PEOPLE´S POWER AND COALITIONS OF DISCONTENTS

by Gustavo Esteva

On January 1st., 1994, two hours after the North America Free Trade Agreement came into force, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) occupied four towns of Chiapas, a province of Mexico neighboring Guatemala. Armed with machetes, clubs and a few guns, the rebels declared the war to the Mexican government. A massive mobilization urged immediately both parties to stop the armed struggle. The government, forced to declare twelve days later a unilateral ceasefire, wage since then what has euphemistically been called a "low intensity war". The EZLN, in contrast, complied immediately with the mandate of the civil society, put its weapons to sleep and became the main promoter of non violent means to change the country.

I will not tell here a story full of incidents and tension regarding a movement that has just started . But I bring it to our discussion because it clearly illustrates a peaceful epic now evolving at the grassroots.

The EZLN never was a guerrilla. It was not "a fish that swim in the sea of the people", as Che Guevara would say. It was not a revolutionary group attempting to seize power. It was organized as a collective decision of hundreds of communities: they were the sea, not a fish.

After ten failed years of using every available legal channel, of trekking the two thousand miles to Mexico City -the Indian peoples of Chiapas found themselves at a dead end; literally at death's door, their own end. Their voices remained unheard by the government and the society; their commons continued to be daily raided; their children and elders continued to drop like flies of hunger and curable diseases. Faced with their own mute extinction, they chose the freedom to die a dignified death -not the silence of lambs headed for their slaughter.

As their last resort, they took up arms against the state. They became faceless, losing their faces behind the anonymity of ski-masks: "We were forced to lose our faces, in order to have a face. We were forced to lose our names, in order to have a name. We were forced to lose our voices, in order to have a voice". They had nothing left but their dignity. They affirmed themselves in it, hoping that their sacrifice will awaken the society and their grandchildren will live better lives, beyond colonization, development and globalization.

The Zapatistas are still a mystery and a paradox: a revolutionary group with no interest in seizing power? rejecting any position of power, now or in the future? ("We were ready to die but also ready to kill", they say; "no one ready to kill should occupy a position of power"); an army shooting words and civil resistence?; a locally and culturally rooted organization with a global scope?; a group clearly and firmly affiliated to democracy and its most radical critic? The Zapatistas are both traditional and contemporary. They are singular, unique, and at the same time typical. They come from an ancient tradition but are also fully immersed in contemporary ideas, problems and technologies. They are ordinary men and women with an extra-ordinary behavior, exemplifying the epic now unfolding at the grassroots all over the world.

In the times of Che Guevara, I was involved in a clandestine movement dedicated to organize the first urban guerrilla in Mexico. Since 1965, however, I assumed the principles of non violence. Was I betraying them, in supporting the Zapatistas from the very beginning? I rushed to my Gandhi, to find some light in my predicament. Non violence is for the strong, Gandhi said; I will not preach non violence to a mice at the point of being devoured by a cat. The weak have no option but violence or passive resistance. I am preaching non violence in India -he added- because I don´t see why 300 million people should be afraid of 150 000 British troops. They are the strong. They should thus use non violence to achieve their political goals.

The Zapatistas were the weak. Nobody heard them: not the government, not the society. After the uprising, however, people started to support them. With that strenght, they have been able to lead a non violent path of social transformation.

The movement triggered and still nourished by the EZLN is ecumenical and very open in religious matters. The Zapatistas oppose the fragmentation of the country or decentralized forms of vertical administration of the nation-state. They also resist the propensity to subsume local identities and cultural differences into a regime for minorities. Almost all members of the EZLN are indigenous people, belonging to different cultures and speaking different languages. But they refuse to be qualified as an indigenous or ethnic movement and project their pluralism to both indigenous and non indigenous people of the civil society.

Localization, as a trait of the Zapatista movement, is the opposite to both localism and globalism. In the social fabric of their culturally differentiated communities, the Zapatistas find the key to human existence: their commonality is their form of being in the world. But they don't close themselves in it. Fully aware of the global forces affecting their lives, they consider that mere resistance is no longer possible: if they persist in it they will be swept away. They are thus articulating themselves to wide coalitions with others like them: coalitions of discontents with the so called neoliberal globalization. This open and even cosmic worldview is the opposite to the parochialism and shortsightedness of national governments, transnational corporations or international institutions affiliated with the neoliberal credo.

The Zapatistas affirm the autonomy of local-regional bodies where people can have and exert their power to govern themselves. Inside those bodies, forms of government, land tenure, self defense and justice, as well as a convivial notion of the good life, can be defined. They thus challenge the framework of representative democracy, which transfers people's power to homogeneous and monocultural structures of domination of the nation-state. At the same time, they resort to juridical and political procedures to generate social consensus and to construct a new social order, forging the communion of the different through intercultural dialogues and radical democracy.

The Zapatistas, in short, promote radically democratic localization, as an alternative to neoliberal globalization; ruralization of the cities and regeneration of the countryside instead of conventional utbanization; local-regional self reliance and marginalization of the economy instead of intervention by the market or the state; and the regeneration of the commons or the creation of new commons instead of modern and capitalist individualization.

The movement had an immediate impact over the local life of thousands of communities, both in the area in which the EZLN was born and in the rest of the country and even outside Mexico.

In 1994, thousands of peasants of Chiapas many of them not affiliated to Zapatismo-, occupied private lands and forced the government to legalize their posession of those lands. The whole social structure of Chiapas changed in these years.

In the "area of conflict", 50 000 troops transform the communities into barracks, bring to them alcohol, drugs, prostitutes, and intimidate and abuse the people. Paramilitary groups, created by the government, operate with impunity and commit every kind of crimes and abuses against the people. For six years now, the Zapatista communities had not received a penny from the government but for the roads constructed by the military to facilitate their incursions.

In spite of all that, the communities enjoy an amazing autonomy and started to construct new social relations and a different life style, full of energy and hope. "They are not killing more people than before", explains doña Trinidad, a lucid old woman of Morelia, one of the most affected communities; "We are not suffering more than in the past. But now we have hope. And that changes everything."

That changes everything. Radical hope is the essence of popular movements. The main outcome of the Zapatista movement, until now, is an affirmation of dignity, at the grassroots. The dominant view postulated globalization as an unavoidable path and brought desperation to its victims. The Zapatistas revealed that the Emperor had no clothes, and started to walk through an alternative path.

The positive impact of the movement is clearer outside the "area of conflict". Zapatismo has stimulated the initiative, the capacity and the sociological and political imagination of thousands of communities and millions of people.

In Oaxaca, a state neighboring Chiapas, the impact is perhaps deeper than in any other place. During five centuries, entrenched in their communities, the 16 indigenous peoples of Oaxaca resisted internal or external colonialism by Spaniards or Mexicans. But their autonomy, badly tolerated by the authorities, was always unstable and exposed to economic exploitation, social discrimination and political domination. Since 1994, they exhibit a new dynamism. They participated in the forefront in the mobilizations to support the Zapatistas and multiplied their own local initiatives, widening their public presence and visibility and forging new social consensus.

To prevent the extension of the uprising, the government of Oaxaca felt the need to make many concessions to the indigenous peoples. In 1995 a new law cancelled the tense situation which until then prevailed in the constitution of local governments. Three years later, continual mobilization made possible constitutional reforms and a new law for indigenous communities and peoples. A juridically pluralistic regime was thus born in Oaxaca.

In this period, Oaxaca communities suffered unprecedented natural calamities. They are still exposed to the economic turbulence of neoliberalism and the authoritarianism of the dying political regime. But they are successfully overcoming old and new predicaments.

In many communities, people are actively repairing or improving their houses, building new ones and improving public services. The change includes meaningful technological improvements. Sanitation offers a good example. Most Oaxaca communities had no sanitation facilities. The few receiving every year the 'benefit' of a sewage system were suffering the polution of their soils and rivers; the government never provided treatment plants. In the last six years almost a hundred thousand ecological dry latrines were built, with marginal support from the government. This alternative technique effectively and autonomously coped with the problem, avoiding the ecological and social damages of sewage or conventional latrines.

Self-sufficient productive projects multiplied everywhere, well beyond the logic of homo economicus. Even the dramatic need of temporary or permanent migration, stimulated by neoliberal policies, got a new meaning. The migrants actively participate in the economic and political life of the communities. A new "transnational community" has been created: the same human group rotatively occupy two spaces, one in their original community in Oaxaca and the other in a new community in the US or Mexico City. This flow of people and goods contributes to the improvement of the living conditions of the whole group.

In 1999, after long reflection and research, a group of grassroots organizations formulated a proposal to articulate the efforts of the civil society for the social transformation of the province. This action plan, affirming the principles of pluralism, radical democracy, spirituality, ecological endurance and conviviality, is now being discussed in thousands of communities of Oaxaca. The gender emphasis of the proposal reflects and further promotes the increasing participation of women in all aspects of social life, actively opposing both traditional patriarchalism and modern sexism. It is associated with a similar exercise, at the level of the country, to promote a profound social change, beyond the globalized market or the nation-state, through non violent means.

Everywhere, in villages and barrios of the cities you can smell the strenght of the people, affirming themselves in their own initiatives. We are far from a radical change of the whole society, but we are not waiting for that change, or hoping that an event, a charismatic leader or a party will rescue us from our current predicaments: people by the millions are actively involved in the construction of a new social order.

As the Zapatistas say, it is very difficult, next to impossible, to change the world. We are involved in something clear, simple and feasible: the creation of a new world, a world -as they say- in which many worlds can fit.

Copyright: Gustavo Esteva