for the seven members of the group inside, Zarate declared “We will not

surrender, come and get us.” The assault on the house that followed was massive. After

saturating the house with tear gas, the soldiers came in firing. Zarate, Carmen Ponce, Mario

Sanchez, Anselmo Alberto Rios Rios, and the 19 year old Deni Prieto Stock were all killed

quickly. Two members of the group, María Gloria Benavides Guevara and Raul Morales,


survived the assault and attempted to escape while returning fire on the soldiers. Morales was

captured when he lost his balance after jumping the wall of the compound and Benavides

surrendered when the soldiers threatened to execute Morales. Benavides and Morales were

identified by Glockner and Rivera and then Morales was forced to identify the dead. One soldier

was wounded in the course of the combat.

In keeping with the practices of the dirty war against revolutionary guerrilla groups, the

remains of the five FLN members killed in Nepantla were buried anonymously and the location

of their graves kept hidden from their families. Only Zarate’s family would eventually secure the

transfer of his remains to Jalapa. (Cedillo 2008:240-244)

In addition to Benavides and Morales, the army also captured a trove of documents

including photos and identifications for over 50 FLN militants and supporters. This precipitated

another round of raids on the homes and workplaces of FLN members and their families. The

raids resulted in the arrest of twelve more members and supporters of the FLN. Among those

arrested was Alberto Hijar, in whose name a Jeep found in Nepantla had been registered. Hijar

described the experience vividly in an account circulated on the 35th

anniversary of the Nepantla

raid. Arrested at his home, Hijar was hooded and forced to lie on the floor of the vehicles that

took him to an unidentified building where he was interrorgated and tortured using electrical

shocks. As he awaited his interrogation his mind recalled the scene in the The Battle of Algiers in

which the French colonel, Mathieu, reconstructed the triangular cell structure of the Algerian

National Liberation Front on a blackboard. While owing to his unique position, Hijar had

considerably more knowledge of the organization than other urban militants, and had met

frequently with its leadership, the security precautions taken meant that he actually had very little


information on the real identities or whereabouts of other FLN members and was thus unable to

gove his tormentors any useful intelligence. (Hijar 2009a)

Morales and Benavides were also tortured in prison. (Cedillo 2008:246) The others were

treated a little better. The arrest of Hijar, who was a well known intellectual and a trustee of the

artistic estate of the painter David Alfaro Siquieros, precipitated a campaign for his release. In

addition to eventually securing Hijar’s release, this campaign forced the government to

acknowledge and bring legal charges against all of those arrested, an outcome that was hardly

certain given the general lawlessness with which the government was then waging its dirty war

against guerrilla groups. Between June and October 1974 all except four of the FLN prisoners

were released on bail. The remaining four would spend two and a half years in Mexico’s

notorious Lecumberri prison before all charges were dropped under a general amnesty in 1976.

Operación Diamante

The raid on Nepantla and the arrests of members of the FLN’s urban apparatus was not

the end of the matter. Among the documents discovered in Nepantla was the purchase deed for

El Chilar, in effect giving the state authorities the precise location of the NGEZ’s training camp.

Consequently, while the FLN’s urban structure was reeling from the events described above, a

second and even more massive military operation was being prepared against the newly

heretofore unknown guerrilla nucleus in the Lacandon Jungle. (Cedillo 2008:317-360)

On February 14 the members of the NGEZ learned by radio that Rivera and Glockner had

been captured in Monterrey. The next day Nau Guichard and Mario Saenz set off for

Villahermosa to make contact with the rest of the organization. Their subsequent whereabouts

remain unknown to this day. There is no record of their capture by police or military forces and


there is no indication of any further contact with the FLN. That same morning the radio news

reported a confrontation between soldiers and a “subversive group” in the state of Mexico that

the NGEZ correctly suspected involved their headquarters in Nepantla, Accordingly they began

to make preparations to flee El Chilar.

On February 16 a combined force of soldiers and DFS agents, accompanied by two local

Indians compelled to act as guides, made their way to the encampment only to discover that the

guerrillas had fled. Instead they found freshly prepared food and another trove of books,

pamphlets and internal documents. Among the books were works by Ché Guevara, Mao Ze

Dong, Frantz Fanon, and the Vietnamese revolutionaries Truong Chinh and Vo Nguyen Giap, as

well as a copy of the New Testament and a grammar in Tzeltal. (Cedillo 2008:321n ) Two days

later soldiers and DFS agents attempted to arrest the Guichard brothers, Aldo, Nau and Geno

Delin in Estación Juarez, but all three escaped. (Cedillo 2008:340-342)

Over the next two months the Mexican armed forces would conduct an extensive hunt for

the remaining six guerrillas. While Tello and La Grange and Rico give brief descriptions of these

events, Cedillo’s is the most detailed and considered account. For more than two weeks the

group was able to hide with the assistance of a Lacandon Indian, Atanasio Lopez. Lopez

revealed their location only after he was accused of working with the guerrillas by the ejidal

commissary of Metzabok. The discovery of the guerrilla hideout on March 4 led to a shootout in

which one soldier was killed and another wounded. Elisa Saenz was also likely wounded, but all

six guerrillas were once more able to escape.

Ten days later, on March 14, the guerrillas sought aid from the residents of the village of

El Chamizal who had apparently been alerted to their presence by the military. The villagers

assisted the military in locating the guerrillas the next morning, resulting in a two hour shoot out


involving thirty soldiers. In addition to suffering a number of wounds, the result of the combat

was that the guerrilla group was permanently separated into three parts. Raul Perez and Elisa

Saenz went in one direction, Federico Carballo, César Yañez, and Juan Guichard went in

another, while Carlos Vives was separated completely from the group. Vives wandered for three

days before he was captured on March 18 by armed indigenous campesinos who intended to turn

him in for a reward until they were intercepted by an army patrol in the ejido of Siria. Three

days later on March 21, Raul Perez and Elisa Saenz were captured by members of the village of

Santa Rita where they had sought shelter the previous day. The captives were taken to El

Diamante where they were beaten severely and Saenz was gang raped before they were

transferred to a secret prison located on a nearby military base. (Cedillo 2008:259-265)

The precise fate of the remaining members of the group is not known. Working from

conflicting reports and rumors Cedillo hypothesizes that Federico Carballo was killed in the

vicinity of Laguna de Ocotal around April 6 and that the other two – César German Yañez

Muñoz and Juan Guichard Gutiérrez – were killed ten days later on April 16 in the ejido of

Cintalapa by soldiers in civilian dress. (Cedillo 2008:265-270)

It is worth noting here that while all of the members of the group were eventually

captured or killed, in every instance it was the actions of the indigenous communities rather than

the efforts of the military that resulted in their discovery.

The three members of the NGEZ captured in the course of Operación Diamante were all

eventually transferred to the secret prison maintained in Military Camp No. 1 in Mexico City at

which point all three join the ranks of the “disappeared” in Mexico’s dirty war against guerrilla

groups. They were joined in this regard by the groups solitary Tzeltal supporter, Fidelino

Velázquez of Ocosingo, who was arrested without a warrant on June 26. While FLN supporters


who were quite clearly much more intimately involved in the organization’s military activities

were released on bail, Velazquez was disappeared. (Cedillo 2008:346)

Implications of 1974

The repression experienced by the FLN in 1974 was a watershed in the history of the

organization. The capture, torture, death and disappearance of so many leaders and members, and

the disruption of the organization’s support structures might have spelled the end of the group.

The larger “dirty war” being waged by the Mexican state against the guerrilla organizations that

had emerged in the 1960s was largely successful. But unlike the the ACNR, the PdlP, the MAR,

the LC23S, and most of the other guerrilla groups of this period, the FLN survived. While the

experiences of 1974 were a very serious blow, the FLN was able to regroup, to reflect on its

errors, and to develop a new strategic approach to their work that would eventually lead to the

founding of the EZLN in 1983.

There are two questions about the FLN that are important to pose at this point and they

are in some sense counterposed. The first question is: what did the FLN do wrong that led it to

suffer such a devastating and potentially lethal blow? The second question is: what did the FLN

do right that enabled it to, nonetheless, survive that blow? Understanding these questions is

critical to understanding the transformations that the FLN would go through that would lead to

the creation and organizational successes of the EZLN.

It is not difficult to identify a number of major errors committed by the FLN. Many of

these were committed by other guerrilla groups that shared, in different measures, elements of

the FLNs Guevarist political-military strategy. Despite considerable security precautions, the fall

of the safe-house in Monterrey produced a cascade of useful intelligence that revealed much of


the clandestine support structure that the FLN had so patiently built up. If the two-month long

hunt for NGEZ revealed the military incompetence of important elements of the Mexican armed

forces, its final results also exposed the amateurishness of the NGEZ’s own military training.

After a year and a half in the jungle, the members of the group were astonishingly unprepared,

and were forced by desperation in the course of their flight to make contact with indigenous

villages, which did not support them and which in every instance, betrayed them to the armed

forces.

The FLN’s technical errors were, in general, the sort of errors likely to be committed by

any newly formed clandestine revolutionary organization. They often come at a very high price,

up to and including the survival of the project itself. Some groups have clearly been better at

avoiding such errors than others, but it is doubtful that they can ever be avoided altogether. The

close study of the experiences of other groups is, of course, critical to reducing such missteps,

but as the political and military terrain itself is constantly shifting and as elements in the

repressive apparatus of the state are also drawing lessons from those same experiences, technical

failures of security must be regarded as inevitable. Important as technical preparations are, they

can never compensate for weaknesses in the overall political strategy of a revolutionary

organization.

While it is possible to identify a whole string of such technical failures, they were all

secondary to the FLN’s fundamental political failure to develop bases of support among the

indigenous population of the Cañadas before attempting to establish a guerrilla base. Thus

despite contacts going back to 1968 and the continuous presence of the NGEZ beginning in

1972, the FLN enjoyed essentially no base of popular support at all among the indigenous

residents of the Lacandon Jungle that they imagined would one day join their efforts. Worse, they


had essentially no appreciation of the political potential of the different indigenous communities

and ethnic groups that might have enabled them to establish such a base. Nowhere was this more

apparent than in the decision to cultivate relations with the Lacandon Indians rather than with the

Tzeltals and other more recent arrivals in the Cañadas fleeing the fincas that abutted the jungle.

While their Lacandon contacts aided them briefly in their flight, the prospects of the Lacandon

serving as a social base for a guerrilla army were essentially nil. Their culture was very much

the product of an historical strategy of deliberate avoidance of both contact and conflict with

ladinos. They had essentially no familiarity with firearms, much less any tradition of armed

struggle. In contrast the colonists of the Cañadas had been at odds with ladino finqueros and

rancheros for their whole lives and in some cases were the recent veterans of violent land

struggles, particularly those coming from the Northern Zone. And of course the Lacandon were

about to become beneficiaries of a the presidential decree declaring them the owners of much of

the Lacandon Jungle, a decree that would contribute to the rapid political radicalization of the

colonists of the Cañadas who were in effect stripped overnight of their title or claims to the lands

they worked and had literally carved out of the jungle.

Simply stated, the FLN’s orientation undervalued the critical political work of securing a

base of popular support for their project. This undervaluation meant that the group had no serious

political analysis of the indigenous-campesino movement that was emerging in Chiapas, which

in turn caused them to commit very elementary mistakes when they were compelled to make

contact with the indigenous communities.

In spite of the serious deficiencies in the FLN’s strategic orientation, they were able to not

only survive the repression of 1974, but were able to regain lost capacities and ultimately build

the most significant armed insurgent challenge to the Mexican state since the 1910 revolution. It


is therefore important to also understand the qualities that enabled the FLN to survive 1974 to

help us appreciate their contribution to the distinctive politics of Zapatismo. Here it is necessary

to note the FLN’s technical accomplishments and to understand their political grounding. The

FLN’s internal security regime was remarkably robust. If lapses enabled the authorities to use the

accidental discovery of the safehouse in Monterrey to discover the headquarters in Nepantla and

the training camp in Chiapas, the compartmentalization of the organization meant that much of

the urban apparatus was not discovered. The FLN had drawn important lessons from the

experiences of the EIM and the CLR. If they had emphasized military preparation to the

exclusion of political work, their opposition to premature military engagement reflected an

implicit recognition of the ultimate strategic importance of securing a real base of popular

support. In so far as their caution and preoccupation with security enabled them to survive it thus

also enabled them to eventually modify their orientation. It brought them a critical measure of

time and space in which they were able to digest their experiences and adapt their their practice

accordingly.

The FLN did not immediately draw out all these lessons. It would in fact, take several

years for them to do so and to seriously rethink their whole political military strategy. Before this

was to occur, however, the FLN had to rebuild itself.

10.3 REBUILDING AND RETHINKING

The FLN didn’t just lose those members who were killed, imprisoned or disappeared. It

also lost many of its members who were simply no longer willing to face the risks of further

participation in the organization given its demonstrated incapacity to defend its supporters

against repression. To compensate for these losses, the leadership structure of the organization


would have to be rebuilt, new militants recruited and new support networks built up. In the

course of this, the organization underwent important changes that would make the launch of the

EZLN far more fruitful than the NGEZ.

Between 1974 and 1983 the FLN would go through several changes in both the

composition and organization of their leadership. These were in part the result of the deaths of

several leading members in a series of unrelated incidents. They would also, in rapid succession.

make three failed attempts to re-establish themselves in the Lacandon Jungle. In the course of

this they would be influenced by the experiences of the emerging revolutionary movements in

Central America, in particular the Sandinista-led revolution in Nicaragua. Most importantly of all

they would establish relations with a nucleus of indigenous-campesino leaders and begin

recruitment of a cohort of young Indians who would play a critical role in the founding of the

EZLN in 1983 and in its subsequent growth. In the course of all of this, the FLN’s politics would

evolve and mature in ways that would contribute to the EZLN’s organizational successes.

First Moves

The deaths of Alfredo Zarate in Nepantla and César German Yañez in Chiapas left Mario

Saenz (aka Mateo, Omar, Federico, Alfredo) as the only remaining member of the FLN’s

national leadership. Almost immediately after the attack on the FLN’s headquarters in Nepantla

and the beginning of the military operations against the NGEZ, Saenz ordered the regional

responsables in Mexico City, Puebla and Tabasco to undertake a “tactical retreat” to the city of

Villahermosa. Thus,

all the professional militants and those that had to pass into clandestinity because they

had been discovered (because of documents found by the police) were gathered in safe

houses in this city and afterwards redistributed. (Cedillo 2010:79)


Since the fate of César Yañez was unknown, Saenz assumed the title of Second National

Responsable and appointed Julieta Glockner as third in command of the organization. The new

national leadership set three immediate tasks for the organization:

to search for lost combatants in the jungle; to investigate the causes of the total collapse

of the Monterrey network, the headquarters, and El Chilar; and to rebuild the urban

networks with cells of Students and Workers in Struggle (EYOL). (Cedillo 2010: 80)

The efforts to locate any survivors or the remains of members of the NGEZ would be a

major preoccupation of the organization for the next several years. If, in retrospect, the searches

seem like a vain enterprise it is important to recognize their role in both holding the organization

together and in maintaining and developing a familiarity with both the physical and political

terrain of eastern Chiapas. Returning to the jungle, however, was very dangerous. Military

patrols continued for a year after the last member of the NGEZ was killed. In order to

camouflage the real purposes of their travels into the jungle, members of the FLN joined

Mexico’s National Commission for the Eradication of Malaria or dressed as surveyors for the

national oil company, PEMEX. (Cedillo 2010:81)

By 1975 the FLN had regrouped sufficiently to begin making preparations to establish a

new guerrilla encampment in the Lacandon Jungle and FLN members began explorations of

potential sites. Before they were able to establish an encampment, however, on February 7, after

a shoot-out with police the previous evening in Villahermosa, a car carrying Julieta Glockner and

two other FLN militants, Graciano Sanchez and Federico Ramirez, was identified by security

forces and ambushed in the town of Cardenas, Tabasco. Both Julieta and Graciano were killed

while Federico escaped. The ambush and resulting losses caused the FLN to abort its immediate

plans to reestablish a base in the Lacandon Jungle. Another consequence of the ambush was the


promotion of Cesar German’s younger brother, Fernando Yañez Muñoz to replace the fallen

Glockner as the FLN’s Third-in-Command. It is around this time that Fernando took the alias

German to honor his brother. (Cedillo 2010:85–86)

The Execution of Nora Rivera and Napoleon Glockner

Julieta Glockners death reveals the fragility of the FLN in this period immediately

following the repression of 1974. By 1977 the organization had regrouped sufficiently to attempt

to establish once more a guerrilla nucleus in the Lacandon Jungle. Before we can look at this

effort, however, it is necessary to consider what is arguably the most fraught chapter in the

FLN’s history.

Julieta’s older brother, Napoleon and his wife, Nora Rivera, who had been captured in the

raid on the safe house in Monterrey and whose interrogation had revealed the location of the

Casa Grande in Nepantla, were released from prison in June 1974 on the condition that they

meet regularly with the authorities. Almost two and a half years later, on November 5, 1976,

Glockner and Rivera were killed. Napoleon was shot nine times and Rivera, who was pregnant at

the time, was strangled and shot once in the head. Glockner’s body was found in a car in Colonia

Roma in Mexico City and Rivera’s was found several blocks away in a mini-bus. Responsibility

for the killings has been disputed ever since. The police insisted that fingerprint evidence from

the scene of the crime supported their claim that the killing was carried out by members of the

FLN in retaliation for Glockner and Rivera’s cooperation (under torture) with the police in

identifying the location of the FLN’s headquarters in Nepantla. The police account is further

supported by an internal FLN communiqué, supposedly captured several years later in 1980,

which gives a political justification and detailed account of the execution. In opposition to the


police account, however, members of the Glockner family have insisted that the killings were

the work of the police’s Brigada Antiguerrillera, notorious for their extrajudicial executions of

suspected guerrillas. (Cedillo 2010:86–89; Puig 1995)

The question of responsibility for the killings was revived in 1995 when the government

of President Ernesto Zedillo cited the communiqué in its efforts to delegitimize the EZLN,

prompting a debate on its authenticity in the pages of the newsweekly Proceso. Cedillo presents

a detailed analysis of the contents and context of the communiqué and other evidence and

concludes that the FLN communiqué is authentic, noting in particular that in her interviews with

former FLN militants, none attributed the killings to the police. (Cedillo 2010:90-91)

If the FLN was indeed responsible for Glockner and Rivera’s executions, the operation

was, as Cedillo argues, both a “symptom of [the FLN’s] decomposition” and a sign of “the re-

establishment of the organization.” (2010:89) That is to say that while the decision to carry out

the executions reflected the loss of the organization’s ethical and political compass, their success

in carrying it out reflected the recovery of its military capacities.

A Brief Return to the Jungle

As evidence of the organization’s recovery, in early 1977 a group of eight FLN militants

– Mario Saenz (AKA Alfredo), Jorge Velasco del Rincón (AKA Ismael), Fernando Yañez (AKA

German), Gloria Benavides (AKA Elisa), José Guadalupe León Rosado (AKA Urbano), “Ruth,”

“Mario Marcos,” and “Susana,” were finally able to establish an encampment somewhere in the

Lacandon Jungle, though the exact location remains unknown. The new encampment, however,

was shortlived. On the evening of March 7, while awaiting the return of other members of the

group from a hunting expedition, Mario Saenz lit up a cigarette. One of the returning guerrillas


apparently mistook the burning ember of the cigarette for the eye of a jaguar and opened fire,

hitting Saenz between the stomach and the hip. The wound itself was not so serious, but it

became infected and Saenz resisted urgings to leave the jungle for proper medical attention.

Fernando Yañez finally took matters in hand and gave the order that he be taken into the city, but

by then it was too late and Saenz died en route. (Cedillo 2010:92)

With Mario Saenz’s death the FLN lost the last member of its pre-1974 national

leadership. The younger Yañez brother replaced him as the leader of the organization and named

Federico Ramirez as his second in command. Ramirez came from a very wealthy family and had

only gone underground in 1974, but both his access to resources and his organizational talents

had proven invaluable in rebuilding the FLN. Ramirez was using the alias Juan at the time but

would later take the name Rodrigo. His appointment however produced frictions within the

organization, resulting in a short-lived split of about eight members, including Mario Marcos,

Ruth, Susana, and Urbano who had been involved in establishing the encampment in the

Lacandon Jungle. On September 3, however, Urbano was captured by the police in

Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz. He was tortured and interrogated first by local police, then by state

police, and finally at the hands of the DFS in Mexico City after which he was apparently

“disappeared.” Following Urbano’s capture and disappearance, Mario Marcos, Ruth and possibly

the other defectors decided to reunite with the FLN and were accepted back. (Cedillo 2010:92-

95)

Amnesty and Reorientation

While the FLN was rebuilding itself, most of what remained of the armed revolutionary

left in Mexco was disintegrating under the pressure of the dirty war. The dirty war itself,


however, was increasingly becoming a political liability for the government as families of the

disappeared began to organize and demand an accounting for what had happened to their

children. As most of the members of the second wave of guerrilla groups were children of the

middle classes, these protests came to be regarded as a serious challenge to the moral authority

of the state. It is in this context that in 1978 the government extended an offer of amnesty to most

of the largely scattered and demoralized guerrrilla forces still underground. The amnesty offer

successfully coaxed many into abandoning armed struggle for other forms of political struggle.

The amnesty was part of a larger process in which the state sought to open up legal political

space for its opponents. This process also included the legalization and extension of electoral

registration to a number of previously outlawed left-wing political parties, including the PCM.

By 1980 it seemed that the Mexican left’s flirtation with guerrilla warfare was over. Only a

handful of the most hardened combatants, with no apparent base of popular support, remained

underground. The popular wisdom on the left was that the road to real social change now lay

through the legal methods of electoral participation and incremental strengthening of the

organizations of civil society at the expense of the power of the party-state.

Paradoxically, the same processes also rebounded to the benefit of the FLN. The FLN

refused the amnesty, but its acceptance by most of the rest of the armed left meant that the FLN

had less competition from other groups for prospective recruits. And even if the modest

democratic opening convinced many to reject thoughts of armed struggle, the less repressive

political atmosphere also made it easier to identify prospective recruits active in various

movements. In any event, the late 1970s would see the FLN grow considerably.

If the killings of Glockner and Rivera and the split in the organization following Saenz’s

unnecessary death marked a low point in the history of the FLN, they were followed by a period


of both qualitative political reorientation and quantitative growth. In the wake of these events the

FLN finally began to confront some of its underlying political weaknesses. Under Fernando

Yañez’s leadership a five-member Political Bureau was established. Composed of Yañez,

Ramirez, Velasco, Benavides, and Alberto Hijar, (who unlike the others was not living

clandestinely), the Political Bureau was intended to encourage internal political discussions

within what remained a still very hierarchical and militarized organization. (Cedillo 2009; Hijar

2009b)

Even if the resulting discourse remained firmly within the boundaries of the FLN’s

Marxist-Leninist and revolutionary nationalist orthodoxies, the stated commitment to livelier

debateand the actual proliferation of voices in the organization’s internal publications created an

internal intellectual atmosphere that would prove attractive to more heterodox cohort of new

recruits.

¡Sandino Vive!

An important influence on the FLN in this period would be the rapidly developing

revolutionary movements in Central America, in particular the Nicarguan Revolution led by the

Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberation Front or FSLN). The

Sandinista Revolution, which would finally topple the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle

in 1979 had a couple important consequences for the FLN.

First, just as the Cuban Revolution had two decades earlier, the example of a successful

revolution in Nicaragua inspired a revived interest in revolutionary politics in Mexico, and in

particular in the potential for revolutionary armed struggle. If the successful repression of the

PdlP and the LC23S followed by the amnesty appeared to mark a decisive end to the path of


armed struggle in Mexico, the Nicaraguan Revolution and the examples of guerrilla warfare in El

Salvador and Guatemala generated a counter-current by suggesting to at least a fraction of

radical young Mexicans that a strategy of revolutionary guerrilla warfare might still be viable.

Second, the Sandinistas inspired a strong solidarity movement in Mexico, especially

among university students. Even if most of the participants in this movement were not likely

recruits to the FLN, Nicaraguan solidarity activism, much like the MLN’s solidarity with the

Cuban Revolution in the early 1960s, opened up a space where such politics could breathe and

in this way created pool of newly radicalized young activists from which the FLN was able to

successfully recruit many new members.

Instrumental in this process was Dolores de la Peña, a student of Alberto Hijar at UNAM,

who had engaged in clandestine work on behalf of the Sandinistas in Mexico and was active in

the Comité Mexicano de Solidaridad con Nicaragua. Recruited to the FLN by Hijar she took the

name “Ana” and facilitated both the recruitment of solidarity activists into the FLN as well as the

FLN’s own limited relations with the Sandinistas. (Cedillo 2010: 120-124)

Third, the Sandinistas provided the FLN with an alternative to the Guevarist model of

revolutionary guerrilla warfare that had previously dominated their strategic orientation. In 1967,

the FSLN suffered a major defeat in an engagement known as the Battle of Pacasán that it

interpreted as resulting from the more general failure of its own initial Guevarist strategy.

Influenced by the first-hand experience of several of its own members then fighting alongside the

Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (Rebel Armed Forces or FAR) in Guatemala, the FSLN, under the

leadership of Carlos Fonseca, formally embraced a strategy of protracted people’s war. The FAR

in Guatemala had distinguished themselves from many other attempts to initiate armed struggle

in Latin America in the 1960s by their early rejection of foquismo andtheir comparatively


successful application of the strategy of protracted peoples war to build a guerrilla force that

commanded the real support of a significant fraction of Guatemala’s indigenous-campesino

population. The FAR’s experiences suggested to Fonseca and others that such an approach was

appropriate to Nicaragu as well and following an internal struggle the Sandinistas adopted the

strategy.

Here it is necessary to comment on the subsequent divisions that emerged within the

FSLN over matters of strategy. In the mid-1970s disagreements within the FSLN over its

exclusive reliance on the mobilization of the rural population produced a three-way split in the

organization in 1975. Two fractions reoriented towards the mobilization of urban forces, while

the third, which continued to adhere to the strategy set in 1967 became known as the Guerra

Popular Prolongada faction. What is important to stress here is that none of the fractions

represented a return to the Guevarist position and that all three had internalized the principles of

reliance on the people that distinguished the doctrine of protracted peoples war from the single-

minded Guevarist emphasis on developing the military capacities of the foco. The factions would

finally reunite several months before the successful overthrow of Somoza in July 1979. The

subsequent disputes within the FSLN notwithstanding, as a point of reference, the Sandinista’s

rejection of Guevarism in favor of the strategy of protracted peoples war was crucial in enabling

the FLN to critically re-assess their own prior single-minded focus on the logistical question of

establishing a guerrilla foco in the jungle.

Growth and Development

The late 1970s thus saw the FLN grow significantly in size but also saw important

developments in its political orientation. These were connected phenomena. The growth of the


organization brought into its ranks a layer of more theoretically sophisticated young members. It

also gave the organization the means to support processes of political investigation and internal

discussion that had previously been impossible. According to Yañez, at its height the FLN

gathered together as many as 1,000 members, including both supporters and full-time organizers,

in Nuevo Leon, Puebla, Mexico City, Tabasco, Veracruz, Yucatan and Chiapas. (2003a)

One of the more theoretically sophisticated recruits to the FLN during this time was a

student of Alberto Hijar’s and a recent graduate from UNAM named Rafael Sebastián Guillen

Vicente. Guillen’s theoretical acumen and literary talents are evident in his bachellor’s thesis, a

study of the ideological content of official primary school textbooks informed by the work of

Althusser and Foucault. (Guillen Vicente 1980) Arguing for a politically engaged philosophy that

could serve, in Althusser’s words, “as a weapon of the revolution” Guillen seeks to demonstrate

how primary school textbooks serve the bourgeois class project of the Mexican state by ordering

the assimilation of the necessity of the state through the articulation of the space of the school

with the institution of the family. His writing is both erudite and irreverent towards academic

conventions. The last paragraph of the thesis captures both his style and anticipates his

subsequent political trajectory:

I would like to end (the pages are running out and I still haven’t put in the bibliography),

underlining the importance of the POLITICS of taking a political position that makes

possible an “other” discursive strategy, that opens up an “other” space of theoretical

production, that makes possible philosophical tasks “other” than the merely academic.

And it is only the practice of proletarian politics that makes this possible. We practice

politics, we make theory with politics and politics with theory. (Guillen Vicente

1980:110)

While he studied with Hijar, Guillen was apparently recruited by Silvia Fernández after

he began teaching in the Department of Graphic Design at the Universidad Autonoma

Metropolitana-Xochimilco. Also an instructor at UAM-Xochimilco Fernández had joined the


FLN the previous year. Guillén took the name Zacarias and in 1979 Mario Marcos and Ruth

would take responsibility for training the new recruit. Another UNAM student and a friend of

Guillen’s, Salvador Morales Garibay, who would also later play an important role in the EZLN,

was also recruited during this period. (Cedillo 2010: 97)

It is during this period as well that the FLN began to undertake systematic study of

Mexican history including the experiences of other guerrilla groups. According to Cedillo:

The most studied phenomena were: the fight for independence in 1810, the 1910

revolution (Zapatismo and Villismo), and, for the first time, the guerrillas of the 60s and

70s, particularly the Grupo Popular Guerrillero (GPG) of Chihuahua and the Partido de

los Pobres (PDLP) in Guerrero, propelled by mass movements. They also undertook a

detailed review of the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnamese wars of national liberation

and studied the military experiences of the FSLN. (2010:134)

Combined with their study of the Nicaraguan Revolution, the FLN’s studies of the GPG

and PdlP encouraged them to ultimately embrace the strategy of protracted people’s war and to

refine their understanding of its application to Mexican reality.

The growth of the FLN’s urban apparatus during this period also gave the organization

both the need for, and the means to establish, a press in the form of several periodical

publications. The most important of these was Nepantla, an internal organ intended for the

organization’s full time members living in various safe houses around the country. Named for the

site of the FLN’s headquarters raided in 1974 Nepantla included articles on a variety of topics. In

addition to pieces on revolutionary theory and history and reports on some of the FLN’s own

activities, there were analyses of current events in Mexico and around the world, and a regular

series on the history of the FLN itself called “Nuestra Historia.”

Another FLN publication, Conciencia Proletaria, was aimed mainly at students and

intellectuals. Consisting largely of longer and more theoretical articles, often reprinted from


Nepantla, but with no specific reference to the FLN, it was an important recruitment tool. While

produced clandestinely in Mexico City, the first issue of Conciencia Proletaria published in

1980, listed a post-office box in Managua, Nicaragua as a contact address. Other publications

would be aimed specifically at campesinos, industrial workers, and later on at members of the

EZLN’s village-base militias.

Breakthrough

1977 was also the year that the members of the FLN’s network made contact with a

number of indigenous students in Mexico City with family connections in Chiapas. Representing

himself as interested in coordinating some volunteer work in the indigenous communities there,

Federico Ramirez asked for their assistance and they suggested he get in touch with their family

members living in San Cristobal de Las Casas. Gloria Benavides followed up on those contacts

who in turn had family members in the municipalities of Sabanilla and Huitiupan in the northern

part of the state which. As discussed in the previous chapter, these municipalities were the site of

particularly intense ongoing land struggles.

By 1978 Benavides and Jorge Velasco had established an FLN safehouse in San

Cristobal. The safehouse was intended to serve as a

platform for community work in the form of literacy brigades, first aid, vaccinations …

from which they could develop relations with the marginalized communities in the Jovel

valley [around San Cristobal]. (Cedillo 2010: 101)

Doctors and nurses had been recruited to assist them in this work. While Benavides

attempted to develop contacts in Jovel, Velasco was put in in touch with the contacts in Sabanilla

and Huitiupan. It was through these contacts that he was able to identify a young leader from the

ejido of Lazaro Cardenas in the municipality of Huitiupan who is known to us only as “Paco,”


the pseudonym he took when he joined the FLN no later than 1980 and quite possibly as early as

1978. (Cedillo 2009; 2010:101)

Paco was apparently an established figure in the community. He had participated in the

Indigenous Congress in 1974. As Cedillo explains:

At scarcely 22 years old, this Tzotzil leader had headed up several land takeovers and

would become the decisive link between the FLN and the indigenous world. (2010:107)

Cedillo also argues that it is unlikely that Paco’s decision to join the FLN was made

without discussion with family members. Thus, while we do not know their identities, Paco also

apparently brought with him a cohort of experienced leaders from the Tzotzil community of

Lazaro Cardenas and the nearby Chol community of El Calvario.

There is an assumption in virtually all of the literature on the origins of the EZLN, that

mestizo members recruited indigenous members who in turn recruited other indigenous

members. If this describes the overall direction of recruitment it was by no means exclusively

unidirectional. “Margarita” was a mestizo working in indigenous communities when she was

recruited to the FLN by Paco sometime in 1980. She describes him as

a conscious, restless man who understood the situation of marginalization and

exploitation. (2009)

Regarding Paco’s recruitment Margarita says

They met him in a meeting. I don’t know if it was CIOAC or some other but they met.

Their points of view were congenial, and that was how they entered into relations. Right

now he is a man of more than fifty. But at the time he had to have been 24, 25. … He

began to do political work there in his community, and starting with family and others, to

to do this work.

Paco thus gave the FLN access to the group of indigenous campesino leaders whom

Marcos would later describe as the “politicized indigenous elite,” a group he is careful to

distinguish from “a very isolated group, that is the indigenous people of the Selva” who would


later become the EZLN’s primary bases of support. Marcos describes this politicized indigenous

elite as having “a great organizational capacity” and

a very rich experience of political struggle. They were in practically all the political

organizations of the left that there were then and they were familiar with all the prisons in

the country. They realized that to solve their problems with land, with living conditions,

and political rights there was no other way out than violence. (LeBot 1997:132)

It is not entirely clear how extensive this initial group was or even how accurate Marcos’s

characterization of them is. Cedillo suggests that Marcos’s characterization is an exaggeration. It

is certainly true that that the indigenous recruits who would be part of the EZLN’s founding

nucleus were all too young to meet Marcos’s description. What is less clear is how quickly the

FLN was able to recruit political leaders of Paco’s generation or older who, even if they did not

become professional militants played a critical role in building the organization. What is certain

is that Paco was part of a larger layer of indigenous activists in the Northern one who had passed

variously through the PCM, Linea Proletaria, the PST and left-led mass formations like CIOAC

or OCEZ, and of whom many had been to prison. The strategy that the FLN had embraced by

1980 quite specifically emphasized the importance of winning over experienced revolutionary-

minded leaders of this sort.

What is also clear is that Paco, and possibly others, assisted the FLN in recruiting their

first full-time indigenous members to live and receive training in the FLN’s urban safehouses.

The first recruits were quite young, between the ages of 11 and 14. They included several

individuals who would go on to play critical roles first in launching and then in building the

EZLN. We know them almost exclusively by their nom de guerres as high-ranking officers of

the EZLN or as members of the CCRI-GC. Included in this initial cohort was Yolanda, also

known as Ana Maria, the future Major Mario, as well as Petul, Benjamin, Cecilia, Javier, Frank


and Jorge among others. This group included both Tzozils from Lázaro Cardenas and some

Chols from El Calvario in the neighboring municipality of Sabanilla.

These young indigenous recruits spent most of the next several years or more living in

safe houses that the FLN had established in various cities including San Cristobal, Tuxtla

Guitierrez, Puebla, Villahermosa, Veracruz, and Mexico City and elsewhere. During this period

between 15 and 20 Tzotzil and Chol youth would join the FLN and receive training in their

safehouses. (Cedillo 2009)

In the FLN’s urban safehouses, these young indigenous recruits would receive an intense

education that included Mexican history, revolutionary political theory, military training, and a

broad range of practical skills such as radio operation and maintenance, battlefield medicine,

bootmaking, and the like. By all accounts the safehouses were also sites of culture shock as the

young indigenous recruits encountered flush toilets, gas stoves, and electric light switches for the

first time in their lives.

Set a few years later when the EZLN had already been established, Carlos Imaz’s novel,

Tierna memoria, La voz de un niño teltal insurgente, gives a vivid fish-out-of-water account of

his protagonist, Roberto’s experiences in safehouses in Tuxtla Gutierrez and Mexico City. While

the distribution of labor among men and women was still gendered, the routines of the

safehouses also challenged the young recruits views on the roles of women. In Mexico City,

Roberto finds himself under the command of a woman named Lucha.

I didn’t know how to cook either, so I learned to chop onions, tomatoes and all the rest.

She taught me to cook, because in my house my mom spoiled the men. Even though they

were younger than I, only my sisters would be made to help her with cooking and

housework. (Ímaz 2006:106)


The recruitment of such young members into an armed clandestine political military

organization inevitably raises ethical as well as political questions concerning both their ability

to make informed decisions of this nature and the responsibilities of the adults involved. This

practice undoubtedly put the lives and safety of the young recruits at risk, and in one case that we

will look at later, had quite horrific consequences for one young recruit. It must nonetheless be

located within the context of both the political conditions and life chances that existed in the

communities from which they were recruited, as well as the prospects that their training would

open up for them and their communities. The conditions of extreme poverty that characterized

life in the indigenous communities in northern Chiapas were grim. Their recent efforts to

transform their conditions had been met with brutal repression not just at the hands of local

authorities, but also by the army. Formal educational opportunities were effectively non-existent

and the recruits were not considered too young to work long hours picking coffee or engaged in

other forms of agricultural labor. Which was in fact what most of their age peers were doing.

The FLN didn’t just offer their young indigenous recruits military training that might

enable their communities to better defend themselves. They offered them access to a degree of

education that would otherwise have been unavailable to them. If the training of catechists by the

Diocese and the organization of political trainings by the Maoists had produced a layer of

organic indigenous campesino intellectuals able to read and write and critically examine their

social conditions, they remained in many respects still highly dependent on the non-indigenous

priests, nuns and university educated leftist “advisors” for any analysis of the national or

international context in which their local struggles occurred.

The much more intensive training offered by the FLN would deepen the process of

indigenous campesino intellectual formation considerably and would give the future indigenous


leadership of the EZLN a level of political sophistication, especially in their understanding of the

machinations of the ruling party, that was simply not previously available to the leadership of the

indigenous-campesino movement in Chiapas. It would also impart to them the FLN’s distinctive

brand of left-wing nationalism. Cedillo explains:

They enabled them to travel the entire country, some even going to the United States.

[…] They brought them to factories to see firsthand the exploitation. They brought them

to sugar plantations in Morelos to see the poorly paid workers there. All so as to forge a

national consciousness in them, because, you know, they did not have a national

consciousness. They just wanted to solve the problem of the land in their communities,

“we fight for land, and they gives us the land and goodbye.” The Fuerzas formed them to

have a national vision. They were forged with a left-wing nationalism in which the

emphasis is “you are not fighting for your communities, are not fighting for Lázaro

Cárdenas or Sabanilla or Huitiupan or the jungle, but to install a socialist republic.” And I

think the fact that they were able to assimilate this concept of nation, was one of the

ideological victories within the apparatus of the FLN, because when these people finally

return to the jungle, […] they brought all that ideological training, that is the line that the

FLN followed, I think that they were very good disciples, very good apprentices. And

they assumed, they assimilated this nationalism of left, this socialist nationalism as well.

(Cedillo 2009)

The Statutes

On August 6, 1980 the FLN’s Political Bureau gathered in a safehouse in San Cristóbal

de Las Casas. It was the 11th

anniversary of the founding of the FLN and the Political Bureau

was determined to consolidate the considerable recent gains made by the organization. The

meeting made a number of changes in the responsibilities of its leading members. Jorge Velasco

was elevated to the position of Third National Director and Mario Marcos was added to the

Political Bureau. The main task of the meeting, however, was to draft a document, Los Estatutos

de las FLN, that would establish and clarify the political orientation and organizational norms of

the organization. The FLNs “statutes” are 42 pages long, divided into 11 chapters with a total of

78 articles elaborating both the political perspective and the formal structure of the organization.


While much of the material contained in the statutes was a codification of the FLN´s

previous decisions and practices, the document also represents the consolidation of a

considerably more sophisticated political analysis than had appeared in previous FLN

communiques. As Cedillo notes,

In contrast with the first generation of the FLN, the third had Marxist intellectuals in its

organs of leadership and consultation (Victor, Ismael, Mario Marcos, Hijar, etc…)

(2010:124)

Chapter II of the statutes spells out the FLN’s core politics which remained consistent

with the left wing revolutionary nationalism and anti-imperialism articulated by the MLN in the

early 1960s and conjoined with a strategy of protracted peoples war that aimed at an armed

seizure of power and the installation of a “people’s socialist republic.” This was to be achieved

through a multi-class “alliance of workers, peasants, and the progressive layer of the petty

bourgeoisie.” As Cedillo explains, the statutes

divide the political spectrum of the left into two camps: that of the true revolutionaries,

which needed to be consolidated, and that of the reformists, which needed to be

combatted as an arm of the state broadly. (2010:126)

The FLN thus saw its task not as substituting itself for the already existing leadership of

popular movements, but rather of incorporating the scattered revolutionary-minded leadership

that arose from such struggles into a unified organization. This is precisely the approach that

would eventually see the EZLN transformed from a project of a still small core of mainly urban

middle class university-educated radicals into a genuine army of the indigenous communities.

Indeed it was precisely the approach that had enabled the organization to already gain a small

base of support in the northern municipalities of Sabanilla and Huitiupan.

As suggested earlier, this orientation reflected not only the influence of the Sandinistas

and their experience with the strategy of protracted peoples war but also the FLN’s systematic


investigations into the historical experiences of revolutionary armed struggle in Mexico and

internationally.

The stautes also contain the first known mention of the EZLN in print three years before

the EZLN itself was formally founded. Article 5 of the Statutes defines as one of the immediate

objectives of the FLN

To integrate the struggles of the urban proletariat with the struggles of the the campesinos

and Indians of the most exploited zones of our country and to form the Zapatista National

Liberation Army. (FLN 1980a)

Later the EZLN would be conceived of as one of several regional armies under the FLN’s

command, but in this initial formulation, the EZLN was imagined as a single force operating

across the whole country. The EZLN is mentioned several more times in the statutes.

Article 6 defines as one of the long term objectives of the FLN, “The disolution of the oppressive

army and formation of a popular army out of the EZLN.” Article 27 defines the EZLN as one of

the three “organisms” that make up the FLN, while Articles 30 and 31 elaborate on the structure

and functions of the EZLN, and Article 58 establishes the rules of discipline over “militants of

the FLN and members of the EZLN.”

The conception of the EZLN and its relationship to the FLN as expressed in the Statutes

of the FLN grew from the FLN’s assessment of the larger political situation in Mexico. As

Marcos would explain many years later, the FLN’s “political analysis,”

foresaw a radicalization and polarization of the different elements of Mexican society --

the state on one side, the people on the other -- and that this polarization was going to

result in a civil war. On the military plane this posed a new possibility -- that didn’t

consist of preparing for war, for initiating a war, but rather to prepare for when the war

breaks out. It’s an organization that doesn’t intend to initiate combat but rather to appear

when it becomes necessary. The idea is that, in this case, the people were going to need

an armed group to defend themselves, to fight, to resist the actions of the Federal Army,

of the government’s army. (LeBot 1997:124)


The 1980 Political Bureau meeting thus marked the beginning of a new stage in the

development of the FLN. The organization had not only recovered from the blow it had suffered

in 1974, it had grown much larger than it had ever been before and had also matured politically.

Over the next three years the FLN would advance towards the objective of establishing a

guerrilla presence in the Lacandon Jungle, but this time on a very different basis than their

previous efforts. Before that could occur, however, the organization would suffer two more

blows.

Macuspana

The elevation of Jorge Velasco to the third highest position in the leadership of the FLN

reflected his considerable talents and contributions to the organization. These can not be

overstated. He had demonstrated an aptitude for both political and military work and was

recognized as one of the organization’s most developed cadres. It was Velasco who recruited

Paco and who, more than any other individual, deserves credit for bringing into the FLN the

cohort of indigenous leaders and their younger relations who would give the EZLN its character

as an army of the indigenous-campesino movement. He was also responsible for the FLN’s

network of safehouses in southeastern Mexico in which the young indigenous recruits who

would be part of the EZLN’s founding nucleus were being trained.

Velasco was also central to the FLN’s plans in 1980 to plant a guerrilla nucleus in the

Lacandon Jungle. Velasco, Benavides and Yañez were preparing to form this nucleus and had

secured a safehouse in the Municipality of Macuspana in the oil producing lowlands of Tabasco

just to the north of Chiapas which was to serve as the launching point for this new effort.

Humberto Ochoa, who had taken the nom de guerre of Pedro, and would later rise to leadership


in the EZLN, secured a job with the national oil company, PEMEX, to assist this work. (Cedillo

2010:137-141)

On August 18, 1980, Velasco returned from the Political Bureau meeting in San Cristóbal

to the safehouse in Macuspana. On his arrival he was shot four times. His assailant was Roberto

Isla de la Maza. Isla de la Maza and his partner, Catalina Rivera Olvera, were lawyers who had

worked with the FLN since the early 1970s, but who had only just been compelled to enter

clandestinity. Isla had apparently found clandestine life in general, and Velasco’s discipline in

particular, unendurable, and along with Rivera had decided to quit the organization. Aware of the

FLN’s policy of executing deserters, the couple chose to ambush Velasco first to facilitate their

flight.

The only other person in the safehouse at the time, “Olivia,” a nurse and medical student

at UJAT, fled immediately when neighbors heard the shots and called the police. In her haste

she left behind a substantial cache of FLN documents for the police to discover in the house.

Including internal communiques, issues of Nepantla and Conciencia Proletaria, as well as the

newly approved statutes of the FLN presumably found in Velasco’s possession, this trove of

information eventually made their way to the files of the DFS.

Unlike the capture in 1974 of the FLN’s safehouse in Monterrey and headquarters in

Nepantla, however, the capture of the safehouse in Macuspana did not lead to the arrest of any

members of the organization. Along with the death of Velasco it none the less was a serious blow

to the group. The incident precipitated the departure of an important number of the

organization’s urban militants, in particular a good number of those recently recruited through

Sandinista solidarity work. The plans to plant a guerrilla nucleus in the Lacandon Jungle also had

to be abandoned.


The Strange Case of William Morales

The FLN would suffer one more major blow in the period prior to the founding of the

EZLN. Mario Marcos, who had been elevated to the FLN’s Political Bureau in 1980, was also

responsible for the organization’s network in the northern state of Chihuahua. In this capacity he

developed relations with members of the Comite de Defensa Popular, a militant mass

organization active in the state since the early 1970s. The Comite included sympathizers with the

guerrilla efforts in the state going back to Arturo Gamiz’s GPG. One of these was Alma Gómez,

the daughter of Dr. Pablo Gómez who had been killed in the assault on the Madera barracks.

Following the destruction of the GPG, Alma had herself supported the North Korean-trained

Movimiento de Acción Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Action Movement or MAR) before that

group was broken up as well. Gómez is presumably the main source of the research materials

used by Mario Marcos in the FLN’s study of the GPG. (Cedillo 2010:196-201)

In 1980 Gómez and her husband adopted the infant child of Dylcia Pagan and William

Morales, two members of the armed clandestine Puerto Rican independence organization, the

Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (Armed Forces of National Liberation or FALN).

Morales had been arrested in 1978 when a bomb he was preparing blew up in his hands and

Pagan was arrested in 1980. In 1979, however, Morales was able to escape from Bellevue

Hospital where he was being treated for wounds suffered in the explosion, including the loss of

several fingers and serious damage to his face. Morales made his way to México where he was

presumably put in contact with Mario Marcos by Alma Gómez. Through Mario Marcos, Morales

was given refuge in an FLN safehouse in the town of Cholula in the state of Puebla south of

Mexico City, where he agreed to train members of the FLN in the use of explosives. Morales

shared the safehouse with Mario Marcos, “Ruth,” and a recent 16 year-old Tzeltal recruit.


Remarkably, the FLN permitted Morales to make multiple phone calls from a pay phone

to Alejandrina Torres, a Chicago-based FALN member in the United States whose phone was

tapped by the FBI. On May 26, 1983, Morales and Mario Marcos were intercepted at the phone

by agents of Interpol and the Mexican Federal Judicial Police. In the resulting shootout, Mario

Marcos was killed and two police agents were wounded. Morales was able to flee briefly but was

soon captured. Morales was then brutally tortured and presumably gave up the location of the

safehouse. In the resulting raid, Ruth was killed and the Tzeltal youth suffered a paralyzing

spinal injury and was captured. The loss of Mario Marcos and Ruth was yet another blow to the

FLN less than six months before the founding of the EZLN.

The fates of Morales and the Tzeltal youth are also illuminating. Once in custody, the FBI

took control over Morales’s interrogation and apparently sought to take him back to the US

without following proper extradition procedures. When this failed and the US sought formal

extradition, Morales’s lawyers were able to bring attention to these violations of Mexican

sovereignty. After a five-year long legal battle, extradition was denied and Morales was allowed

to go into exile in Cuba where he remains to this day.

The Tzeltal youth suffered an even more improbable fate. After two years of being

tortured and deprived of food under police guard while hospitalized, he was thrown from a

military helicopter over an indigenous community in the Lacandon Jungle. Miraculously, he

survived the fall.

The Guerrilla That Wasn’t

A striking fact in both the murder of Jorge Velasco in 1980, and in the capture of William

Morales is that the Mexican government appears to have deliberately concealed the continued


existence of the FLN from the press. In the case of Velasco, the government claimed that he was

Guatemalan. In the case of Morales, the government claimed that the two FLN members killed

were Puerto Rican. The government was deeply invested in maintaining the appearance that the

period of guerrilla activity in Mexico had been brought to an end with the amnesty in 1978. As

the FLN was not engaged in any kidnappings, bombings, bank robberies or other public actions

it was not difficult for the government to conceal its continued existence.

What is important to understand is that despite the organization’s security practices, the

FLN’s continued existence was forcefully brought to the attention of the authorities on five

separate occasions between 1974 and 1983 giving every indication that it was an ongoing

project. Furthermore, in one of those incidents, the police came into possession of an extensive

collection of documents detailing not only much of the organization’s recent history, but also, in

the form of the statutes, its immediate plans to form the EZLN. In spite of these warnings, the

FLN was able to continue its work through the 1980s essentially unmolested.

10.4 CONCLUSION

Beginning in the early 1960s an armed communist left emerged in Mexico composed of

political military organizations commited to waging guerrilla warfare with the objective of

carrying out a socialist revolution. Virtually all of these organizations traced their origins at least

in part to dissident currents in the PCM, the PPS or affiliated formations, which they had come to

regard as irretrievably compromised. They shared a common left-wing revolutionary nationalism

that regarded a struggle for national liberation from foreign (mainly U.S.) domination as a

condition for a socialist transformation of Mexico. The formation of the MLN in the wake of the

Cuban Revolution both facilitated the articulation of this left-wing revolutionary nationalism and


enabled these dissident currents to make contact with each other.Over the course of the 1960s

and 70s these groups pursued a variety of political-miltary strategies informed by heavily by the

experience of the Cuban Revolution but also by the experiences of revolutionary guerrilla

warfare in other countries. By the late 1970s, however, almost all of those efforts had failed and

almost every group had been destroyed by an aggressive and very dirty counter-insurgency

campaign.

One organization, however, survived this intense trial by fire. By 1980 the FLN had

recovered from near-lethal blows to build an impressive clandestine structure of urban safe

houses and support networks, and was recruiting in indigenous communities in the Central

Highlands and the Northern Zone of Chiapas to establish a new guerrilla nucleus that would

become the EZLN.

The FLN and the more revolutionary-minded leadership of the indigenous campesino

movement with which they had begun to fuse were two distinct and partial expressions the

communist movement in Mexico. They were each the products of distinct historical processes of

political development that converged at this moment to produce a particularly vital synthesis of

the accumulated lessons of those experiences.

Cedillo has described this fusion as an encounter between what she has called “the

mestizo vanguard” and “the indigenous vanguard.” As described in this chapter, the mestizo

vanguard was the product of the exhaustion of the foquista strategy associated with the military

writings and actions of Ernesto “Ché” Guevara, which the FLN had only recently rejected in

favor of a strategy of protracted peoples war. Thus, the FLN in 1980 was not, as had been in

1969, one of a couple dozen inexperienced would-be guerrilla groups. It was the product not just

of its own difficult history but really of the whole experience of the the armed communist left in


the 1960s and 70s which it had digested and synthesized with its knowledge of the experiences

of revolutionary armed struggle around the world.

The indigenous vanguard in turn was the product of the creation of a strata of organic

indigenous campesino intellectuals through the efforts of the liberationist Diocese of San

Cristóbal. Through the process of building independent campesino organizations and influenced

by their Maoist asesores distinctive reading of Mao’s theory of the mass line method of

communist leadership they developed a practice of mass democracy based in popular assemblies.

They were progressively convinced by their own experiences of both the futility of collaboration

with the ruling party and of the necessity of developing a capacity for armed collective self-

defense. So, just as the mestizo vanguard had learned the limits of Guevara’s foquismo in blood

and fire, the indigenous vanguard had also discovered at great cost the limits of both their own

more horizontal forms of mass organization as well as the reformism, economism, and

opportunism of those who would soon stop calling themselves Maoists.

The EZLN was the product of the encounter between, on the one hand, a radicalizing

popular movement, a revolutionary people convinced of the need to develop its own military

capacity, and, on the other, a political military organization in search of a popular base. The

process of the fusion of these two currents would only begin with the FLN’s recruitment of its

first cohort of indigenous members in Sabanilla and Huitiupan. The continuation of that process

with the founding of the EZLN in 1983 and its subsequent growth and development leading up to

the 1994 Zapatista uprising, is the subject of the next chapter.


CHAPTER 11: THE MAKING OF A REBEL ARMY

In late January 1993, 400 delegates, most of them representatives of several hundred

indigenous villages, gathered in a schoolhouse in the village of Prado in the Patihuitz Cañada in

the Lacandon Jungle. A small fraction of the delegates represented the urban apparatus of the

FLN spread across the rest of Mexico and a somewhat larger fraction represented the several

dozen companies within the thousands strong clandestine rebel army. The delegates would vote

to declare war on the Mexican state and to direct the EZLN’s command to prepare the uprising

that less than a year later would capture the attention of Mexico and much of the rest of the

world.

From its first conceptualization in the Statutes of the FLN in 1980 up until the January

1993 decision to go to war, the EZLN was a project of the FLN and under its command. Initially,

as indicated in the FLN’s statutes, the EZLN was imagined as a nationwide rural-based guerrilla

army. When the EZLN took root and began to grow rapidly in Chiapas but nowhere else it was

reconceived for a while in the latter half of the 1980s as one of several future fronts that would

all operate under the command of the FLN. The efforts to establish these other fronts, however,

would bear little fruit. Indeed, while the EZLN flourished, the rest of the FLN floundered and

was unable to replenish the ranks of its urban apparatus, which consequently took on more and

more of an indigenous character. Thus while the high command of the FLN remained mestizo to

the end, the mestizo parent organization was in fact coming increasingly under the influence of

its almost entirely indigenous offspring.

In 1992 the indigenous communities that constituted the EZLN’s direct bases of support

voted in a series of village assemblies to urge the EZLN to declare war on the Mexican state.


This initiated a process that culminated in the January 1993 decision to go to war that involved a

decisive rupture between the almost entirely indigenous EZLN and most of the remaining

mestizo membership of the FLN’s urban apparatus.

In this chapter I look at the development of the EZLN itself from its founding in 1983 to

the eve of the 1994 uprising. This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part I look at the

initial period preceding and immediately following the EZLN’s founding when the small

guerrilla nucleus had very little contact with the indigenous communities of the Cañadas, paying

special attention to the controversial question of the role of the Diocese in facilitating the

establishment and growth of the EZLN. In the second part I trace the growth of the EZLN and its

transformation from a small and isolate guerrilla group to a large rebel army with the active

support of hundreds of indigenous communities in the Cañadas, the Northern Zone and the

Highlands. In the third and final section I look at the complex processes that would lead to the

decision to go to war and the final preparations for the uprising that I described in the first

chapter of this study.

11.1 THE RIGHT MIX

Between its formal founding in 1983 and the 1994 uprising, the EZLN underwent a

dramatic process of transformation from an initiative on the part of a largely urban, university-

educated and mestizo clandestine political military organization involving a half dozen

individuals divided evenly between Indians and mestizos, to a thousands-strong and

overwhelmingly indigenous popular and revolutionary army rooted in Chiapas’s broad

indigenous-campesino movement. This transformation entailed a complex process of the


digestion and synthesis of the outlooks and experiences of the several distinct currents

documented in previous chapters of this study. As Marcos explains:

What is Zapatismo in 1994 has behind it three main components: a political-military

group, a group of politicized and very experimental indigenous people, and the

indigenous movement of the Selva. (LeBot 1997:123)

The first component is the FLN, or more precisely the urban mestizo FLN. The second

group refers, apparently, to the FLN’s indigenous recruits such as “Paco” as well as their

younger relations trained in the FLN’s safehouses. The third component refers to the indigenous-

campeseino movement especially in the Cañadas, with its roots in the catechist movement that

took a variety of organizational forms, the most important of which was the Union de Uniones.

The Role of the Diocese

A question that has loomed over every account of the origins or history of the EZLN has

been the role of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in facilitating its creation and growth.

There is little question that the work of the Diocese in training catechists, in organizing the

Indigenous Congress, in supporting the formation of independent campesino organizations, and

in its relations with revolutionary movements in Central America contributed to the positive

reception of the EZLN’s revolutionary project by the indigenous communities. What has been

disputed has been the degree of conscious and deliberate collaboration with the FLN-EZLN on

the part of particular elements within the Diocese.

In the immediate aftermath of the 1994 uprising, opponents of the work of the Diocese,

especially among la familia chiapaneca, insisted that the EZLN could only be a project of the

Diocese and luridly accused the Bishop of San Cristóbal of being “Comandante Samuel.” For its

part, Ruíz, who had been chosen to mediate the talks between the Zapatistas and the government,


rejected the accusations, as did the Zapatista leadership which insisted on the EZLN’s

independence. Tello and Legorretta both acknowledged the very real tensions that existed

between the Diocese and the EZLN in the period leading up the uprising, but inisisted that the

FLN could never have secured the base of support in the indigenous communities that it had

without the early active collaboration of Ruíz and at least some of the pastoral staff of the

Diocese.

A complicating factor in any attempt to determine the extent of collaboration is the

simultaneously hierarchical and heterogeneous character of the Diocese. The hierarchical

character of the Catholic Church in general, and the high degree of loyalty that existed on the

part of the vast majority of the pastoral staff toward the person of Bishop Samuel Ruíz meant

that Ruíz was in general kept extraordinarily well informed about the activities of all political

forces within the territory of the Diocese. At the same time, within the broader framework of its

liberationist orientation, the political inclinations of the Diocese’s various organisms, and of the

individual members of the pastoral staff, were in fact quite heterogeneous. It should be

remembered that the secular clergy of the Diocese was quite weak and that most of its parishes

were under the responsibility of one of several religious orders (Dominicans, Jesuits, Marists,

etc…), and that the Diocese was divided into several zones which enjoyed a degree of

independence in how they implemented the overall orientation of the Diocese. On top of this

there were also institutions, like DESMI and the Fray Bartolome Center for Human Rights that

had been formed ath the initiative of the Diocese and were active in communities across the

whole of its territory. Thus, the pastoral staff of the Diocese in accordance with their own

predilections as well as in response to particular local conditions and the wishes of the

communities acted in alliance with a heterogeneous and often shifting collection of political


actors. On occasion the whole weight of the Diocese was brought to bear for or against a

particular organization, as when the Diocese opened its doors to the brigadistas of Línea

Proletaria, or when those same brigadistas were expelled from the communities in the Cañadas.

But in general it tolerated a range of orientations and organizations. Indeed, one of the reasons

that Ruíz’s leadership commanded the respect that it did was precisely his general respect for

both the initiative of the staff of the Diocese and for the self-determination of the communities.

Meyer’s study on behalf of the Conference of Mexican bishops, (2000) advances this more

nuanced view of the role of the Diocese which is also supported by Morales Bermúdez’s history

of the Diocese.(2005)

Within this overall framework it is, nonetheless, appropriate to say that, at least in the

first part of the 1980s, that a tactical alliance was established between the Diocese and the FLN-

EZLN in which the leadership of the Diocese was aware of some, though certainly not all, of the

FLN’s activities in the indigenous communities, and in which members of the pastoral staff and

other personnel associated with the Diocese were allowed to collaborate with the FLN-EZLN if

they were so inclined.

The official stance of the Diocese was one of “accompanying” the poor, and in particular

the indigenous communities, in their struggles, and of not dictating to them what their methods

should be. Behind this stance, of course, was a much more complex practice. While the Diocese

exercised considerable influence over the communities, it was actually beyond its capacities to

simply dictate what they should do. Indeed, Chojnacki (2004) details how even in processes

supposedly internal to the life of the church, that is to say in the training and organization of

indigenous catechists but also in the actions of the clergy, the Diocese is constantly compelled to

negotiate with the communities. The organizational experiences following the Indigenous


Congress, which the Diocese had vainly hoped to transform into an ongoing unitary organization

of the indigenous communities, had clearly demonstrated that the communities were not

monolithic and that they would form alliances with various outside actors and pursue their own

respectives courses of action as they saw fit.

This is not to suggest in any way that Ruíz’s stance or that of the pastoral staff was one of

simple passive support for the initiatives of the communities. On the contrary, Ruíz and the

pastoral staff, were constantly engaged in making strategic assessments of the best path forward

for the indigenous campesino movement and using their influence within the communities to

support that course of action over competing ones. But, as indicated above, the perspective of the

pastoral staff was not necessarily any more monolithic than that of the communities, and Ruíz’s

thinking was itself constantly evolving in response to both international developments and the

experiences of the movement.

At the same time the respect that Ruíz commanded in the communities clearly

complicated the FLN’s security measures. In an interview with Cedillo, a mestizo FLN militant

“Rene” reported that “Paco” would tell Ruíz everything. (2009) It was in this context, according

to Tello, that Ramírez became the liaison between the FLN and Ruíz. (2000:172)

It apears that in the late 1970s and the very early 1980s Ruíz came to see the FLN-EZLN

as preferable partners to the Maoists who not only directly attacked the authority of the church

and the catechists, but who were seeking to channel the indigenous-campesino movement into

closer collaboration with elements in the ruling party. The revolutionary movements in Central

America, with their close ties to the liberationist wing of the church, had a radicalizing influence

not just on Ruíz, but on the whole Diocese. The increasing repression directed at the indigenous

campesino movement and the active role of the armed forces in that repression made the scenario


of revolutionary guerrilla warfare spreading to southern Mexico increasingly plausible. For its

part the FLN, which like much of the rest of the Mexican left had been instinctively anti-clerical,

had learned from the Central American experiences to see the liberationists as a genuinely

revolutionary force to be allied with.

Whether or not Ruíz deliberately offered the FLN the support of the Diocese, he was

most likely aware that they were recruiting within and utilizing the resources of the Diocese and

made no apparent effort to prevent them from doing so. Though here again it should be

emphasized that his knowledge was undoubtedly incomplete. At the same time the leadership of

the Diocese does not appear to have pushed anybody who was not inclined to do so on their own

accord into working with the FLN-EZLN, and it is quite clear that entire fractions of the Diocese,

such as the Jesuits, largely abstained from any collaboration with the political military

organization.

Furthermore, as we will see, relations between Ruíz and the FLN soured in the late 1980s

and in 1992 and 93, the Diocese actively campaigned within communities against the push to go

to war. Those later events notwithstanding, the active or passive support of different elements

within the Diocese undoubtedly facilitated the FLN’s recruitment in the indigenous communities,

the implantation of the EZLN in the Lacandon Jungle, and its subsequent successes in building a

base of support in the communities Cañadas.

Preparations

In the period leading up to the founding of the EZLN, FLN members were involved in

ongoing explorations in the Lacandon Jungle in search of potential sites for both guerrilla

encampments and caches for storing weapons and supplies. These explorations were assisted by


supporters of the FLN in the mixed Chol and Tzotzil communities of Emiliano Zapata and Tierra

y Libertad, both settled by colonists from Lazaro Cardenas and El Calvario. Marcos explains the

FLN’s conception of the future army:

Not yet at the level of practice, the EZLN’s plan for the future was to build a regular

army, thinking already in terms of its command structure, its articulation, its territory, its

organic character. This was proposed and the politicized indigenous elite offered to find a

place where this could be done without the danger of being detected. This coincided with

our idea of making preparations without anyone else being aware of it. (LeBot 1997:133)

By 1982 the group that would found the EZLN had been selected. Three of its members

were mestizos: Yañez (AKA Comandante German), Benavides (AKA Comandante Elisa), and

probably “Rodolfo” who had previously been assigned responsibility for the FLN’s networks in

the northern Mexico. The other three were younger Tzotzil recruits, “Javier,” “Jorge” and

“Frank” who by this point had spent five years training in the FLN’s safehouses. It would take

another year of even more intensive training and preparation before the group would actually

establish its first encampment. The group departed from Ocosingo on November 15, 1983,

travelling first by truck to the ejido La Sultana. The next day, carrying heavy backpacks, dressed

as PEMEX workers, and assisted by Chol guides and pack horses from the community of Tierra

y Libertad, the group, entered the San Quintín canyon, passing the community of Emiliano

Zapata before climbing Chuncerro Mountain where they established their first camp, baptized

“la garrapata” or the wood tick on November 17. (Cedillo 2010:204–205; La Grange and Rico

1998:167) Marcos, who would not join the group for almost another year, gives a secondhand

account of the attitude of the guides:

So they said, this is the Selva Lacandona, there are places where the government won’t

come, the Guardias Blancas won’t come, the ranchers won’t come, the roads won’t

come, and neither will the indigenous people come, because they are very secluded areas.

Not even God will come. There it could be done, if that is what you want to do, but it’s a


very difficult area. We don’t live there either. (LeBot 1997:133)

Marcos’s account also assigns the first encampment a different name:

This is when this group decided to establish itself in the Selva Lacandona. It went in and

founded the Zapatista National Liberation Army, in November 1983, in an encampment

that was paradoxically named ‘The Nightmare.’ We named the encampments according

to what happened, something that happened in that encampment, I think they sent an

explorer and we asked him how the place was, ‘its very pretty, very pleasant, it has a

river and trees, and there’s food, its possible to hunt’ because that was how we were

going to survive. When we came and saw it we said ‘This is a dream? No, it’s a

nightmare’ and it was stuck with the name, ‘The Nightmare.’ (LeBot 1997:133)

Whatever the name of the first camp, and the group would establish several in their first

few months, life in the guerrilla encampments was difficult. The first months of the EZLN’s

existence were primarily occupied with learning how to survive, how to hunt and gather food,

how to march through the jungle and over the mountains, how to conserve energy, and how to

maintain their mental and physical health. Travelling by foot or on horseback, they avoided the

roads and were able to move freely within a large area bordered by the communities of Tierra y

Libertad, Amador Hernandez, Las Tazas, La Sultana and La Realidad. (La Grange and Rico

1998:174) Not everyone could endure the hardships of a guerrilla’s life. This was especially true

of the urban mestizo participants. Of these, those who could bear it also proved to be precisely

those most able and willing to also assimilate to the indigenous cultural context in which they

found themselves.

For the first several months following its founding, the guerrilla nucleus continued to

explore the jungle, moving their camp every two or three weeks while two members travelled

back and forth to the urban safehouses with supplies and reinforcements. Eventually German and

Rodolfo returned to the city leaving Comandante Elisa in charge of six other guerrillas. Elisa was

the third ranking member of the FLN’s command below German and Rodrigo. While both


travelled back and forth frequently between the FLN’s urban safehouses and the EZLN’s

encampments, for the next four years Elisa was responsible for the day to day command of the

EZLN’s forces in the Lacandon Jungle.

It is impossible to determine the precise comings and goings of every individual, but in

early 1984, two indigenous recruits, “Yolanda” from Lazaro Cardenas, late known as Major Ana

Maria, and “Josue,” who had been recruited in San Andres Larrainzar, joined the nucleus along

with the mestizo, Hector Ochoa or “Pedro.” From Michoacan, Ochoa was one of a number of

working class recruits to the FLN in the late 1970s. In August or September the group was joined

by two other indigenous members and by Rafael Guillen who changed his nom de guerre from

“Zacarias” to “Marcos” in honor of the recently fallen “Mario Marcos.” In December two more

indigenous members, “Benjamín” and “Mario” arrived raising the military strength of the

nucleus to that of a company with between 12 and 15 troops of whom three were mestizos of

urban origin, two Chols, and the rest presumably Tzotzils. Sometime in 1985 the group would be

joined for several months by Guillen’s friend from his days at UNAM, Salvador Morales

Garibay, who had taken the name “Daniel.”

At least several of the indigenous members of the newly formed army had family

relations in the mixed Chol and Tzotzil communities of Tierra y Libertad and Emiliano Zapata. It

was precisely these sorts of family connections between veterans of the political struggles in the

highlands and the northern region of Chiapas on the one hand, and the communities that had

colonized the Lacandon Jungle on the other, that would enable the EZLN to eventually recruit

from, and finally to sink such deep roots in those communities.

A major preoccupation for the small band of guerrillas was the maintenance of their

supply lines from the city. The materials they received from the FLN had to pass through or


around the indigenous communities that, as of yet, were almost completely ignorant of the

EZLN’s existence. Marcos describes the situation:

We went into the Selva. We went into the Nightmare. It really was a nightmare, with no

help from the villages, with only this little political group that didn’t even bring 10

indigenous people with no possibility of aid from the communities. And our supply line

grew longer, it came from the city and went underground until it arrived at our

encampment. The underground included the communities, or that is we passed by all the

villages without them seeing us, at night and concealed. (LeBot 1997:137)

The existence of the EZLN may have been known only to a handful of people, but the

indigenous communities were hardly unaware of the strangers who passed by their villages at

night. The very communities that would eventually become the bases of support for the EZLN

initially regarded the guerrillas as a threat. Marcos explains,

They persecuted us at times because they said we were cattle rustlers, or bandits, or

witches. Many who are now compañeros, including comandantes of the CCRI,

persecuted us in this period because they thought we were bad people. (LeBot 1997:137-

138)

“What preoccupied us most” explained Marcos,

was how to live in the mountains. We knew that if we were to keep on doing what we

were doing that would be our most powerful weapon, because the environment was

repellant, and we said ‘Well, the same will happen to the soldiers, this is our shield, we

have to learn how to live there.’ Thus we dedicated most of our time to survival, and we

succeeded in surviving over long periods of time without any sort of outside supplies. As

the supply line came from the city we had to wait months for things to arrive. As a result

we lived off fruit, hunting wild animals, we knew the paths, we walked, we became part

of the land, we had a network of paths that we used. We could move from one mountain

to another without anybody seeing us.

In retrospect the importance of this process in the development of the Zapatistas both

politically and militarily seems obvious. At the time, however, it was far from clear. According

to Marcos,

It was a solitary period because we weren’t told anything, in terms of the world and

national reality, that we were being successful or the value of the sacrifices we were

making, the opposite, everything said that we were going to fail all around. ... As a


guerrilla group we were very isolated, as much on the national terrain as on the local,

because we had no contact with the indigenous communities. (LeBot 1997:139-141)

The guerrillas also continued the military training that had begun in the safe houses. As Marcos

explains,

(I)n military terms, during these months in the mountains, as we had no foreign support

nor advisors, nor anything, we had to resort to training ourselves militarily, what we

could give ourselves, based on the experiences of the Latin American guerrillas that we

had read about, but above all based on the guerrilla and counter-guerrilla manuals of the

US Army. We learned how to be guerrilllas in the manuals of the Rangers, the SIESPOS,

the SEALS, and all the commando-type structures in the US Army and NATO. Here we

learned what the guerrilla was, what was a regular army, we learned this from the military

history manuals. From the epoch of the War of Independence we learned about the army

of Morelos and from the Revolution above all about Villa’s División del Norte and

Zapata’s Ejercito Liberatador del Sur. Accordingly we organized into units, sections,

companies, battalions, divisions, army corps, army, the great army, the same as their

command structures. Our schema is very close to that of the armies of Villa and Zapata.”

(LeBot 1997:137-138)

11.2 TO BUILD A REBEL ARMY

For the first two years of its existence, the tiny guerrilla band was cut off not just from

the larger world, but also from the developments taking place in the indigenous communities that

would eventually contribute to the dramatic growth of the Zapatistas. Marcos describe sthe

situation:

This guerrilla group was alone. For that reason it failed to detect other things that were

beginning to gestate in the zone, the sharpening conditons of repression, of life, of

misery, and that would allow this indigenous movement, this indigenous mass that we

now see, to become ready to enter into contact with the guerrilla group. (LeBot 1997:142)

Paradoxically, this experience of isolation which on the one hand prevented the guerrillas

from immediately seeing these important developments on the other hand proved to be crucial

when the group was finally able to enter into contact with the indigenous communities. As

Marcos continues


This contact between the communities and the armed group – this group of urban origin,

the guerrilla of the university didn’t happen with people coming from the city. These

people came from the mountains, had lived in the mountains three, four or five years. For

the indigenous people this signified a lot. (Lebot 1997:142)

During the period from 1983 to 1985 there was very little direct contact between the

guerrillas and the indigenous communities of the Cañadas that were to become the Zapatistas

main bases of support. The first cautious contacts were made in strict secrecy by the indigenous

members of the new army with their closest family members and most trusted political contacts.

Only after these initial contacts had been made were any members of the communities

introduced to the ladino members of the organization.

If the guerrilla nucleus itself was isolated, the FLN was continuing to recruit from the

communities where it had contacts. By the time that the EZLN was founded, the FLN was

actively recruiting new indigenous members not just in the northern miunicipalities of Sabanilla

and Huitiupan, but also in the Central Highlands municipality of San Andres Larrainzar, in the

deeply impoverished communities of the Jovel vallaey around and especially to the south of San

Cristobal de Las Casas, as well as in the those communities in the Cañadas like Emiliano Zapata

and Tierra y Libertad where they already had established contacts.

An important early recruit was “Moisés,” from San Antonio la Huasteca in the Amador

cañada north of San Quintin. His life story is recounted in an excellent historical novel, Nudo de

Serpientes by Alejandro Aldana Sellschopp, (2004) which describes his political awakening in

the aftermath of the massacre at Wololchán in 1980, his encounters with various political actors

in the indigenous-campesino movement and his eventual recruitment into the FLN-EZLN in

December 1983. Moisés learned to read and write in an FLN safehouse in Mexico City before

joining the guerrilla force back in the jungle in 1985. (LeBot 1997:165–175)


Following the pattern established first with Paco, and consistent with the FLN’s

understanding of the strategy of protracted peoples war, the FLN sought to first recruit

established leaders in the communities and then, through them, their most trusted friends and

family members. As with Paco, many of those recruited to join the guerrillas in the mountains

were adolescent family members of already respected community leaders. In his novel Tierna

memoria, Carlos Ímaz tells the story of one such boy who discovers that his father and other men

are meeting secretly at night with the guerrillas before he decides to join them. After a brief and

miserable introduction to life in a guerrilla encampment, the boy goes to a safehouse where he

receives an intensive political education. (Ímaz 2006)

At the same time that the FLN-EZLN was expanding its indigenous membership,

however, its organizational work in the rest of the country had begun to stagnate. The combined

effect of these two processes was a transformation in both the ethnic composition of the FLN and

its relationship to the indigenous campesino movement. As Marcos tells it:

After a little while -- I’m speaking of 1984 -- we ceased having a majority of ladinos and

mestizos, and the indigenous people became the majority. Therefore at the time that

contact was made with the communities the indigenous element is already the majority in

the political-military organization, even if this wasn’t reflected in the command structure.

But it was reflected in its internal life, because already there had been an initial cultural

shock that had been necessary to assimilate and resolve: to learn the language, but to

learn something more than the language; the use of the language, of the symbols of what

different things represented, what the sense of the symbol represented in the communities

and all that. (LeBot 1997:144-145)

There was a political dimension to this process of cultural transformation as well. The

EZLN ceased to be simply the rural project of the urban university educated mestizo political

military organization and was progressively transformed into an armed wing of the indigenous

campesino movement. This, of course, involved a transformation in the political outlook of the

indigenous participants as much as the mestizos.


As the guerrilla group established itself it began to make more direct contact with the

communities. In October 1984, only a month or two after his own arrival in the jungle, Marcos

visited the community of Las Tazas and met with a group of community members, addressing

them on the subject of Mexican history, covering Father Miguel Hidalgo’s war for independence

from Spain as well as the guerrilla struggle of Lucio Cabañas in the state of Guerrero in the

early 1970s. (La Grange and Rico 1998:177)

Those present in Las Tazas included some of the most important leaders of the Union de

Uniones. While the EZLN sought contacts in a number of campesino organizations including

OCEZ, CIAOAC, and even the PRIs campesino organization, the CNC, it was their contacts in

the Union de Uniones that would develope into their most important bases of support. The rapid

departure in 1983 of many key leaders and the demoralization associated with the events leading

to the expulsion of the Maoist asesores had effectively paralyzed the organization. The

conditions of misery and repression that had made the organization so important to its members,

however, had not gone away. It was in this context that members of the FLN had begun to make

contacts with militants from the Union de Uniones. In the beginning of 1985 the Union de

Uniones would begin to regain some of its former strength. The community of Nueva Estrella

located in the valley of Ocosingo was fighting for lands claimed by ranchers. Under the new

leadership of Ausencio Lorenzo, the organization mobilized a massive response to the attempt by

gunmen to terrorize the village and their success reinvigorated the organization. (Tello Díaz

2000:114–118) It was of course precisely these sorts of confrontations with large landowners

that the Maoists had discourage.


Slohp Again

Among the leader of the Union de Uniones present at the meeting in Las Tazas was

Lazaro Hernandez. Hernandez had very close relations with the Diocese. He was among the first

tuhunels ordained by the Diocese in the late 1970s and had been appointed “Tuhunel of the

Tuhuneles” the highest office in the autochthonous church. He was also secretary of the largest

of the ejidal unions that made up the Union de Uniones, Quiptic Te Lecubtesel. According to

Tello Hernandez made contact with the FLN through meetings organized by Slohp, of which he

was also a leading member. (2000:118)

AS discussed earlier Slohp was advised by Javier Vargas and gathered together some of

the most politically sophisticated catechists and tuhunels in the Tzeltal Cañadas.

The concrete project that brought the EZLN into sustained contact with the communities

in the Cañadas was the project of training them in self-defense. In Tello’s account, the vehicle

for this project was Slohp. Tello claims that Slohp was committed to developing the self-defense

capacities of the communities and that Slohp entered into an alliance with the EZLN. Vargas

denies that Slohp ever had such an orientation. Whether Slohp itself ever officially adopted the

project is, in any event, less important than the fact that its leading member, Hernandez was

recruited to the EZLN. Hernandez proceeded to use his extensive contacts and influence within

the indigenous campesino movement to recruit many other community leaders to the Zapatistas

and to convince their communities to begin sending youth to the guerrilla encampments to

receive military training.

The village San Francisco was the first of many communities that would be brought into

the EZLN on this basis. The ranchers and coffee growers had been hiring and organizing

“guardias blancas” to terrorize the indigenous communities and drive them off disputed lands.


The efforts of the communities to arm themselves and organize their own defense had up to this

point been unsuccessful. Marcos describes the process by which the project of organizing and

training village self-defense groups was proposed to the communities:

These two groups, the political-military organization and the politicized indigenous elite

are still a little separated. The group that now I would call the intermediate group, that

would be the intermediary between the Zapatista Army and the communities, this

politicized indigenous group began to talk with some of the leaders of the indigenous

communities that were aware of the armed struggle. This was to coincide with the growth

of the Guardias Blancas and repressive acts, above all in the Selva änd in the North of

Chiapas, where the indigenous people naturally had to defend themselves. At the time

that the armed struggle was proposed to them they said “Well, if they are going to teach

me to fight and they are going to get weapons, that’s what I need.” It’s a very practical

interest, very immediate, of survival, that allowed this first contact between the

indigenous communities and the political military group – and from this collision would

emerge what we now know as Zapatismo, not that of right now, because that already has

other ingredients, but the Zapatismo that emerged in January 1994. (LeBot 1997:142-

143)

On September 23, 1985 a group of EZLN insurgents, including Moises, Josue and

Marcos made direct contact with San Francisco. (La Grange and Rico 1998:178; Tello Díaz

2000:119) Located in the Avellanal cañada, San Francisco was one of a number of communities

then threatened by the Mexican Army with eviction in accordance with the Decree on the

Lacandon Community. The entire community was determined to resist any attempt at eviction

and approved a proposal from the guerrillas to form and train self-defense groups to defend the

community. In early 1986, EZLN members began to approach other communities in the

Avellanal cañada with the same plan. (Tello 2000:121)

The First Defeat

When the young people from the communities went into the mountains to join the

guerrillas they underwent a process of military and political training. The political training of


EZLN insurgents was based on the FLN’s still more or less orthodox Marxism-Leninism. But

that orthodoxy underwent a process of transformation as it was translated both into both the

languages and cultures of the indigenous communities. The result was something new – a

synthesis of revolutionary Marxism and the current religious proto-communism in the

communities that was informed by 500 years of resistance to the Spanish conquest and ladino

racism. Marcos describes this process:

It’s a kind of translation enriched by the perspective of political transition. The idea of a

more just world, everything that was socialism in its broadest features, but digested and

enriched with humanitarian, ethical and moral elements that are more from the

indigenous people themselves. Quickly the revolution was transformed into something

essentially moral. Ethical. More than the redistribution of wealth or the expropriation of

the means of production, the revolution began to be the possibility that to be human was

to have the space for dignity. Dignity started to be a very strong word. This wasn’t our

contribution, this wasn’t a contribution of the urban element, the communities

contributed this. In such a form that the revolution would be the guarantor of a dignity

that would be fulfilled, that would be respected. … The EZLN is not conscious of this

translation or enriched digestion. This was happening without our planning it. We

thought we were growing because the light had emerged from the darkness, but with

distance we see that this is what happened. (LeBot 1997:145-146)

An important figure in the political transformation of the EZLN was Old Antonio. Many

of the EZLN comminques written by Marcos have used the stories of Old Antonio to illuminate

the outlook of the indigenous communities for the benefit of non-indigenous readers. Old

Antonio has been widely regarded as a literary invention, but Marcos insists that he was a real

man. He describes how Old Antonio turned the process of political education around so that the

ladino members of the EZLN became the students of the history and experiences of the

communities:

At first, in our perspective as guerrillas, they were exploited people that had to be

organized and shown the road. Put yourself in our place, we were the light of the world

… They were blind people who had to open their eyes. This didn’t change until that

translator, Old Antonio, appeared. At the time that the communities entered into contact

with us someone emerged who seems like a literary character, but who was real, who


existed. That old man became the link with the communities, with their world, and with

the part that was most indigenous. By way of him, by way of those political leaders and

leaders of the communities, the Zapatista National Liberation Army began to understand

the history of their political roots, of their consciousness, of their historical

consciousness. And what came of this is that we are not talking with an indigenous

movement that is waiting for a saviour, but rather with an indigenous movement with a

lot of tradition of struggle, with a lot of experience, very resistant, very intelligent as

well, to which we would simply serve as something like an armed wing. (LeBot

1997:146-147)

In The Story of Questions, Marcos recounts one of his first encounters with Old Antonio

in which he asks Marcos toexplain who he is.

So I begin to talk about the times of Zapata and Villa and the revolution and the land and

the injustice and hunger and ignorance and sickness and repression and everything. And I

finish by saying so “we are the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.” I wait for some

sign from Old Antonio who never took his eyes from my face.

“Tell me more about that Zapata” he says after smoke and a cough.

I start with Anenecuilco, then with the Plan de Ayala, the military campaign, the

organization of the villages, the betrayal at Chinameca. Old Antonio continued to stare at

me until I finished.

“It wasn’t like that” he says.

I’m surprised and all I can do is babble.

“I’m going to tell you the real story of Zapata.”

Taking out tobacco and rolling paper, Old Antonio begins his story which unites

and confuses modern times with old times, just like the smoke from my pipe and his

cigarette which mingle and converge on one another.

“Many stories ago, in the time of the first gods, the ones who made the world

there were two gods who were Ik’al and Votan. Two were one single one. When one

turns the other could be seen, when the other turns the one could be seen. They were

opposites. One was like the light, like a May morning in the river. The other was dark,

like a night of cold in a cave. They were the same. One was two, because one made the

other. But they didn’t walk they were always stationary these two gods who were one.

‘So what do we do?’ ‘Life is sad like this.’, they lamented the two who were one. ‘The

night won’t go’ said Ik’al. ‘The day won’t go’ said Votan. ‘Let’s walk’ said the one who

were two. ‘How?’ said the other. ‘Where?’ said the one.

When they did this they saw they moved a little bit. First by asking why, and then

by asking where. Happy was the one who was two. Then both of them decided to move

and they couldn’t. ‘How do we do it then?’ One would move from the other and then the

other would move. So they agreed that in order to move they had to do so separately. And

no one could remember who moved first, they were just happy that they moved and said

‘What does it matter who is first as long as we move?’ The two gods who were the same

one said and they laughed and agreed to have a dance, and they danced, one little step

behind the other. Then they tired of all the dancing and asked what else they could do and


saw that the first question was “how to move” and brought the response of “together but

separately and in agreement.” They didn’t care much that it was so.

They were so happy they were moving until they came to two roads: one was very

short and one could see the end of it. They were so happy they could move that they

decided to choose the long road which then brought them to another question. ‘Where did

the road go?”. It took them a long time, but the two who were one finally decided that

they would never know where that long road took them unless they moved. So they said

to one another ‘Let’s walk it then” And they began to walk first one and then the other.

They found it was taking them a long time and asked “how will we walk for such a long

time?’ Ik’al declared he did not know how to walk by day and Votan declared that by

night he was afraid.

So they cried for a long time, then finally agreed that Ik’al would walk by night

and Votan by day. Since then the gods walk with questions and they never stop, they

never arrive and they never leave. So that is how the true men and women learned that

questions serve to learn how to walk, and not to stand still. Since then true men and

women walk by asking, to arrive they say good-bye and to leave they say hello. They are

never still.”

I chew on the now-short stem of the pipe waiting for Old Antonio to continue, but

he never does. In fear that I will disrupt something very serious I ask “And Zapata?”

Old Antonio smiles “You’ve learned now that in order to know and walk you

have to ask questions.” He coughs and lights another cigarette and out of his mouth come

these words that fall like seeds on the ground.

“That Zapata appeared here in the mountains. He wasn’t born, they say. He just

appeared just like that. They say he is Ik’al and Votan who came all the way over here in

their long journey, and so as not to frighten good people, they became one. Because after

being together for so long Ik’al and Votan learned they were the same and could become

Zapata. And Zapata said he had finally learned where the long road went and that at times

it would be light and and times darkness but that it was the same, Votan Zapata, and Ik’al

Zapata, the black Zapata and the white Zapata They were both the same road for the true

men and women.” (2002:413)

This initial interaction with Old Antonio captures in a single story what was undoubtedly

a much more prolonged process. Marcos discusses how during the period from 1985 to 1987 the

process of interaction with the indigenous communities in the course of organizing community

self-defense groups forced the EZLN not only to reevaluate certain ideological formulations, but,

more importantly, to adopt a different posture in relation to the people they were seeking to

organize. The Zapatistas, he says,


quickly realized that this is a reality for which we were not prepared, we discovered the

indigenous world, we saw that they weren’t just any people, that they weren’t waiting for

us, that we hadn’t come to teach them what we had constructed for this or that sector [of

society]. We thought that it was the same to talk with a proletarian, with a campesino,

with an office worker, or with a student. Everybody was going to understand the word of

the revolution. And then we were confronted by a new world for which we had no

response. (LeBot 1997:147-148)

This realization was what Marcos called the “first defeat of the EZLN.” This ideological

defeat of the established categories of the revolutionary left would have a profound effect on

how the EZLN saw its relationship with the communities and with the revolutionary process.

The virtue of the FLN, Marcos argues

was in recognizing that it didn’t have an answer and that it had to learn. That is the first

defeat of the EZLN, the most important and what marked what was to follow. When the

EZLN faces something new and recognizes that it has no solution for that problem, that it

has to wait and learn, that it ceases to be the teacher. The only thing we had to contribute

to this reality was a pile of questions, but no answers. (LeBot 1997:148)

Marcos describes this transformation, as one would expect, from the perspective of the

mestizo members of the FLN.

The process began here of the transformation of the EZLN from an army of the

revolutionary vanguard to an army of the indigenous communities, an army that is one

part of the indigenous movement of resistance among many other forms of struggle.

As I will discuss later, however, the process was more mutual or dialogical than this

account conveys. That is to say that while Marcos rightly emphasizes the transformation as

experienced by mestizo members there was a parallel transformation occurring in the outlook of

the indigenous members as well. In any event the mestizo membership of the EZLN wasn’t yet

conscious of this shift nor of its larger implications. “We didn’t see it like this,” Marcos explains,

“for us the armed struggle was the backbone, the highest stage, etcetera.” Had the EZLN not

begun to change, had it clung to its original methods and understandings, Marcos believes it

would have shared the fate of earlier guerrilla movements.


I think what allowed the EZLN to survive and grow was accepting that defeat. If the

EZLN had not accepted it, it would have been isolated, it would have remained small, the

EZLN that emerged on January 1, 1994 would never have been born. It’s an army of

thousands of combatants, even if poorly armed they are thousands, and to find thousands

of people ready to fight until death is not an easy thing. For me, on the contrary, the

EZLN was born the moment that it accepted that it was confronted with a new reality for

which it had no answer and that it would have to subordinate itself in order to survive

within that reality. (LeBot 1997:148-149)

Admitting this defeat was not easy.

It is very difficult when you have a theoretical schema that explains all of society to you

and you come to society and find that your schema explains nothing. It’s a difficult thing

to accept: to recognize that we had dedicated all of our lives to a project and that this

project is fundamentally crippled. It couldn’t explain the reality in which it sought to

establish itself. This was something very serious. (LeBot 1997: 149-150)

But it was precisely this recognition and how it informed the work of developing

community self-defense that was to determine the distinctive character of the EZLN.

Community Self-Defense and Political Training

The project of organizing community self-defense that began in 1985 transformed the

EZLN from a mere handful of guerrillas hiding out in the jungle into an organization of at least

two hundred armed insurgents with strong ties to a number of indigenous communities. This

period also saw Marcos’s ascent through the ranks of the EZLN from the rank of Lieutenant to

the position of Subcommandante.

Marcos brought a number of qualities to the project of organizing community self-

defense that undoubtedly contributed to its success. More than most of the other mestizos,

Marcos was apparently able to both see the limitations of the FLNs orthodoxy and to adapt to the

indigenous life. He learned to speak Tzeltal and Tzotzil and to understand Tojolabal and Chol.

(Aviles and Mina 1997:173) This was undoubtedly crucial to his acceptance by the communities.


He also quickly proved to be adept in giving the community members the military training they

needed.(La Grange and Rico 1998:179–186)

In 1985 Marcos was providing training to young recruits in an encampment called El

Encuentro. This work went well enough that he was promoted that same year from the rank of

Lieutenant to that of Captain. The organization and training of the communities drew on the

experiences of the FLN in the 1960s and 70s as well as on U.S., Mexican, and NATO military

manuals. The Zapatistas were very poorly armed in this period. They trained with the M1, M2

and Sten rifles that they had. They had no AK-47s or higher powered weapons.

The training of community members was so successful that by June 1986, it was

necessary to establish a new encampment called El Recluta to accommodate the growth in the

EZLN’s ranks. El Recluta was located two hours march from the community of San Francisco.

At this point the EZLN was receiving recruits at the rate of ten a day. Not all of these could

endure the hardships of the guerrillas’ life but enough stayed that the ranks of uniformed

insurgents grew to 200 by this point.

The growth of the EZLN during 1986 enabled them to fill out some of the command

structure they had elaborated for themselves when they were no more than a dozen people hiding

out in the jungle. Towards the end of the year, Marcos, Daniel and Pedro were promoted to the

new rank of Sub-Comandantes. The structure of the FLN/EZLN at this point consisted of three

Comandantes: German, Rodrigo and Elisa. Under them, in descending order, were: the Sub-

Comandantes, Captains, Lieutenants, Sub-Lieutenants, Insurgents, and Recruits. These ranks

constituted the standing armed forces of the EZLN. Beneath them were the village based militias,

and then the civilian support bases. The command structure was not yet formally accountable to

the communities. (Tello Diaz 108-109)


To accommodate the EZLN’s growth, new encampments had to be established. Shortly

after his promotion to the rank of Sub-Comandante, Marcos would establish yet another

encampment, Cama de Nubes, above the small community of Prado. Subcomandante Daniel

would be charged with establishing another encampment, Las Calabazas, in the Sierra

Corralchen and Subcomandante Pedro was to establish an encampment, La Loma, in the largely

Tojolabal zone between the Euseba and Jatate rivers. At the same time Major Mario set up yet

another encampment, Baby Doc, named after a small pig that had been adopted as a mascot who

was in turn named for the Haitian dictator. Marcos’s camp, Cama de Nubes, would become the

general headquarters of the EZLN.

Thus by 1987 the EZLN had established itself as a power in a significant swathe of the

Cañadas. This also happened to be the moment when Pablo Iribarren replaced Gonzalo Ituarte as

the head of the enormous parish of Ocosingo and Altamirano. Iribarren describes his first

encounter with the guerrillas shortly after his arrival in Ocosingo,

I had an interview with the command. I did not know who they were, but they invited me

to coffee, and there I met the movement’s command. It must have been in 87. I was only

invited to this meeting, this informal and private gathering, so that they could just tell me

that “the zapatista army was very widespread,” and that I was free to “... simply visit

communities, that there would be no problem, that I could visit them all, all the

communities, all the villages in the municipios, but that I shouldn’t forget that they were

there as well.”(Iribarren 2008)

Guns and Money

The growth of the EZLN presented the organization with what would prove to be a

persistent problem: securing enough weapons to adequately arm their rapidly expanding forces.

Lacking foreign support and eschewing fundraising methods such as kidnappings and bank

robberies, the EZLN appears to have been consistently plagued by a shortage of weapons that


would be evident during the January 1, 1994 uprising when many milicianos carried fake

wooden rifles with knives attached as bayonets.

Before 1986, the EZLN had very few arms -- the MIs, M2s and Stens mentioned earlier.

Marcos claimed that the weapons of the EZLN came from three sources:

A small portion comes from the ‘work of ants,’ of buying arms here and there. Another

important source is the Mexican police and army involved in the anti-drug battle. When

they arrest drug traffickers, they seize their weapons, but they only turn over a small

portion of the weapons to their superiors, the rest are sold on the black market. Thats how

we bought AK-47s, M-16s, and other arms. They thought they were selling to other drug

traffickers and that they would soon enough arrest them and resell the weapons. The

third source was the guardias blancas of the ranchers, trained by the security forces and

the army. They had good weapons and last year began to recieve UZIs. Finally there are

the weapons of the peasants themselves, shotguns and rudimentary things. We don’t have

as many weapons as we would like, nor ammunition. (Collier and Quaratiello 1994:84)

Because they had to take what they could get there was considerable variety in the guns

carried by the insurgents and the milicianos. Their armory included 22 carbines, SKS Simonovs,

303 Savages, Comando .45s, Ruger Mini-14s, UZIs, M-16s, AR-15s, and AK-47s. (La Grange

and Rico 1998:187–196)

Finances were also a consistent problem. The FLN operated workshops in various other

parts of Mexico to produce boots and uniforms and to modify and reassemble weapons. They

also operated a print shop and a carpentry shop on a commercial basis to raise funds for the

organization. In the absence of the traditional illegal sources of funds employed by other

guerrilla organizations, the FLN depended on the dues of their members, the meager profits from

operations like the print shop, profits from the sale of weapons to the village militias and,

according to LaGrange and Rico, resources that could be redirected from NGOs where they had

either recruited existing staff or infiltrated their own members.


Meeting New Challenges

1988 was a very important year in the development of the EZLN. It was a year of intense

military and political training for the many new recruits who had joined the organization in the

previous year. The year began with a close call with the Federal Army, and in August the EZLN

carried out a massive war-game that demonstrated the organization’s greatly expanded military

capacities. The year also saw the further consolidation of Marcos’s position of leadership within

the EZLN.

On the national level, 1988 also saw the presidential candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas,

the son of General Lazaro Cárdenas, in opposition to the ruling party’s candidate Carlos Salinas

de Gortari. A former PRI senator and governor from the state of Michoacan, Cardenas broke

ranks with the ruling party and ran as the candidate of the Frente Democrático Nacional, an

alliance of dissident PRI members and several left-wing parties and using the electoral

registration of the former PCM now renamed Partido Socialista Mexicano after a merger with

several smaller left-wing parties. The Cardenas campaign represented the first serious electoral

challenge to the ruling party’s control of the presidency since the beginning of a modest process

of democratization in the late 1970s. It also reflected the growth of a large but loose constellation

of neighborhood groups, NGOs and other non-state actors, widely referred as “civil society,” that

had grown considerably in the aftermath of the PRI’s fumbled response to the 1985 Mexico City

earthquake. By Marcos’s own later admission, the EZLN did not fully appreciate the significance

of these developments. That did not mean, however, that other forces in Chiapas failed to register

their import. While Cardenas was almost certainly denied the presidency only by means of

massive electoral fraud, his campaign convinced many, including the leadership of the Diocese

of San Cristóbal, that an electoral path to ending the PRI’s monopoly on political power had


been opened up. This was an assessment that would, of course, have an important impact of the

Diocese’s relationship with the EZLN.

1988 witnessed a number of other important events. In February, an Army patrol,

supposedly looking to destroy marijuana plants, stumbled upon an EZLN militia camp outside of

the community of San Francisco. They discovered a hidden collection of wooden rifles used for

training the milicianos. The soldiers also came within a kilometer of a camp where Zapatista

troops, who were at that moment commemorating the anniversary of the raid on the FLN’s safe

house in Nepantla, were given orders to surround the soldiers with the objective of defending the

nearby headquarters at Cama de Nubes. (La Grange and Rico 1998:160–161; Tello Díaz

2000:133) The confrontation was averted when the Federal Army soldiers turned around and left.

Interestingly, the Zapatistas had already convinced the communities they were working with to

refuse to plant marijuana precisely to avoid the attention of the military.

Shortly after this event Comandante Elisa, pregnant and now married to Javier Elorriaga,

returned to the FLN’s urban work. Elisa’s departure left Marcos in command of the EZLN.

Also sometime in the first half of 1988, the FLN formally initiated a new rural guerrilla

force, the Frente Villista de Liberación Nacional (the Villista National Liberation Front or

FVLN) in mountainous semi-desert region around Hidalgo de Parral in the northern state of

Chihuahua. Named after Francisco Villa, and under the command of Captain Rodolfo, a member

of the founding nucleus of the EZLN and originally from Chihuahua himself, the FLN hoped that

the FVLN would be able to reproduce the accomplishments of the EZLN in Chihuahua. It was

not to be. Neither the physical nor the political terrain proved as auspicious as the conditions

encountered in Chiapas. The FVLN never grew beyond a small nucleus which was eventually

renamed the Northern Front of the EZLN. The failure of the FVLN would only become further


evidence of the lopsided relationship between the EZLN and the rest of the FLN. (Tello Díaz

2000:136)

Operation Votan

The commemoration of anniversaries was an important feature of the internal life of both

the FLN and the EZLN and the most important date commemorated each year was August 6, the

anniversary of the FLN’s founding in 1969. Margarita attended the commemorations organized

by the EZLN in the Lacandon Jungle every year from 1985 to 1989 and describes them as large

events involving parades, speeches, reports on the organization’s various accomplishment (such

as the construction of a clinic or other similar projects). The commemorations gave participants a

sense of the growth of the organization. The 1986 the commemoration already involved a

thousand participants. (2009)

The FLN’s 19th

anniversary in 1988 was the occasion for Operation Votan, a massive

Zapatista war-game conducted in the jungle. About 70 communities and ranches were

represented in the military parade of about 1,000 insurgents and militia-members that began the

commemoration on August 4. Each community contingent carried a standard honoring a

revolutionary hero that signified that community within the EZLN. The parade was followed by

a five-phase mock operation in which the troops took an “enemy headquarters” by assault. The

operation lasted almost three hours. (La Grange and Rico 1998:163–164; Tello Díaz 2000:135)

Lucia wrote a detailed account of the operation for the FLN’s internal periodical,

Nepantla: “We arrived on the third (of August) in the Zapatista Front’s zone of operations,

everything was planned, including entering by an alternative route in case of rain.” The urban

militants were then met by two campesinos who guided them on horseback to a community


where they ate and changed into their uniforms before proceeding on further in the rain.

Eventually they encountered a platoon of uniformed Zapatista milicianos who saluted them and

escorted them to a safe house where Sub-Comandante Marcos, Sub-Lieutenant Alfredo and

another platoon of milicianos were waiting for them. Lucia notes that they offered a regulation

military salute before shaking hands and embracing the visitors. The next morning they set out

again to a point where they were met by battalions of Zapatista insurgents and escorted by

another platoon of mounted miliIcianos. When they finally arrived at the site of the operations

Comandante German reviewed all the troops. (Lucia 1988:17–31)

1988 would also be the beginning of the FLN’s “Year of the Cadre School.” It was a

year dedicated to developing the capacity of the organization to integrate and train its swelling

ranks both politically and militarily (as well as in a variety of other skills ranging from medicine

and carpentry to boot repair and playing the guitar).

The Cadre School was established by the FLN in a safe house in Mexico City. According

to an article that appeared in Nepantla under the byline of Rosa, the school offered its first

classes starting September 3, 1988. The first course lasted one month. In order to attend, students

had to meet certain minimum requirements. They had to be able to read and write in Spanish and

to have read the FLN’s statutes, another document entitled Estrategia Obrera (Working

Strategy), and Engels’ The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man. They also

had to pass an admissions exam and sign an agreement to use their training as cadres for the

organization.

The course of study was divided into five topic areas: 1. the history and organizational

workings of the FLN, 2. the FLN’s basic political positions, 3. an introduction to Marxism, 4.

Historical Materialism, and 5. Dialectical Materialism. The classes on the history and


organization of the FLN relied on the statutes of the FLN, the series of articles entitled Nuestra

Historia that had appeared in Nepantla as well as various other documents and internal

communiques. The classes on the FLN’s basic political positions began with a discussion of the

capitalist character of Mexico, its particular class structure, and why a revolution was necessary

before systematically reviewing a number of the FLNs positions on particular questions. The

introduction to Marxism relied on three texts: The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from

Ape to Man, and The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State by Engels and The

Communist Manifesto. (Rosa 1988:58–67) Studenst also read selections from Marx’s Capital as

well as Lenin’s What Is To Be Done. (La Grange and Rico 1998:186)

Between twenty and thirty students participated in each month-long course, including

recruits from the states of Puebla, Chihuahua, and Veracruz as well as Mexico City. (La Grange

and Rico 1998:186) Since the growth of the organization in Chiapas was not being matched

anywhere else in the country, most of the students came from Chiapas and the work of the Cadre

School was largely directed at the education and training of the indigenous troops of the EZLN.

If the leaders of the FLN saw the Cadre School as a means of correcting the EZLN’s political

drift away from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, the effect was apparently the opposite. The EZLN

troops undoubtedly learned the fundamentals of Marxist political economy and read the classic

works of Lenin and others, but their acquisition of those analytical tools only strengthened their

position within the organization and their consequent influence on the organization’s politics.

(La Grange and Rico 1998:190–193)

Given their own circumstances, the urban cadres of the FLN were actually in no position

to seriously remold the thinking of the Zapatista troops. While the EZLN was flourishing in the


Cañadas the FLN’s urban apparatus was withering. “The situation in the city was grave,”

Marcos says of this period:

The disenchantment, the disillusionment was greatest in the urban sectors. The urban part

of the organization didn’t grow, it continued to stagnate. What then happened was that the

indigenous youth who had joined us in the mountains and that had to learn medicine,

communications, carpentry, all that an army needs to maintain itself, we sent them to the

city and with them we sent the virus. If was as if the tactical indianization of the EZLN

had moved and contaminated the urban part of the EZLN and it was indianized as well.

The majority of the members of the army were indigenous and the majority of the urban

structure, which was very small – I’m talking to you about a few dozen people – was

also of indigenous origin. Thus it produced the contamination, even if it had less effect.

(LeBot 1997:150)

The curriculum of the Cadre School had a strong cultural element. There were trips to

museums and music lessons. While they undoubtedly benefited from this education, it was the

indigenous members who ended out remolding the non-indigenous members. Marcos continues,

We really suffered a process of re-education of remodeling. As if they had disarmed us.

As if they had taken apart all the elements we had -- Marxism, Leninism, socialism, urban

culture, poetry, literature -- everything that formed a part of us and also things we didn’t

know we had. They disarmed us and then returned our arms to us, but in a different form.

(LeBot 1997:151)

The political training of the Zapatista forces was not limited to the efforts of the Cadre

School. Comandantes German and Rodrigo were responsible for the political training of the new

guerrillas. They travelled frequently to the EZLN’s training camps to oversee ongoing

ideological instruction. An important tool for the political development of the organization was

its array of clandestine publications. Gabriela was responsible for printing the FLN journals in

the capital. These included two mass publications and three internal publications. The two mass

periodicals were: The Truth of the Proletariat aimed at the workers, and The Waking of the

People for the campesinos. The three internal publications were: Nepantla for the FLN cadres,

Nupi for the insurgents of the EZLN, The Red Star for the milicianos,.


The events of 1988 marked the end of one period in the development of the EZLN, and

the beginning of another. The EZLN was no longer a small guerrilla group dependent on the

experienced urban cadres of the FLN for its every need. It had become an army of the indigenous

communities who contributed the recruits that filled its ranks, the tortillas that fed them, and

whose donations not only purchased their weapons and other supplies, but increasingly

supported the the urban apparatus as well. While the EZLN remained under the formal command

of the mestio leadership of the FLN, its trajectory between 1988 and 1994 would be increasingly

determined by considerations arising from its relationship with the indigenous communities that

formed its base. These considerations would ultimately lead the organization to decide to launch

a revolutionary war.

The Zapatista Boom

The developments of 1988 laid the foundations for what Marcos would call “the

Zapatista Boom.” Between late 1988 and 1990 the growth of the EZLN took on the character of

what Marcos would call a “boom.” (LeBot 180) The boom meant the transformation of much of

the Cañadas into what amounted to Zapatista-controlled territory. As Marcos explains,

Until 1988 our contact with the communities is still sporadic. We continued being a

guerrilla group in the mountains where the youth would go, and if they couldn’t take it,

returned to their communities, and continued doing their work and helping us. They

weren’t executed, they weren’t shot. Whoever quit the guerrilla group returned to their

village, period. But there wasn’t close contact at the beginning of the second half of the

80s, 87-88, the contacts with the communities were very occasional, or were when the

guerrilla group came close to the communities. It wasn’t until the last years of the 80s

when closer contact was made, when we already had more than 100, we had hundreds of

combatants in the mountain, professional guerrillas dedicated only to that. The people of

the villages started to go to the mountains, to the encampments, to the celebrations of

April 10, November 17, and September 16, the historical celebrations of Mexico or the

EZLN. Still we didn’t go to the villages, except hidden and at night. There weren’t

“controlled” villages as we say, villages where everybody are Zapatistas like here [in La


Realidad]. Later came the period where the majority of the villages of the Selva and Los

Altos were totally Zapatista. But then no, not yet. (LeBot 1997:176–177)

Towards the end of 1988 the situation changed rapidly. Marcos tells what happened,

From 89 to 90 we went from hundreds to thousands of combatants. And the villages in

which some families had supported us came to be entire villages, canyons, areas, regions

of areas that were completely Zapatista. We could walk in a canyon, day or night, entirely

among compañeros, knowing who came and who went, we had absolute control over

what occurred in the canyons in those years. It was a Zapatista boom, a phenomenal

expansion all out of proportion such that we quickly began to fill the organizational chart

that had been a dream or a nightmare in 83-84: companies, battalions, divisions: quickly

that army became possible. (LeBot 1997:180)

During this period of growth the EZLN also sought to establish itself more solidly in the

predominantly Tzotzil highlands region around San Cristobal de Las Casas, in particular in the

municipality of San Andres Larráinzar. According to La Grange and Rico, Yolanda and David

were charged with this work and were accompanied by Ramona. (1998:196) Marcos mentions

this development as well, noting that in the latter part of the 1980s, the EZLN had established

guerrilla unite in the Highlands, though their work was primarily political.

An important aspect of this political work was the use of the military discipline of the

EZLN to demonstrate concretely the potential of collective labor to transform social conditions

in the communities. The indigenous communities of Chiapas had longstanding traditions of

certain kinds of collective labor, and these had been deepened considerably in the development

projects promoted by the Diocese through DESMI, but the military organization of the Zapatista

army enabled the communities to take on even more ambitious projects. If the communities were

going to be asked to feed, uniform and arm the EZLN, the EZLN would in turn be used to

undertake infrastructural projects that the communities would otherwise not be able to

accomplish on their own. As Marcos explains,


We began to organize it as we were thinking it must be a people’s army. That is to say an

army for fighting and for production, that was not only prepared for combat, but that

worked in the service of the communities. Our army worked collective cornfields, had

what we have now built in the Aguascalientes – clinics, meeting centers, sports fields –

where the military units would come together to work and built a playground, things in

the service of the community. (LeBot 1997:181)

The two best examples of these sorts of projects are the clinics built by the EZLN in the

villages of Ibarra and Morelia. Marcos describes the EZLN “gather[ing] 1200 combatants to

build a clinic in place of fighting” in 1989 in Ibarra. While they undoubtedly improved the

delivery of healthcare and therefore saved lives in their respective regions, the deeper

significance of the clinics, and the EZLN’s other projects, was political. They were a

demonstration of how, by promoting collective labor and self-reliance, a disciplined

revolutionary organization could reduce the dependence of the communities on the state and

NGOs. They were also a very concrete reminder of the new society for which the EZLN was

preparing to eventually go to war. As Marcos explains,

The contact of the Zapatistas with the communities signified, for example, the

introduction of contraceptives. The change in perspective of the women, even though it is

still not yet consolidated and it has not been achieved in all the communities. The access

to technical resources like electricity, gasoline engines, a kind of culture that electricity

allows, like, for example, the use of videos or small radio stations that we carried, and a

health system that we are developing. We are radically changing the status of public

health in the communities, using the structure that the EZLN has built. For example,

when the community makes a decision, those who don’t comply with it are punished.

What we’ve achieved is that the communities agreed that there must be a latrine in every

house, whoever didn’t comply was punished. Thus we have made latrines obligatory in

all areas. Even though it wasn’t our order we follow the line of the community

authorities. Not to have a latrine means having to pay a fine. One might fail to use it, but

at least now there was a latrine. It was the kind of agreement that we succeeded in getting

passed by the assemblies that are the maximum authority. Health campaigns,

vaccinations for children, when there was a Dengue Fever epidemic there were some

preventive measures we could take thanks to this contact. (LeBot 1997:185)


Given their dependence on the limited resources of very impoverished communities these

projects could not, of course, hope to address more than a fraction pressing material needs of the

communities. They were, nonetheless, potent symbols of the collective power represented by

having their own army.

11.3 THE ROAD TO WAR

By 1989 the EZLN had achieved in much of the Cañadas a degree of political hegemony

that could be confused with unanimity. Such appearances would, however, have been deceiving.

The communities generally placed a very high premium on achieving and maintaining

consensus. By systematically recruiting recognized community leaders who had the influence to

win whole communities to the Zapatistas, the EZLN was able to rapidly absorb virtually the

entire indigenous campesino movement in the Cañadas, if not elsewhere in Chiapas. In so doing,

of course, they also brought inside their own organization all the various distinct yet related

social conflicts that had previously characterized that movement. These contradictions would

express themselves in a series of struggles beginning in 1989 and continuing up to, and then in

new forms after, the 1994 uprising.

An important element linking all of these struggles together would be a shift in the

Diocese’s perspective on the prospects of armed struggle and therefore on the value of any

tactical alliance with the EZLN. By the late 1980s the national and international political context

that in the first half of the decade had predisposed a significant fraction of the Diocese to

consider armed struggle had changed.

As already noted, the presidential campaign of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, while thwarted by

fraud, had convinced most in the Diocese that there was an electoral road to political change in


Mexico. Similarly the development of the Contadora peace process to bring an end to the wars

raging in Central America held out the prospect of a negotiated path to more genuinely open and

democratic political regimes within the region. On both questions the EZLNs views were at odds

with those of the Diocese. Thus at the very moment that the EZLN was winning over a large

fraction of the indigenous campesino movement, the leadership of the Diocese was coming to

view the organization as a dangerous obstacle to the realization of its political agenda. It wasn’t

long before this divergence began to generate conflicts within the movement.

The first of these conflicts involved a revolt within the ranks of the EZLN in the Cañada

of Avellanal where Slohp had been particularly strong. In the fall of 1988, several Zapatistas

associated with Slohp, including Santiago Lorenzo, Francisco Lopez, a former and future

president of ARIC, and Flaviano Alfonso, all from the community of Las Tazas, organized what

they called simply the Autodefensa, an armed force of approximately 70 men based in a camp

near Las Tazas. With only 12 rifles and carbines, the Autodefensa was not much of a military

force and the EZLN was able to rather quickly force it to disband, but only after meetings with

the Diocese which demanded that the EZLN not inflict any reprisals on the communities

involved in the revolt.

The revolt, according to Tello, was apparently motivated by the view that mestizo

leadership of the FLN and EZLN, and in particular Marcos, were imposing their views on the

indigenous communities and that the EZLN had concentrated control over resources coming into

the Cañadas. While Lazaro Hernandez would remain with the Zapatistas for the next several

years, the revolt of the Autodefensa marked the end of the EZLN’s relationship with Slohp and

signaled the growing distance between the EZLN and the Diocese.


A year later these divisions would become clearer when, on December 14, 1989, in the

community of San Miguel, Bishop Ruíz addressed a celebration of the 15th

anniversary of the

founding of Quiptic Te Lecubtesel. Those gathered included leading figures from the Diocese

and from Slohp as well as participants in the Autodefensa. Without identifying them by name,

Ruíz warned that the communities needed to be careful of the leaders of the FLN whose ideas

were supposedly foreign to their struggles and who were appropriating the organizational work

that had been done before they had arrived. “They have come,” he warned “to ride a saddled

horse.” The comment says as much, perhaps, about Ruíz as it did about the FLN, but in any

event was the first public indication of a rupture between the leadersip of the Dioces and the

EZLN. (2000:138–144)

In the period between the revolt of the Autodefensa and Ruíz’s speech, the world had

witnessed some profound changes. The Tiananmen Square massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall,

the FMLN’s failed offensive in El Salvador, and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in

Nicaragua, all only reinforced the view of many in the Diocese that the EZLN’s commitment to

armed struggle and socialist revolution was hopelessly out of touch with contemporary political

reality.

Ruíz’s speech in San Miguel corresponded with a new challenge to the authority of the

EZLN. By the end of the 1980s almost all of the members of ARIC Union de Uniones identified

as Zapatistas. But in early 1990 in a closely fought election, two of the leaders of the

Autodefensa, Francisco Lopez and Santiago Lorenzo, were elected to lead the organization.

Lopez and Lorenzo’s election clearly reflected the fragility of the Zapatistas apparent hegeony

within the Cañadas. (Tello Díaz 2000:148)


The contradictions reflected in the revolt of the Autodefensa and the leadership elections

in ARIC reflected a deepening crisis in the communities. As part of the neo-liberal policies

pursued by the ruling party since the early 1980s, the National Coffee Institute (INMECAFE),

which had previously supported coffee prices, was dismantled. Beginning in 1989, the

communities found the income from their most reliable cash crop cut by almost 50%. The

collapse of coffee prices had a devastating effect on the communities that contributed to an

impatience with all of the forces competing for their loyalties. Thus, while the leadership of the

Diocese was concerned that the EZLN was mistakenly taking the communities down a path

toward an armed confrontation with the state, some of the discontent with the leadership of

EZLN coming from the communities had the opposite character, namely a sense that the army

they were building at considerable cost was never going to be used.

This sense of desperation in the communities would only be compounded by two related

initiatives from the federal government. The first of these would be the revision of Article 27 of

the Mexican Constitution which was the basis of Mexico’s agrarian reform law. The second

would be the signing and passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The

proposed reform of Article 27 would have effectively ended the land reform process foreclosing

the possibility of many communities ever receiving lands for which they had struggles, in many

cases for decades, while NAFTA threatened to flood the country with U.S. grown corn that

would ruin Mexico’s small farmers.

ANCIEZ and AMMAC

It was in the context of both the deepening crisis confronting the communities and the

defeat of the EZLN’s candidates for the leadership of ARIC that the Zapatistas decided to launch


their own public mass campesino formation and an aligned womens organization. The

campesino organization was initially called the Alianza Campesino Independiente Emiliano

Zapata (Emiliano Zapata Independent Campesino Alliance or ACIEZ) in Chiapas, but

subsequently took the name Alianza Nacional Campesino Independiente Emiliano Zapata

(Emiliano Zapata National Independent Campesino Alliance or ANCIEZ) following a founding

meeting in the community of Coxcatlán in the Tehuacán valley in the southern part of the state of

Puebla on July 20-21, 1991.

The founding of ANCIEZ brought together campesino delegations from Chiapas,

Oaxaca, Puebla, Chihuahua, and Coahuila reflecting the work of FLN militants in all of those

states. They would later be joined by groups from Guerrero, Durango, Michoacan, Veracruz, and

San Luis Potosi. The new national organization was under the leadership of “Frank,” one of the

FLN’s first young indigenous recruits and a member of the EZLN’s founding nucleus. He had

been involved in building a campesino cooperative in the Tehuacán valley. (Tello Díaz

2000:156–160)

Several months after the founding meeting, the organization published a statement of its

aims that read,

The government doesn’t give us credit, nor lend us seed, fertilizer, machinery, or

anything else. It has completely abandoned us. And this is how it wants us to compete

with modern North American farmers that have the full support of their government. […]

We want our organization to be independent of the government, the PRI, the CNC, and

all official organizations, for the simple reason that they have demonstrated by their

deeds that they are on the side of the latifunistas and other exploiters. We also want to be

independent of the existing political parties because they neither have a convincing

agrarian program nor are they able to do anything effective to our benefit. They are only

interested in our votes to augment their small participation in bourgeois power. (Tello

2000:158–159)


While ANCIEZ would represent itself as a national formation, its primary area of activity

would be in Chiapas. In building ANCIEZ, the Zapatistas did not simply abandon their work in

ARIC. While some Zapatista communities in the Cañadas left ARIC to join the new formation,

many others did not. Utilizing the EZLN’s clandestine networks in the highlands and the

northern zone of the state, ANCIEZ was able to rapidly establish itself as a major independent

campesino organization outside of the Cañadas which had been the base of ARIC. ANCIEZ

established groups in the municipalities of Tila, Sabanilla, and Yajalon in the north and El

Bosque, Larrainzar, Huixtan, Chanal, and San Cristobal in the highlands.

ANCIEZ’s success reflected a profound crisis in the other independent campesino

organizations active in Chiapas. These organizations were not always as independent of the

ruling party as they claimed. Many were highly dependent on the state for access to meager

credits or for assistance provided through CONASUPO and PRONASOL which had proven very

effective instruments of cooptation. Understanding the potentially explosive nature of the issue,

the ruling party was very eager to secure as much campesino support for its proposed revisions to

Article 27 as possible and it used all of its leverage over the leadership of the supposedly

“independent” campesino organizations to obtain their endorsements of the government’s

proposal. Since the revisions were a frontal assault on the legal basis of land reform across the

country this in turn prompted revolts not just among the rank and file of the independent

organizations, but even within the CNC. In some cases these revolts succeeded in replacing the

leadership of their organizations and reversing course, but the overall effect was to seriously

undermine the legitimacy of these organizations in the eyes of their members. Nowhere was this

process more evident than in Chiapas, the state with the largest number of unresolved land

claims before the agrarian reform authorities. (Villafuerte Solís et al. 2002) In this context,


ANCIEZ’s unambiguous rejection of the proposed reforms along with its radical critique of not

just the ruling party, but also of its essentially loyal electoral opposition, was able to attract broad

support in the communities.

In Chiapas ANCIEZ centered its operations in Altamirano where it was led by Jesus

Santis Chus, a Tzeltal from Morelia whose nom de guerre in the EZLN was Nicodemo. Santis

Chus and ANCIEZ worked closely with the nuns at San Carlos Hospital in Altamirano in

organizing health programs for the indigenous communities in the region. Francisco Gomez, a

captain in the EZLN, was the ANCIEZ representative in Ocosingo.

Sister Patricia Márquez Moisen began working with San Carlos Hospital in1988,

eventually becomings its director, and learned of the existence of the EZLN in 1990 or 91 when

in the course of her visits to the communities she became aware that they were engaged in

military training. “At first the Zapatistas were la organización, and nothing more” she explained,

“but later they formed an organization called ANCIEZ, which was the public face of the EZ.

(2009)

In this manner the creation of ANCIEZ enabled the San Carlos Hospital to openly assist

what were in fact Zapatista clinics in Ibarra and Morelia. In the aftermath of the uprising the San

Carlos Hospital would come under intense pressure from local ranchers who accused Sister

Patricia of being a “guerrilla nun.”

At roughly the same time that they formed ANCIEZ, the FLN-EZLN launched a

woman’s organization Asociación Mexicana de Mujeres Asociación Civil (Mexican Women’s

Association A.C. or AMMAC). Unlike ANCIEZ, AMMAC was a legally registered organization

for purposes of obtaining funding. Margarita describes the work of AMMAC.


ANCIEZ was for the campesinos and AMMAC was to generate a movement of women,

with links to the EZLN. I think they wanted to generate an open women's movement, but

also with the possibilities of securing resources. AMMAC did more work here in

Chiapas than in other regions of the country. Here was where it could be done, because

there were responsible compañeras participating in meetings, and from there they would

with women in their regions. It was the same, to organize the women. I participated there

with other compañeras here in the city, and in all regions. From Ocosingo, Margaritas,

the Highlands, the Northern one, and from Altamirano. That’s where we promoted it the

most. Then we had training meetings to do more work with women. (2009)

AMMAC reflected the slow emergence of what would only later be explicitly called a

feminist consciousness within the EZLN. The seeds of this were planted first in the FLN’s

safehouses and the guerrilla encampments where the first young indigenous recruits frequently

found themselves under the command of women. Indeed, it is worth remembering that between

1984 and 1988 all of the EZLN forces were under the command of Comandante Elisa. Men in

both the safehouses and the encampments were expected to do all the sorts of work traditionally

expected of women: gathering firewood, preparing fires, cooking, cleaning, repairing clothes and

so on. If the principle of the equal division of labor was too often honored in the breach, the fact

that these tasks were required of men at all was nonetheless a profound challenge to the

traditional relations between men and women in the communities. As indigenous women were

promoted to positions of command in the EZLN, joining the guerrillas became a means for

young women to escape their socially subordinate status in the communities. Over time the

interactions between the guerrillas and the communities encouraged greater political

participation on the part of women in the communities as well. By the early 90s the process had

advanced to the point that it was possible to establish a separate women’s organization in the

form of AMMAC.

Just as the Zapatistas were concentrating their energies on building up ANCIEZ and

AMMAC, ARIC was confronted with a corruption scandal involving its new leadership. In the


course of this Francisco Lopez was first replaced as president of ARIC by Santiago Lorenzo.

Lorenzo was then himself accused of stealing 619 million pesos and removed from office. In the

ensuing leadership election the Zapatista’s candidate, Lazaro Hernandez, prevailed.

The Decision for War

In 1992 the various conflicts within the broader indigenous-campesino movement, but

also within the FLN-EZLN, that had been simmering now for several years all began to come to

a head. While some of this was simply a matter of the ripening of existing contradictions, the

process was further catalyzed by the quincentanary celebrations of Columbus’s first voyage to

the Americas. As Marcos explains,

In 1992 we didn’t perceive a question that was very important to the indigenous

communities, which was the character of the Conquest, what the discovery of America

signified, as they were then celebrating the 500 years since the discovery of America and

planning big official celebrations. Within the indigenous movement, I don’t know about

nationally, but at least locally, a kind of restlessness started over what this signified and

the necessity of demonstrating, and they set out to remember the 500 years as they really

had been, as a movement of resistance against domination. The process of radicalization

accelerated, the villages have now come to a point of no return on the question of going

to war, expressed through the indigenous leaders, the leaders of the communities and of

the regions that later will be transformed into the [Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine]

Committee. Then the indigenous leaders proposed to start the war in 92. The military

leadership, in agreement with the commandancia [of the FLN], of which I was still a part

then, we put forward […] that the conditions weren’t there, that the international situation

wasn’t favorable, that the national situation as well was unfavorable for any attempt at

change, even more for armed struggle. Together we decided that it was necessary to

consult the people, this was the first consulta in the villages on what was going to be the

Zapatistas line of work. This is in the second half of 1992 and it coincided with the

indigenous mobilization for the celebration of the 500 years, the big October 12 march on

San Cristobal that the indigenous people posed as the last civil appearance of the

indigenous movement that has already become Zapatista. (LeBot 1997:189–190)

While Marcos’s characterization of his own supposed opposition to the push to go to war

is at odds with virtually every other account of the process, there is little question that the


proposal for war responded to an impatience within the communities and among the indigenous

ranks of the EZLN to take action that was only sharpened by the Columbus Quincentenary and

that it encountered resistance from the FLN’s leadership and urban apparatus.

For over twenty years the FLN had dedicated itself to quietly and patiently putting in

place a political-military apparatus that they imagined would act as the armed wing of a broad

movement of national liberation. They had resisted the temptation to which otherwise similar

groups had succumbed to engage in bombings or other spectacular actions or to use their

weapons to secure financing through bank robberies or kidnappings. To the distress of at least

some of their members they had also refrained from undertaking military actions in solidarity

with other organizations, such as the PdlP and the LC23S, when these groups were facing intense

repression. When on several occasions the FLN itself came under direct attack, its military

response was purely defensive and not particularly effective. All of which is to say that the

organization was culturally resistant to any precipitous engagement in armed actions.

From the point of view of much of the FLN’s leadership, and in particular Federico

Ramirez (AKA Comandante Rodrigo), conditions couldn’t have been less auspicious for an

uprising. Outside of Chiapas the FLN was very weak while nationally and internationally the

left was on the defensive. The events of 1989 had widely discredited socialism. The Soviet

Union had broken up and the United States was in a triumphalist mode following the First Gulf

War. In Mexico, neo-liberalism was on the march. The revision of Article 27 of the Constitution

moved rapidly through Congress and the negotiation of NAFTA was underway. Cuauhtémoc

Cárdenas’s 1988 campaign apparatus had been transformed into the Partido de la Revolución

Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution or PRD) and was well positioned to channel

whatever discontent the PRI’s policies were generating into the upcoming presidential election in


1994. Hopes were high that Cardena would be able to claim the victory that had been stolen from

him six years earlier and that the PRI’s monopoly on power would finally be broken at the ballot

box.

The case for launching an uprising rested largely on the EZLN’s impressive

organizational accomplishments in Chiapas and the fact that they could not be maintained

indefinitely. While the EZLN had recovered from both the revolt of the Autodefensa and the loss

of its leadership of ARIC, both of these events revealed the potential fragility of the EZLN’s

support in the communities. As the economic situation in the communities worsened, the

question was inevitably raised as to why they were supporting an army if not to use it.

There was another problem that lent urgency to the question of launching an uprising.

While both the FLN and the indigenous communities were very good at keeping their secrets, the

sheer size of the EZLN made this increasingly difficult. Here it is important to say that while the

public at large was unaware of the EZLN’s existence, the intelligence services of the Mexican

state were clearly aware that a guerrilla group of some sort was active in the Lacandon Jungle,

even if they did not have an accurate sense of either its size or the extent of its popular support.

In early 1991, according to Tello, the Mexican Army had discovered evidence of another

Zapatista encampment near the ejido of Quintan Roo including more wooden rifles, uniforms,

and radio codes. (2000:154) The government, however, was very reluctant to acknowledge the

existence of a guerrilla force of any size within Mexico while NAFTA was being negotiated, and

as a consequence military and government officials who knew otherwise vigorously denied the

rumors of guerrilla activity in Chiapas that were beginning to circulate more and more

insistently. The situation simply could not be sustained much longer. It was only a matter of time

before some incident or other would force the Mexican state to launch an offensive against the


guerrillas. It was better, the argument went, for the EZLN to take the initiative and retain the

element of surprise by launching an uprising sooner rather than later.

Rodrigo recognized the problems, but argued that they did not alter the larger political

context which would determine the actual prospects of any uprising. Absent a broader national

base of support, the EZLN would quickly find itself cornered in Chiapas where its poorly armed

forces would be brutally crushed by the much superior firepower of the Mexican Army. The

FLN needed to radically rethink its strategy. In Rodrigo’s view the organization needed to

abandon its reliance on arms and concentrate its energies on building broad mass movements in

opposition to the ruling party’s policies. While Rodrigo did not think the FLN should abandon its

clandestine character, he did think it needed to dismantle its army and transform itself into a

more purely political force. It was presumably at least in part in response to Rodrigo’s arguments

that the FLN decided to initiate a process to reconstitute itself as the Partido de las Fuerzas de

Liberación Nacional, though we know little more about either the facts or the significance of this

decision. In any event, Rodrigo’s proposal was a radical departure from the path the FLN had

been on for over twenty years.

These then were the terms of the debate that began to take place within the FLN-EZLN in

1992. It was a debate that unfolded against the backdrop of a notable worsening of conditions in

the communities and increasingly militant spirit on the part of the indigenous campesino

movement. Coffee prices continued to fall in 1992. Beef prices also began to fall, hitting another

major source of income for the communities. To compound matters Governor Patrocinio

Gonzalez abruptly cancelled all credits to the communities in the Cañadas for cattle farming.

This was ostensibly part of a program launched by President Salinas to protect the rainforest

from further destruction. In reality the attack on the communities was a shot in the arm for the


big ranchers who coveted their lands and resented their competition. As state credits were often

used to pay back private loans the result of their cancellation was to force many communities to

sell off their herds wholesale to the big ranchers to keep up with their payments. (Tello

2000:166)

On January 19, 1992, ANCIEZ organized its first mass mobilization in Chiapas. Over

4,000 campesinos marched on Ocosingo, against NAFTA, the revision of Article 27, and delays

in the resolution of land disputes, but also against the increasingly oppressive presence of the

Mexican Army in the jungle. On March 7, 1992 a march departed from Palenque for Mexico

City that came to be known as Xi Nich (Chol for “marching ants”) against the repression of the

state government. The Xi Nich march successfully captured the attention of the national news

media. On April 9 a demonstration in support of Xi Nich was held in Ocosingo and the next day

there was another demonstration of several thousand in Ocosingo organized by ANCIEZ. On

May 20, 5,000 Zapatistas gathered clandestinely in the village of La Sultana to commemorate

500 years of indigenous resistance to European domination. (Tello 2000:181-184)

Meanwhile rumors of the guerrillas in the jungle were growing louder. On April 23

Chiapas PRD deputies Jorge Moscoso and Camilo Valenzuela spoke publicly of the existence of

an armed movement, a guerrilla movement, has implanted itself in a region of Chiapas,

that is obtaining popular support in some of the jungle and canyon regions of the state.

(Rojas 1995:213)

Valenzuela went on to claim that

there is a military and police campaign underway to try to resolve by repression and

blood the development of a social insurgency. […]When we say that an armed movement

is developing in Chiapas we are bringing before public opinion something that for broad

sectors of Chiapan society and for the security forces of the Mexican state is known and

that has been hidden.


On June 13 the state government requested that the Federal Secretariat of Governance

and the PGR share information with the state Attorney General’s office regarding their

investigations of supposed guerrilla activity around Altamirano and Ocosingo based on

accusations by campesinos in the area that there were foreign guerrillas intent on training

guerrilla cells. The governor assured reporters that they had not yet been able to confirm any

presence of guerrillas in the area. (Rojas 1995:75, 213)

Voting for War

Sometime after May, the Zapatistas began to organize a series of extraordinary

assemblies in the villages where their support was sufficient to do so, posing the question of

whether or not to direct the EZLN to declare war on the government and to prepare to launch an

uprising. The proposal was put to an up or down vote and the results were duly recorded and

signed by the responsables of each community. While their description of the character of these

assemblies is in general agreement, accounts differ on a number of important details. According

to Tello 15,000 people participated in the vote to go to war sometime in June. (Tello 2000:184-

189) Sellschopp suggests that the number was closer to 65,000 from 60 separate communities.

(2004:102) In Marcos’s account the voting took place in different communities between

September and the middle of November and involved between 400 and 500 communities. (LeBot

191-192)

It is of course quite possible that there were two waves of assemblies, the first

presumably occurring in the communities where the outcome was most predictable and the

second occurring as opinion became consolidated in ever more communities. In either event the

assemblies must be regarded as a defining moment in the development of Zapatismo. By putting


the question of whether or not to go to war to a popular vote before the proposal had secured the

support of the FLN’s top leadership, Marcos and the rest of the leadership of the EZLN radically

altered not just the relationship between the FLN and the EZLN but also the relationship within

the EZLN and the support bases in the communities between revolutionary leadership and mass

democracy. If the original purpose of the move was to force the question of going to war, it also

established a precedent that major decisions concerning the direction of the movement needed

formal consultation with and approval by the communities. This is not to suggest, as some have,

that the whole decisionmaking structure of the EZLN was democratized. It wasn’t, but a

principle of formal accountability to the communities was established that would become a

distinguishing feature of Zapatismo after the uprising.

500 Years of Resistance

The unresolved question of the timing of the village assemblies remains a matter of

interest because it casts another important event in a different light, namely the massive

indigenous campesino demonstration in San Cristóbal on October 12, 1992. The Columbus

Quincentenary was an object of indigenous protest across the Americas. In Chiapas, the October

12 demonstration was prepared for months in advance by a coalition of 18 organizations

including all of the major organizations making up the indigenous campesino movement. Under

the common banner of the Frente de Organizaciones Sociales de Chiapas (Front of Social

Organizations of Chiapas or FOSCH), ARIC, ANCIEZ, OCEZ, CIOAC, UNORCA built for the

demonstration. (Rovira 1994:29)

As the date approached the demonstration became the object of intense anxiety. On

September 6, ANCIEZ accused ranchers and businessmen from Ocosingo, Altamirano, Salto de


Agua and Sabanilla of forming paramilitary groups with the objective of preventing the

demonstrations. In the brief statement, representatives of the group from the municipalities of

Larrainzar, Chenalho, San Cristobal, Huixtan, Oxchuc, Chanal, Altamirano, Sabanilla, Ocosingo,

Salto de Agua, Las Margaritas, Tumbala, Tila, Palenque, Yajalon and Huitiupan dismissed

speculation that they were organizing as guerrillas: “It has never occurred to us to think of

destabilizing society, we reject violence wherever it comes from.” When asked on October 10,

about speculations on the existence of guerrillas in Chiapas, Governor Gonzalez Garrido also

assured reporters that “there is no such thing” though he did not rule out the possibility of

disturbances around the coming demonstrations. (Rojas:92-93)

Finally, on October 12, 1992 more than 9,000 Indians converged on San Cristobal for a

demonstration in opposition to the official celebration of Columbus’s “discovery” of the

Americas. The ANCIEZ and AMMAC contingents to the demonstration were the largest by far,

constituting over half the demonstration. The Zapatista contingents were also distinguished from

those of other organizations by their military discipline and the high number of women in their

ranks. Suggestive of their future intentions, some of the contingent also wore warpaint and

carried bows and arrows. They mobilized for the demonstration at night and arrived at the city in

the early morning. Unknown at the time, armed Zapatista units were also secretly deployed

around the city to respond in the event of repression. The high point of the demonstration came

when a group of ANCIEZ members first climbed and then toppled the bronze statue of Diego de

Mazariegos, the conquistador founder of San Cristobal. (LeBot 191; Tello 2000:195)

The speakers at the demonstration represented the largest organizations as well as the

ethnic diversity of the participants. Jesus Santis of Morelia spoke in Tzeltal for ANCIEZ.

Antonio Hernandez of Plan de Ayala spoke in Tojolabal for CIOAC. Angel Hidalgo of


Venustiano Carranza spoke in Tzotzil for OCEZ. Reflecting the Zapatistas’ leading role in the

demonstration the master of ceremonies was Frank. Frank called for uniting in one movement

the struggles of teachers, students, neighborhoods, workers and campesinos. He also called for

the assembled campesinos to express their solidarity with striking oil-workers in Tabasco, VW

workers in Puebla, and university students in Sonora who were at that moment gathered in the

Zocalo in Mexico City. The demonstration was then followed by a mass in the Cathedral led by

Bishop Samuel Ruíz. (Tello 2000:195)

The October 12 demonstration was probably the single largest and certainly the most

unified, radical, militant, and disciplined demonstration in the history of the indigenous

campesino movement. Only in retrospect did it become clear that the October 12 demonstration

was a dress rehearsal for the Zapatista taking of San Cristóbal on January 1, 1994. For both the

Zapatista participants and for those from the communities not yet convinced that the time had

come to go to war, the demonstration was undoubtedly a compelling argument for the mobilizing

capacity of the clandestine army.

To Go To War

According to Tello (2000:191-194) the June vote in the communities to go to war was

followed by a July meeting in a San Cristóbal safehouse that brought together the EZLN’s

officer corps and representatives of the FLN’s urban apparatus, but not any members of the

FLN’s national leadership. In addition to tabulating the votes collected from the communities

this meeting supposedly also drafted the Revolutionary Laws that the EZLN would distribute on

the first day of the uprising. It was also at this meeting, at least according to Tello, that Marcos

presented The Southeast in Two Winds: A Storm and a Prophecy, a political economic panorama


of Chiapas that both presents a detailed accounting of the systematic exploitation of the state’s

natural resources and indigenous peoples and celebrates the state’s legacy of indigenous

resistance. The Southeast in Two Winds, which would be included with the first packet of EZLN

communiques following the uprising, concludes with a prediction:

The storm is here. From the clash of these two winds the storm will be born, its time has

arrived. Now the wind from above rules, but the wind from below is coming…. The

prophecy is here. When the storm calms, when rain and fire again leave the land in peace,

the world will no longer be the world, rather something better. (EZLN 1994:66)

Tello then claims that a meeting of the FLN’s Political Bureau was organized in Mexico

City. (2002:193) The Political Bureau at this time was composed of Comandantes German,

Rodrigo, and Elisa as well as Marcos, Gabriela, and Lucia. Tello claims that Yolanda (AKA

Major Ana Maria) accompanied Marcos to the meeting while Sellschopp suggests that Major

Moises was there. (2004:98–105) The meeting lasted between three and four days and revolved

around the question of whether or not to go to war. The meeting was inconclusive. Marcos

argued for going to war while Rodrigo and his partner Gabriela argued against. German and the

others refused to take sides and instead preparations were made for the First Congress of what

was supposed to become the Partido de las Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional (Party of the

National Liberation Forces) in Chiapas in January.

According to Tello, on Marcos’s return to Chiapas, another meeting of EZLN officers

occurred where the decision was made to push for Marcos to replace Rodrigo in the FLN’s

command structure. At a later meeting in December, the decision was made to go even further

and to transfer authority from the comandancia of the FLN to a new body. Marcos explains what

happened:

When we had the results of the voting there was a meeting in December 1992 between

the leaders of the indigenous communities and the EZLN comandancia in the mountains


in which the necessity of changing the decision-making structure was proposed in light of

the war; that the indigenous communities must take control over the whole organization

of the EZLN, even in the city, and it was put forth that it was necessary that the war

would not be a local one, but in the whole national territory, or at least in all the states

where the EZLN was to be found. In this moment – I’m speaking of the end of 1992 – the

comandancia of the EZLN remained formally in the hands of the political-military

organization, but in reality it already resided in the leadership of the communities, those

we then called the responsables of each zone and ethnicity, of the three regions, and of

the four ethnicities. (LeBot:194-195)

Meeting in Prado

Delegates to the First Congress of the PFLN arrived in the community of Prado, an ejido

located in the Patihuitz cañada on January 23, 1993 and the Congress began its formal meetings

the next day. According to Tello there were approximately 400 delegates in attendance. Votes

were apprortioned one to each of the roughly 300 Zapatista communities and one to each

Zapatista company in the mountains, and one for each of the delegates from outside Chiapas who

numbered about 40. (2000:198-205)

The Congress had three main items of business. The first was the passage of a

Declaration of Principles outlining the ideological orientation of the new clandestine political

party. The second item of business was the decision to go to war. The third would be the election

of the leadership of the new party.

The discussion of the Declaration of Principles apparently occurred without any

significant arguments. The resulting document declared:

The objectives of the party are to organize, direct and head the revolutionary struggle of

the working people to uproot the power of the bourgeoisie, to liberate our country from

foreign domination, and to install the dictatorship of the proletariat, understood as a

workers government to prevent the counter-revolution and begin the construction of

socialism in Mexico.


It then explained that given the “impossibility of securing fundamental change by

peaceful methods,” that the PFLN

would rely on politico-military struggle as the principle form of struggle, and combine it

with other forms of political action.

The second day of the Congress was dedicated to the debate on whether to go to war.

Marcos spoke for the communities and the EZLN in making the case for war. He argued that

many Zapatista communities had already been identified by the army, that the EZLN was ready

to fight and could wait no longer, and that the communities had spoken clearly in voting

overwhelmingly for war. Rodrigo retreated from his previous opposition to going to war, not to

mention his position that the organization should put aside its arms. Instead he argued merely

that the time was not yet right. After making his arguments Rodrigo explained that he would still

vote to go to war with the result that the vote was unanimous.

The final item of business was the election of the new party’s Central Committee which

was to consist of a General Secretary, a Military Secretary, an Interior Secretary, and a Secretary

of the Masses. These leading members would be joined by a Commissioner of Ideological and

Political Formation, a Commissioner of Honor and Justice, and a Commissioner of International

Relations. Marcos presented a list of proposed candidates for the positions. German was to

occupy the position of General Secretary. Lucha was to be the Secretary of the Masses, and

Marcos was to be Military Secretary. Rodrigo, who had previously occupied the position of

second in command in the FLN was to be demoted to Commisioner of International Relations.

According to Tello, Rodrigo responded to Marcos’s proposal saying “You don’t need me

anymore” and walking out of the Congress along with Gabriela.


The Congress then approved the proposal to form the CCRI to represent the interest of

the indigenous communities in the preparations for war. Marcos explains,

The CCRI is born in January 1993. There was a meeting with the representatives of the

compañeros from the city, of the regular troops of the insurgents, and of the communities

of the villages in January 1993. … Therefore, after a long discussion that lasted several

days it was decided that the political-military organization would cede control, that it had

to opt for a democratic mechanism for making decisions in which the greater part of the

organization would decide on the course of action and would carry it out, and the greater

part of the organization was the communities. Then the indigenous representatives, the

leaders, approved the results of the consulta, voting for war, as the villages, the

communities, had already voted. Thus they took formal command of the EZLN. They

constituted themselves as the comandancia of the army and the responsables of the

ethnic groups and the zones took the name and the rhythm of work of the Revolutionary

Indigenous Clandestine Committee. (LeBot 195-16)

Thus the first (and last) Congress of the PFLN in Prado made the final decision to direct

Marcos, the CCRI, and the EZLN to prepare to go to war. The remainder of 1993 would be

dedicated to the many tasks this entailed.

Preparing for War

Marcos describes the problems that confronted the EZLN as it began its preparations.

A broad majority came out definitely in favor of starting the war now, and the

communities gave the formal order to the EZLN to make the war together with them.

This provokes problems for us in logistical, tactical, and strategic terms. We weren’t an

army prepared to take the offensive. From when we were a political-military

organization, we set out that war was going to come at some moment, but not that we

were going to look for it, and after our contact with the communities we had conceived

our military role in defensive terms. We supposed that the communities would be

attacked, that the army would come in or discover us, or that there would be evictions and

we would have to resist, to fight the Guardias Blancas and behind the Guardias Blancas

would come the police … and behind them would come the army. Therefore we had a

defensive military plan that covered all of Las Cañadas and the most important points in

Los Altos, that is where the bulk of our troops were, in Los Altos and in the Selva.

(LeBot 1997:192–193)


The preparations for war were political as well as military. The decision to go to war had

been driven largely by the grievances of the communities and need to strike first. But if the

uprising was to draw the broadest possible support within the communities it would be crucial to

articulate the political case not only that peaceful forms of struggle had been exhausted, but that

armed struggle could succeed. The Southeast in Two Winds had been valuable in rallying support

for the uprising within the ranks of the FLN and the EZLN (and would prove valuable after the

uprising in popularizing the Zapatista’s analysis), but now that the decision had been made, a

more rigorous argument had to be developed.

La Ofensiva: porqué sí y ahora (The Offensive: Why and Why Now?), (Marcos 1993)

presumably written by Marcos, and reflecting the arguments he made in Prado, lays out in thirty

pages a comprehensive analysis first of the “objective” political and economic conditions not just

in Chiapas, but in the whole country, and then the “subjective” conditions of the revolutionary

forces under the leadership of the PFLN. While insisting still on the necessity of the armed

struggle, a central theme in this document is the importance of linking the armed struggle up

with other forms of struggle which were likely to prevail in many parts of the country. In this

respect La Ofensiva: porqué sí y ahora, prefigures Otra formas de lucha and illuminates its roots

in the FLN’s (indeed the MLN’s) left-wing revolutionary nationalism with its emphasis on the

need for a broad front of diverse forces in any serious struggle for national liberation and

socialism in Mexico.

In some sense it mirrors the arguments made twenty years earlier by Jaime Soto in Que

significa apoyarse en el pueblo (Unión del Pueblo 1974) which argued that while armed struggle

might be appropriate in some parts of Mexico such as Guerrero that the task of revolutionaries in

the rest of the country was the organization of popular mass movements. The critical difference


being that Soto was arguing for a reorientation towards the latter while Marcos was arguing for

the necessity of the former.

If such themes came readily to the Zapatistas, the indigenous character of the EZLN and

the place of indigenous rights within its politics remained strikingly underdeveloped. The

formation of the CCRI, however, forced the organization to attempt to grapple with the question

in a more systematic way than they had previously:

Then the leaders of the four indigenous ethnic groups met for the first time, now as

leaders, now with the title of comandantes to resolve to work together and make war as

indigenous people and not as one ethnicity, but as the four principal ethnicities of the

state. The general character of the war was established, that it was for national demands,

not just indigenous ones, but national ones. The principal demands, the banners of the

struggle are: democracy, liberty, and justice.

In the moment that it was decided to make decisions democratically the great majority of

the organization acquired a power that hadn’t been recognized. Their real power was

converted into formal power and was able to influence the rest of the organization. That

is what determined that they begin to rely on the mountains and on the Revolutionary

Clandestine Committee for those activities on which they previously relied on the city.

The whole organization suffered this process of transformation. Everybody had to

subordinate their thinking to the interests of the indigenous leadership, furthermore an

indigenous leadership with this trajectory, with this mix that I tell you about, with this

provocative cocktail.

We had to pass through a kind of internal transition, from an urban political-military

organization that is displaced from power to a collective, democratic, indigenous and

pluralistic organization. It must be taken into account that his was formalized in January

93, but the same compañeros of the Committee also suffered a process of transformation,

of adaptation in order to become leaders, formal leaders, in order to take control of

everything. That doesn’t happen at the moment it is declared, rather it begins to procede.

(LeBot 1997:195-196, 200-202)

This process of transformation in the role of the indigenous leadership of the EZLN had

its corollary in a disintegration of the urban and mestizo sides of the organization. (Margarita

2009) According to Tello, Rodrigo and Gabriela’s departure was not theirs alone. Rodrigo had

been responsible for the FLNs urban apparatus and much of the Mexico City network withdrew


from the organization with him. Closer to home, SubComandante Daniel (Salvador Morales

Garibay) resigned his post, and retreated to the FLN safehouse in Yanga, Veracruz before

leaving to visit his family and then departing the country. (2000:232-233) Daniel would

subsequently distinguish himself by becoming a key informant of Mexican military intelligence

and of several anti-Zapatista authors, including Tello and LaGrange and Rico.

Almost immediately after the meeting in Prado, ANCIEZ closed down its operations in

San Cristóbal and its leaders disappeared from public view. (Rovira 1994:29) As the Zapatistas

preparations intensified, so did the circulation of rumors and the activities of the police and

army. 1993 was punctuated by a series of incidents, the full meaning of which would only

became apparent on New Years Day 1994. In one such incident Jose Antonio Lopez de Leon,

commander of state Judical Police reported that a truck was stopped by a police commander and

three officers, apparently coming from Monte Libano. When the police boarded the truck they

found themselves outnumbered and outgunned by about twenty camouflaged and heavily armed

men they presumed were Central Americans. Discretion being the better part of valor, the police

let the truck go, believing that it continued on towards Cuchulja, near Altamirano. (Rojas

1995:282)

Rumors of War

Rumors of guerrilla activity in Chiapas were widespread in the spring of 1993 and the

Army was by then engaged in regular patrols of the canyons in the Selva. A significiant incident

was the discovery of the dismembered corpses of Mexican Federal Army Captain Marco

Antonio Romero and Lt. Porfirio Millan in March near the community San Isidro El Ocotal. In

response to this the village was occupied by 400 soldiers who threatened the 46 families there


with death. Thirteen villagers were arrested, beaten and robbed. One villager, Marcelino Chilon

was dragged from his home and his face forced into an anthill while another, Jose Hernandez,

was beaten with sticks before pieces of rush were forced into his penis to compel him to confess

to the murder of the two soldiers. The incident prompted the intervention of the Diocese which

only further inflamed its already precarious relations with the military. (Rovira 1994:30)

Also in March a letter was sent to Romeo Suarez Culebro, a municipal agent in Las

Margaritas, apparently by an indigenous spy that said that warned “that the war would be very

soon...” This letter was apparently one of many that were submitted to municipal and other

authorities over a two or three year period denouncing the presence of “armed groups” in the

Tojolobal regions of the Selva and soliciting the intevention of the authorities. At the same time,

Antonio Hernandez Cruz, the leader of CIOAC in Chiapas claimed that members of his

organization had been invited to participate in “an armed project.” (Rojas 1995:325–327)

Cruz insisted that CIOAC was not supporting the guerrillas, but apparently only because

the conditions did not (yet) exist for a more forceful movement than already existed. Reflecting

the political situation within the indigenous campesino movement at the time, he did not reject

the idea that at

a distant moment the armed struggle could become an option if the government did not

carry out actions to benefit the thousands of indigenas and campesinos who live in a

situation of extreme marginalization and poverty promoted by the State and by the

caciques. (Rojas 327)

In response to increasing harassment of indigenous communities by army patrols in the

Cañadas FOSCH called for a demonstration on April 20 in Tuxtla Guitierrez. Over 1,500 people

participated in the march, many of them members of ANCIEZ. They marched past the residences

of the 7th Military Region to the Central Plaza where they demanded to speak with the


Governor, Elmar Setzer (Patrocinio González having been appointed as Interior Secretary in

Mexico City). After three days the representatives of FOSCH were only allowed to meet with

two of Gonzalez’s advisors, Gustavo Godoy and Jesus Cancino. In response to the demands for

an end to Army patrols, Godoy said that the Army was patrolling because they had detected the

presence of a well-armed group in the region of Ocosingo, that they weren’t Guatemalan, but

rather Mexican and that they were using sophisticated radio transmission equipment for

communications. (Tello 2000:211) While these incidents only served to fuel further speculation,

one event threatened to initiate open warfare before the Zapatistas’ forces were fully prepared.

The Battle of Corralchen

On May 14, 1993, under the orders of the Chief of Staff at Rancho Nuevo, General

Miguel Leyva, the Mexican Army’s 83rd Battalion entered the Sierra Corralchen between San

Miguel and Morelia and began patrolling the area in search of guerrillas. At 5 pm on May 22, a

company under the command of Captain Roberto Hernandez came under fire. Lucio Hernandez

Xolo was apparently wounded in this first confrontation. The company had come upon the

encampment of the EZLN’s 5th Insurgent Regiment, known as Las Calabazas, and home to three

Zapatista battalions: the Matraca, the 14th and the 24th. Las Calabazas was under the command

of Major Mario. Intermittent fighting continued into the evening. At 8 pm Marcos ordered Mario

by radio to prepare a retreat. For the next several hours fighting continued while the Zapatistas

destroyed everything they could. At 11:30 pm the first attempt was made to break through the

Federal Army lines. This attempt was unsuccessful and a second breakout was attempted after

midnight. In this effort, according to Tello, at least one Zapatista, a Lt. Rafael, died. Two Federal

Army soldiers, Sargeant Mauro Garcia Martinez and, SubLieutenant Jose Luis Vera, also died in


the confrontation. (Tello Díaz 2000:213-216; Rojas 275-277; Rovira 1994:30-31) Major Mario

described the events:

We were some 30 insurgents there. The first order was to resist and defend our quarters.

But when our intelligence informed us that there were more than three thousand bastards

encircling us, we decided to retreat. They advanced, closing the encirclement. We got

out at night between the Federal troops and they never saw us. We were far from there

when they finally took the place. They fought each other for a few days, and took many

casualties they never declared, we got out uninjured from that trap they set for us. We

only had one casualty. We thought that the war would begin there, that they were going

to annihilate us, but we had to wait more than half a year to return to combat.

(Rovira1994: 30-31)

EZLN Lt. Leonel, who was also there, said

We didn’t leave a single weapon, I think we left some uniforms. They killed each other

because they were confused, because they entered from the canyon of Altamirano and the

canyon of Patihuitz and got confused in the night. We counted that they took more than a

dozen dead. (Rovira 1994:31)

The following day a company of Federal Army troops arrived in Laguna del Carmen

Patate to the west of San Miguel. They rounded up the whole village on the basketball court,

searched their homes and apparently found 11 .22 caliber rifles, a pistol, two knives, and two

radios for communications. This was hardly damning evidence as similar “armories” could be

found in peasant villages across much of the country. The soldiers, however, arrested eight men

and accused them of shooting the soldiers. They were ultimately charged with treason and sent to

Cerro Hueco prison in Tuxtla Guttierez. The accused as it turned out were not members of the

EZLN or even ANCIEZ, but rather were affiliated with ARIC.

About a thousand additional federal troops were sent into the area in search of the

guerrillas. On the Zapatista side Major Rolando, one of the very few mestizos in the EZLN, and

the commander of the 3rd Insurgent Regiment, was sent into the zone as well to assist the retreat

of Mario’s forces. On May 24, two days after the initiation of the hostilities, the Federal Army


finally entered the abandoned Zapatista camp. What they discovered suggested that they were

dealing with more than a handful of guerrillas running around the mountains. The camp had

parapets, an electrical system, kitchens, and dormitories for more than 200 fighters. Most

impressive was a mock-up of the Federal Army facilities in Ocosingo with buildings made of

cardboard and tanks made of wood.

The Zapatista response to the incident was to go on maximum alert. Marcos instructed

the CCRI “if they touch the villages we begin.”(Rovira 31) Fortunately for the Zapatistas this

proved unneccesary.

Which is not to say that the villages were left untouched. On May 25, soldiers continued

their operations doing houses to house searches. One of those affected, Alberto Perez Perez,

reported that 33 truckloads of soldiers had “sacked” the communities of Patate Nuevo and La

Garrucha. Perez reported that the majority of the inhabitants of the communities had fled into the

mountains in fear. A day later, three helicopters were conducting flyovers and a military

checkpoint was set up on the road to Altamirano. On May 30 soldiers still surrounded the

community of El Chichon believing that the guerrillas were hiding in a cave in the area. (Rojas

275-281)

The Federal Army operations around Corralchen had been too massive to conceal, but the

Army was not ready to admit the existence of guerrilla forces in the region. At the end of May an

Army press release acknowledged the confrontation but stated that they did not know if they had

fought “illegal timber harvesters, fugitives from justice, or people dedicated to illicit cultivation

of drugs.” (Tello 2000:215) The one possibility they did not admit, was what they knew perfectly

well, they had done battle with a large and well organized guerrilla army. The official


explanations were not entirely convincing to elected officials and on June 1 the Federal House of

Deputies formed a commission composed of members of several parties to investigate the events.

The Battle of Corralchen sharpened the contradictions between the Diocese and the

EZLN, but also within the Zapatista’s own ranks. The Diocese had already undertaken an

intensive campaign to dissuade the communities from participating in the uprising and in the

aftermath of Corralchen, Lázaro Hernández finally broke ranks with EZLN. Later that summer

Gonzalo Ituarte, now the Vicar General of the Diocese of San Cristobal, declared that Mexico

“could not close its eyes or ignore” the existence of armed groups in Chiapas, especially given

that huge sectors of the population were living under conditions of extreme poverty and injustice.

(Tello Díaz 2000:215; Rojas 1995:329)

According to Tello, on June 5 Marcos presented a self-critical analysis entitled “Errors

Committed in the Battle of Corralchen” at a meeting in the community of La Sultana. The blame

was largely laid on the 5th Insurgent Regiment and in particular on one Lt. Gabriel who was

reponsible for radio communications. As Marcos explained the Zapatistas analysis of the events

later:

In military terms they thought we were a group they could annihilate. But the fact of

annihilating us, or that is, beginning to send in troops, signified for the government

recognizing the existence of the guerrilla forces. And so we were thinking ... that in view

of NAFTA this retreat could not be a mistake of the Federal Army. I’m sure that it was a

political decision from very high up. That it couldn’t be anyone other than the President

of the Republic. (Rovira 1994:31)

Military operations in the Cañadas continued. As did the circulation of rumors. On June

2 a “reliable source” of the Altamirano Ranchers Association reported that campesinos from

Venustiano Carranza, La Grandeza, Guadalupe Victoria, Morelia, Cardenas, San Miguel Chultic,

and Puebla had seen a group of between 70 and 140 heavily armed presumed guerrillas.


According to the account the guerrillas were tall, had long hair and beards, and were apparently

foreigners. They had been seen in caves in the hills and firing practice had been heard in the area

as well. The guerrillas, according to the accusation, were supposedly providing military training

to members of ANCIEZ. (Rojas 1995 283-289)

On June 4, around 800 Tzeltal inhabitants of Morelia complained that they had been

under a virtual state of siege for seven days as a result of the presence of more than one thousand

soldiers searching for guerrillas and weapons. On June 5, 15 Tzeltal inhabitants of La Grandeza

confirmed that on May 22 there had been two confrontations between the Army and supposed

guerrillas in which three Army helicopters attacked nearby caves with gunfire and bombs. On

May 23 more than 60 soldiers surrounded and then entered the community and there was another

confrontation. On June 5 more than 800 Seguridad Publica and Judiciales plus 100 cavalry

supported by helicopters seized 24 Tzeltal campesinos in a suprise operation in the communities

of El Carrizal, Chalam del Carmen, Eden del Carmen, Rio Florida, and Nuevo Sacrificio. The

police were accompanied by PRIista residents of the village of Tomas Munzer who assisted them

in identifying the 24 campesinos for arrest. The community members insisted that they had been

targetted for being members of OCEZ. (Rojas 1995:289)

The response of the local cattle-men to the Army operations was one of relief that

revealed their underlying fears. According to Rojas, Hector Culebro, a member of the Ocosingo

ranchers association said of the operation:

Now we feel protected by the Army, it’s marvelous what they’re doing. The unease, the

threats and rumors in the municipality were such that many owners were thinking of

selling their ranches, everyone has heard rumors about the existence of armed groups, but

the government did nothing, we don’t know why. It’s very good that they’ve decided to

get involved in this business.

Francisco Lopez Ardinez, president of the Ranchers Association said


Its about time, for years we’ve been asking that they do what the Army is now doing.

[…] Workers from various ranches have confirmed to us that there are armed groups and

guerrilla training camps they say are advised by Central Americans. (Rojas 280)

On June 9 the Attorney General of Chiapas, Joaquin Armendariz said in a public

statement that would come back to haunt him:

There is no guerrilla, this is definitely a false alarm, promoted by people who are trying

to discredit the government and create anxiety among the citizenry. (Rojas 297-298)

Meanwhile, the ongoing actions of the military only served to further inflame the

communities. On July 1, two hundred members of OCEZ seized the municipal building in

Ocosingo demanding the liberation of 20 members still in prison. (Rojas 310)

The response to the perceived guerrilla threat was not exclusively military. On August

20, the Secretary of Social Development, Luis Donaldo Colosio, visited Las Margaritas and

announced the distribution of 170,000 million pesos in the area. Two weeks later, on September

6 he returned to the region, this time to Guadalupe Tepeyac with President Salinas to inaugurate

the IMSS Hospital that only a few months later the EZLN would capture and make its

headquarters following the 1994 uprising. (Tello Díaz 2000: 228-229)

Final Preparations

Through all of this, the EZLN continued its preparations. On August 6, 1993 five

thousand Zapatista troops gathered in Ibarra to commemorate the 24th anniversary of the

founding of the FLN. In September there was a meeting of the General Command of the EZLN

in the schoolhouse in San Miguel. Present were Marcos, German, Elisa, Vicente, Lucia, Pedro,

Daniel and Lucha. Six months pregnant, Elisa was replaced by Vicente in her position at the

head of the Commision of Ideology. (Tello 2000:226-241)


By the fall of 1993 there were about none thousand combatants in the EZLN divided into

six battalions, including both full-time insurgents and militia members, each commanded by a

major. The six majors were Rolando, Yolanda, Alfredo, Moises, Mario, and Josue.

Finally, on December 28 the EZLN began the mobilization that would capture the

world’s attention on January 1. They began seizing vehicles to deliver their troops into the cities

of Chiapas. Their movements were apparently detected by the Federal Army including General

Miguel Angel Godinez who flew over the area on December 30. But Federal Army troops were

ordered to remain in their barracks. The Zapatista Uprising had begun.

11.4 CONCLUSION

Over the course of ten years, the EZLN went from a group of a half-dozen guerrillas

camped out in one of the more remote corners of the Lacandon Jungle to an armed force of

thousands that would capture cities and towns across eastern Chiapas and propel itself and its

distinctive politics into Mexican and international consciousness. The change in the scale of the

EZLN was matched by a qualitative transformation in the political thinking of the several

component groups that made up the rebel organization. The politics of the EZLN on the eve of

the 1994 uprising were the product of a complex process of synthesis involving several distinct

currents of radical thought and bodies of experience that occurred within the EZLN and the

communities over the course of those ten years. The culmination of that process was the formal

transfer of the power of command over the EZLN from the mestizo leadership of the FLN to the

CCRI-GC. That transfer of formal authority, in turn produced an acceleration of the development

of the most distinctive elements of the Zapatistas’ politics. Marcos explains how the decision to

go to war forced this acceleration:


Before this, or before January 1, 1994 the Zapatista National Liberation Army in 1993

had to prepare to go on the offensive, had to prepare to enter the public eye. All the ideas

I’m expounding to you were more or less homogenous -- some were homogenous in the

city, others were homogenous in the mountains, others were in the villages -- but they

had to converge in order to begin to function as something basic: the identity of

Zapatismo. (LeBot 1997:198)

The identity of Zapatismo would be the product of what Marcos called “the provocative

cocktail” of different elements that had been brought together with the EZLN’s formation in

1983 and then mixed and remixed over the course of the EZLN’s ten year existence. But the

particular recipe that the EZLN would present to the world in the wake of the 1994 uprising

would be shaped by this shift in authority from the mestizo leadership of the FLN to the CCRI-

GC. The explicitly indigenous element of Zapatismo, which had previously gone relatively

undeveloped, surged forward. As Marcos explains:

In 1993 the indigenous element in Zapatista discourse began to become preponderant.

Until then an explanation would be made, and this was translated to the indigenous

communities. In 1993 as they tried to direct the war, this process began to operate in

reverse: the indigenous demands began to be translated to the troops that were going to

be charged with speaking to, or showing, the public what the EZLN is. The confrontation

in May 93 in the Sierra de Corralchén interfered with this and disturbed the preparation

for war and made everything difficult. Because of this when we emerged on January 1,

1994, we have only defined very vaguely what Zapatismo is. It is a very vague first

synthesis, a mix of patriotic values, of the historical legacy of the clandestine left of

Mexico in the 60s, of elements of indigenous culture, of military elements from Mexican

history, of what the guerrillas of Central and South America were, the national liberation

movements. […] The indigenous question had become fundamental and as the

indigenous people are the majority they imposed that fundamental character that was

percieved from the first days of the uprising and that immediately shaped the whole

discourse of Zapatismo. I speak of this universal indigenous feeling, that bypassed the

local or the national, and immediately raises the question of the universal, as it is

understood by the indigenous people. (LeBot 1997:200–201)

This accelerated process of political development and clarification would continue, as

described in the first chapter of this study, over the course of the two years that followed the

uprising before a more or less stable configuration that would be called Zapatismo was finally


consolidated. That distinctive politics was the product of the complex historical processes

charted in this and the previous chaptesr of this study. It was, as I have suggested, a synthesis of

several partial expressions of the communist movement.

With the uprising on January 1, 1994, the narrative part of this study comes to an end. In

the final part of this study I will return to the theoretical questions raised in first part and consider

the whole arc of the development of the indigenous campesino movement and of the EZLN

within the larger process of the development of revolutionary theory and practice globally, both

in terms of Zapatismos’ roots in previous expressions of the communist movement and in terms

of its contributions to new expressions on a global scale.

Gunderson 520

PART III

CONCLUSIONS


CHAPTER 12: CONCLUSIONS

When the Zapatistas announced their existence to the world, what most immediately and

obviously distinguished them from other Latin American guerrilla groups was precisely the

absence of the familiar language of the revolutionary left – the language of vanguard parties, of

the dictatorship of the proletariat, of the seizure of state power, indeed even of socialism or of

communism. If a few lower-ranking figures went off-message in the first days of the uprising,

the charisma and literary talents of SubComandante Marcos quickly focused attention back on

the EZLN’s demands for “freedom, justice and democracy,” on their appeals for support, not to

workers and campesinos, but to “civil society,” and on their repudiation of the pursuit of state

power. If the EZLN’s first public proclamations, The Declaration of War and The Revolutionary

Laws, were actually largely in keeping with the discourse of Marxist-Leninist led national

liberation movements in Latin America and elsewhere, the poetry of the communiques that

followed made it easy to forget this. At a moment when the language of socialism and

communism felt completely exhausted from carrying the weight of soul-crushing bureaucracies

and apologetics for massacres, the Zapatistas offered the scattered and demoralized forces of the

radical left, not just in Mexico but around the world, a seemingly fresh new way to talk, to think

and to represent itself.

It was not a small thing. The international Zapatista solidarity network that arose in the

wake of the 1994 uprising played a critical role in crystalizing the alter-globalization movement

that emerged in the late 1990s. More recently, many of the central and distinctive ideas and

practices that alter-globalization activists took from their reading of Zapatismo have returned on

a much larger scale in the Arab Spring, the movement of the plazas in southern Europe, in

Occupy Wall Street in the United States, and in other movements that have been part of the


global wave of social struggles that erupted in 2011. If the direct Zapatista influence is less

visibly evident in Cairo than in Madrid, Rome or Santiago, that should not distract our attention

from the important role that the Zapatista uprising played in initiating a new global sequence of

mass democratic and sometimes more and sometimes less explicitly anti-capitalist struggle at an

historical moment when what Badiou called the “saturation” of the sequence initiated by the

Russian Revolution made such a thing look impossible.

This study set out to account for the Zapatista’s distinctive politics, and their global

resonance, by excavating their historical development prior to 1994. As I indicated in the

introductory chapter, this study is rooted in my own experiences as a solidarity activist working

with Zapatista communities in Chiapas and my desire, not just to reconcile what I saw on the

ground in those communities with the poetry and promises of the communiques that had initially

drawn me to Chiapas, but also to understand the implications of those tensions for anti-systemic

movements and the larger project of human emancipation more generally. This study then is the

product of a process that began for me on January 2, 1994 when I first saw the faces of Zapatista

troops staring at me from the front page of the Chicago Tribune. It continued through my

participation in Zapatista solidarity work, first in the United States and then in Mexico, and in

my continuing investigation of the historical origins of the EZLN leading finally to the decision

to make that history the subject of the dissertation you now hold in your hands.

Not certain of what I would discover, either theoretically or empirically, I intuited that a

study of the intellectural origins of the Zapatistas might illuminate some larger dynamics that

have characterized anti-systemic movements in the era of neo-liberal globalization. With this in

mind I identified a number of research questions that I spelled out in Chapter 1 and that guided


me in my investigations and in organizing the results of those investigations into what I hope is a

coherent narrative.

To recap, those questions were: What were the social structures and processes that

conditioned the emergence of the indigenous campesino movement in eastern Chiapas? How did

a poor, largely illiterate, and fragmented rural population obtain the capacity to collectively and

critically analyze those processes and their place within them? How did they then develop the

organizational capacities to act on this critical analysis? How did a fraction of this movement

then come to constitute itself as a revolutionary political-military organization and to further

develop the distinctive politics of Zapatismo? What was the role of intellectuals, both external

and internal to the indigenous communities, at each moment in this process? How did this

process contribute to, and how was it influenced by, changes in the status of women and youth?

What was the role of indigenous identity and culture in this process and how in turn were they

transformed through this process?

I believe that while I have had different degrees of success in answering each of these

questions, that in my attention to them I have produced a study that does in fact illuminate larger

processes. Along the way my understanding of both Zapatismo and its implications for the larger

study of contentious politics has undergone several transformations. This chapter presents the

resulting conclusions. It is organized into three parts. In the first part I summarize the main

findings of the study on the origins and development of the distinctive politics of the EZLN with

respect to the theoretical model sketched in Chapter 3. In the second part I discuss what I think

the implications of these findings are for the future study of contentious politics. In the final part

I briefly discuss their meaning for the future practice of contentious politics.


12.1 ZAPATISMO AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT

I want to focus here on several core questions – the relationship between Zapatismo and

communism, the idea of a revolutionary people, the role of intellectuals in the constitution of a

revolutionary political subject, and finally, Zapatismo’s reconception of the relationship between

revolutionary leadership and democracy.

I propose, first, that the Zapatista uprising actually represented, if not yet in name then in

fact, the beginning of a rebirth of communist politics after their supposed death with the collapse

of the socialist bloc in 1989. I then argue that the geneology of Zapatismo that constitutes the

greater part of this study demonstrates how Zapatismo itself is the product of a creative synthesis

of several partial expressions, in Chiapas and in Mexico, of communism as understood in Marx’s

words as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” This synthesis, I

explain, emerged in the context of a deep theoretical and practical crisis in the communist

movement on a world scale around the relationship between revolutionary leadership and mass

democracy that by the 1990s had resulted in the saturation or exhaustion of the sequence of

communist-led socialist revolutions initiated in 1917.

I then argue that this synthesis found its expression in the constitution of what I have

called a “revolutionary people,” in the form of a fraction of the indigenous campesino movement

in Chiapas which came to see itself not simply as engaged in a struggle to improve their own

conditions, but in terms of a national and and even global revolutionary transformation of social

relations and a realization of the possibility of a communist future. I proceed to discuss the

complex but also critical role of intellectuals in the constitution of this new collective

revolutionary subject. Specifically I look at the role of both outsiders and insiders to the


communities in the process of synthesizing the seemingly disparate elements of competing

radical ideologies to articulate a new and distinctive revolutionary antic-capitalist politics.

Finally, I consider the ways that Zapatismo has reconceived the relationship between

revolutionary leadership and democratic participation in a revolutionary process. I argue

specifically that the layer of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals constituted through the

training of indigenous catechists radically subverted the historical intellectual dependence of the

communities on outsiders, and that this not only facilitated a qualitative leap in their ability to

constitute themselves as a revolutionary people, but indicated the possibility of a reconceived

relationship between leadership and mass participation in the revolutionary process.

The Real Movement Which Abolishes the Present State of Things

If the Zapatista uprising appeared on first glance to distinguish itself precisely by its

distance from the discourse and practices associated with the term “communism,” I am arguing

that in retrospect it now appears to actually mark the beginning of a global rebirth of communist

politics.

From the vantage point of 1994, the fall of the Berlin Wall and related events in 1989

appeared as the end of a terminal crisis that had plagued the communist movement for at least

several decades Exactly how many decades is a subject for another study, but as I argued earlier,

this crisis was already a defining fact in the events of 1968. In any event, by the 1990s,

triumphalist neo-liberals and demoralized leftists alike acknowledged the obvious death of

“communism.”

The Zapatista uprising thus came as a great surprise, not just because it had been prepared

in secret, but more profoundly because it seemed to defy the unambiguous direction of history.


The dramatic reappearance of the literal “wretched of the earth,” organized into a ragtag army

and demanding “todo para todos, para nostros nada,” on the very evening that neo-liberal elites

were toasting the implementation of NAFTA, defied the scripts assigned by a hegemonic neo-

liberalism. It even came as shock to those in the Diocese of San Cristóbal and in the Mexican

security and intelligence apparatus, who knew very well that it was going to happen, but who

utterly failed to anticipate its scale, much less its global significance. This blindness to what was,

in retrospect, right in front of their noses, can not simply be attributed to the Zapatistas success in

keeping their secrets. Rather it reflected the fact that both the Diocese and the Mexican state

were, in their own quite distinct ways, in the process of accommodating themselves to what

everyone was certain was a post-communist world.

This sense that the Zapatista uprising was defying the expected course of history

informed how the uprising and the Zapatistas came to be understood by both their sympathizers

and their critics. For their sympathizers it meant that Zapatismo had to be understood as

something entirely new and expressive of radically new conditions. To whatever degree it had to

be acknowledged to have a history, it was a history that culminated precisely in a rupture with

the exhausted politics of communism identified with the history of the short 20th

century that had

ended in 1989. Indeed this view would be taken up to an important degree by the Zapatistas

themselves, especially in statements by Subcomandante Marcos.

In the eyes of the Zapatistas’ critics, it was precisely the EZLN’s actual roots in the

communist movement that, appearances of novelty notwithstanding, made them a relic, another

tragic example, as it were, of the persistent backwardness of Chiapas. In this view the uprising

represented a clinging to an exhausted formula and as such, a dead end.


If these two perspective produced seemingly opposing verdicts on the EZLN, they both

partook of the view that communism was dead. From the vantage point of 2012, and with the

benefit of the much more detailed account of the actual genesis of the Zapatistas’ politics, I am

arguing that this reading is no longer sustainable. The revived philosophical interest in the idea

of communism occasioned by the publication and reception of Badiou’s The Communist

Hypothesis (Badiou 2008, 2010) has prompted an intellectual debate on whether the term can

become again the name of an emancipatory politics. The very fact of the debate, however,

suggests that it already has, if only yet in spectral form. For the generation raised since 1989, the

menacing shadow of Soviet tanks no longer looms as it once did over any attempt to make real

the possibility of a better world. If most of the participants in the current wave of struggle remain

reluctant to revive the name of communism, the voices of reaction have not. The lurid and absurd

accusations of communist sympathies directed at candidate and then president Barack Obama by

Glenn Beck, and the recent, and no less surreal, charges of Florida Congressman Allen West that

there are at least 80 communists in Congress, can not help but recall the words from the preface

of the Manifesto,

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its

opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding

reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against

its reactionary adversaries? (Marx and Engels 2006:2)

As the Manifesto proceeds to argue, this fact means that “Communism is already acknowledged

… to be itself a power.” In 2012, as in 1848, the revival of anti-communist political discourse is

a response to a threat that largely does yet know itself to exist. And to the extent that it does

know itself to exist I am suggesting that its self-awareness can be traced in significant measure to


the Zapatista uprising as the moment when dispersed forces began to recrystalize and the

communist movement reappeared under a new name.

The overthrow of the FLN’s mestizo leadership and its replacement by the CCRI-GC in

January 1993 has been interpreted by many sympathetic to the EZLN as a rupture with the

FLN’s communist politics. What I am arguing here is that it is much better understood as an

overcoming of those aspects of the FLNs politics, not least of which were its deep reluctance to

go on the offensive and initiate armed struggle against the Mexican state, that were obstructing

the EZLN’s potential to actually advance the communist politics that animated the whole project.

The contribution of the “indigenous element” to Zapatismo then should not be understood as a

repudiation of communism so much as a rejection of its reification in a form that had become

exhausted. Thus, when the EZLN broke with the urban leadership of the FLN and decided to go

to war, it represented an advanced expression of communism, but at a moment when the political

name of “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” was not, or could not

be, “communism,” or even “socialism.” This, however, only becomes apparent when we are able

to locate the Zapatistas and Zapatismo within a much larger and longer-term process of its

historical development.

An important aspect of this, of course, is the impact and resonance that Zapatismo has

had on anti-systemic social movements globally since 1994. As I argued in Chapter 1, the

international Zapatista solidarity network that arose in the wake of the 1994 uprising played a

critical role in catalyzing the emergence of the alter-globalization movement in the late 1990s,

deeply informing that movement’s strategic outlook and organizational practices. More recently,

of course, many of the movements that erupted around the world in 2011 have adopted much of

the alter-globalization movement’s anti-capitalist analysis of neo-liberalism as well as its


repertoire of consensus decision-making, distrust of centralized leadership, and mass

mobilization at a deliberate distance from the state. Zapatismo, of course, is only one of many

influences on recent movements, but as I am suggesting here, it played a unique catalytic role in

bringing together previously dispersed and disconnected forces, first in the form of the

international Zapatista solidarity network, and then in the form of the alter-globalization

movement which, in effect, codified and popularized what it understood to be the essence of

Zapatismo, an essence which has now reappeared in the even larger recent wave of anti-systemic

movements.

The direct influence of the Zapatistas on Occupy Wall Street, to take just one example, is

not neccesarily immediately apparent in the way that it was during the wave of alter-

globalization protests at the beginning of the last decade. That the Zapatistas none the less

remain an important point of reference, however, was illuminated recently in a public debate that

erupted over the role of “the Black Bloc” in Occupy. In response to a number of militant

confrontations with police on the part of the Black Bloc in Oakland and a number of other cities,

Chris Hedges wrote a critique in which he said

Black Bloc adherents detest those of us on the organized left and seek, quite consciously,

to take away our tools of empowerment. They confuse acts of petty vandalism and a

repellent cynicism with revolution. The real enemies, they argue, are not the corporate

capitalists, but their collaborators among the unions, workers’ movements, radical

intellectuals, environmental activists and populist movements such as the Zapatistas. Any

group that seeks to rebuild social structures, especially through nonviolent acts of civil

disobedience, rather than physically destroy, becomes, in the eyes of Black Bloc

anarchists, the enemy. Black Bloc anarchists spend most of their fury not on the

architects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) or globalism, but on

those, such as the Zapatistas, who respond to the problem. It is a grotesque inversion of

value systems.(2012)

In response to Hedges, David Graeber responded in defense of the Black Bloc by arguing

that


if you took a poll of participants in the average Black Bloc and asked what political

movement in the world inspired them the most, the EZLN would get about 80% of the

vote. In fact I’d be willing to wager that at least a third of participants in the average

Black Bloc are wearing or carrying at least one item of Zapatista paraphernalia. (2012)

The question of the role of the Black Bloc, and even the respective merits of the claims

made by Hedges and Graeber concerning the Zapatistas, are beyind the scope of this study. The

exchange, however, illustrates the extent to which Zapatismo still frames the range of debate

among anticapitalist activists even 18 years after the Zapatista uprising.

The possible implications of these sometimes fugitive developments are difficult to

discern, however, without an understanding not just of how Zapatismo may have encouraged the

appearance of the slender shoots of a new communist project, but of how Zapatismo is in fact

itself the product of a creative synthesis of several partial expressions of communism as it has

appeared at earlier moments in the history of Chiapas and Mexico. This synthesis, I have argued,

emerged in the context of a deep theoretical and practical crisis in the communist movement on a

world scale around the relationship between revolutionary leadership and mass democracy that

by the 1990s had resulted in the exhaustion of the sequence of socialist revolutions initiated in

1917.

As discussed in Chapter 2, communism does not generally express itself as a unitary

movement under the conscious and unambiguous leadership of a single revolutionary party or

organization. Even in the context of successful socialist revolutions when the impetus towards

unity is strong it typically finds multiple, partial and contradictory expressions. This is even more

the case, of course, when and where the movement is comparatively weak and has not (yet)

posed a serious threat to the capitalist state. Liberationist Christianity, Guevarism, Maoism, and

radical indigenous thought, were each partial and contradictory responses to the crisis in the


official Soviet-dominated Marxism of the Latin American Communist Parties that became

apparent in the 1960s. As I believe this study has demonstrated, Zapatismo is the product of

complex synthesis of these, and to a lesser degree other, partial expressions of “the real

movement to abolish the present state of things.” I will now briefly review the findings of this

study with respect to the communist content of the different elements that were synthesized to

produce Zapatismo.

Elements of a Synthesis

Our starting point must be the proto-communism of the indigenous communities

discussed in Chapter 3. This has its roots first in the widespread pre-Columbian communal

management (if not ownership) of land. In the course of the conquest and the insertion of the

communities into the new global circuits of capital accumulation they suffered a radical, though

not total, leveling of internal class distinctions. The Lascasian version of Christianity introduced

to the recongregated communities organized by the Dominican missionaries in the late16th

and

early 17th

centuries gave them a conceptual framework which both valorized the relatively

egalitarian relations within the communities as well as their resistance to a decidedly

inegalitarian larger racial and colonial order in which they were embedded. As both Maurer

(1984) and Wasserstrom (1983) have argued, while the Dominicans’ fealty to their original

Lascasian vision was shortlived, that vision would persist as an important though hardly

unalloyed framing element of the Traditional Catholicism of the indigenous communities into the

20th

century. It was reflected in various ways, most notably in the organization of the cofradías

which, while introduced by the Dominican missionaries for decidedly other purposes, became a

vehicle for the redistribution of wealth by means of the obligations of civic-religious offices.


On two occasions, in 1712 and 1869, this indigenous Lascasian Christian proto-

communism erupted in the form of more or less open revolt. The 1712 rebellion united

indigenous communities across ethnic divisions and aimed at nothing less than the complete

replacement of the Spanish dominated colonial order by what can be described as an indigenous

campesino communist theocracy comparable in a number of respects to the commune established

by Thomas Müntzer in the town of Mühlhausen during the German Peasants War (Engels 1967)

A critical difference between Muntzer’s proto-communism and that of the Tzeltal Rebellion, of

course, being the added dimension of the colonial subjugation of the indigenous population. The

theocratic vision of the rebels of Cancuc was no less austere than that of Muntzer, but its target

was of necessity the whole colonial enterprise.

If the 1712 rebellion imagined the overturning of the long established Spanish-dominated

colonial order, the indigenous protagonists of the “Caste War” in Chamula acentury and a half

later confronted a situation which was much less explicable within the framework of a

worldview still very much grounded in the colonial era. The “Caste War” was a largely defensive

response to an opening salvo in a restructuring of land tenure and labor relations that would

greatly intensify the extraction of surplus value from the indigenous communities of Chiapas,

chiefly to the benefit of English and U.S. capital. Rather than imagining and fighting for the

overthrow of the system into which they were being drawn ever more tightly, the Chamulans

sought only to withdraw from it. There is, however, in the the experience of the “Caste War” the

intriguing role played by the anarchist school-teacher Ignacio Fernández Galindo and his wife.

This is arguably the first, but certainly will not be the last, moment of connection between this

indigenous proto-communism of the indigenous communities and the then emerging current of

modern European communist thought and practice.


The next element that commands our attention should be the communist trends that

expressed themselves in the course of the Mexican Revolution. There are several of these and

their interaction is complex and contradictory. The first is represented by the anarchist and

socialist workers of the Casa del Obrero Munidal in Mexico City who formed the Red Battalions

that joined the Constitutionalist forces led by Carranza. While the Red Battalions rather

notoriously fought against Villa and Zapata’s armies, they also influenced the actions of the

Constitutionalists especially in places like Chiapas where they introduced radical labor reforms,

including the abolition of debt peonage, and prompted the appearance for the first time of a

socialist-inspired movement based among the state’s largely indigenous agricultural labor force,

especially in Soconusco where the largely German-owned coffee planatations became the scene

of strikes and sometimes deadly class struggles.

By the 1920s this movement had spread and led to the formation of the Partido Socialista

Chiapaneco (Chiapaneco Socialist Party or PSCh). The organizational and agitational activity of

the PSCh, especially among the migrant coffee workers of Soconusco many of which were

drawn from the Tzotzil and Tzeltal communities of the Highlands, would see the first systematic

introduction of modern socialist and communist ideas to the indigenous population of the state.

This process however was cut short. While the PSCh began life as a radical working class

organization, by 1925 it had been effectively transformed into an instrument of the state and

within a few years would be absorbed into the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, the official

state-party that would later become the PRI.

The other current within the Mexican Revolution of interest to us here is, of course, that

represented by Zapata. Zapata’s radicalism has often been cast as sort of primitive peasant proto-

communism, but this ignores the influential role of leading members of the Ricardo Flores


Magon’s Partido Liberal Mexicano who joined Zapata’s staff as the PLM disintegrated.

Revueltas (1980) argued that Magon and the PLM concentrated the most advanced communist

current within the Mexican Revolution and that the failure of the PCM to incorporate them was

an important cause of the PCM’s subsequent history of vacillation. Leading members of the

PLM did however help Zapata articulate a vision that would become the basis of a radical current

that would influence campesino movements in Mexico over the rest of the 20th century. The

figure of Zapata himself would become an important symbol of the Mexican Revolution’s

promises to the rural poor that would be used by the ruling party to legitimize its rule. This

appropriation of the image of Zapata by the PRI party-state, however, did not prevent the

subterranean transmission of a more radical legacy that upheld not just the more expansive

programmatic vision of Zapata’s Plan de Ayala, but also in some instances the necessity of

popular rural guerrilla warfare as a method to accomplish it.

If, as Revueltas (1980) suggests, the PCM never actually fulfilled the leadership functions

of the revolutionary party it claimed to be, it nonetheless acted as a pole of attraction for

revolutionary-minded activists and as a sometimes effective propaganda group. Individual

members and fractions of the party acted as genuine communist nuclei within many important

struggles over the course of the 20th

century, often, as argued byHodges and Gandy, (2002) in

contradiction with official party positions. Splits and defections from the PCM and its various

mass formations nourished both the Mexican New Left that would embrace Maoism in the late

1960s as well as the guerrilla formations that looked to the Cuban Revolution for inspiration.

The PCM also exercised a brief but important influence on the indigenous communities

of Chiapas in the latter half of the 1930s. In 1935, following the election of General Lazaro

Cardenas as President, the PCM was allowed once more to organize publicly. PCM cadres


played important roles in the wave of campesino organizing and land struggles that Cardenas

sought to direct into the corporate structure of the ruling party. The center of PCM activity in

Chiapas was always Soconusco, but by 1936 the party was recruiting elsewhere in the state. This

process was, of course, facilitated by the dependence of the coffee plantations of Soconusco on

migrant labor from the Tzotzil and Tzeltal communities in the Highlands. While the PCM’s

organizing efforts were focused primarily on building unions among agricultural and other

workers, they were inevitably also drawn into land struggles as their influence extended into the

Highlands and the Northern Zone. It is during this period that a number of indigenous

communities in these areas first won lands and recognition as ejidos. Of special interest to us, in

the municipality of Sabanilla, where seven ejidos, including the ejido of Lazaro Cardenas, were

established at this time. With Mexico’s entrance into the Second World War, the PCM would

retreat from the role it had played under Cardenas, but as García de León argues, the influence of

its radicalism on the subsequent political development of the indigenous communities would

continue on its absence. While the precise impact of the PCM’s activities on the subsequent

political consciousness of the communities is unknown, it is clear that the indigenous campesino

movement that emerged in this region was particularly combative and that Lazaro Cardenas in

particular would play a critical role in the development of the FLN’s relations with the

indigenous campesino movement.

The next element that we will consider is the influence of liberationist Christianity

described in Chapter 6. It is important to recognize that liberationist Christianity was not simply

introduced into the communities by the pastoral staff of the Diocese but arose from the

interaction between the pastoral staff and the communities. As Löwy argues, liberation theology

was an attempt to articulate in theological terms the prior emergence of liberationist Christianity


in the practice of the church, in particular its efforts to address the needs of the poor. While the

sharing of experiences at Medellin in 1968 and the subsequent circulation of theological writings

undoubtedly reinforced this process, it is the encounter of initially moderate or even conservative

pastoral staff with the conditions and struggles of the poor that is the motor that drives the

development of liberationist Christianity. The initial orientation of the pastoral staff of the

Diocese of San Cristóbal towards the traditional religion of the communities was to regard it

simply as backwards or even heretical. It is in the course of ministering to the communities, and

in particular in the training of indigenous catechists, that the pastoral staff encounters and then

increasingly comes to respect the proto-communist elements in the Traditional Religion of the

communities. Of course the pastoral staff, who were themselves being shaped by the larger

upheavals then occurring both within the church and in the broader world, also exercised an

enormous influence on the young catechists. Most importantly they brought them into sustained

contact with the liberationist ideas and practices circulating throughout the Latin American

church at precisely the moment when their communities were encountering the limits of their

own traditionalist worldview and it is through the pastoral staff that the catechists first gain a

systematic exposure to a materialist critique of the political-economic bases of the condition sof

their communities. The layer of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals that emerged from

the process of training indigenous catechists would radically subvert the historical intellectual

dependence of the communities on outsiders, thereby facilitating a qualitative leap in their ability

to constitute themselves as a revolutionary people.

Whatever lasting influence the PSCh and the PCM had had on the communities

understanding of their struggles as part of a larger, even international struggle, it is only with the

emergence of liberationist Christianity in the 1960s that a stable cohort of indigenous leaders


with the necessary level of literacy begins to acquire the theoretical tools to develop a critical

understanding of the oppression of the communities within the workings of capitalism as a world

system. While the perspective that will emerge remains deeply informed by the communities’

Lascasian inheritance and long histories of struggle, the embrace of liberationist Christianity

nonetheless marks a radical transformation in the outlook of the communities.

Like Mariategui, but unlike the Latin American CPs, the liberationist church came to see

the communist seed in the communal life and traditions of struggle of the indigenous

communities and sought to nurture it. It challenged the monopoly on authority previously

enjoyed within the communities by male elders and generated a culture of debate and

engagement with competing ideas. It located the struggles of the communities within global

processes of social transformation and encouraged the members of the communities to see

themselves as agents of large scale social change.

Finally, while liberationist Christianity arose in response to a variety of factors, the role

that it came to play in many countries can not be understood without reference to the generalized

abdication of the responsibilities of revolutionary leadership on the part of Latin American CPs.

In the absence of a revolutionary party actually committed to communism, radical priests and

nuns trained indigenous catechists in the methods of historical materialism, encouraged them to

struggle for a radical vision of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, and along the way increasingly

embraced revolutionary methods to achieve that vision.

The next element was the Maoism of groups like Unión del Pueblo and Política Popular.

As described in Chapter 7, the embrace of Maoism was rooted in the Mexican New Left’s

perception of the exhaustion of the PCM. Unión del Pueblo and Política Popular saw in the

Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution a fight against both the bureaucratization of the revolution


and the effective abandonment of communism by the Soviet Union and the “capitalist roaders” in

the Chinese Communist Party. The Maoist analysis of the emergence of “capitalist headquarters”

within the communist movement provided the New Left with an explanation of the non-

revolutionary politics of the PCM and other Latin American CPs. Skeptical of premature party

formation and committed to a practice of the “mass line” that relied heavily on the organization

of popular assemblies, the Maoists encouraged a transformation of the ejidal assemblies already

used by many communities into much more deliberative and democratic bodies in which women

and youth began to participate.

The revitalized assemblies of the communities became in turn the foundation for robust

regional mass independent organizations and for the comon, the communal identity that found its

expression in the village, regional and organizational assemblies. In the end, the Maoists

skepticism on party formation turned into its opposite, first in the form of an extreme

centralization of authority in the figure of Aldolfo Orive and then in the effective liquidation of

their own organization into appendages of the ruling party. Combined with their inability to

grasp the cultural dimension of the indigenous campesino movement, especially in its relation to

land struggles, the Maoists ultimately suffered the indignity of being expelled from the

communities of the Cañadas. As a consequence, among the Zapatistas the Maoists became

associated primarily with negative lessons concerning the dangers of opportunism and

economism. In spite of this legacy, a balanced analysis must acknowledge that the Maoists made

a significant contribution to the political and organizational capacity of the indigenous

campesino movement that would become the foundation for the EZLN.

The final elements we will consider are those contributed by the FLN as discussed in


Chapters 10 and 11. There are several of these. The first is the left-wing revolutionary

nationalism and associated strategic orientation towards the construction of a broad multi-class

anti-imperialist front that the FLN inherited from the MLN. As discussed in Chapter 1, the

EZLN’s nationalism is often overlooked or treated as peripheral to their politics by solidarity

activists outside of Mexico, some of whom even regard it as fundemantally at odds with the rest

of their politics. It has, however, I am arguing in fact been critical to the Zapatistas’ success in

commanding at times very broad popular support within Mexico.

If the MLN was held together by this broad left-wing revolutionary nationalism, it

ultimately came apart over the related question of how broad that front could be and the methods

of struggle that corresponded with that assessment. In contrast with the PCM, the armed

revolutionary left that emerged as the MLN fell apart saw the ruling party and the national

bourgeoisie as both hopelessly implicated in Mexico’s domination by U.S. imperialism. They

were also convinced by their own experiences of state repression that there was no peaceful

electoral road to socialism in Mexico.

Like the GPG and the PdlP, the founders of the FLN became convinced that, like the

other Latin American communist parties, the PCM’s faith in the anti-imperialist potential of

Mexico’s national bourgeoisie was misplaced and that as a result the PCM as well had become

hopelessly compromised. Ché Guevara’s critical stance toward the strategic orientation of the

Latin American CPs and the alternative represented by the strategy of revolutionary guerrilla

warfare developed in the course of the Cuban Revolution helped convince these forces of the

viability of a similar strategy in Mexico. The limitation of Guevara’s military strategy were only

learned at a very high price. It took the destruction of the GPG, the PdlP and many other groups,

and the near-destruction of the FLN itself, for the FLN to finally abandon Guevara’s foquista


strategy in favor of a modified version of the strategy of protracted people’s war. This was

inspired by the Central American experiences of revolutionary guerrilla warfare, in particular

that of the Sandinistas, but also rooted in close studies of Mexico’s own rich body of experience

with revolutionary guerrilla warfare from Villa and Zapata through Jaramillo, Gamiz and

Cabañas.

Zapatismo was not simply an intellectual synthesis of these disparate elements in the

minds of revolutionary intellectuals. It was rather a concrete synthesis that occurred in the course

of the emergence of a revolutionary people from the crucible of the indigenous campesino

movement in Chiapas. This synthesis involved multiple processes of fusion between fractions of

the indigenous campesino movement and several distinct expressions of the communist

movement.

A Revolutionary People

When the FLN returned to Chiapas in the late 1970s and began to cultivate its first

contacts in Lazaro Cardenas and El Calvario, it did not find a politically inexperienced or naïve

indigenous population. Rather it encountered a population with a long history of struggle that

proved especially receptive to the FLN’s arguments for both armed struggle and socialist

revolution. As I have already argued, the indigenous campesino movement in Chiapas had

produced a revolutionary people. To speak of a revolutionary people then is to speak of a critical

mass of people who had become receptive to revolutionary politics, who found meaning and

purpose in acting to transform not just their own immediate conditions, but those of the larger

world, and who consequently constituted a potential field in which explicitly revolutionary


organizations could potentially. In a process of mutual transformation, take on a genuinely mass

character.

The once fractured indigenous communities had acquired a common critical

understanding of their conditions, and had passed through a series of experiences involving

competing political projects that had exposed them to a variety of strategic perspectives and

given them a particularly rich repertoire of tactics and organizational methods. They had come to

understand their own local struggles as embedded within larger social processes and had

developed the means to much more systematically analyse the workings of capitalism,

imperialism, colonialism and racism in relation to their own immediate struggles.

This account is at odds with the position of the anti-Zapatistas articulated by Lagrange

and Rico:

Two distinct projects had come together to join forces and had ended out transformed

into one. One, reformist, of small indigenous campesinos whose consciousness had been

raised by the priests of the diocese. And the other, revolutionary, of activists who came

from the Mexican capital to establish a guerrilla foco in Chiapas and, from there, to create

the political and social conditions at the national level to overthrow the regime, according

to the theory of the insurrectional vanguard developed by the Cubans and applied by Ché

in Bolivia.(1998:48)

In this view the indigenous campesino movement’s demands for reforms make it a

reformist movement and its only its embrace of or subordination to the FLN’s politics makes it

revolutionary. In truth the indigenous campesino movement was an arena of struggle in which

different positions, most of which claimed to be revolutionary, were in contention but also in

flux. The Maoists of Union del Pueblo who would indeed later promote a reformist orientation

arrived first as memebrs of a clandestine armed organization committed to building popular

organiations in preparation for a future revolutionary peoples war. Similarly Linea Proletaria’s


discourse was on first encounter revolutionary as well. It was in large part on the basis of the

Maoists’ apparent commitment to revolutionary change that the indigenous campesino

movement at the moment of its emergence accepted their assistance and advice and it was

precisely when it became apparent that those commitments had become only rhetorical that the

Maoists found themselves in conflict with a large fraction of the movement. The stance of the

liberationist church is somewhat more complex, with individual members of the pastoral staff

following quite distinct trajectories. It would certainly be fair, however, to characterize the

overall orientation of the Diocese in 1968 as reformist. By 1975, however, the politics of Diocese

had been radicalized considerably and they were working in alliance with the Maoists. By the

early 1980s, under the influence of the movements in Central America, a large fraction of the

pastoral staff consciously saw themselves as part of a revolutionary process, and had come to

regard the Maoists as reformist, a view that echoed the verdict of a similarly large fraction of the

indigenous campesino movement. Much of the pastoral staff would moderate its views in the

latter part of the 1980s and in the early 1990s, but at the moment that the FLN/EZLN entered

into contact with the indigenous campesino movement it is simply inaccurate to describe that

movement as reformist. It was rather a mass movement that was already developing in a

revolutionary direction and that contained a diversity of developing views. It was, in short, a

movement that had produced a revolutionary people but that had not yet seen their consolidation

into a revolutionary organization.

None of this is to suggest that these developents were uniform or that this revolutionary

people at the moment of its encounter with the FLN was able to yet act in a unified and

coordinated manner to advance a program of revolutionary action. On the contrary, these

developments were very uneven. The movement was divided between competing organizations,


many of which were highly compromised in various ways, particularly in their relations with the

state and ruling party. The movement was vulnerable to, and frequently the victim of, violent

repression which had been very effective in disrupting its development.

Nor is this to suggest that this revolutionary people in its entirety would become the

EZLN support bases. A large fraction would, but others wouldn’t. Some would pass in and then

out of the EZLN for a variety of reasons. Others would rally around the EZLN in the immediate

aftermath of the 1994 uprising, but fall away later. What is important is that without the prior

emergence of this revolutionary people, the EZLN would simply not have been able to constitute

itself as the conscious and organized expression of the most politically developed fraction of the

indigenous communities. Nor would it have then been able to act in a manner that would

importantly alter the political configuration of forces, not just in Chiapas, but nationally and even

internationally.

The emergence in Chiapas of a revolutionary people and the constitution of the EZLN are

were both moments in the development of the collective revolutionary political subjectivity of

the indigenous campesino movement. Both of these moments, I am arguing, depended in turn on

the prior development of the layer of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals initiated

through the training of indigenous catechists.

The Role of Intellectuals

The goal of the fusion of revolutionary socialist or communist ideas with the mass

movements of the oppressed is commonly associated with Lenin’s conception of a revolutionary

vanguard party as described in his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? As Lars Lih (2008) has

persuasively argued this notion of fusion was, in fact, not unique to Lenin, but was rather almost


universally embraced by European social democracy prior to the Russian Revolution, with the

experience of the German Social Democratic Party regarded as the model case. In any case, the

formulation identifies the fundamental challenge facing any small consciously revolutionary

minority interested in seeing a large oppressed majority population realize their potential to

become agents of both their own emancipation and the revolutionary transformation of the

world. In no instance in which it has actually occurred has this fusion simply involved the

encounter of an enlightened revolutionary minority and a mute mass flailing blindly at the

conditions of its existence. It has always been, and this was as apparent to Lenin as anyone, a

process of mutual and radical transformation that involves multiple and complexly interrelated

mediations.

The sequence described in this study from the formation of indigenous catechists as

organic intellectuals through the transformation of a fraction of their communities into a

revolutionary people and then their organization as an armed and disciplined revolutionary force

in the form of the EZLN, culminating in the capture of the leadership in 1993 suggests that this

process of fusion is not reducible to a single moment of cognitive liberation, but is rather a

protracted one involving a progressive series of distinct transformations in the capacities and

consciousness of different actors. It is a process that involves not just the acquisition of a set of

insights and skills on the part of an emergent layer of organic intellectuals, but also the

transformation of the “outside” actors as well. It involves not just the exercise of intellectual

leadership by this layer over “the masses,” but rather their mutual development of an

increasingly sophisticated and radical understanding of the political options available to the

movement through a series of experiences in struggles involving competing political projects.


And finally it involves the consolidation of a particular organizational expression of this

emergent communist subjectivity.

Gramsci’s notion of organic intellectuals is enormously helpful in getting a handle on this

dynamic process. It is only with the constitution of its own layer of organic intellectuals that an

oppressed group can legitimately claim the intellectual independence necessary to constitute

itself as a “class for itself” and advance a revolutionary process.

In the case of the indigenous communities of Chiapas, the constitution of such a body of

organic intellectuals initially depended on the emergence of competition between a number of

external actors (the ruling party apparatus, protestant evangelists, and the Diocese of San

Cristóbal) in which each suffered from weaknesses that interfered with its consolidation of

hegemony over the communities and in which the communities possessed some capacity for

autonomous action grounded in the counter-hegemonic vision of indigenous Lascasian

Christianity that remained at the heart of their communal life.

A racist underestimation of the intellectual capacities of the indigenous population

blinded these outside actors, at least initially, to the consequences of their own efforts which

imagined that their various developmentalist interventions would make the communities

compliant vehicles of their respective projects. In the critical case of the Diocese, however, the

process of training indigenous catechists not only gave the catechists crucial skills and

knowledge, but awoke in the pastoral staff a critical self-awareness that caused them to decide to

deliberately subvert the historic function of the church in exercising ideological hegemony over

the indigenous population. The indigenous catechists effectively won over a fraction of the

pastoral staff of the Diocese (including Bishop Ruíz) who, in turn, brought with them their own


not inconsiderable intellectual and material resources. By so doing they greatly accelerated the

process of their own independent intellectual development.

Here it is important to discuss briefly the question of the class (and in this case ethnic)

origins of organic intellectuals. While the term has sometimes come to be identified with the

notion of intellectuals drawn from the ranks of the proletariat (or other subaltern group), for

Gramsci the critical question was decidedly not the origins of organic intellectuals, but rather the

extent to which they came to share the life of the subaltern population. Indeed Gramsci

commented on the diverse class origins of organic intellectuals. In the case of the indigenous

communities of Chiapas, however, very few outsiders have been willing and able to actually

share their lives, and most of these for only a relatively short period of time. So, while much of

the pastoral staff of the Diocese of San Cristóbal were willing to travel over difficult terrain and

endure the temporary hardships of frequent trips to the indigenous communities, few actually

mastered any of the indigenous languages and none took up permanent residence in the remote

communities. A number of the members of Unión del Pueblo and Linea Proletaria did move into

communities in the Cañadas, but again largely failed to master the first language of the people

they lived among, and in any event would eventually either be expelled from the communities or

left of their own accord after a few years. Similarly, while a number of mestizo members of the

FLN spent months or years in Zapatista encampments, only a handful proved able to endure both

the physical hardships of guerrilla life and the psychological challenges of truly immersing

themselves in the culture of the communities. Three of these – Daniel, Pedro and Marcos –

would rise to the rank of SubComandante in the EZLN. Daniel would betray the Zapatistas and

Pedro would die in combat on the first day of the uprising, leaving only Marcos.


Marcos is not the only non-indigenous member of the EZLN. There are or have been a

handful of others as well as a presumably somewhat larger group of campesinos with one foot in

the indigenous world. But other than Marcos, the leadership of the EZLN is entirely indigenous.

So while class and ethnic origin are not neccesaril determinant of an individual’s capacity to

become an organic intellectual, they are, at least in this case, very important.

Thus, while a handful of individuals, like Javier Vargas or Jaime Soto, could arguably be

characterized as having achieved the status of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals,

SubComandante Marcos actually stands alone in terms of his level of mastery of indigenous

languages (speaking two and understanding another two) and the duration and intensity of his

immersion within the indigenous cultural context. This is critical to understanding his unusual

position as the mestizo spokesman and military commander of an indigenous rebel army.

Characterizing Marcos as an organic intellectual of the indigenous campesino movement should

not be taken as suggesting that he has “become indigenous” in any sort of unproblematic way,

much less that this confers upon him some sort of inerrancy. It is rather to say that his intellectual

activity, not just as a writer, but as a political leader, can not be understood except as a

consequence of his actual immersion in the life of the indigenous communities and their

recognition of him as a leader.

With the consolidation of the body of organic indigenous campesino intellectuals and the

emergence of the indigenous campesino movement represented by the 1974 Indigenous

Congress, a different kind of competition by outside actors began between explicitly radical and

revolutionary organizations of varying stripes. While this study has concentrated its attention on

the most significant groups (the Diocese, UP, PP and the FLN), there were in fact many others

with a presence in Chiapas including the PCM, the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (later


the Partido del Frente Cardenista de Reconstrucción Nacional), the Partido Mexicano de los

Trabajadores, the Maoist Compañero, and the Trotskyist Partido Revolucionario de los

Trabajadores, among others. All of these groups arguably contributed at least a little to the

overall process of political radicalization that occurred in the communities. It was really the

competition between them, however, and the resulting debates over their respective programs,

strategies and tactics that deepened the overall political education of the indigenous campesino

movement and enabled the emergence of a revolutionary people.

Revolutionary Leadership and Democracy

Zapatismo was thus the product of a creative synthesis of several partial expressions of

communism that emerged in the context of a global crisis in the communist movement arising at

least in part over the relationship between revolutionary leadership and mass democracy. It is on

this question that Zapatismo most clearly distinguishes itself from the dominant thinking in the

communist movement during the short 20th

century between the Russian Revolution and the fall

of the Berlin Wall. It is the reconception of the historic relationship between leadership and

democracy is at the heart of what is most distinct in the Zapatista synthesis.

The anti-Zapatistas and the autonomists alike both reduce this tension between leadership

and democracy to a single aspect rather than grasping its dialectical movement. For the anti-

Zapatistas, Zapatismo’s democratic credentials are simply a fraud, while for the autonomists, the

evident role of centralized leadership and military discipline are vestigial.

As I explained in Chapter 1, anti-authoritarian declarations notwithstanding, the EZLN

has not rejected or in any way dispensed with the critical functions of revolutionary leadership.

Changed conditions have not eliminated the need for leadership, unity in action, organizational


discipline, or the military capacity for armed struggle, all of which the EZLN has sought to build

and maintain. Rather they have transformed the relationship between these things and the

democratic participation of the movement’s mass base.

What the Zapatistas have done is to couple the exercise of leadership with a culture of

more or less continuous consultation with their support bases, reflected in the slogan “mandar

obedeciendo.” This is evidenced perhaps most clearly in the process of voting in village

assemblies that preceded the EZLN’s decision to go to war and then again in the rejection of the

government’s offer following the first rounds of talks in 1994. Perez Ruíz (2005) traces the

slogan “mandar obedeciendo” to Ruben Jaramillo, suggesting that it might have entered the

EZLN’s conceptual armory through the FLN’s efforts to ground a strategy of people’s war in

Mexico’s history of armed struggle. Whatever its exact genesis it clearly reflects the political

culture of the communities where a premium is placed on the construction of consensus. The

EZLN has also attempted to employ similar methods in their relations with supporters and allies

across Mexico and even internationally. These include the national and international consultas

and encuentros, and more recently the process of consultation with representatives of different

sectors of Mexican society that preceded the launch of the Otra Campaña.

It needs to be said, especially in case of the latter examples, that there has consistently

been a strong element of theater to these processes of consultation and that in no instance does it

seem that the leadership EZLN undertook them with any doubt as to what the results would be,

even if in the case of the rejection of the government proposal in 1994, the results were a surprise

to the general public. This should not be taken to suggest that the votes aren’t genuine. Even

Tello concedes that the votes in the village assemblies to go to war reflected genuine support for

the proposal. The results of votes cast in the consultas may have been foreordained, but only


because the proposals were themselves only advanced after protracted processes of discussion

aimed precisely at determining what the communities were actually prepared to support.

For matters concerning the civil side of Zapatismo, this process of discussion and

deliberation was institutionalized with the organization of the autonomous municipalities starting

in the fall of 1994 and later with the organization of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno in 2003. These

structures, however, reproduce in significant measure the regional structures based on popular

assemblies developed first within Quiptik and then in the Union de Uniones.

Hardt and Negri have suggested that the EZLN’s more horizontal organizational practices

should be understood as an expression of the rise of immaterial labor. While there may be some

truth to this with respect to workings of the international Zapatista solidarity network, it is a

more difficult position to sustain with respect to the relationship between the EZLN and its

support bases within the indigenous communities.

A couple things need to be said here. The first is to reiterate that the horizontalism of the

Zapatistas is firmly embedded within the the verticalism of the EZLN’s military command

structure. The second point is that the labor performed in Zapatista communities remains pretty

overwhelmingly material in character though of course the work of the catechists has decidedly

immaterial elements.

This is not to suggest that the labor process in the indigenous communities hasn’t

undergone important transformations. It has. The decline of the fincas, the rise of cattle ranching,

and the process of agrarian reform means that a much larger fraction of indigenous labor occurs

within the framework of the ejidos. At the same time competition for land resulting from

population growth and the expansion of cattle ranching has propelled an increasing reliance on

wage labor among men and non-agricultural artisanal or petty commodity production among


women. Combined with rising literacy rates and increased acces to information flows, even in

quite remote areas, these changes have undoubtedly facilitated a mass expansion in the

opportunities for the indigenous campesino population to see their conditions within a larger

social context. By comparison with most of the rest of Mexico, the remoteness of many of the

indigenous communities from contact with the larger world even in 1994 was striking. And of

course in this respect the communities of the Cañadas were the most remote of all. But by

comparison with many other peasant populations, and certainly in comparison with their own

recent past, the communities were much more integrated into national circuits of trade and

communication. Thus while the majority of communities in the Cañadas were not accessible

even by unpaved roads, many had landing strips for use by small airplanes. These were often

among the first pieces of land cleared by young male colonists before they brought their young

wives and possessions, often including pigs and chickens, in by planes. Similarly, while

telephone communications were non-existent, every community had at least one CB radio, often

provided by the Diocese, that facilitated not just emergency communications, but also the

circulation of news both among remote villages and between them and the cities. By the 1970s, a

large fraction of the adult male population of the communities was finding seasonal wage work,

whether in construction or in processing plants of various kinds and this process of semi-

proletarianization only brought the communities into closer contact with political developments

in the rest of Mexico and the world. Finally, protestant evangelization, catechist training and the

educational projects of independent campesino organizations all contributed to rising literacy

rates even in the most remote communities. All of these processes taken together eroded the

historic monopoly on information and knowledge that had previously been enjoyed by various

outside actors and thus encouragesd the communities in their discovery of their political agency.


These are precisely the sorts of transformations, however, that in other historical

contexts, have fueled the rise of conventionally hierarchical mass parties, revolutionary or

otherwise. What I believe the narrative presented in this study strongly suggests is that the

Zapatistas’ relative or hybrid horizontalism is not primarily a consequence of a structural shift in

the labor process from material to immaterial labor, but is rather the product mainly of

ideological struggles arising from the crisis in revolutionary theory which gave rise in the 1960s

to a variety of of partial solutions in the form of the different currents examined in this study

which were in turn synthesized by the most revolutionary-minded elements in the indigenous-

campesino movement.

I return here to the theoretical framework I sketched in the Chapter 3 and am proposing

what I consider to be a more robust and compelling alternative interpretation of the origins of

Zapatismo than those proposed by either the anti-Zapatistas or the autonomists. I believe that this

reading of the history of the EZLN is of more than just scholarly interest and that it suggests

some lessons of interest to activists and organizers in contemporary anti-systemic movement that

are different from and in some cases at odds with the lessons that many in those movements

think the experience of the EZLN has to offer. As I discussed in Chapter 1, anti-systemic

movement activists have mainly taken from the Zapatistas a sense of the importance of

horizontal organizational forms. While there is some value in this, I believe that it is an overly

static reading of what the Zapatista experience actually has to teach other movements which

really has more to do with the process through which they developed a political orientation

appropriate to the particular time and place in which they were operating than with the particular

organizational practices associated with the orientation in that time and place. Before proceding


to that discussion, however, I would like to discuss the theoretical implications of this study that

I see for the social scientific study of contentious politics.

12.2 COMMUNISM, ANTI-COMMUNISM AND THE STUDY OF CONTENTIOUS

POLITICS

The academic study of contentious politics has considerable difficulty theorizing the role

of revolutionary thought, and in particular in dealing with the idea of communism. There is an

entrenched resistance in the scholarly literature to recognizing the theoretical potency of

communism as a real force in human affairs. This is I would like to argue, a major obstacle to the

development of a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding anti-systemic social

movements, social revolutions and related forms of contentious politics. Without an

understanding of communism and the broader theoretical framework such an understanding

enables, the best intentions of sympathetic scholars notwithstanding, most of the scholarship on

contentious politics willcontinue to be of marginal value to the movements themselves.

As discussed in Chapter 3, a number of theories of contentious politics recognize the

critical role that cultures of resistance and processes of cognitive liberation play in the formation

of social movement actors as political subjects. In their definition of protest movements, Piven

and Cloward describe the process of cognitive liberation:

The emergence of protest movements entails a transformation both of consciousness and

of behavior. The change in consciousness has at least three distinct aspects. First, “the

system” – or those aspects of the system that people experience and perceive – loses

legitimacy. Large numbers of men and women who ordinarily accept the authority of

their rulers and the legitimacy of institutional arrangements come to believe in some

measure that these rulers and these arrangements are unjust and wrong. Second, people

who are ordinarily fatalistic, who believe that existing arrangements are inevitable, begin

to assert “rights” that imply demands for change. Third, there is a new sense of efficacy;

people who ordinarily consider themselves helpless come to believe that they have some


capacity to alter their lot. (Piven and Cloward 1978:3–4)

They continue with a description of the change in behavior, noting first the element of defiance,

and secondly its collective character, even in instances that appear to be individual in character,

“when those involved perceive themselves to be acting as members of a group, and when they

share a common set of protest beliefs.”

This emphasis on the central importance of the transformation of consciousness in the

emergence of social movements was a challenge not only to theories of collective behavior

which cast the motivations of movement participants as irrational, but also to theories of resource

mobilization that emphasized the conscious intentions of formalized social movement

organizations and in the process excluded from analysis many of the most defiant forms of

protest precisely because they occurred outside of the actions of formal organizations.

McAdam (1999:48–51) significantly modified the resource mobilization paradigm by

adopting and adapting Piven and Cloward’s notion of cognitive liberation, which he

characterizes as “the crucial intervening process” that transforms the “structural potential”

generated by the combination of “indigenous organizational strength” with “expanding political

opportunities” into “actual insurgency.” In the resulting political process model of social

movement emergence, the process of cognitive liberation is set in motion by “cuings among

groups of people who jointly create the meanings they will read into current and anticipated

events.” These cuings are in turn prompted by socio-economic transformations but are only

likely to produce the necessary phenomena of cognitive liberation where “existent organizations

afford insurgents the stable group-settings within which that process is most likely to occur.” In a

similar move, Foran, working in the comparative historical sociology of revolutions, identifies


what he calls “political cultures of opposition” (2005:21) as a necessary pre-condition for the

emergence of a serious revolutionary movement.

All of these are examples of efforts to restore the role of conscious agential action to

accounts of contentious politics. Still there persists a striking resistance to a serious theoretical

engagement with the specific content of the explicitly stated ideological orientations of

movement actors, especially where that content is consciously or unconsciously communist, as it

very often is. In all of these models (and in others) political ideology is viewed ultimately in

functional or instrumental terms. That is to say as a necessary condition or mechanism for the

emergence of movements. So long as certain elementary conditions are fulfilled, for example

that it facilitate the three aspects of cognitive liberation identified by Piven and Cloward,

ideological positions are viewed as more or less interchangeable.

Indeed, for the purpose of explaining the simple fact of the emergence of an insurgency,

this approach is entirely justified. Whether the frame is Musteyite, Baptist or Maoist, so long as

it facilitates the delegitimation of established powers and arrangements, challenges the belief that

those arrangements are inevitable, and encourages a group of people to believe in their own

capacity to effect change, any ideology can provide the meaning necessary to transform

“structural potential” into “actual insurgency.” But as soon as we try to account for why a

particular movement embraces or develops a particular political orientation among various

options, or seek to understand strategic debates and choices between diverse forces within

movements, the resistance to engaging the specific theoretical content of movement ideologies

becomes a serious obstacle.

This resistance can express itself in a variety of ways. One of these is simply a

presumptively cynical view of the motivations of revolutionary leaderships. There is a sort of


popular Cold War-era common sense that the leaders of revolutionary movements are largely

intellectuals whose opportunities under a particular regime have been thwarted and who

consequently seek to ride the discontent of the lower classes to power. Sometimes, as in the case

of Wickham Crowley, this is advanced explicitly. More often it is an implicit assumption, as in

the case of the anti-Zapatistas views of the FLN.

Another form this resistance sometimes takes is a privileging of local or “autonomous”

movements as objects of study and an instinctive skepticism of national political parties or

organizations which are regarded chiefly as threats to the autonomy of local forces. Judith Adler

Hellman (1992:52–61) deftly dissects this tendency in the study of Latin American social

movements, criticizing what she calls “the anti-organizational bias” of

those who are pleased and excited by the spontaneity of isolated grass-roots movements

and dismayed when these autonomous movements link up with others in a stronger, far

better organized and coordinated political coalition.

Hellman goes on to note that

[t]his bias may simply reflect deep suspicions about the inevitability of bureaucratization

in centralized organizations—even those that do not correspond to a Leninist model.

Certainly, concern about bureaucratization has been a common theme for the European

Left since the beginning of the century when Roberto Michels first formalized the

problem as the “iron law of oligarchy.”(1992:56)

Sometimes taking cover under a misreading of Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect,”

this Michelsian view is seductive in its realism. In so far as it denies, however, the possibility of

any enduring organizational expression of the collective subjectivity of the oppressed it

implicitly accepts the permanence of capitalism and the impossibility of its actual supersession

and I am arguing must be understood as an essentially ideological stance.


As Buechler has argued, the study of social movements has become satisfied with the

perpetual production of ever more refined theories of the middle range. These theories describe

with impressive precision a whole array of mechanisms that supposedly account for the various

dynamic of movements, but that are notoriously unsatisfying as explanations to anyone who has

actually dedicated themselves to such movements.

It is permissible within the social scientific study of contentious politics to critique

capitalism. It is permissible to study and even sympathize with movements that identify to one

degree or another, as anti-capitalist. It is permissible to celebrate their acts of resistance,

subversion and their construction of autonomous spaces within capitalism. What is effectively

marginalized, what is largely excluded from the scholarship on contentious politics, however, is

any serious consideration of movements as the varied theoretical and practical expressions of

“the real movement which abolishes the present state of things,” or as the process through which

humanity realizes, in Marx’s terms, its “species being.” Communism is not treated as a serious

theoretical category or concept, but only as the name of an instrumental ideology of party and

state elites and apparatuses. Individual communists may be recognized as leading particular

popular movements. But their communism is not to be taken as expressive of anything other than

either their individual political predilections or the instrumental machinations of their respective

parties.

This narrow understanding of communism as nothing more than the name of an ideology

effectively obstructs the development of a comprehensive theoretical framework for

understanding the underlying common dynamics animating anti-systemic social movements,

social revolutions and related forms of contentious politics and as consequence their actual role

the process of human social development.


In the face of the capitalist world system’s deepening financial, ecological, and political

crises, and the desperate hunger of huge swathes of humanity for an alternative as expressed in

the political upheavals of the past several years, this resistance to the question of communism

needs to be challenged. If radical scholars working within academia are to fulfill their intellectual

responsibilities to people in struggle we need to be able to think and speak clearly about those

struggles as part of the real movement to supersede capitalism. This has already begun to occur

in Philosophy in the work of Badiou, Zizek, Buck-Morss, Bosteels, Dean and others. It needs to

now be taken up by radicals working in the more empirical social or human sciences.

This is not to argue that communism isn’t also the name of the official ideologies of

socialist and communist states and parties. Those states and parties, and their respective

ideologies are, in fact, also products of the real movement towards communism. But their

relationship to the real movement is complex and contradictory and in need of critical

deconstruction. This study is, in part, a contribution to that deconstruction. The establishment of

socialist states on the one hand and political parties and mass organization aligned to various

degrees with those states on the other, has been profoundly contradictory. During the short 20th

century, the resources available to the Soviet Union and other socialist states radically altered the

balance of forces between popular movements and capitalist states on a world scale. The social,

economic and political conquests of workers movements in the 20th

century and the post-war

decolonization of Asia and Africa, while certainly not reducible to epiphenomena of socialism,

obtained considerable momentum from both the socialist revolutions that gave rise to socialist

states and from the actions of those states themselves. Less widely recognized is the similar

impetus given to changes in the status of women and even the emergence of the LGBT

movement.


At the same time, of course, the resultant subordination of the communist movement to

considerations of state which were not themselves expressions of the movement was a source of

serious distortions in the development of the movement. Here again, however, it is important to

understand the disputes within and between socialist and communist parties and states, as well as

within and between party and non-party forces within movements as expressions of a struggle

with the persistent re-emergence of capitalist forces and relations within the communist

movement itself. The recognition of the centrality of this problem is arguably the most important

contribution of Maoism to any coherent understanding of contemporary political life. Its

marginalization comes at a considerable cost.

These are all questions that a theory of contentious politics that takes communism as an

objective, as well as subjective, force in human affairs will have to address. This study is an

attempt to make an empirically grounded contribution to the development of such a theory in the

course of grappling with the question of the origins of the distinctive politics of Zapatismo.

Hopefully it has been successful in this respect.

12.3 IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTICE OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS

Embedded as it is within insititutions responsible for the ideological reproduction of

bourgeois society, the productionof knowledge in the form of academic scholarship is never a

politically neutral act. It is even less so when the object of investigation is the struggles of

oppressed peoples. Accordingly, I believe that it is incumbent on conscientious scholars engaged

in the study of contentious politics to consider and give an account of the implications of their

research to the movements that struggle for a better world. This does not mean that such research

must aim to produce pragmatic how-to advice for movements. Rather I believe it means there is


a responsibility to try to identify what results of any investigation are most likely to enrich the

theoretical and empirical needs of actual movements and to present them in a form that speaks to

those needs. It is a commonplace in the social sciences to indicate the “policy implications” of a

particular piece of research. While such indications may also prove useful to activists and

organizers in popular movements, the form they take is essentially one of advice to the capitalist

state and its managers. If this is permissible I submit that an indication of the implications of the

present work for those who would overthrow that state is too.

I believe that the value to contemporary movements of the empirical and historical

material in this study is straightforward. A comprehensive knowledge and appreciation of the

history of different movements is critical to navigating the twists and turns that any movement is

bound to encounter. The historical account of the origins of Zapatismo presented here is the story

of a prolonged struggle to build a revolutionary movement with a genuine popular base of

support in a large country. This struggle had to overcome all sorts of structural contradictions

that stood in the way of the political unification of the broad array of classes and sectors

necessary to any deep social transformation of Mexican society. It also had to contend with a

sophisticated party-state apparatus that was skillful in its combined use of various forms of direct

repression and cooptation. Even if the particular conditions were unique to Mexico during a

particular period, this is an experience that is rich with lessons of potential value to anti-systemic

movements in many other contexts, including the United States. While it is beyond the scope pf

this study to catalog all of these lessons, it seems appropriate to conclude this work with a

discussion of several of the most important ones. I will discuss these under several headings

starting with some general practical observations and then considering: the different

organizational expressions that the communist movement takes on, the role of intellectuals in its


development, the corresponding contradictory relationship between leadership and democracy

within revolutionary processes, and finally what I call the “bushy geneology” of Zapatismo and

presumably other popular revolutionary movements.

Organizational Expressions of the Communist Movement

Oppressed communities, in their normal atomized conditions under capitalism, do not

take on a communist character spontaneously. This is a consequence of the division of mental

and manual labor within class society generally, and contemporary capitalism in particular.

While fragmented communist tendencies can and do appear, it is only through contact with the

globally circulating ideas of the communist movement that those fragmented tendencies can

cohere into a conscious organized force able to adequately comprehend and analyze their place

within larger (global) social processes and to act strategically to transform that situation.

If we understand these processes as moments in the development of the communist

movement, it becomes very clear that, as a real force, communism takes a wide range of

organizational forms according to the circumstances. In the course of the historical developments

described in this study, for example, the communist movement expressed itself variously in the

form of cofradías, political parties, Masonic lodges, pastoral work teams, student brigades, small

guerrilla nuclei, ejidal assemblies, and finally a people’s army.

Each of these forms involved one or more distinct solutions to the contradictions between

leadership and democratic participation in a revolutionary process as it presented itself at a

particular moment. These organizational forms frequently existed side by side, sometimes

working together, but often at odds with each other. The contradictions they seek to resolve do

not simply disappear, but instead reappear in new forms. No single organizational form should


be regarded as an all-purpose template, yet all of them played, at least for a period, a valuable

role in the overall development of the larger movement of which they were momentary

expressions.

When a fraction of the indigenous campesino movement entered into a relationship with

the FLN, it was in fact a break with previous practices and organizational forms that had

prioritized mass democracy. It was a break that reflected the very real exhaustion of those

practices and forms in the face of the repression and cooptation directed at the movement by the

state. The FLN was a clandestine hierarchical and militarized organization that conceived of

itself as fulfilling the leadership function of a revolutionary vanguard party. Its growth was, in

fact, as the anti-Zapatistas have argued, at the direct expense of the forms of horizontal

organization of the indigenous campesino movement developed in the late 1970s and early

1980s. It was also, however, necessary for the realization of their larger objectives. Over the

course of the EZLN’s development it would enable the forging within the indigenous campesino

movement of a politically sophisticated and disciplined indigenous leadership group that would,

when circumstances demanded it, lay hold of the army that the FLN had helped them build.

If communism is not merely an ideological orientation but an objective force within

capitalist society we should expect every country to have its own communist history that might

include traditions of resistance and revolt with proto-communist elements as well as the

historical experiences of socialist and communist parties and dissident currents. The

development of Zapatismo, I would argue, reveals the importance of developing a systematic

understanding of that history as a condition for developing a revolutionary politics that can

actually find a mass base of popular support. The FLN’s studies in the late 1970s of the history

of revolutionary movements in Mexico were critical in the development of their understaning of


what it would actually take to build the EZLN. Similarly their ability to integrate the traditions of

indigenous revolt carried by the indigenous campesino movement into their broader

revolutionary nationalist and communist politics was critical to Zapatismo’s subsequent

resonance across Mexico and around the world.

Class Struggle and Peoplehood

Here we encounter the troubled relationship between the communist project understood

in purely class terms and the grounding of actual struggles in racial, national or ethnic identities,

or what Wallerstein calls forms of “peoplehood.” (1991) As I believe this study clearly

demonstrates, the communist content of Zapatismo and its antecedents is closely wound up in the

struggles of the indigenous communities to assert, establish, and defend their status as peoples.

From the Tzeltal Rebellion of 1712 to the signing of the San Andres Accords the struggle in

Chiapas to resist and pose a radical alternative to the modern capitalist world system has been

inseparable from the struggles of indigenous people for the survival and autonomous

development of their cultural existence. While it expresses itself in a particular manner in

Chiapas, this relationship between class struggle and the question of peoplehood is not itself

particular to Chiapas. It is, on the contrary, universal. In some cases, such as Chiapas, it may be

more immediately apparent. But the division and redivision of humanity into races, nationalities

and ethnic groups has been and remains a defining feature of capitalism as world system that

always defines the terrain on which class struggles occur. Sometimes this fact is suppressed and

movements explicitly identify themselves in purely class terms. This was in fact how the

independent campesino organizations that were established in Chiapas in the 1970s conceived of

themselves and indeed how the Maoists, who never developed an analysis of the indigenous


character of the movement, encouraged the organizations to think of themselves. But of course

the simple and necessary act of deciding in what language they would name themselves revealed

that the class antagonism was inevitable mediated through categories of peoplehood. This did not

prevent Quiptik from embracing the struggles of mestizo campesinos in La Nueva. Rather what

that incident illustrated was precisely how the class interests of the mestizo campesinos were

wrapped up in the fight of the indigenous communities to secure their communal existence.

Wallerstein makes the more general argument when he writes that

a very high proportion of class-based political activity in the modern world has taken the

form of people-based political activity. […] For more than a hundred years, the world

Left has bemoaned its dilemma that the world's workers have all too often organized

themselves in ‘people’ forms. But this is not a soluble dilemma. It derives from the

contradictions of the system. […] Would it not make more sense to try to understand

peoplehood for what it is - in no sense a primordial stable social reality, but a complex,

clay-like historical product of the capitalist world-economy through which the

antagonistic forces struggle with each other. We can never do away with peoplehood in

this system nor relegate it to a minor role. […] What we need to analyse more closely are

the possible directions in which, as peoplehood becomes ever more central to this

historical system, it will push us, at the system's bifurcation point, towards various

possible alternative outcomes in the uncertain process of the transition from our present

historical system to the one or ones that will replace it.(1991:84–85)

The failure of the Maoists to develop a proper appreciation of the indigenous character of

the class struggle in Chiapas must be regarded as critical to any understanding of their

subsequent trajectory and their rejection by the communities. Similarly, the EIM and the FLN’s

defeats in 1969 and 1974 were each in part a consequence of their failure to understand the

particular character of the indigenous struggle in the region where they were seeking to establish

a guerrilla nucleus. This blindspot broke down in their practice before it did in their theory. As

late as 1994, the EZLN did not have a developed analysis of the position of indigenous peoples

in Mexico. This was evident in the absence of any reference to the indigenous character of the

EZLN in the initial documents issued at the time of the uprising and was only corrected in the


period between the uprising and the signing of the San Andres Accords. The position that the

EZLN ultimately adopted, with its emphasis on the autonomy of the indigenous communities as

a condition for the revolutionary social transformation of Mexico, was in fact that of the Diocese

rooted in its own struggles over its colonial legacy and to establish an autochthonous church.

The critical lesson of the Zapatista experience is that a revitalization of communist

politics will not be achieved through an evasion or end run around the question of peoplehood

but rather through a direct engagement that understands the particular struggles of oppressed

peoples as critical to the process of constituting a revolutionary subject able to actually carry

forward a social revolutionary transformation.

The Importance of Intellectuals and Intellectual Work

The central concern animating this study has been to establish the intellectual origins and

development of Zapatismo. I believe that in the course of laying out that process I have

demonstrated the critical role that intellectuals and intellectual activity have played, and must

play, in any movement that aims to carry out a radical transformation of existing social relations.

Individuals and social groups can be said to act according to their interests, but only as they

come to understand them through mediating ideas. In the absence of their own independent

intellectuals, the understanding of their interests on the part of subaltern populations is inevitably

constrained within ideological frameworks that reflect the interests of their rulers. As Marx

famously said in The German Ideology,

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the

ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class

which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time

over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of

those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are


nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the

dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make

the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals

composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore

think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of

an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things

rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of

the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.(Marx and Engels

1998)

The development of independent ideas thus depends on the development of independent

thinkers, and not just as individuals, but as a critical mass with a distinct collective identity that

enables them to actually and collectively develop an anti-systemic analysis and program of

action. The development of a layer of organic intellectuals is therefore a fundamental task of any

serious anti-sytemic movement.

Access to globally circulating communist ideas is necessarily mediated by intellectual

cadres with access to the history and accumulated knowledge, or some fraction of it, who are

able to transmit, translate, and apply it within the particular context of an oppressed community.

This process is not a simple one of revolutionary intellectuals bringing communist consciousness

to oppressed communities, but rather involves complex mediations in which both external actors

are transformed and the intellectual independence of at least a fraction of the oppressed

community is also developed. Revolutionary-minded organizations that do not initiate such

processes abdicate their responsibilities and leave the oppressed communities they claim to want

to liberate themselves without the critical means to do so.

The development of Zapatismo is, I am arguing, quite simply unimaginable without the

investment made by the Diocese of San Cristóbal in the systematic training of the layer

indigenous catechists who I have described in this study as organic indigenous campesino

intellectuals. Their development was importantly complemented by the work of the Maoists and


the FLN, but neither of these groups had the wherewithal to cultivate a group of young

independent indigenous thinkers on the scale that the Diocese did. The development of this layer

in Chiapas involved a number of unique challenges as well as opportunities, so it should not be

supposed that this work will follow the same course under other conditions. Absent any such

systematic work developing organic intellectuals, however, it is reasonable to expect most

struggles to be self-limiting, that is to say that they will, except under extraordinary

circumstances, tend to confine themselves within the imaginary of the existing order. Anti-

intellectualism, understood here as the tendency to minimize the importance of intellectual work

or to marginalize intellectuals within movements must be understood then as a particularly

pernicious form of capitalist ideology.

The lesson here is two-fold. The first part is that the cultivation of organic intellectuals

among strategically located oppressed communities with potential to become a revolutionary

people is at the heart of any serious revolutionary politics. The second part is the important role

already radicalized intellectuals (often students, school teachers and clergy) in the development

of organic intellectuals and the organizational capacities of oppressed communities.

Leadership and Democracy

The exercise of political leadership is fundamentally a form of intellectual activity. The

development of organic intellectuals is thus a condition for the development of independent

political leadership within a larger social group and reflects the inevitably uneven development

of political consciousness within groups. There is thus an inherent tension between the

development and exercise of a capacity for political leadership and the workings of mass

participatory forms of democracy. In the absence of a robust layer of organic intellectuals


exercising leadership, the exercise of democracy within subaltern movements will tend to be

formal rather than substantive.

Political leadership is not absent in such circumstances, though it may not be visible. It is

rather exercised effectively by the dominant group within society by simple virtue of the

prevalence of its ideas. Thus, when the brigadistas of Linea Proletaria brought their “War to the

Death Against Social Democracy” into the indigenous-campesino movement, attacked the

indigenous catechists, and labeled them caciques, their actions had a superficial appearance of

radicalism. In truth though, these actions were profoundly conservative, because, had they

succeeded, they would have dismantled precisely the force that enabled the communities to

develop its capacity for political independence. It was therefore not a coincidence that this

campaign occurred precisely when Linea Proletaria was entering into increasing collaboration

with elements in the ruling party and beginning to promote an “economist” strategy that

emphasized increasing production over the struggle for land.

It is important to appreciate the complex role that the libertarian and horizontalist stance

on organizational questions taken by Linea Proletaria actually played in the indigenous

campesino movement’s development. Up to a certain point, it clearly played a very positive role,

fostering the development of independent campesino organizations based in popular assemblies

that encouraged a large fraction of the indigenous campesino population to enter into political

life. Beyond that point, however, it tended to act as a fetter on the movement’s development by

depriving it of the mechanisms of internal discipline necessary to effectively counter increasingly

violent repression and sophisticated forms of cooptation. Indeed, the cadres of Linea Proletaria

would themselves effectively become instruments of that cooptation.


Mass Work, Reformism and Revolution

The emergence of a revolutionary people out of a process of radicalization of mass

struggle is not something that revolutionaries can engineer. Rather it is something they can

faciliatet if they are there and ready when the opportunities arise. This requires a constant

attentiveness to the appearance and development of popular struggles whereever they are

occurring. It was only when the Maoists and the FLN became students of Mexico’s popular

movements that they were able to make breakthroughs.

Part of being there and ready is recognizing the spaces within which radicalization is

actually occurring. Reformist mass formations, NGOs, churches, etc… play important if

contradictory roles in the development of the political and organizational capacities of oppressed

communities and as such are an important space in which revolutionaries can enter into contact

with the more advanced forces in such communities. While this is not the only possible route,

winning leading personnel in such structures to revolutionary and communist politics can greatly

enlarge the resources available to revolutionary forces. For example, it was precisely when the

FLN moved from a sectarian anti-clericalism to a recognition of the revolutionary potential of

liberationist Christianity and of the the church and church-affiliated NGOs as important vehicles

of popular discontent that they were able to initiate the fusion with the layer of revolutionary-

minded catechists that gave the EZLN its mass character. Such institutional linkages are, of

course, not without their dangers.

Similarly, broad coalitions or alliances of left forces that are not themselves able to move

in a revolutionary direction can nonetheless facilitate the gathering together of revolutionary-

minded forces. Despite profound limitations that were apparent to many participants at the very

outset, the MLN was able to play precisely this role. Indeed it was precisely the presence of


highly compromised forces, including elements of the ruling party that enabled the MLN to

create a space in which more revolutionary politics could breathe.

A Bushy Geneology

Oppressed people in struggle make their way to revolutionary and communist

conclusions by many paths and employing the languages of a variety of currents. The political

challenge is to bring these different currents into fruitful conversation with each other in a

manner that dialectically fuses disparate elements into a coherent and correct analytical whole. It

is insufficient to insist simply on the intersection of different forms and experiences of

oppression. It is necessary to forge an analysis that correctly understands how they constitute a

social totality and what the strategic implications of that are for the liberatory transformation of

that totality. Similarly, the processes of fusion are both horizontal and vertical with each

facilitating the other. Vertical fusion between leadership and base results precisely from the

accumulation of and horizontal fusion of prior experiences in struggle.

While it is not necessarily the case (indeed it is almost certainly not the case) that each

and every collective historical experience or current of thought will contribute something of

equal value to this process of fusion, the respective value of the contributions of each can not be

predicted in advance. Prevailing orthodoxies among revolutionary-minded actors frequently owe

their standing as much to their unacknowledged embrace of elements of capitalist ideology as to

their proven emancipatory power.

Over the course of the short 20th

century from the Bolshevik Revolution to the fall of the

Berlin Wall, the several major currents of revolutionary thought that each imagined themselves

to be, and were in one combination or another generally recognized as, the international


communist movement, were defined by lineages. Each began with Marx, Engels and Lenin, after

which they began to diverge. The pro-Soviet parties had their version, the Trotskyists theirs, and

the Maoists theirs. If it was a conception of the development of revolutionary theory and practice

that had more in common with the principle of apostolic succession than with the evolution of a

progressive scientific research program, that was because it served chiefly as a means of

enforcing orthodoxy.

What this study strongly suggests, however, is that the affirmation of these lineages more

often than not obscured much more complex processes of actual development. Until relatively

recently the prevailing understanding of human evolution conceived of it in similarly linear form,

represented most notoriously in those sequential images of the “Ascent of Man.” Recent

discoveries suggest instead closely related hominid species living at the same time and in some

cases interbreeding. What emerges is less an image of a family tree with a central column

representing the lineage of modern humans and a handful of branches representing evolutionary

and more of a bush with branches that are crossed and entangled.

Similarly, communist theory and practice has not actually proceeded in anything like a

linear fashion since Marx and Engels announced their intentions to openly publish the views of

communists in their Manifesto. Indeed the belief that it has only worsened the intellectual

poverty of the movement that is presumably an important cause of its theoretical crisis. As the

crisis in revolutionary theory deepened and became harder to ignore, it was precisely those

formations that defied the boundaries between currents and opened themselves to heterogeneous

influences that were able to cobble together an orientation that enabled them to creatively

navigate the last few decades of the 20th

century. The provocative cocktail that became

Zapatismo is probably the clearest example of this. As a new generation of revolutionary-minded


young activists confront the challenges of developing a revolutionary praxis worthy of the new

millennia I would suggest that, far more than any particular organizational practice or strategic

decision on their part, that it is Zapatismo’s ability to draw without prejudice on such diverse

theoretical influences that should be emulated.

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