[Militant International Review, No 61, Summer 1995, p. 18-21]
Sixty thousand Mexican troops, together with US and Argentinian ‘advisors’, are besieging the guerrillas of the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN) in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Unable to hunt down and crush the guerrillas, they are wrecking the peasants’ villages, destroying their tools and poisoning water supplies – all part of a strategy to break the peasants from the Zapatistas. Tony Saunois looks at this historic rebellion.
When former Mexican President Carlos Salinas attended the 1993 ceremony to sign the NAFTA free trade agreement, he joked – in a reference to neighbouring countries like El Salvador and Nicaragua – that, in Mexico, ‘there are no guerrillas’. A few months later on 1 January 1994, to the surprise of Salinas and the world, a peasant guerrilla uprising broke out in the southern state of Chiapas.
When the young peasant fighters took over the town of San Cristobal, to the stunned bemusement of American tourists, they sarcastically daubed ‘hay no guerrillas’ (there are no guerrillas) on the walls. The peasant uprising was even a shock to the Mexican left which had no clue that for ten years radical activists, with the help of the local Catholic church, had been preparing armed struggle.
So why did revolt, in the form of an armed struggle, break out in Chiapas? The Mayan Indians who live in Chiapas are the poorest section of Mexican society – a country where 66% of the population live below the poverty line. In Chiapas 33% of households have no electricity, 59% no sewers and 41% no running water. According to EZLN leader Subcommandante Marcos, Mexico is divided into three: the penthouse (the upper class), the ground floor (the mass of poor workers and peasants) and the basement (the Mayan Indians). The Mayan peasants want land, clean water and decent prices for their agricultural produce. But with Mexico joining NAFTA, small producers will be crushed by US-dominated agribusiness. Marcos calls NAFTA a ‘death certificate’ for the Mayan peasants.
When Salinas came to power in the 1980s with his free trade and privatisation policies, there were just two Mexican billionaires. By the time he left office 26 more had made their fortunes. At the same time the average wage for industrial workers in real terms fell by 40%, and minimum wage levels by a staggering 58%. Overall wage labour costs as a percentage of GDP fell from 36% to 22%, an enormous reduction in national wealth going to the workers and peasants.
Launching their armed struggle, the Zapatistas faced grave difficulties. Limited to one corner of the country, the EZLN has no illusions about a military overthrow of the state. Marcos says: “The balance on the battlefield is not a good guide: if it was, then the events of January 1994 would not have taken place … from a military point of view the EZLN is absurd. What makes it tangible is the claims it upholds”.
The Zapatistas rising did however detonate a nationwide political crisis. While the ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was re-elected in fraudulent elections in August 1994, with a new president Ernesto Zedillo, his party and government have staggered from crisis to crisis – in large part because of the effects of the Zapatistas.
‘Telenovelas’ – TV soap operas – are very popular in Mexico. None of them however could depict more outrageous melodrama than has engulfed Mexico’s ruling elite in real life, tearing back the veil on massive ruling class corruption and in-fighting. Since the beginning of 1994 the PRI has been shaken by an extraordinary series of events. These included the assassination of the PRI’s presidential candidate Luis Colosio in March 1994; the murder of the PRI’s general secretary José Ruis Massieu; the gunning down of a Roman Catholic cardinal and the killing of PRI officials in Chiapas. Following these bizarre events, open warfare broke out in the leadership of the PRI with claim and counter-claim of murder and corruption, culminating with the outgoing president Salinas going into exile.
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Nothing could be more symbolic than Salinas’ exile. He was hotly tipped to be the first chair of the new World Trade Organisation – as a ‘thank you’ from international capitalism for his privatisation and free market policies, and also symbolic of Mexico’s new-found international status. Instead it has all ended in ignominy and collapse.
The gangsterism among the PRI’s rulers originates in the near terminal crisis of that party’s rule. The PRI has ruled Mexico since 1929, with a political base running all the way from big business to the trade union bureaucracy. Now economic collapse has shattered the PRI’s unity.
Mexico was at the forefront of the 1980s Latin American ‚economic ‘reform’ programme. Trade barriers were brought down and privatisation mania broke out. Foreign capital poured in, much of it to Mexico, to buy up state industries at knock-down prices and to carry out speculation on the booming stock markets. Of $55bn going into Latin America in 1993, $25bn (45%) was destined for Mexico.
However, far from economically transforming Mexico into a ‘first world’ nation, the capital influx was speculative – aimed at making a quick kill. Just as such speculative capital could flood in, it could just as spectacularly flood out, which is exactly what happened in December 1994 when the peso collapsed.
The source of this collapse was the anti-inflation policy of the Salinas government. The peso was kept at an artificially high rate to keep down the price of imports. However, this built up an enormous balance of payments deficit – $28bn in 1994 – which in turn undermined the currency. But the economic collapse of December 1994 was also caused by the government’s failure to deal with the Zapatistas’ uprising.
Limited to one corner of the country, the EZLN has no illusions about a military overthrow of the state.
The initial fighting lasted 12 days; on 12 January 1994, after some savage fighting during which Mexican government troops assassinated guerrilla prisoners, a ceasefire was signed. The ceasefire was a first victory for the EZLN: the mass outpouring of popular protest against the savagery of government troops prevented the Salinas government from going in for the kill. The guerrillas were able to stabilise their political and military base: to survive as a permanent challenge to the legitimacy of the PRI government.
Marcos was absolutely forthright: Mexico needed the Zapatistas because the Mexican opposition had failed: “I am talking about the whole spectrum – the far left, the left and those sections of the centre who declare themselves in favour of democratic change”. The EZLN took the initiative to help form the CND (the National Democratic Convention), uniting opposition bodies from all over the country. Mass demonstrations throughout Mexico rallied support for the EZLN.
On-again, off-again negotiations continued throughout 1994. However after the August elections which brought Zedillo to power, the EZLN leaders decided that the government was not serious about negotiations. They gave a November deadline for substantial concessions to be made, and when it passed resumed armed actions. This led directly to the collapse of the peso last December: the government of a country which claims it is going ‘from the third world to the first’ cannot be seen to permit the existence of armed guerrillas for nearly a year.
Mexico’s stock market has been temporarily stabilised by the injection of a $50bn US loan. But the loan conditions are draconian. Interest payments will take a huge part of the Mexican government’s annual budget.
In addition a massive austerity package has been introduced. Prices of basic commodities – food, transport. fuel rents – are going through the roof. Hundreds of factories have closed; hundreds of thousands have been made redundant as the economy collapses into a dire slump. The Business Coordinating Council says that 200-250,000 workers were made redundant in the two months after the crisis erupted, equivalent to one per cent of the total workforce of 26 million. More is to follow with an estimated further 750,000 jobs to be lost by the end of 1995.
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There was obviously a further, unannounced, ‘condition’ in the package: the US insisted that the Zapatistas be crushed. The government strategy is a variant of the ‘strategic hamlet’ approach. Some peasants have fled with the guerrillas into the forest. Those who haven’t have their villages economically wrecked by government soldiers, with their US advisors. With tools destroyed and water supplies poisoned, they are forced to rely on government handouts: this helps to break their independence and break down their links with the guerrillas. Some villagers have been bribed or coerced into forming village ‘defence’ brigades, with arms supplied by the army. The Mexican government is digging in for a long fight, with the aim of exterminating the guerrillas.
However, as the Vietnam war and other guerrilla struggles have shown, trying to crush rural guerrilla insurgency solely with military means has little chance of working where political conditions favour the insurgents. The Zapatistas are not a foreign army, they are political insurgents with deep roots in the local community and mass support throughout Mexico and beyond. As we went to press, it was announced that after three days of new negotiations, the Mexican government had actually agreed to the EZLN re-occupying some of the ground it evacuated after the government’s offensive!
Since January 1994, world media attention has been focused on Subcommandante Marcos himself. The Mexican government devised a series of ludicrous stories about who Marcos really was, until, finally they hit on one which is probably true, and the most mundane of the lot: Marcos is 37-year old Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, a university lecturer from the city of Tampico. Like thousands of his generation, Marcos grew up in the period of guerilla struggle in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala. By the early 1990s, with the election defeat of the Sandinistas, the near-crushing of the Guatemalan guerrillas and the peace deal in El Salvador, it looked as if the region had been ‘stabilised’ in the interests of the US and their NAFTA deal. The Zapatistas have changed all that.
It is possible that the Mexican government may now just be able to slow the recession and avoid a total collapse. This will in part depend on developments in the world economy. It is however a far cry from Mexico ‘joining the first world’.
The rise in base interest rates to nearly 90%, with mortgage and credit rates reaching an incredible 150%, has particularly hit the middle class. During the boom years middle class Mexicans accumulated massive debt with the banks, repayment of which at the new interest rates is proving impossible. Thousands are facing evictions and repossession of houses and goods.
Confronted with this crisis an explosion is currently taking place amongst the middle class. A new protest organisation has flourished called El Barzón (The Yoke). It claims 500,000 members throughout Mexico. Thousands have participated in its demonstrations. Lawyers, accountants, shopkeepers, businessmen – large and small – reportedly joined its protests in Mexico City against the high interest rates. On one day 100 anti-government demonstrations took place in Mexico City.
El Barzón has even organised the occupation of banks by customers. On one day 800 banks were taken over around the country. Protestors called on customers to refuse to pay mortgages and credit card bills. Significantly they also demanded that the government should do the same and not pay the foreign debt.
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Subcommandante Marcos, a revolutionary but not a Marxist, has like Che Guevara become a symbol of the struggle in the minds of workers, peasants and especially young people. The EZLN, and especially Marcos, have articulated the feelings of the masses and the demand for change.
To secure the overthrow of capitalism and replace it with a socialist alternative, the working class in the cities has the decisive and the leading role in the revolution. Its strength and cohesion as a class, because of its position in industry and the workplace, means that through it a system of workers’ democracy can be established as the alternative to capitalist rule. This, as the experience of the Russian revolution demonstrated, is even the case where the proletariat is in a minority in society. With a correct programme and astute tactics it can win big layers of the urban middle class and the majority of poor peasants behind its banner.
In Mexico the working class has the decisive role to play in the future development of the revolution. Seventy three per cent of the Mexican population lives in the cities. Of the total workforce 31% are employed in industry, 47% in the service sector and 22% in the agricultural sector.
While defending the leading role of the working class Marxists also support the conducting of peasant war in the countryside. The method of struggle for the peasants will not be exactly the same as the industrial workers in the cities. Land seizures and the throwing up of a peasant army are part of the methods of peasant struggle. While the working class and the movement in the cities is decisive, this does not mean the revolution will necessarily start with them. The struggles of the peasantry and land workers in the countryside can give an important impetus to the movement in the cities, in the absence of a fighting leadership at the head of the workers movement.
Contained within the uprising in Chiapas are the economic and social demands for land and ‘democracy’, but also for an end to the oppression of the indigenous peoples. This is a factor present in many upheavals in Latin America, especially Peru, Bolivia and the central American states. In the state of Oaxaca 4,000 Indians occupied government buildings demanding more land, public works projects and suspension of all debts to the banks. As Time magazine commented in February 1994: “Here and there in central and southern Mexico, tens of thousands of people, mostly poor peasants and Indians, went on strike and protested in other ways, in almost every case citing the Zapatista National Liberation Army’s surprise rising last month as their inspiration. ‘We are not Zapatistas, but the poverty is the same. The land must be for the peasants, not the caciques (landowners)’ said Juan Garcia, one of the men who took over Teopisca town hall”.
In Mexico the working class has the decisive role to play in the future development of the revolution.
The struggle of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and the struggles of other groups in other states in Mexico, are likely to continue, with inevitable defeats as well as advances, both militarily and socially. The decisive question, however, which has developed during 1995, is the sweep and scale of the movement in the cities, especially Mexico City. On May Day this year four million people, including one million in the capital itself, participated in anti-government demonstrations – just as the government announced that it had agreed in negotiations with the EZLN to let them re-occupy part of that land from which the army had driven them.
Reflecting the movement of workers which has begun, opposition groupings are developing in many of the official unions. Some independent unions have also been established. It is a measure of the pressure building up that the electricians union, the SME, refused to sign the national agreements which the government has recently put together.
For the ruling class an historical point of departure has opened in Mexico. Lying behind the scandals and murders of representatives of the PRI is a major division and split. Zedillo represents a ‘reformist’ wing which understands that it is not possible to continue to rule in the same old way. At the same time the ‘Dinosaurs’ have a strong presence in the PRI and are fighting to maintain their position. It is quite possible that this will eventually result in an open split in the PRI. Zedillo and the ‘reformist’ wing have already taken the unprecedented step of holding talks with the populist opposition party, the PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party) led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. In the congress the PRD, in return, does not demand the resignation of the president and fresh elections. They justify this by saying the removal of Zedillo would mean a strengthening of the right wing. Despite the hesitancy of the PRD leadership, however, new elections could be called, especially if the mass movement develops further in the next period. A tentative framework is being prepared for a coalition government which could include the PRD. This unprecedented step in Mexico’s post-revolutionary history may be forced upon the ruling class as a | means of trying to hold back the mass movement.
The first steps in a new mass movement inevitably focus on the demand for democracy. In a country like Mexico, ruled as a virtual one-party state for so long, democratic aspirations are of decisive importance. However to end the misery and poverty of the masses and ensure a lasting democracy poses the need for the overthrow of capitalism. The EZLN at this stage is clearly reflecting the aspirations and demands of the masses. It is, however, not advocating a clear alternative. Its specific demands are limited and it is mistakenly advocating a ‘national government of transition’ – a proposal which would entail alliances with sections of the ruling class.
Such a policy, as has been seen throughout Latin America, cannot lead to a lasting victory for the exploited masses. For this the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with a socialist regime of workers’ democracy is necessary. The capitalist class cannot be relied upon to conduct a real struggle against imperialism nor play any progressive role.
Alliances with them in government will only used to derail the mass movement.
The recent upheavals mark the beginning of a new process of the Mexican revolution. It is part of a new wave of struggle which is currently unfolding throughout Latin America. The free market model lies shattered on the © floor. It is up to the working class and exploited layers of Mexican society to build a new ‘model’ which can encompass the whole Latin American continent.
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