3 | THE NEW MODERN PRINCE AND AUTONOMOUS RURAL COMMUNITIES
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the context of the debate that pitted scholars who argued that most rural social subjects were becoming proletarianized against those who argued that they still had to be considered campesinos or ‘peasants’, Gustavo Esteva, a ‘peasantist’, argued that in Mexico:
[T]he most important characteristic of the rural population is not their increasing proletarianization, but the collective form of their social existence and their collective efforts to remain tied to the land … Moreover … in response to the forces working for their de-peasantization and proletarianization, the collective resistance of the peasantry to these forces has succeeded in strengthening their peasant class consciousness and in some cases, even the objective conditions of their class. (Esteva 1978: 708–9, cited by Harris 1978: 21)
Esteva also added that the vigour of peasant organizations, exemplified in the growing number of struggles for land, suggested that the peasant population was in a process of becoming a ‘class for itself’ and that it was assuming ‘growing importance in national politics’ (ibid.).
Although the process of proletarianization of the rural population in Latin America has accelerated in the past thirty years (Kay 2000, 1995), Esteva’s conclusions about the collective efforts of peasants to struggle against their depeasantization as well as their growing class consciousness can still be seen to apply to the MST and the EZLN. In fact, in this chapter, taking my inspiration from E. P. Thompson’s idea, I will argue that, in the case of the MST and the EZLN, the class consciousness of landless rural workers and indigenous peasants is politically and culturally constructed through the process of struggle for land itself, and through the experience of creating or strengthening relatively autonomous rural communities.1 Moreover, this process of constructing class consciousness through the experience of the political empowerment of marginalized sectors not only informs the resistance of these sectors to the established social order but also inspires the transformation of social relations of power within and across communities. These transformations include the democratization of political power, higher levels of political participation, and the modification of gender relations. In the case of both the MST and the EZLN, all these processes together represent a response to the experience of exclusion from, and discontent with, traditional and state institutions on the part of marginalized people.
The movement as a new type of Modern Prince
Antonio Gramsci’s (1975: 577) notion of the ‘extended state’, which distinguishes political society from civil society in an attempt to grasp the complexity of class power in liberal democratic capitalist societies, is useful to understand the process of politicization of the grassroot membership and creation of autonomous communities by the MST and EZLN. In Gramsci’s thought, political society is constituted by state institutions such as the government, the legislative bodies, the judiciary system and the administrative apparatus of the state.2 In contrast, civil society is constituted by institutions such as the school, the Church, the mass media and the voluntary civic organizations that produce and reproduce bourgeois culture and values. Ultimately, bourgeois hegemony rests on what Gramsci calls the ‘common sense’ of society, which consists of the values, norms and institutions that are so internalized that they are understood as natural and organize our daily life. Thus, this hegemony can be challenged only by diffusing a knowledge or ideology that allows the development of the ability to self-reflect on the institutions, values and practices that structure everyday life.
This distinction leads Gramsci to rethink the role of the political party or the ‘Modern Prince’, as he called it. For him, the party plays the role of an initiator and promoter of a revolutionary counter-hegemony within civil society, leading or accompanying popular struggles and articulating, giving meaning to and diffusing the hegemony of the subaltern classes. Accordingly, the party is expected to be active not only in political society but also in civil society by challenging the bourgeois hegemony and contributing to the emergence of autonomous, active and politicized citizens who are capable of governing themselves. The party carries out a function of education, political formation and empowerment of its militants and individuals in general, for it is one of the institutions in which the exercise of popular power is learned (ibid.: 428, 447).
If, for Gramsci, the political party is the ‘collective intellectual’, the militant is the ‘organic intellectual’. The organic intellectual performs basically three roles. The first is the hegemonic role, which consists of achieving the acceptance of the interests, ideas and values of the class he/she represents by other members of that class and society in general. The second role consists of raising the class consciousness and intellectual capacity of the ‘masses’. The third role is that of the domination/coercion that is synonymous with the ability to govern, i.e. exercise power and control state institutions. In line with the importance of everyday life, all these roles are learned through practice, i.e. through the direct participation in the struggles of the subaltern classes. In Gramsci’s thought, since one of the main objectives is to challenge the dominant hegemony, the party member is understood less as a disciplined soldier than as an autonomous organic intellectual. The militant should not merely be capable of reproducing and propagating an ideology, but of critically responding to the historical circumstances (ibid.: 134, 160). In this sense, Gramsci moves away from a strictly Leninist ‘vanguardist’ understanding of leadership and even challenges the need to separate the rulers and the ruled.
As this chapter will show, participation in the MST and EZLN, as it begins with questioning private property, one of the foundations of the liberal order, interferes with the bourgeois hegemony within civil society that seeks to depoliticize social and economic problems. Later, through their various political experiences, the Sem Terra and the Zapatistas, by solving problems and planning actions, learn to mobilize and organize, and challenge their exclusion from the polity. As they become aware of their rights and exert pressure on, negotiate with or confront state authorities from the various levels of government, they learn to question the state, demystifying it and, as it were, depriving the king of his royal robes. Hence, the MST and the EZLN play the same role that the Modern Prince does in Gramsci’s thought. By empowering peasants and landless rural workers, they are educators in citizenship, class power and self-government for the subaltern classes. Therefore, if we recognize the class character of these experiences of construction of popular power, the politicization happening in the territories that they control is the beginning of what scholars of new social movements call ‘new forms of doing politics’ or ‘the transformation of the dominant political culture’ (Calderón et al. 1992; Alvarez et al. 1998; Zibechi 1999). However, the MST and the EZLN are not exactly a replica of the political party that Gramsci had in mind. These movements do not seek to take state power themselves and, as we will see in Chapter 5, have very different strategies towards institutional politics. What is new about these movements is that they have focused primarily on creating autonomous rural communities and developing alternative power structures to the state that become a fundamental source of strength in their confrontation with the state.
Wendy Wolford (2003b, 2010) argues that the MST capacity to maintain high levels of participation is due to two factors. The first is its ability to create an ‘imagined community’ organized around ideas, practices, symbols, slogans and rituals. The second, more important than the first, is that the MST has the ability to remain an effective mediator between the state and settlers. The same can easily be said about the EZLN. However, although ideological and cultural factors lead to high levels of participation within the MST and the EZLN, I argue that this participation also derives from the maintenance of an organizational structure that encourages participation and creates not only an ‘imagined community’ but real and concrete ‘autonomous rural communities’ which are easier to mobilize than the membership of other organizations. What distinguishes, in my view, the MST and the EZLN – and many other peasant movements – from other types of social movements is that their members control a geographic space, a determinate territory: the autonomous communities, municipalities and Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Councils, JBGs) in the case of the EZLN, and the encampments and settlements in the case of the MST. In other words, participation in these organizations implies living in a community with its own rules, its own norms, its own values and its own political institutions.3 It is the Zapatistas and the Sem Terra themselves who make decisions regarding education, health, micro-development projects and infrastructure in their communities. In turn, each of them is connected to a network of communities that have shared political autonomy over a territory. Moreover, Zapatistas and Sem Terra take these decisions according to objectives and mechanisms that they themselves decide upon, mostly through participation in community assemblies that seek either consensus or majority rule.4
In order to capture the politicization process within peasant movements, Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, focusing on the case of the MST, has developed the concept of ‘socio-territorial movements’ (2005). Fernandes explains that ‘Territorialized movements are those that are organized and act in different places at the same time, made possible by their form of organization, which permits the spatialization of the struggle for land’ (ibid.: 326). Fernandes distinguishes socio-territorial movements from ‘isolated movements’, because the latter remain marked by local interests and circumstances and their geographic influence is restricted to a fairly limited territory (for example, a municipality or a small number of municipalities). In contrast to isolated movements, socio-territorial movements ‘possess a political dimension that overcomes the limits of daily problems and issues of place’ (ibid.: 327). Socio-territorial movements are thus able to spatialize the land struggle and insert the specific interests of their member communities into a broader process of struggle. Socio-territorial movements in their struggle against capital and proletarianization also use the space they control as ‘a space of political socialization’ (ibid.: 321), where the movement creates and re-creates itself through the experiences of its members.
Fernandes’ concept of socio-territorial movements is extremely useful for analysing the MST and the EZLN because it emphasizes the importance of the control of a territory by these two movements for the politicization and mobilization of their members. Such territorial control is at the base of the development alternative of both movements. However, there are two important distinctions that need to be made in the case of the Zapatista movement. First, in contrast to the MST, which creates rural communities ‘from scratch’ in the form of the encampment, the EZLN had to convince pre-existing rural communities to join the organization. Secondly, the Zapatista struggle for land, following the indigenous conception of land which links it to a territory around which history and culture are built, has much wider implications than the struggle for land of the MST.5 However, beyond these differences, the control of rural communities by the MST and the EZLN has allowed these two movements to develop their own autonomous structures of decision-making, structures that have given rise to a highly politicized and mobilized grassroots membership. Hence, as the Modern Prince did for Gramsci, the movement becomes a school of government for subaltern classes, as the movements replace or take on several roles and functions of the state.
The organizational structure of the MST and the making of its militancy
Gaining access to land is obviously the main objective of the people that join the MST. However, joining the movement is not like signing up for any type of organization. It implies becoming immersed in a political community which requires levels of participation that very few acampados imagine before adhering to the movement. For many, their perception and values change through the process of occupation of land, as does the way they value land itself. After a long conversation with Jacir Suares, an assentado from settlement Pirituba Area 5 in the municipality of Itapeva in the state of São Paulo, in which he told of the vicissitudes of the struggle for land of his acampamento, I asked: ‘Would you sell your land now?’ He replied: ‘For me, land was always someone else’s. I think that’s why I didn’t value it. After conquering6 a piece of land, I value it. Before I would have sold my land. Not today. With the struggle, all that I have, I have because we conquered the land. Land is the beginning of everything … Who could have said that everything starts under a plastic tent?’
The tent that Jacir was referring to is one of the symbols of struggle of the MST. Encampments made of hundreds of plastic tents can be seen on the fringes of federal and state highways all over Brazil. It is under these tents that landless families, men, women and children live and organize for several years while they occupy unproductive latifundios.7 Life in these encampments is very harsh. Braving all kinds of weather and illness, on a daily basis they must make ends meet with a scarce supply of food and irregular sources of drinking water. On top of these hardships, in many regions they face constant intimidation and violence from gunmen paid by local landowners. Families live under these conditions year round, without any guarantee of achieving their goal of winning land. Other than the sheer will of wanting to find a way out of their marginalized situation in the countryside or in the city, what are the factors that make landless people endure these conditions for as long as they do? The period of encampment and land occupation, made up of countless experiences of camaraderie, solidarity, common suffering and empowerment – often the first experiences of that kind for most acampados – helps to explain their determination.
The period of encampment and land occupation Understanding the struggle for land in terms of universal human rights and humanistic values that establish limits to the capitalist functioning of the economy is probably the first step in the formation of political consciousness among landless rural workers envisioned by the MST. But it is through the actual everyday experiences and practices in encampments and land occupations that landless families are transformed into an organized force of the poor. The occupation constitutes a period of ultra-politicization (Romano 1994) of everyday life, because almost all aspects of acampados’ lives proceed through participation in different types of committees. On the first days following the creation of an acampamento, several camp-wide committees are created to take care of important issues and services such as security, infrastructure and sanitation, education, health, food, production, etc. In these committees, the people that have volunteered to serve discuss the problems that arise, the possible solutions and the steps and resources needed to address them. Each committee makes proposals on a consensus basis and has a coordinator who liaises with and reports to other committees or the political structures of the encampment and the movement (see Starr et al. 2011: 109–10). Fernandes refers to these daily interactions as the communicative space of the movement (2005: 321) because it is in this way that landless people share their life experiences, forge personal relationships and confirm their common interests and goals. Through their participation in these task-based committees and the political decision-making structure of the encampment and the movement more broadly during the period of occupation, MST grassroots members learn how to solve concrete problems, make connections between their individual situation and the larger social and political environment, and reflect and work collectively. To refer to the function of the political structures, Fernandes uses the term ‘interactive space’, meaning a space where life experiences are slowly systematized into class consciousness and where a process of political empowerment takes shape.
In this regard, the MST differs from many other organizations. Being a Sem Terra means not only being part of an organization but, more importantly, living for a relatively long period of time in a community with its own norms, values and objectives. This feeling of ‘belonging’ to a community of Sem Terra takes form gradually through daily interactions, which, because of the conditions of the struggle, lead to solidarity and cohesion, which facilitate participation in the political structure of the encampment and the movement.
The kind of feelings that the close daily interactions among individuals and families within the encampment generate is expressed vividly by Jacir Suares:
The process of struggle is a learning process. It’s where you learn what camaraderie means. When you are squatting you support each other all the time, morally, emotionally and materially. Before, I only valued what was mine. Now I value more what we have in common … The MST is the best thing that has ever happened to me. It’s what allowed me to conquer land … The MST is not only a movement, it’s also people. It’s my family.
Like the great majority of assentados and assentadas I interviewed, Vanesa, from assentamento Belo Monte in the municipality of Andradina in the state of São Paulo, told me that what she remembered most about the period of the encampment was the communitarian way of life:
During the time we were acampados, it was nice … The way of life was nice. We constantly visited each other’s tent. We looked out for each other, for each other’s children. People were close to each other. The encampment creates a community with the same common objective: land. When we obtain our plot, the common objective disappears.
José Estevan, from assentamento Fazenda Anoni in the municipality of Sarandi in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, talked about an even more powerful gesture that must have greatly reinforced the strength of interpersonal relationships among landless families: ‘What I remember the most about the experience of the encampment was the practice of solidarity. For example Irene, my wife, breastfed a baby that wasn’t hers and whose mother could not breastfeed herself.’
Obviously, because of the often violent response from large landowners and state governments, the history of an encampment and land occupation often includes stories of encirclement by, and confrontation with, police forces or gunmen. For instance, Sadi Maurer, from assentamento Rondhina in the municipality of Joía in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, commented on the relationship between camaraderie, solidarity and danger and, like Vanesa, pointed to the difference existing between the period of encampment and the period of settlement. He stressed that ‘difficulties form consciousness, conflict creates tension, and tension creates camaraderie, solidarity … With the PT government, tension has declined … Once we are settled, the level of tension drops, but then internal problems start emerging.’
Practices and experiences during the period of encampment and land occupation can be extremely powerful in terms of the impulse they give to fostering the social cohesion and the collective identity of the group of landless people involved in the common struggle. But these emotional ties are also given a political meaning by the participation of each acampado and acampada in the political structure of the encampment and the other levels of the movement.
The núcleo (nucleus), made of ten to fifteen families, is the basic unit of the political structure of an encampment. These núcleos name representatives (always a man and a woman) to a higher and more specialized level, called teams and sectors. The teams are in charge of taking care of practical matters such as security, food, wood, barracks, work and sports, while the sectors are responsible for planning the functioning of the encampment with respect to specific issues such as education, health, agricultural production, political education, gender relations, discipline, women’s affairs, human rights, communication, and youth and culture. A coordinating committee, made up of representatives nominated by each núcleo, oversees encampment life. This committee, in turn, elects a direção (an executive committee) that has to be ratified by the encampment’s assembly, the body that constitutes the highest decision-making level (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000: 16). At all these levels, decisions are taken through discussion and participation, making life in the encampment a succession of constant meetings.
At the state and national level, the MST is organized in a manner similar to the structure that obtains in the encampments and settlements, i.e. through a series of sectors and committees. Encampments and settlements elect members to the different regional sectors and to the coordinating committee, which, in turn, names representatives to the state coordinating committee, the body responsible to the grassroots membership (Fernandes 2000: 184–5). Out of these state-based organizational levels are carved different national sectors and a national leadership of around thirty members. This measure mirrors a practice that is observed throughout the organization of establishing collective rather than individual leadership.
Thus, in an encampment, most political decisions are made by acampados and acampadas, while strategic decisions are taken in consultation and coordination with regional, state and national leaderships. For instance, the ins and outs of the decision to occupy a specific latifundio are discussed in the encampment in conjunction with the regional, state and national leadership. These upper levels often provide technical information (e.g. facts about legal ownership of the property) and global strategic assistance and analysis (e.g. mobilization of allies and resources, media coverage, etc.). In many interviews that I conducted during my fieldwork, accounts of the various times acampados and acampadas had to move from one property to another were a common feature. In all cases, people remembered the direct discussions and the negotiations they had with state and police officials with respect to the terms and location of their displacement. Hence, the movement, although highly institutionalized, maintains an important level of local autonomy within the organization. As often happens in any organization, however, the balance of power between the different decision-making levels is constantly negotiated in light of political victories or defeats. For example, as we will see with the case of the selection of an electoral candidate in Rio Grande do Sul in Chapter 5, decisions that are taken by the leadership that are introduced either too rapidly or with insufficient attention to participation from the grassroots might be confronted with opposition or might very well not be followed.
The negotiations, discussions, decisions and actions undertaken during the period of land occupation make up a concrete and practical process of political education and empowerment. Luis Sinecio da Silva, from the assentamento Sumaré II in the state of São Paulo, pointed to this practicality very succinctly: ‘Through participation in the assembly people learned how to speak. They learned to be citizens.’
In the case of many encampment and settlement members of the MST, the education and empowerment process is reinforced by the formal political and technical training offered at various MST training centres, such as the Instituto Técnico de Capacitação e Pesquisa da Reforma Agrária (Technical Institute for Training and Research of Agrarian Reform, ITERRA) in Veranópolis in Rio Grande do Sul, which offers state-recognized courses in education, pedagogy, cooperative administration, agronomy, social communication and community health. Finally, this formal system of political and technical training is enhanced by participation in numerous state and national mobilizations, marches, encounters, forums and congresses, where landless people exchange information about their experiences among themselves or with members of other organizations.
Over time, MST members also acquire a sense of their ‘imagined community’. This sense of belonging is constantly reinforced by cultural practices and symbols, locally referred to as mística. Mística helps to maintain the movement’s cohesion and activism. The movement, over the course of its different moments and actions, builds its ideology by encouraging certain values, such as humility, honesty, conviction, perseverance, sacrifice, gratitude, responsibility and discipline, and by discouraging others, such as individualism (spontaneism) and immobility (Wolford 2003a: 508, 510).8 In turn, the relative positive and negative weight that is given to these values informs the type of alternative rural communities the MST hopes to create in the settlements.
The entire process of politicization of landless families has provided the MST with a constant renewal of leaders who emerge directly from the grassroots membership, have experienced the vicissitudes of life in the camps and settlements, and who thus identify completely with the values and practices of the movement. Although differences of perspective and approach among leaders do exist within the MST, these are not due to different political or ideological backgrounds. They are more often related to different experiences of struggle marked by regional and cultural characteristics (ibid.) and divergent points of view on issues of tactics and strategy. Thus, for instance, leaders may have varying opinions on whether it is better to adopt a ‘defensive’ or an ‘offensive’ posture with regard to aggressive actions against the movement (Fernandes 2005: 324).
From encampment to settlement: the cooling of political activism Since at least the early twentieth century, political scientists, notably Robert Michels (1962), have underlined that political parties and social movements, as they become more institutionalized and their leadership becomes more professionalized, tend to rely more on their bureaucratic structure than on the mobilization and participation of their membership. More recently, social movement theorists have also noted that with time social movements tend towards demobilization (Tarrow 1998) or adopt more conventional tactics (Taylor and Van Dyke 2004), especially once the main goal of the movement is accomplished. Similarly to what happens to other social movements, maintaining high levels of participation and mobilization is much more difficult to achieve in the settlements than it is in the encampments. The first years of settlement building are marked by the continuity of the ultra-politicization that is characteristic of the period of occupation (Romano 1994: 257). However, this period is only temporary because once most of the infrastructure is put into place, private domestic preoccupations often become more important to settlers than collective political goals. Very often politics within the settlement becomes routine and less participatory (Abramovay 1994) since the number of actions that demand everyone’s mobilization decreases. The forms of participation also change and become more specific, each settler attending meetings geared only towards the issues (education, health, production, etc.) that most interest her or him.
MST members presented many explanations for this cooling of political activism once people are settled in a rural community. Some mentioned that after achieving their long-desired goal of winning land, the Sem Terra, now turned settlers, lose the common objective that originally kept them united. Some settlers from settlements that were established prior to the creation of the MST, such as those in Sumaré, for example, either explicitly expressed or suggested that settlers were ‘tired of struggling’ and that participation and consciousness-raising (concientização) had been reduced to a minimum. Obviously, political participation and mobilization vary from settlement to settlement and depend on a variety of factors, but it is fair to say that these processes do not reach the levels that are generated in the encampment settings.
MST’s most active members, and the leadership in particular, take this relative ‘demobilization’ seriously and have started to search for a path towards solutions. Like many others, Rosevaldo, from assentamento Belo Monte in the municipality of Andradina in the state of São Paulo, suggested that the spatial organization of the settlement could make some difference. Referring to discussions that have been going on within the movement around the best way to organize the settlements in order to facilitate community building, Rosevaldo argued: ‘We need a new model of settlement, a model that would create more convivência [community life]. We need the agro-villa type of settlement.’9 Of course, the main idea behind this proposal is to reproduce what Vanesa referred to as ‘the encampment’s way of life’, i.e. a mode of existence that is seen as more communitarian than the settlement way of life. Although there is an element of truth to this, the organization of space per se does not seem to be the determinant factor behind decreased or increased participation. Assentamento Sumaré, for instance, where a settler mentioned that ‘people were tired of struggling’, is organized as a quite dense agro-villa, since many sons and daughters of the original settlers have built their home on the plot of their parents. The levels of participation were, however, quite low. Explaining the decrease in participation by taking into consideration the day-to-day preoccupations and imperatives of settlers points to more important obstacles to sustained participation.
Indeed, the major transition in the life of a Sem Terra-turned-settler is the beginning of the struggle to remain on the land and produce enough material subsistence to survive and improve the standard of living of the family. This new struggle generates many more contradictions than does the struggle for land in encampments because, unlike encampments – which, to a certain extent, function on the margins of the market economy – settlements find themselves much more inserted in capitalist relations. As Abramovay argues, the world of production cannot be seen as ‘some sort of continuity or reproduction of the wonderful world of the struggle that goes on during the period of land occupation’. The reality of the world of the settlement, he argues, ‘is the reality of the capitalist society: market, money, inequality, depersonalization of economic relations … a world that tends to reduce the weight of the local communitarian sphere’ (ibid.: 316). As we will see in the next chapter, one of the main preoccupations of settlers very quickly becomes which cash crop to plant in order to repay the start-up production credit that the state provides for settlers. Under this pressure, work on and outside the farm sometimes also leads settlers to disengage from the political process of the settlement.
Hence, many settlers justify their decision to stop participating actively in the MST by referring to the specific role that settlements have to play, which is to prove that the agrarian reform is working. Ulises, for example, from assentamento Sumaré 1 in the state of São Paulo, commented:
The MST is taking care of land occupations, mobilizations, etcetera. We have to prove that the settlements are functioning. That’s our contribution. We need to concentrate on our settlement and on the local level, opening up institutional and political channels. Our relationship with the MST is now to focus on production, programmes and credit.
Regardless of this supposed ‘division of tasks within the struggle’, the establishment of encampments in regions where settlements exist is, however, a factor that can contribute to sustaining participation and mobilization of settlements, as settlers often support encampments with recruits, food and people for mobilizations. During my stay in Itapeva, São Paulo, I witnessed the atmosphere of excitement and enthusiasm that the preparation of a nearby encampment generated on the part of many settlers. The settlers were eager to share their experience of encampment struggle with the new Sem Terra embarking on the process of occupation. But beyond these real and symbolic ties between the MST members involved in different phases of the struggle, the day-to-day preoccupations of settlers are quite significantly different from those of squatters.
Wolford (2010) has argued that once land is conquered and the struggle for production begins, the state slowly takes back the space lost to the MST and many settlers do not see the use of the movement or begin to disagree with its general objectives and ideology. She contends that ‘the MST has created a historical tradition with elite notions of membership, horizontal ties between members, and a sense of autonomy’ (ibid.: 77). Moreover, according to her, ‘The sense of historical justification lends itself to the idea that membership is a privilege that should be extended to those who fulfill the appropriate criteria. Settlers are expected to be a combination of the traditional peasant and the conscientious socialist/citizen’ (ibid.: 79). When they do not live up to this model, they are left out of the movement or move away from it.
She is partly right. Not all the people who participate in land occupations, or end up living in settlements with MST membership, can be said to be fiercely committed to radical social change in Brazil, and thus ready to participate in the MST political structure of their settlements. Many of them, and this is recognized by the movement itself, are simply seeking land and are not interested in continuing with their militancy after gaining access to land. There are, however, many others who participate more or less actively in the movement, from simply joining marches and protests from time to time to becoming a delegate or a leader of a sector or any of the numerous militant bodies at the regional, state and national level. By not looking at these members of the MST, which she discards because she considers them ‘model MST members’, Wolford ends up painting an incomplete picture. Moreover, she draws these conclusions from an atypical settlement in the north-east of Brazil that is ill suited to assessing the potential that mobilization and politicization have for landless people and smallholder families, because half of the families of that settlement did not go through the process of acampamento and land occupation.
Regardless of all the obstacles to sustaining levels of participation that are as high as in encampments, many settlements are nevertheless able to maintain relatively good levels of participation in the first few years after being established. Considering all the pressure that needs to be exerted on state agencies in order to acquire services and infrastructure, MST settlers quickly realize that their struggle is not over. Many come to realize that, as they were during the time of the encampment, political organization and mobilization are still fundamental to guaranteeing the constant development of the settlement. Hence, settlements maintain the same political structure and practices of decision-making to which they were accustomed during the period of encampment. The major differences between political participation in a settlement and participation in an encampment are that in a settlement meetings are much less frequent, many negotiations with the state have permanent consequences, and many involve a substantial amount of funding. Meetings do not occur on a daily basis but either monthly or when an issue arises. Negotiations with state authorities around the establishment of a school in the settlement, for instance, can result in very long, difficult and conflictive battles because they must take into consideration not only the construction of the facilities but also the elaboration of a curriculum, the selection of the pedagogic orientation, teachers and form of administration. The negotiation process often involves countless meetings of the education sector and the general assembly of the settlement and requires the participation of all families. In the case of changes to the family-farm agricultural credits and new state programmes, the meetings are called by the production sector and matters are also discussed in the settlement assembly. However, if there are specific negotiations with the state, they often end up being led by a small group of people who have developed expertise on the particular issue at hand or have a mandate from the settlement assembly to represent them. Here, as we will see later in this chapter, tensions and conflicts may arise between the grassroots membership and the leadership of the settlement or the movement.
The quality of political participation and mobilization within settlements will thus depend on a variety of factors. An important factor is the number of actions required to keep developing the settlement and the amount of effort required to maintain the adequate functioning of political structures and decision-making practices. The following comments from Dona Lidia, from assentamento Sumaré 2 in the state of São Paulo, represent the vision of someone who sees the decision-making structures of the settlement as responsive to the demands of the settlers:
Everyone goes to the meetings, at least one person per house. Everyone can speak, everyone speaks. If we have problems, there is the possibility of people helping to find a solution. That’s where problems get solved. Things are not hidden … I heard about R$8,000 for the construction of a ‘women’s house’ for the community. I have not seen the money yet. I will bring up the issue at the next meeting.
Obviously this image depicted by Dona Lidia is not the only one circulating, as many settlers have a completely opposite view of the power structures within their settlement. I will deal with these differing views later in this chapter. But the most important factor influencing the maintained participation in settlement is whether a settlement comes out of the experience of occupation or not. Indeed, a study sponsored by INCRA and FAO observed that the great majority of the more developed settlements throughout Brazil were those that had gone through a process of mobilization before winning land and that had consolidated their organization after being settled (Bittencourt et al. 1999: 39–43). One of the main challenges for the MST, therefore, is to keep its decision-making and representative structures in the settlement functioning so as to facilitate mobilization when required. Simultaneously, the MST, as an organization, needs also to remain a successful mediator between the settlers and the state (Wolford 2003b: 513), something it cannot be without mobilized forces.
The organizational structure of the EZLN and the making of its militancy
Twenty years have passed since the military uprising in 1994, and even though the Mexican state relaxed its political persecution of the EZLN and its military incursions into Zapatista communities following the election of Vicente Fox in 2000, for an indigenous family to be Zapatista still represents a major act of defiance of traditional authorities and the Mexican state. As a response to the state’s decision to withdraw its signature of the San Andrés Accord on Indigenous Autonomy (see Chapter 5), the Zapatistas decided in 1997 to adopt a position of ‘resistance’ in relation to the state whereby they agreed to refuse any programme or funding from the state, until it reversed this decision. Since then, Zapatista communities have relied only on their own resources, on micro-development programmes from alternative non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and on donations from international solidarity groups. Taken together, these resources are difficult to evaluate financially but the amounts that they generate are modest. Furthermore, the general health of the Mexican economy, the low prices for agricultural products, and the poor and scarce employment opportunities for peasants have not improved in the past decade. On the contrary, the crisis of the Chiapanecan countryside, an area dependent especially on peasant agriculture, has only worsened. Thus, the same question that was raised above for the Sem Terra can be raise for the Zapatistas: what accounts for the determination and endurance of Zapatista communities?
Joining and staying in the EZLN: a commitment to resistance In the overwhelming majority of the discussions I had with Zapatistas, the term compromiso (commitment) recurred again and again. The term is used to explain the decision to remain in the EZLN organization despite political repression, harassment from opposing factions within communities, and the harsh conditions that the resistance position implies. Commitment is what gives meaning to participation in the organization but also to the Zapatistas’ relationship with their community. As Marco, the health promoter of Santa María, told me: ‘If I get out [of the struggle], I might improve my personal situation but the community will stay in a mess.’ He then went on to explain his commitment:
My brothers are working in the United States. They have offered to help me to get over there … Up to now, I have said no because I don’t want to leave the community without a health promoter and the region without a coordinator … It’s been now seven years [in 2004] since I took up this commitment.
Marco contrasted his commitment to that of the local Zapatista education promoter, who, because of money difficulties, had had to ask permission to leave the community: ‘He was trained by the organization and he left the school to work outside for a while. He left the community, and the children got discouraged … He did not live up to his commitment.’
It is true that there are important costs involved in taking on a position of authority or responsibility within the EZLN. For instance, people who take on responsibilities tend to fall behind in their agricultural work and have to rely more on other members of their family, especially their wife and children. However, for many of these militants, a feeling of service to the community and a strong identification with the EZLN and the struggle come with their commitment. In my conversations with EZLN members, it was easy to note a sense of pride among them and a conviction that they were building something important, which, as my interviewees put it themselves, ‘is bearing fruits even though it’s going slowly’.
When I asked why the other inhabitants of the community did not join the organization, the Zapatistas answered very much along the lines of Daniel’s explanation:
Because they are afraid. Because, even if they agree with our objectives, they prefer to receive the government’s money or the projects of the government to buy their booze … They don’t care about being dependent on the government … What is most difficult to understand for people that are not in the organization is the idea of resistance. They ask, ‘Why should we not receive projects or money from the government?’
The term resistancia (resistance) is another key expression in the vocabulary of Zapatista militants. It is used to celebrate their commitment to the organization and its goals, but also helps to explain why the Zapatistas have decided to refuse any relationship with the state. They often use the term after portraying all government policies as ways to co-opt and divert their struggle from radical social change and autonomy. Similarly to the ways in which they speak of commitment, Zapatistas speak of resistance with pride, wanting to demonstrate that they have been right to take the position they have adopted. What is also most noticeable is that the period of resistance is not circumscribed in space and time. I was told again and again in many conversations: ‘We will resist until our demands are met, until we win … the time that it will take.’ Likewise, discussions on resistance often ended with statements such as ‘We’ll see where it takes us’. Daniel, paraphrasing the Zapatista hymn, told me:
Our struggle is until we win. If we have to die, then we’ll die because our slogan says it: ‘We live for the nation or we die for freedom’ [Que vivamos por la patria o morir por la libertad] … We are not fighting only for ourselves but also for the people, for the poor.
Most Zapatistas I talked to were conscious of being part of a much larger struggle than the struggle to improve their own daily lives. They were conscious that in order to find solutions to their daily problems they needed to embark on a collective effort to change the way the state treats all indigenous peasants. However, particularly for those living in communities that joined the EZLN after 1994 and did not have much time to develop their collective political structures, the evaluation of the individual costs of participating in a collective effort has to be considered a gamble that necessitates further hardship. Indeed, the posture of resistance adopted by the Zapatistas seems to have been relatively costly for the movement. Many sympathizers have abandoned the movement since the strategy of resistance was adopted. In Santa María, this sector amounted in 2004 to two-thirds of the community. Many abandoned the EZLN because for many indigenous subsistence peasants, programmes and funds from the government, although scarce, are often a crucial source of monetary income, allowing them to buy at least some consumer goods. Many of these ex-Zapatistas still agree with the EZLN’s objectives and the way the organization functions, and often even seek its mediation to solve some intra- or intercommunity conflicts. They could thus probably return to the organization if the political conjuncture changes, if they see that their re-entry might help to improve their situation, and if the EZLN allows them to return.
Eric Wolf, in his study of peasant villages in Mexico and central Java, noticed that peasant communities tend to ‘put pressures on members to redistribute surpluses at their command, preferably in the operation of [a] religious system, and induce them to content themselves with the rewards of “shared poverty”’ (Wolf 1999: 148). He also added that peasant communities ‘strive to prevent outsiders from becoming members of the community’, and ‘place limits on the ability of members to communicate with the larger society’ (ibid.: 148). Hence for Wolf many peasant communities are ‘corporate organizations, maintaining a perpetuity of rights and membership’, and are ‘closed corporations, because they limit these privileges to insiders and discourage close participation of members in the social relations of the larger society’ (ibid.: 148). He further argued that ‘closed corporate peasant communities’ were not necessarily a vestige of the past, but rather ‘offspring’ of the ‘dualization of society into a dominant entrepreneurial sector, and a dominated sector of native peasants’ (ibid.: 154). Hence, the closed corporate peasant community takes on the characteristics it does because its members attempt to respond to the internal and external threats to their livelihood emanating from the expansion of capitalist relations (ibid.: 157–9).
Since the majority of the indigenous communities in Zapatista territory are small communities, which maintain some characteristics of ‘closed corporate communities’, the image that one presents of oneself within the community is a constant preoccupation for the members of the community. Since membership in a community depends not only on land rights but also on adherence to collective social norms, it is very important for an individual to be recognized by the community as someone who respects and follows the established social norms, especially in the case of a revolutionary and semi-clandestine organization such as the EZLN. As has been highlighted by feminist scholars studying the Zapatista movement (Hernández Castillo et al. 2006: 45), social ostracism can be one of the harshest forms of communal discipline. Rumours, gossip and mockery are extremely powerful weapons of discipline. Not only mockery itself, but also simply the fear of mockery can be sufficient to control an individual’s actions. It is very easy for a member of the closed community to use mockery or rumour to make another member feel that she or he is breaking the established social norms of the community. Rumours are often treated as if they were true, even though people know that a rumour can simply be used by its initiator as a strategy, as a means to an end.10
The decision to become a Zapatista and stay a Zapatista, particularly in cases where they have become a minority within their community, implies a significant risk that, in the last instance, can even lead to the loss of land rights and expulsion from the community. This risk is made even more acute since participation in the EZLN does not always bring direct and immediately perceivable benefits. In this context, the views and the perception of the opposing anti-Zapatista majority, reflected in the mockery that arises, acquire even more significance. One’s decision to join and stay in the EZLN is constantly ridiculed by non-EZLN members in an attempt to discredit the individual and/or his/her family. This practice, however, can have an inverse effect as Zapatista families feel that resistance becomes an issue of honour: abandoning the struggle would mean the recognition of defeat or error. Hence in the face of the ridicule of the non-Zapatista majority of the community, a strong element of pride and stubbornness is part of the posture of resistance of the Zapatista minority. In many conversations I had with Zapatistas, they would constantly refer to arguments that would contradict the critiques of the non-Zapatistas living next to them. For example, Pedro, the delegate to the Junta de Buen Gobierno, told me:
My father used to make fun of me. He used to call me stupid for being in the organization and not taking the government’s money. He would brag about the money he would receive … But what is it good for? He lives in the same kind of house as I, he eats the same things that we do … All that money is going to buy alcohol … When he goes to get the money, he comes back with alcohol … He can be drunk for days, even a week … And then what? … The money is gone.
Barmeyer, who conducted fieldwork in 1997 in exclusively Zapatista communities when the position of resistance to the state had just been adopted, saw prestige as one of the motivations leading peasants to join the EZLN. He argued that, for certain families, participation in the EZLN was part of a ‘prestige economics whereby individual effort for the benefit of the community was rewarded with prestige’ (Barmeyer 2003: 129). Barmeyer contended that membership attributable to prestige was particularly relevant in the case of landless youths. Joining the EZLN was one of the few options available to landless youths wanting to remain in the region, because their access to land was blocked owing to its scarcity and the reform of Article 27. In turn, this landlessness impeded them from participating in and taking on political responsibilities within the ejido.
The idea of prestige is helpful in explaining the commitment of certain families towards the EZLN. Pedro was proud of being on the board of the JBG, especially since he had gone to school only until grade two. He saw the head of the municipal council, a person who also had very few years of schooling and had been able to reach the highest political position in the region, as his model. However, although joining the EZLN might mean for some individuals the possibility of occupying a political position of prestige, for most landless indigenous peasants it means more fundamentally the possibility of gaining access to land through the occupation of neighbouring ranches. For ejidatarios, it means the protection of their access to land and the possibility of access to land for their children. Manuel, one of the leaders of Santa María, frankly told me once that he had joined the EZLN in order to acquire land. Having fifteen children and being an avencindado,11 Manuel was just barely able to feed his family by working a piece of land that his cousin, an ejidatario, allowed him to till. He had been offered land by the EZLN in another region of the jungle, but after visiting the place, he decided that the risks were too high. He preferred to stay in his current situation, waiting until another round of ‘land recuperations’ took place.
Another term or idea that often recurred in the discourse of grassroots Zapatistas was dignity. After clarifying that they are ‘not fighting for things, credit, houses’, some interviewees would state that they were ‘fighting for a life of dignity’. When I asked some people to specify what a life of dignity would include, they would sometimes come back to issues of housing, education and health (elements that constitute a decent life), but they would always refer more to political demands: that their voice and demands be heard, that they be respected as indigenous people, that they be allowed to govern themselves. The almost fearless commitment to resistance by avencidados as well as by ejidatarios suggests that there is a deeper meaning to the concept that neither the idea of prestige nor the possibility of access to land can encompass. Joining the EZLN means joining a movement that allows more participation in decision-making processes than is permitted in the traditional and institutional structures of power. For many Zapatistas, as for many Sem Terra, joining the EZLN means becoming active political subjects through a process of both individual and community empowerment, two of the foundations upon which a particular kind of popular power is based.
Autonomous communities and municipalities and the structure of the EZLN The encampments of the MST represent the space where class consciousness and politicization of members are initiated. With the exception of the ranchos recuperados (recovered ranches)12 that were created by the EZLN after 1994, the EZLN, unlike the MST, does not create communities from scratch. Indeed, most of the current Zapatista communities were already in existence when the EZLN was created and began to recruit people. The EZLN has thus built on the previous experiences and traditions of indigenous political participation.
Since the implementation of the agrarian reform in Mexico in the 1930s, indigenous communities have been organized as ejidos, the internal governance of which is codified in the Agrarian Law. The formal authority over the ejidos is the Mexican state through its corresponding state agency, which provides different kinds of services (Ibarra Mendívil 1996; Hellman 1988: 84–7; Goldring 1996: 276–7). According to Mexican law, politically the ejido assembly is the highest decision-making body of the community. In theory, decisions must be taken democratically by all ejidatarios, who are the only inhabitants of the community with the right to vote in the assembly. Every several years the assembly elects a comisario ejidal, which represents the executive branch of the ejido and is in charge of its internal and external affairs. Owing to inheritance practices that privilege sons over daughters, ejidatarios are mostly men and the comisarios ejidales often – although not necessarily – come from the more well-off families of the community. The comisario ejidal also tends to be the political broker of the village, and is connected to a network of clientelistic relationships with indigenous regional leaders, the Ladino elite or political parties. Because of demographic pressures and the absence of employment, most ejidos have numerous avencindados, who, together with the ejidatarios, account for different strata within the ejido (Goldring 1996: 279; Nuijten 2001).
The EZLN has not abolished the ejido structure. It has created a parallel structure that has reclaimed the initial democratic role of the assembly and has adapted it to the current situation of subsistence peasants. In Zapatista community assemblies, all members of the EZLN have the right to vote and to be appointed to leadership positions, regardless of their land status. Women and youths, who were previously marginalized in the original ejido structure, have found in the EZLN’s version of the ejido opportunities and spaces to participate as never before. The result has been that women and youth, but particularly youth, have been among the sectors offering highest support for the EZLN.
Barmeyer reports the existence of small groups within the community that are similar to MST núcleos. It is inside these small groups, organized on the basis of gender and age, that community discussions take place, thus allowing overall for the political participation of a larger number of Zapatistas (Barmeyer 2003: 127–8). Within Santa María, I observed that day-to-day community decisions were taken through discussions in informal meetings. Only male ‘heads of households’ participated in this decision-making process, although some men said they consulted their wives before making an important decision. From the conversations I had with men and women and from my observations of gender dynamics within couples, some men seemed to consult with their wives, but others clearly did not (gender relations will be explored later in this chapter). Only for important political decisions do all the Zapatista families (men, women, elderly people and children) gather in an assembly.13 Even though, as noted by the literature, the EZLN encourages women’s participation, there are no quotas or any women-specific sector that would allow for more participation by women. Women’s participation seems to depend more on the self-organization of women within the community or across communities than on a real commitment of all Zapatistas.
In the Lacandona jungle the EZLN developed within, and parallel to, the Asociación Rural de Interés Colective-Unión de Uniones (ARIC-UU), another indigenous peasant organization. The organizational structure of ARIC-UU thus became the blueprint for the political structure of the EZLN. Similarly to the organizational structure of the MST, every community that was part of the ARIC-UU was organized into different sectors, which, in turn, elected delegates to regional committees and to the organization’s assembly (Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco 1996: 282–8; Leyva Solano 2001: 22). Zapatista communities are organized in a similar fashion, having several sectors (health, education, military, justice, etc.), each with its respective coordinator (Barmeyer 2003: 135). Those elected are also delegates to the regional and municipal levels of a particular sector, called the comisión. Every community also elects its political responsable, who constitutes the link between the community and the EZLN and is also the community’s delegate to the autonomous municipal council. In communities where all families are Zapatistas, this representative, who is preferably not an ejidatario, participates in the ejido assembly and is consulted on any decision that the ejido wants to take. In divided communities, the representative only looks after the needs and interests of Zapatistas and negotiates with the non-Zapatistas of the ejido. In some cases, when enough Zapatistas are ejidatarios, the representative will be in a position to negotiate with ejido authorities to make sure that ejido decisions do not negatively affect Zapatistas or that certain benefits can also be shared by non-ejidatarios.
In theory, the EZLN military structure is made up of five groups: the bases de apoyo (bases of support); the milicianos (militias or reserves); the insurgentes (regular troops); the responsables; and the Comité Clandestino Revolucionario Indígena-Comandancia General (Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command, CCRI-CG). The bases de apoyo are the members of the community who do not have military training and who are not within the military structure of the EZLN. Bases de apoyo are nevertheless crucial for the EZLN because they are called upon for mobilizations or events. The milicianos, the insurgentes, the responsables and the members of the CCRI-CG all have military and ideological training. Insurgentes make up the core of the guerrilla organization per se and are the full-time military personnel of the organization. They are organized hierarchically, and obey a chain of command. Milicianos form the second level of military forces of the guerrilla organization, and have less military training. Milicianos and insurgentes participated in combat in the first few weeks of 1994.
The members of the CCRI-CG are at the apex of the military and political structure of the EZLN. CCRI-CG members are constantly asked to travel to different communities to attend meetings or to help solve an issue in a particular region or community. Even though the CCRI-CG is ostensibly a clandestine body, members of the CCRI-CG are fairly active in their region. This is how a Zapatista from our community summarized the role of a comité:
The clandestine committee is chosen by the compas14 of all the communities. They are in contact with the bases de apoyo and they go around to collect the views of the compas [recogiendo la palabra] … To be a member of the committee is a hard job because it means being away from the community. There is no time for the milpa [field]. To be a member of the committee you have to be appointed by the communities. You have to have military training … When they do a good job, they can be appointed again.
Since the creation of the autonomous municipalities in 1994, along with the development of the military structure of the EZLN, the political structure of the autonomous municipalities has also developed with its own assembly and commissions. After the constitution of the autonomous communities began, some of the municipalities quickly reached high levels of organization. By the middle of 1995, numerous autonomous municipalities were functioning in Chiapas, each of them with different degrees of consolidation, depending on the local support for the EZLN. Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor (1998a), writing when the autonomous municipalities had been in existence only for a few years, distinguished four levels of consolidation of Zapatista autonomies. The lowest level of consolidation was in regions where Zapatistas were in a minority and exposed to constant harassment by their indigenous neighbours. The regions that had reached the second level of consolidation were those where the Zapatistas were able to render justice among their own members but did not have their own infrastructures. The third level of consolidation was reached in regions where Zapatistas had enough support and legitimacy among the population to solve agrarian conflicts, render justice and have the majority accept their rulings. Some of the autonomous municipalities, such as La Libertad, San Andrés and Pohlo, were even able to distribute land. Finally, the most consolidated experiences of Zapatista autonomy were in regions where Zapatistas controlled vast territory, rendered justice, had built their own infrastructure, and had not only distributed latifundio land but also the land of small ranchers and political opponents (ibid.: 142).
In 1998, President Ernesto Zedillo ordered a military offensive against these autonomous communities in order to dismantle them.15 This offensive was in addition to the actions of the army and the state police, which were waging low-intensity warfare on Zapatista communities, including targeting the training and proliferation of paramilitary groups. The most horrific consequence of this low-intensity war strategy occurred with the massacre, on 22 December 1997, of forty-five people, mostly women and children, in the community of Acteal in the municipality of Chenalho in the highlands. Following the tactic that the military had used during the civil war in Guatemala, ‘paramilitaries ripped open the wombs of pregnant women who were dead, extracting unborn babies with their machetes … to teach a lesson to any insurgents and their supporters in the vicinity’ (Olivera 2005: 618). But every autonomous municipality that was dismantled re-emerged a few months later. These officially sponsored military attacks finally came to an end with the election of Vicente Fox in 2000, but Zapatistas today, especially where they are in a minority, are still subject to political harassment by other organizations.
Today, every autonomous municipality has taken over all the services that are normally the responsibility of the state, such as civil registration of births, education, health, development and justice. In the area of education, for instance, autonomous municipalities train their own community educators and develop their own education programme, focusing on their own curriculum and pedagogy, as well as on their own view of Mexican history. In the area of health, autonomous municipalities have established programmes to train both community health promoters and midwives. The former are able to identify and treat the main curable diseases to which the population is vulnerable, while the latter are capable of assisting in women’s pregnancies (see Starr et al. 2011: 104–6).
At the beginning of the autonomy struggle, because of the military harassment, both the politico-military structures of the EZLN and the structures of the autonomous communities were somewhat fused. However, in 2000 the EZLN decided to divide its leadership into a political ‘civilian’ wing (the autonomous municipalities) and a military wing (the guerrilla). On the one hand, issues regarding the security of Zapatista communities are the responsibility of members of the community belonging to the military wing of the organization. The latter assess the security or military threat coming from the federal army and paramilitary groups, as well as from rival organizations, such as PRI or PRD sympathizers or ARIC members, within a given community or from neighbouring communities. On the other hand, members of the autonomous municipal councils and the Juntas de Buen Gobierno are people who have been nominated to take care of the political aspects of the struggle such as intra- and intercommunity conflict resolution.
With time, the political structure of the autonomous municipal councils and the Juntas de Buen Gobierno are bound to replace the politico-military structure of the EZLN, but the process is still under way. Since the creation of the autonomous municipalities, balancing the responsibilities, jurisdiction and power between the two wings of the movement has been difficult. Regardless of attempts to allocate more decision-making power to the civilian wing, the CCRI-CG has remained the highest authority in Zapatista territory. No major political decision can be made without its consent.
In theory, important political decisions are first discussed by the representatives of all the communities in an assembly at the level of the autonomous municipality. The representatives then go back to their respective communities, where the decision will be discussed by all community members in an assembly. The representative, accountable to his or her community, will then carry forward the community’s opinion to a second municipal assembly, and will subsequently report back to the community on the final decision. One of these community meetings occurred during the period of our fieldwork, after the community representative had come back from a previous meeting elsewhere. However, we were not allowed to attend. In practice, this way of taking important decisions, i.e. through a succession of meetings, is probably the norm. However, the levels of participation in the decision-making process will depend on the history, experience and politics of each particular community. In some cases, according to Barmeyer, the imposition of the will of the majority over the minority within a given community can sometimes include threats and coercion of opponents if the community sees a potential danger in the development of dissent (Barmeyer 2003: 131).
Within the EZLN, the fact that communities are organized into groups or commissions as well as the fact that the leadership at most levels is collective and nominated by the communities as a whole have, just as in the case of the MST, also contributed to maintaining relatively good levels of participation. The distribution of political responsibilities among several individuals within the community, and the creation of sectors accommodating the work of these representatives, has allowed for power to be diffused, avoiding its monopolization by a single individual within the community or the organization. Obviously, when certain leaders remain in a position of authority for several years, as has been the case with some members of the municipal council or the CCRI, their opinion can end up having more impact than the opinion of others. It is reasonable to assume that the opinion of Subcomandante Marcos, for instance, has weighed heavily in the discussions that the CCRI has had.
Subcomandante Marcos is, of course, the most prominent figure within the EZLN. His analysis and opinions most probably weigh heavily on the internal debates. In many occasions in my discussions with Zapatistas, Subcomandante Marcos’ words were used as a reinforcing argument: ‘Because Marcos said …’, ‘The Sub said …’, ‘Marcos told us …’, ‘Because Marcos saw that …’. The use of these sentence starters is so recurrent that it gives the impression that Marcos is present in many of the meetings that Zapatista delegates have. It gives the impression that all the leaders with a certain level of authority know him personally. Given the complexity of the organization and the geographic extension of Zapatista territory, this is highly improbable. What this tells us, though, is that Subcomandante Marcos’ figure is so important that many Zapatistas feel the need to justify their position or tell their collective story of struggle by referring to Marcos in some way or other. This can lead to the danger of concentration of power and personalism. That said, Subcomandante Marcos seems to have quite an important margin of manoeuvre in regard to writing communiqués. However, he cannot write whatever he wants. Within Subcomandante Marcos’ writings, at least three types of texts can be identified: those that are of his sole authorship, such as his short stories, those that he has been commissioned to write, and those that are written collectively with the CCRI (Vergara-Camus 2000: 95). In discussions with some Zapatistas it became clear that even Marcos’ communiqués that present an analysis of the conjuncture or the features of the system of domination are presented to (and discussed with) community delegates before they are released to the press.
Up to now, the Zapatistas have also managed to avoid any major corruption scandal. Moreover, by maintaining their posture of resistance towards the state, they have been able to present themselves as a committed organization that, in contrast to what has occurred with so many other peasant organizations in the region, the government has not been able to co-opt. In this way, Zapatistas have also been able to present their politics as an alternative to the strategies that other organizations have followed with only limited results. This success is made clear in Daniel’s words: ‘In all the other organizations and political parties, bosses get rich while the poor stay as poor as before. The other organizations, the only thing they do is to ask the government … They are not autonomous. They depend on what the government gives them. The government can give one year and not the next.’
From autonomous municipalities to the Juntas de Buen Gobierno In August 2003, the Zapatistas decided to expand the experience of autonomy by creating a higher level: the Juntas de Buen Gobierno. Here, the EZLN deliberately chose the term good government in opposition to the term mal gobierno (bad government) that is used to refer to the state. There are eight Juntas de Buen Gobierno. These councils consist of regional political decision-making bodies that coordinate the activities of five or six autonomous municipalities while they also work with the CCRI-CG. Although women are few at this level, a JBG is made up of an alternating leadership of men and women who belong to different municipalities and who are chosen by their peers to represent their respective municipality at the regional level. The responsibilities of JBG members can be very demanding. The member of the JBG who lived in Santa María, for instance, had to go to the JBG in La Garrucha (a nine-hour bus ride away) every six weeks and sit on the council for ten days consecutively.
The creation of the JBGs was intended to help consolidate the political authority and legitimacy of the EZLN over broader geographic areas and allow for better coordination of the different efforts involving Zapatista communities and municipalities. The JBGs have become the highest political authority in Zapatista territory. They have also become spaces of conflict mediation and resolution for Zapatistas, non-Zapatistas and anti-Zapatistas, to the extent that the government of Chiapas sometimes has had to consult with a JBG before carrying out actions in territory of Zapatista influence. In a communiqué that reported on the first year of existence of the juntas, Subcomandante Marcos mentioned that the state government of Pablo Salazar Mendiguchía (2000–06) had cooperated with the JBGs on many issues. The governor himself confirmed this cooperation later. Pedro, a member of the JBG of La Garrucha, mentioned that the JBGs investigate every case that indigenous peasants present to them, and that they render justice according to indigenous communal practices. As a result, community members accused of a minor misdemeanour can sometimes end up spending several days in jail. But when the issue involves a serious criminal offence, such as rape or murder, the case, as well as all the information resulting from the Zapatista investigation, is passed on to the official judicial authorities of the state. However, the authorities of the Zapatista JBGs who conduct an investigation oversee the follow-up on the official state investigation in order to make sure that the official state authorities conduct their investigation and pass judgment in accordance with Mexican law.
The JBGs have not displaced the authority of autonomous municipalities. As we were informed during my visits to the JBG of La Garrucha, a JBG that coordinates five autonomous municipalities, each autonomous municipality has ‘its own way of doing things’. This variation is due to the fact that the experiences of each region are different. Some regions became part of the EZLN while it was still a clandestine organization and benefited from the organizational experiences of previous organizations (ARIC-UU, ANCEZ, etc.). Other regions, such as the region where Santa María was located, joined only after the uprising in 1994.
Despite the reasons behind the autonomous municipalities’ differences, however, one of the objectives of the JBGs is to try to bring all Zapatista autonomous municipalities to a similar level of organization by deciding democratically on the distribution and allocation of projects as well as financial support. One of the problems the JBGs are supposed to resolve, we were told by a junta member, is the unequal distribution of donations and programmes that can occur between, on the one hand, communities that have established contacts with NGOs or solidarity groups and, on the other, those that are isolated geographically and thus do not have that advantage. This move by the JBGs towards improvement of distribution of resources, however, is not intended to overlap with the power of autonomous municipalities to elaborate and develop their own projects and infrastructures, or with their prerogative to decide on the issues they want to prioritize. We were told, for example, that within the Ricardo Flores Magón autonomous municipality, the priorities for the moment were health and education rather than production.
The MST’s democratic centralism and the EZLN’s mandar obedeciendo
In an overview of some social movements in Brazil and Mexico, Jeffrey Rubin identified two types of movements: the ‘Che-like movements’ and the ‘Marcos-like movements’. In Rubin’s view, ‘Che-inspired radicalism placed too little value on democratic forms and substance and lacked important kinds of cultural awareness.’ Marcos-like movements, on the other hand, ‘exhibit, in varied and uneven ways, greater concern for democratic procedures, for cultural meaning, for multiple dimensions of power, and for gender, race, violence, and sexuality …’ (Rubin 2002: 44). Rubin sees the EZLN as an example of the ‘Marcos-like movement’ and the MST as a current ‘Che-like movement’. Thus he suggests that the EZLN is more democratic and pluralist than the MST:
… Marcos and the Zapatistas speak of a new kind of democracy, a democracy that takes procedure and voting seriously … Marcos has defended a policy of alliances within a complex civil society, no longer broken down into Che’s bourgeois and working class … Marcos calls for a dual Indian–Mexican nation, based on concepts of citizenship and culture, with no revolution of the old sort, led by an armed vanguard, in sight … Marcos argues, in this process the left needs to engage with the reality of difference – in class and worldview and also in race and gender. (Ibid. 2002: 39)
In contrast, Rubin says:
MST leaders insist that their success results from their ability to mobilize with great efficiency; centralization and discipline are essential for combating a repressive rural power structure. Thus the MST eschews internal democracy, imposes a single squatter and cooperative model on vastly different groups of rural supporters, rejects alliances with less radical rural movements, and for the most part marginalizes women and reproduces conventional racial hierarchies. (Ibid.: 46)
Rubin’s views on the EZLN and the MST echo those of several scholars and activists of the alter-globalization movement inspired by a postmodernist interpretation of Zapatismo (Santos 2004: 170), who have celebrated the diversity, plurality and horizontality of so-called ‘new social movements’ and refused the need for a common (albeit vague) political project and strategy. These scholars have drawn their interpretation of the Zapatista political praxis more from Subcomandante Marcos’ early communiqués, which at the time had the clear objective of gathering as much political support as possible (see Chapter 5), than from the actual practice of the EZLN.
Although Rubin’s analysis highlights some genuine differences, the distinction that he makes between the MST and the EZLN does not hold. In reality, as I have demonstrated above in my detailed description of the decision-making structures of both organizations, the ways that decisions are made within the MST and the EZLN are not dissimilar. Moreover, when there are differences, in contrast to what Rubin asserts, decision-making is probably more democratic within the MST than within the EZLN. People tend to forget it, but although it has developed a civilian structure, the EZLN is still a guerrilla organization, albeit a very peculiar one. But what is more important than the differences is the fact that within both organizations the community assembly is where the sovereignty of the organization lies, even though many decisions are discussed in smaller groups prior to the assembly. The following section, which analyses the forms of leadership selection and the relationship between leaders and grassroots membership, should illustrate these similarities between the MST and the EZLN.
In comparison with the EZLN, the more orthodox image and discourse of the MST has given rise to the criticism, exemplified by Rubin’s typology, that the organization is anti-democratic and hierarchical. To some extent, even early Sem Terra such as Antonhino, who participated more actively in the first years of the organization and is now a settler in Nova Ronda Alta in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, recognize this fact:
At the beginning, the organization was very centralized and hierarchical. You could say that the national direction thought of itself as the ‘thinking group’ [grupo pensante] … It was probably like that from 1985 to 1990 maybe … Well, it was not totally centralized … There was always discussion … Now, things have changed. There are many spaces and levels of discussion … The movement has grown a lot.
One of the practices that indicates the degree to which an organization is democratic is obviously the way leaders are elected. On this issue, it is difficult to say that the process of selection of the leadership within the MST is not democratic. In fact, it mirrors the process within the EZLN that was presented above. Claudemir, the coordinator of the cooperative for the region of Sarandi in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, explained the election process that takes place within the MST:
The groups núcleos identify more or less three names … by consensus … The names that come up more often are passed on … The delegates meet and the leaders are selected … There is not much contact between núcleos at the base … Someone can be appointed to the regional direction as many times as he/she is selected … There is no term limitation.
From the time of its creation, the MST adopted ‘democratic centralism’ as its guiding principle in decision-making. Within the MST, the national and regional leaderships, elected by the lower levels of the organization, are responsible for setting the general political orientation and strategy of the movement. They normally meet monthly to discuss different issues, and the discussions are then transmitted to the lower levels, where they are discussed again. After a long process of discussion, a decision will be taken and will be binding on all the members of the organization. Refusal to follow a decision can be sanctioned by all kinds of penalties, ranging from suspension of membership to expulsion.
Another way of determining if an organization is democratic is by analysing the kind of relationship that exists between the leadership and the grassroots. My experience in following René, a former Catholic priest who accompanied the movement during its first year and who is now a regional leader of the MST frente de masas (mass front, a sector of the MST) in the municipality of Andradina in the state of São Paulo, will serve as an example of the role of leaders within the MST.
René goes from encampment to encampment, from meeting to meeting, talking to people within the organization and even outside it. When he arrives at a meeting, he informs the acampados and acampadas of the issues at stake, the latest developments in national politics, and the discussions going on within the movement with regard to these issues and developments. He lays out the way he sees the challenges and engages in what in North America we would call a ‘pep talk’ to keep up the morale of the encampment. His style is very enthusiastic but not preachy. He constantly seeks the reactions of the people gathered. After his talks, acampados and acampadas comment on his analysis, express their approval or disagreement, and even challenge his analysis. Discussion on the issues presented by René will later take place in the núcleos, where the encampment will decide its position and forward it to the regional assembly. Hence René will not be involved in all encampment and settlement discussions, but only in those taking place where he lives.
When the day of the regional meeting arrives, René and other regional representatives meet in a room loaned by the local rural union and cooperative. While the style of this venue is completely different, i.e. less enthusiastic and more serious than in the encampment setting, the same issues are brought up, and the opinions that have circulated earlier in the encampments and settlements are conveyed and analysed. In a decision-making meeting, a decision would have been taken by compiling the results of the positions adopted by the different encampments and settlements.
Within this process of decision-making, political organizers play the role of facilitators. Some Brazilian scholars use the term ‘mediators’ (Romano 1994; Ferrante 1994), as if the political organizers were external to landless people. Of course, having the advantage of being in possession of more information and bridging the different encampments and settlements, political leaders are able to direct and influence debates. However, they do not have the power to impose a decision, although they may try to do so on some occasions. For now, suffice it to say that when the leadership tries to impose a decision, it exposes itself to the possibility of provoking a drop in the participation of the settlers, a situation that can have a significant negative impact on the organization’s capacity to mobilize its membership. The testimony below of Terezinha, from assentamento Fazenda Anoni in Sarandi in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, first confirms Claudemir’s description (presented above) and then rejects it, thus expressing the fluidity that exists in political participation:
In the cooperative, positions were up for election every two years and in the movement every four years … The way it works is that it starts at the base … The names start circulating at the base, in each núcleo, in each settlement … Names circulate and [those who receive the most votes] take the post … It is not like that any more … A lot of people stopped participating. A lot of people distanced themselves from the cooperatives.
In sum, the term democratic centralism does not, in and of itself, mean anti-democratic decision-making. The democratic or non-democratic character of the decision-making process depends on the actual practices of the participants and, more importantly, on the attitudes and interests of the leadership and the grassroots membership. In the case of the MST, the importance of mobilization in sustaining the capacity of the organization, as well as the politicization of the grassroots membership that develops during the period of encampment, can make top-down decisions very problematic and difficult to impose, as I will show in Chapter 5 with the case of the selection within the MST of a candidate to the state legislature of Rio Grande do Sul.
One of the most celebrated features of the EZLN is the fact that, in contrast to previous guerrillas in Latin America, Zapatista communities democratically elect their leadership instead of having leaders appointed by the military hierarchy. The leadership is also said to be accountable to the membership. The idea expressed by the words ‘gathering the view of the compas’, used above by a Zapatista, summarizes the role of a Zapatista regional leader and suggests that it is very similar to how René, the MST leader, carried out his role. The members of the CCRI go around from one community to another, talking at meetings and presenting the different options open to the movement in order to get a sense of the attitude of the inhabitants of the different communities that make up the movement. Similarly, the role of the representative of a community is to express accurately the will of the community at higher levels of the organization. When I asked Carlos to describe the process of decision-making within the movement, this was his answer:
An idea is going to come from the comandancia [the CCRI]. Then it goes down to the different political levels, the Junta de Buen Gobierno, the autonomous community, where there are representatives from each community. It gets discussed a first time. Then it arrives at the communities and is presented to the people by the representative. The idea is discussed and everyone can comment and oppose it. When the discussion in the community is finished, the decisions of the communities start their way up the different levels of authorities, the autonomous municipality, the Junta de Buen Gobierno and the comandancia. Once the process is finished, the decision is taken and no one can go against the decision. We have to stand by the decision.
What Carlos was describing to me is what Zapatistas call mandar obedeciendo (rule by obeying). Kathleen Bruhn (1999) understands the principle of mandar obedeciendo in terms of accountability, close supervision of elected representatives by the community, and revocation of leaders. Bruhn is not mistaken, but her reading denotes a Western, liberal and institutional perspective, where representatives are given a series of prerogatives. For the Zapatistas, the fundamental objective behind the idea of mandar obedeciendo is for sovereignty to truly be in the hands of the ruled and not the rulers. This means that the political authorities should govern in accordance with the will of the majority. Political authorities have to be seen as delegates of the community rather than its representatives since they are ‘at the service of the community’.16 Unlike political representatives in liberal democracies, political authorities are not invested with the power to take decisions. The approach thus implies a different understanding of the legitimacy of the authorities, not as originating from a specific moment (an election, for instance), but rather depending on the relation that the authorities maintain with grassroots membership. This means that every important decision must be made by consulting the community through some sort of deliberative processes. Taken to its limits, mandar obedeciendo implies self-government.17 In the case of the Zapatista bases de apoyo, the consequence is similar to those of the MST membership. If a political decision is made through democratic and deliberative processes that have allowed everyone to have a chance to convince the majority, the decision of the organization must be obeyed. Hence, mandar obedeciendo is in fact what the old left and the MST call democratic centralism.
However, not all decisions take the same path. The EZLN is still an indigenous peasant movement with a guerrilla movement at its core. Political-military decisions are orders from the comandancia and are followed as such. Disobeying this kind of order can lead to disciplinary measures that range from the temporary suspension of political responsibility to the revocation of political responsibility or, ultimately, to expulsion from the organization.
The challenge of the specialization of leadership As mentioned earlier, for Antonio Gramsci one of the most important tasks of the Modern Prince is to form ‘organic intellectuals’ that are directly linked to a class and can animate and disseminate the counter-hegemony of the movement within the respective class and civil society more broadly. For him, everyone has the potential to become an organic intellectual and the Modern Prince has to work at creating the conditions for that to happen. Ideally, every member of the movement, especially coming from the grassroots, is supposed to take up a position of leadership if and when the circumstances arise. The way the MST and the EZLN organize their membership and participation resembles what Gramsci envisioned. The process of politicization that occurs within the movement sets the ideological foundations for developing the potential of its members, but the organizational decision of adopting rotating leadership creates the practical conditions for that to occur. However, there are many obstacles to the generalization of leadership ability, and leadership specialization is one of them.
MST settlers constantly reminded me that the period of occupation was a period of strong unity and solidarity because the common objective of fighting for land, the availability of time and the pressure on the encampment exerted by external actors (landlords, gunmen, local authorities and police, etc.) were conducive to politicization. By contrast, they also overwhelmingly highlighted the fact that the settlement became much less politicized as time passed and as people became more and more occupied with cultivating their family plot.
Some Brazilian scholars have observed that, as time passes, a sort of ‘specialization of the leadership’ arises, sometimes through the ‘accumulation of positions and representations … that confer status and power’ (Zimmermann 1994: 220). Other researchers have also identified a differentiation between grassroots membership and leaders (Romano 1994; Ferrante 1994). This specialization is not necessarily voluntary because, as João Estevão of the assentamento Fazenda Anoni in Sarandi Rio Grande do Sul explained: ‘leadership positions are not much sought after because people think they require too much time, time which they prefer to dedicate to working on their plot. Sometimes the leaders have their position because nobody else wants it.’ To avoid this accumulation of positions, some settlements have enforced a ‘rotation policy’, which constitutes, in principle, a political guideline for the movement. In the cooperative Coopavi in Paranacity in the state of Paraná, for instance, leadership positions of the settlement and the coordination of núcleos are rotating positions. Each year the direção (board) of the cooperative changes and every three months the coordinators of the núcleos are replaced by other members. Each settler must take on the role of coordinator at least once. This, however, is surely not what occurs in all settlements.
Even if efforts are made to avoid ‘specialization of the leadership’, in some settlements the settlers gradually end up seeing the MST as a union, as an ‘organization that would help them navigate the political waters not re-direct them … or as a service organization that represented the settlers rather than a social movement of which they were members’ (Wolford 2003a: 210). During my own fieldwork, I observed this phenomenon mainly in the older settlements, such as Sumaré I and Fazenda Primavera, both in the state of São Paulo, and Fazenda Macali in Rio Grande do Sul. In these settlements, the struggle for land had been carried out before the creation of the MST and was marked by more informal and personalist leadership.
In Sumaré I, for instance, no formal structures of decision-making or selection of leaders seem to exist. According to Calixto da Silva, one of the original leaders of the struggle:
Decisions are taken collectively. In some places, it’s the direção that takes decisions. Here there is no direção, there are persons that represent the settlement. When we have to take a decision or implement a project, we call a meeting, representatives and people together. I am the coordinator of the community [CEBs]18 and there is a coordinator for the settlement. João Lorenço was chosen but since he is too busy now, Aparecida was chosen … She was chosen in a meeting … Many times, when there is an administrative procedure to make or a negotiation to carry out, other people accompany the coordinator.
Calixto’s description of the way decisions are taken in his settlement points to a highly informal power structure that favours long-time activists and the reliance of the community on certain individuals. Sirlene da Silva, daughter of João Lorenço, a lifelong activist of the MST in the region, has this to say about assentamento Sumaré 1:
The settlement is not organized. The organization is only for certain things, such as demands to the municipality. The youth are demobilized. Hilario [son of Calixto] is one of the few who participate. He is working to set up a cooperative … There are no committees, except for health … When someone organizes something or has an initiative, people are accustomed to consider the person who had the idea as the person responsible, the one that will take the decisions.
The danger of leadership specialization is thus real in some MST settlements. However, it is easier for specialization of leadership to arise where no formal mechanisms and structures of political participation and representation exist. In Fazenda Anoni, in Sarandi in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, for instance, even if the settlement is almost as old as Sumaré I, the MST structures were adopted early and continue to function, regardless of the division that has arisen recently around the selection of candidates to the state legislature.
Specialization of leadership is also a danger within the Zapatista movement. Considering the double structures (civilian and politico-military) on top of the ejido structure that continues to function, power is probably as diffused within the EZLN as it is in the MST. Many opportunities exist for anyone who wants to take on a position of responsibility to do so. In some regions where Zapatistas are not yet consolidated or have lost supporters, there might even be more positions than people to fill them. Even in Santa María, where Zapatista families were in a minority, no single individual monopolized power and no one person accumulated different functions. However, a difference in terms of level of knowledge of the organization and its ideology existed between Zapatistas who occupied positions of responsibility and grassroots members who did not. Zapatistas who have higher positions of authority and who leave the community for extended periods of training or for meetings are the ones that have internalized the Zapatista ideology most profoundly. In the absence of formal spaces for political education, a situation which seems to be the case in communities where Zapatistas are in the minority, in contrast to communities where they are in the majority, the gap between the leadership and the grassroots could potentially widen and thus lead to divergent views within communities.
Gender relations and the political participation of women
As has been highlighted by many feminist scholars (Radcliffe and Westwood 1993; Craske 1999; Molyneux 2000), in Latin America traditional gender roles have always been structured by the patriarchal organization of space within the household, civil society and the state, as well as by the male-dominated and racialized conception of nationhood. Broadly speaking, women, because they have been assigned to take charge of the reproduction of the family, are restricted to the private space of the home, while men, because they carry out production, dominate the public space (Gonçalves 2005: 156). This sexual division of labour within the household is one of the most determinant elements enforcing traditional gender relations and blocking the public political participation of women. Obviously, this gendered dualism is the result of patriarchal practices and strategies to maintain the subordination of women. This private/public dualism should thus not be seen in terms of a rigid dichotomy, but rather in terms of a continuum or as disputed and intertwined spaces, where the private is constructed publicly and politically. Hence, as Cutbitt and Greenslade (1997: 53) argue, women’s subordination and isolation tend to decrease when the boundary between the private and public sphere is blurred through the collective action of women. As I will show in this section and further develop in Chapter 4, the increase in public political participation of women in the MST and the EZLN was made possible because their participation in the struggle for land challenged the traditional sexual division of labour and temporarily blurred the boundaries between private and public spaces.
In the 1980s, the literature that focused on the political participation of women in social movements in Latin America highlighted how the political activism of women under authoritarianism was played out in their traditional roles as grandmothers, and mothers. The case of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina during the military dictatorship (1976–83) is the most well-known case of this type of motherist movement (Radcliffe and Westwood 1993: 16–17). Breaking with the social boundaries that limited their gender role to the private sphere, women used their private gender role as mothers to legitimize their public-political role as defenders of human rights, challenging the state’s monopoly over violence (Navarro 2001).
The case of landless and Zapatista women in some aspects parallels the experience of the Argentine mothers during the military dictatorship, especially in their moments of confrontation with police forces and the army. Very often, landless women who confront attacks on encampments by the police play up their traditional gender role as mothers. Hence, gender roles and patriarchal symbols are often not transformed but acted upon for specific purposes. But this recovery of a traditional gender role in fact transgresses the constructed binary and sees women take on a publicly active political role. This situation is perceivable in the following comments made by Salete, a woman from assentamento Rondinha-group 1 in Joía in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, who remembered:
During the time of the encampment, during occupations, women were always in the front row when we would be under siege. Our strategy would be to talk to the police or the army. We would tell them: ‘If you want to kill me, you can, but you will kill a mother, a mother who wants land for her children. If you don’t have a mother, if you don’t have a wife, if you don’t have a sister, you can kill me because I know why I am fighting, why I will die. You, do you know where your wife is right now? I bet she is with another man.’ On the spot we decided what to do. Spontaneously we would confront the police.
Alternatively, landless women used the image of the ‘whore’ to verbally confront and insult the masculinity of policemen. Salete, for instance, also commented: ‘We learned how to talk to the police. We had no arms, so it had to be with words. Our defence was with words. I don’t need to tell you what kinds of words we would use sometimes. Policemen would even end up crying.’
With time, police authorities reacted to this strategy of the landless women and started to use female police officers to confront Sem Terra women during the removal of landless people from the occupation of a property. But Terezinha, an acampada in acampamento ‘Seguindo o Sonho de Rose’ in Julho de Castillo in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, demonstrated in her testimony that women claimed their role of mother not only to avoid aggression but also to legitimize the actions taken by the MST in its struggle for land. This is her recollection of the July 2003 march to São Gabriel, one of the regions of Rio Grande do Sul where many large latifundios still exist:
A judge came many times to attempt to remove the children from the march. We, all the mothers, opposed it and didn’t permit the children to be removed. The judge would tell us that we were bad mothers because we submitted our children to those conditions: the march, the cold and all. We answered by asking him: ‘How much money do you make? Do you have a nice house? Do you have a nice car?’ We would go on and tell him that we were fighting so that we and our children could have only a little bit of what a judge can have, that we were not bad mothers who submitted their children to those conditions, but rather that it was a system that forced us to struggle. A system where judges don’t expropriate large properties and impede the distribution of wealth.
In the same way that the police repression of land occupations triggered the growing political participation of women and a reframing of the traditional gender roles of women in the MST, the formation of the guerrilla movement and the subsequent military operations of January 1994 generated an internal questioning of the traditional gender roles of women within indigenous communities, which had often been justified through a mythologized understanding of indigenous cultural traditions (Hernández Castillo et al. 2006: 44). Women’s participation in the civil disobedience actions of the EZLN mirrors the experience of Brazilian landless women in times of confrontation with police forces. Indeed, at the height of the militarization of the Zapatista territory between 1997 and 1999, especially during the dismantling of autonomous communities and municipalities during the summer of 1997, women were at the forefront of the confrontations with state police and armed forces. Carmen, a Zapatista woman, remembers the decision that women took: ‘We sent the men off because when the army came in 1994, they took three of our men and killed them. So, we told the men to go and hide and we got sticks and chased the soldiers out. They were so scared that they were slipping in the mud. We asked them if they would treat their mothers and fathers this way’ (Carmen, quoted in Forbis 2003: 250).
Women confronting violence, either by confronting police forces non-violently or entering the ranks of the guerrillas, represent an important reversal of traditional gender identities and roles. However, although important progress has been made in the transformation of gender relations, the process of struggle itself and organizational norms are not sufficient to guarantee the full and equal participation of women. Here, however, the MST and the EZLN have taken different routes and, as will be shown, there seems to have been more progress in women’s political participation and transformation of gender roles in the MST than in the EZLN.
The MST: parity, self-organization and sharing domestic chores Nikki Craske, in her chapter entitled ‘Revolutionary empowerment’, where she compares the revolutionary processes in Cuba and Nicaragua, argues that revolutionary struggles, because they ‘represent a moment of fluidity in political structures’, allow for significant gains with regard to women’s rights and political participation, and the transformation of traditional gender roles (Craske 1999: 141). However, as other feminists have highlighted (Radcliffe and Westwood 1993: 19), once the period of mobilization has passed, women do not sustain their level of political involvement, often retreating into the domestic sphere, and traditional gender roles are reinforced. According to Craske, two elements are crucial for determining whether the gains made during the period of mobilization will be maintained or reversed: the commitment of the revolutionary leadership and, more importantly, the existence of an independent women’s organization capable of pressuring for change (Craske 1999: 140, 144, 160).
As was discussed in the previous section, the period of encampment is a peculiar experience for Brazilian rural women. The parity rule of the MST has allowed for more equal participation of women. In terms of political leadership, the parity rule has translated into the generation of a substantial number of female leaders at different levels of the MST organizational structure. Additionally, in every encampment and settlement, and in the movement itself, women have their own sector where they discuss issues that are specific to their situations. However, the parity rule is only an organizational mechanism that facilitates the participation of women. Women’s participation seems actually to take hold only when gender relations, especially those relating to the sexual division of labour within the household, start being modified. Life in the encampment also contributes to a temporary modification of gender roles. Childcare often becomes a collective task of women, and men begin to participate more in the domestic tasks within the tent. Men, especially those squatting alone, are obliged for the first time to do all their domestic chores themselves. All these factors have contributed to the modification of traditional gender roles and have helped to open up space for women to start assuming positions of authority. Salete, who was an acampada in Encrucilhada Natalino during the first occupation in Rio Grande do Sul in the 1980s, remembered: ‘The participation of women was fought for. It was conquered. It had to confront many stereotypes. Today, it has changed a lot. There are many women who have achieved the division of domestic chores.’
In sum, the strategic importance of women’s participation, their increased participation and the numerous women in leadership positions during encampment life all lead to a challenge of the traditional boundaries between the private and public spheres. Because ‘private’ matters, from spousal dispute to domestic violence, can have an impact on the levels of participation of any of the spouses, especially women, and hence on the struggle, other female and male members of the encampment will not hesitate to interfere in domestic issues. What is thus conventionally considered the ‘domestic sphere’ is politicized and becomes the public domain of the collective.
During the transition from encampment to settlement, the toning-down of over-politicization seems to result in a depoliticizing impact on women similar to that which was noted earlier regarding the participation of settlers in general. After the encampment period, during which women take on many political responsibilities and because the proximity between neighbours allowed for the development of collective childcare practices, some settlers return to organizing their family lives around more traditional gender roles within the household (Gonçalves 2005: 158). Similarly, the traditional boundaries between the private and the public spheres, which are modified during the encampment period, slowly reimpose themselves.
In the many cases where male settlers decide to continue militating within the movement, either through the preparation of other groups or through leadership positions, a reversion to a ‘modified sexual division of labour’ occurs. Traditional gender roles are re-established and even the women’s work burden is increased as the ‘cost’ of men’s militancy is transferred on to women and older children. Cecilia, from asentamento Sumaré 1 in the state of São Paulo, recalled: ‘When our children were unmarried and my husband was a political organizer, it was the whole family that farmed the land. My husband was never home.’ Similar stories where the husband’s militancy is made possible by the domestic and agricultural work of the wife and children are common.
In settlements, the issue of the lower level of participation of women, Vanesa told me, was being tackled by trying to provide childcare services for mothers. However, Vanesa added: ‘Many mothers, including myself, believe that our duty towards our children is more important than participating in the movement.’ Fátima was one of those mothers. When she was squatting with her whole family during the first occupation of Fazenda Pirituba, Fátima did not participate because she had three small children under the age of five. When her children had grown up a little, she started participating in the education sector and in marches. At the time of the interview, she sat on the directive board of the cooperative. She explained where she finds herself today politically: ‘With the MST, I gained consciousness. Now I can’t stay in place. A piece of land is not sufficient. We have to struggle for the people who have nothing. We have to help the people so they too can gain consciousness.’ To explain her previous political inactivity, she noted: ‘Women cannot participate as freely as men because of the tasks at home. This affects their level of consciousness.’
However, many women continue participating within the organization but often in accordance with their traditional gender roles. Indeed, there still seems to be a clear division of labour along gender lines within the movement. Men dominate overwhelmingly in the technical sectors, while the great majority of the personnel in the education and health sectors are women. I came across the case of a young woman who had successfully undertaken the two years of training to be a cooperative administrator at ITERRA, one of the state-recognized schools of the MST, but who could not find a place in the production sector and thus ended up switching to the education sector. In a settlement meeting of the production sector I attended in assentamento Rondinha in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, where issues of government programmes, credit and the administration of the co-op were dealt with, the great majority of attendants were men. To address this inequality, many within the MST think that the new ‘micro-villa’ model of settlement, by allowing more communal life and more political activism, could help to maintain women’s participation at a high level. However, here again, it seems to be less an issue of spatial organization of the settlement as a decreased need to be mobilized and participate, as well as the reappearance of the dull compulsion of the imperative of the market, which encourages traditional gender division of labour and roles.
The EZLN: achievements and limits of the Women’s Revolutionary Law The official recognition of women’s rights within the EZLN came in 1993, when women, after initiating a discussion on women’s rights within the ranks of the guerrilla and Zapatista communities, managed to have the Women’s Revolutionary Law adopted by the EZLN. The law proclaimed the right of women to participate in and reach all ranks within the EZLN, the right to work and receive a just salary, the right to decide the number of children they will have, the right to participate in community affairs and hold leadership positions, the right to healthcare and education, and the right to choose their marriage partner. The law also stipulated that women should not be forced to get married, that women should not be beaten by family members or strangers, and that rape and attempted rape should be severely punished (Stephen 2002: 180–93; Eber and Kovic 2003: 23).
Although these rights might seem unremarkable in advanced capitalist societies, the Women’s Revolutionary Law questioned several fundamental customs of subordination of women within certain indigenous communities, such as the buying/selling of brides (Olivera 2005: 623), tolerance of violence against women, and the lack of women’s control over their bodies. June Nash reminds us that in many indigenous cultures of the Americas, gender relations are organized under the principles of a complementarity of differences, whereby men and women, each with their own attributes, contribute to the reproduction of life (Nash 2001: 246). With the struggle to pass the Women’s Revolutionary Law, some Zapatista women also started to question this gender complementarity by adopting a more fluid concept of culture and, subsequently, they have argued for the rejection of cultural traditions that maintain male dominance and patriarchy (ibid.: 182, 248). Echoing similar processes within the indigenous movement across Latin America, Zapatista women have hence ‘opted to vindicate the historic and malleable character of their cultures and to condem those “uses and customs” that offend their dignity’ and have thus struggled ‘for the right to reconstruct, confront and reproduce that culture’ (Hernández Castillo et al. 2006: 66).
Beyond the Women’s Revolutionary Law, and in contrast to the circumstances that exist in the MST, there are no explicit requirements or rules within the EZLN regarding the participation of women in political structures. Unlike in the MST, there is no women’s sector in the EZLN, although some municipalities have created women’s commissions to promote women’s rights and coordinate women’s projects. However, considering the traditional subordination of women within indigenous communities, Zapatista women have also made important progress. Women make up a third of the Zapatista military troops (milicianos and insurgentes) and more than half of its bases de apoyo (Olivera 2005). Women have been crucial in all the periods of development of the EZLN. A minority of them has managed to reach the position of comandante in the CCRI-CG, and others have taken on various significant responsibilities. In January 1994, Comandante Ana María was in charge of the taking of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, the most important city in the highlands of Chiapas. Comandante Ramona was the first Zapatista leader to publicly break the military siege and travel outside Chiapas. She was the EZLN delegate to the first National Indigenous Congress (CNI) in Mexico City in October 1996. In February 2001, Esther was the Zapatista comandante selected to speak in front of the Mexican Congress to demand the adoption of the law on indigenous culture and autonomy. Beyond cases like these, because of the clandestine nature of the organization, it is not an easy task to assess the extent of women’s participation in the EZLN. However, there are numerous testimonies and studies that have chronicled and analysed the participation of women and which have underlined the important changes that the uprising has triggered in gender relations (Rojas 1994; Rovina 1996; Forbis 2003).
In reality, public political participation within the EZLN probably depends on local circumstances. For instance, as noted above, in Santa María women’s public political participation was minimal. This confirms what many observers have noted to the effect that in many Zapatista communities the recognition of women’s rights seems to be a novelty that was introduced de jure by the EZLN to its member communities. The great majority of male Zapatista leaders are conscious of the importance of women’s rights and of the Women’s Revolutionary Law (Stephen 2002: 191–3), but it seems that only the most revolutionary of them have taken them seriously. Hence, if the political participation of women in decision-making differs from community to community, it is probably the level of women’s self-organization and the pressure they are able to exert on men within the community which will determine their level of political participation.
Women’s artisan cooperatives were often the first space, and later the platform, from which women were able to become politically active in their community and region (Nash 2001: 179), although often opposed by male-dominated traditional political leadership (Rus and Collier 2003: 47–8). The organization of micro-projects and collectives for women seems to produce the same results as the women’s sector produces in the MST. It also seems to be one of the paths for women’s increased political participation within the EZLN:
I proudly belong to the Zapatista organization. I was collectively elected to stay as the regional representative and to supervise the cooperative projects of shops. I am the one who promotes workshops with women with a gender perspective. As women we shouldn’t be left behind. I look after nineteen communities on projects with pigs, turkey, cattle, sheep, and twenty-two communities with cooperative shops. I like it, but because I am involved in this movement I feel that I am no longer able to move around freely; if I want to go somewhere I have to ask permission from my Zapatista superiors. (Twenty-two-year-old Zapatista woman, quoted in Olivera 2005: 621)
As is the case with the MST, the political participation of Zapatista women has implied a modification of the sexual division of labour within the household. Within some Zapatista households, women have been able to share domestic responsibilities with men. Zapatista women have underlined the importance of sharing domestic chores as an essential element for allowing their political participation and for the development of their autonomy (Forbis 2003: 247). When their male partners take on domestic tasks, they are able to leave the community and participate in the different community services (e.g. health, education, the organization of women’s collectives) through which autonomy is materialized. The story of María, a community health promoter, speaks of the difficulties of changing the traditional division of labour within the household:
Since the life there [in the camps] is more equal, at first he [her husband] supported my work helping the people here. After I had my first baby, his mother told him that my place as a woman was here in the house to make him his food and take care of my son. He told her that I had an important cargo [political responsibility] and that it was my right, but bit by bit he changed to bad thinking and began to forbid me from leaving the house because I had to make his food. I told him that I didn’t need to ask his permission, but he threatened to leave me. It was like that for a long time, but I talked to my father and some of the women responsables and we had a community assembly. There we talked about this and he was told that he could not take away my right to serve my community. Then he came back to his clear thinking and asked me for my forgiveness. (María, quoted in ibid.: 248)
As is the case with MST women, the latter part of María’s narration confirms the importance of both the support and pressure of other women (and some men) within the community in order for some women to be able to continue their political activism.
Apart from their traditional gender role as caregivers, there are many other restrictions to women’s political participation within indigenous communities. An evident limitation is the fact that women are rarely the title-holders of the family plot, a situation which keeps them out of the ejido assembly. But one of the most striking restrictions is the limited mobility women have within their community, not to say their region, which corresponds to a very strict separation of the private and public spheres. In Santa María, for instance, women rarely left their homes. When they did, it was to go to the family milpa, to gather wood, or to go to the river to wash clothes and take their baths. Sometimes women would visit a relative in their home but they almost never came to the village centre, where all the village infrastructure and institutions are located (e.g. schools, ejido house, jail, basketball field) and where men have their ejido or Zapatista meetings. The only public space where women meet is their section of the river. Starting at puberty, this part of the river is prohibited to men because it is where women bathe. Hence, public space is fairly segregated in indigenous communities, and the private and public spaces clearly demarcated for women.
If the mobility of women is restricted within the community, it is often even more limited when it comes to moving from one community to another. A woman leaving her community exposes herself to threats that can include sexual harassment and rape, two offences which are rarely duly punished by traditional and official justice systems (Nash 2001: 69).19 Of course, these restrictions are reinforced by a series of cultural practices involving men as much as women. Zapatista women who take a position of political authority are subject to jokes, gossip and rumours circulated by other women because their activism leads them to leave the community and enter an environment comprised mainly of men. Other women from the community will suggest, for instance, that there are love affairs going on between women representatives and men. As highlighted earlier, in an indigenous peasant community it is very difficult to carry on as usual when one becomes the subject of rumours. According to the testimony of a regional coordinator of health promoters, ‘Many female compas decided not to continue their activism after being subject to mockery and gossip by the other women of their community.’
During my fieldwork, I did not come across such a case and was not able to corroborate this observation. Nonetheless, as is well known, gender roles are sustained as much by women as by men, with women enforcing traditional gender behaviours on other women who are perceived as deviating from those roles. However, the ostracism of politically active women most probably comes as much from men as from women, and, as the following story of Rosita shows, rumours and gossip can lead a woman to abandon her community:
Rosita is a 17-year-old Tzeltal woman who spent time working and studying in a city three hours away. She said that every time she came home, ‘I would hear rumors about how I was going there to be with men and not work and learn. It made me cry. My father told me to not listen and remember that I was doing important things, but I didn’t like it [the rumors].’ She finally decided to give up and married a young man from another community, so she could get away from the rumors undermining her work. (Forbis 2003: 248)
Although ostracism enforced by women exists, an explanation of the limited participation of women based on the traditional division of labour within the household and its corresponding gender roles appears to shed more light on the limited participation of women within the EZLN.
Women’s lives have improved since the EZLN turned up, everything is better for us indigenous women … but it would be more clearly the case if there was equality for women, but often they have not respected us as women, sometimes we want to go out but our fathers do not let us because women are only there to cook. For our families nothing much of our old habits have changed, although in the organization it did. (Twenty-eight-year-old Zapatista woman from Ocosingo, quoted in Olivera 2005: 621)
This belief that certain tasks are ‘natural’ for women is why, just as in the MST, there seems to be more acceptance of women’s participation in the sector of autonomous education. In effect, an important proportion of education promoters are young women, many of whom are teenagers. These young women are destined to play an active, determining and protagonistic role in their communities because they have taken on the responsibility of forming the new generation of Zapatistas. I was impressed, for instance, by the attitude of self-confidence among young female education promoters compared to the shyness of the oldest students in Santa María, who were just a few years younger than the education promoters.
The political process within the MST and the EZLN has transformed traditional gender roles to an important degree. The militarization of the conflict with the state and the strategic deployment of the traditional gender roles of women for political purposes have led women to take their place at the forefront of the battle – confronting the police in the case of the MST and the army in the case of the EZLN. As highlighted by Craske, Radcliffe and Westwood in the case of other movements, during this period women take on important decision-making responsibilities, but with the ‘normalization’ of politics in MST settlements, women tend to return to their traditional roles. In both the MST and the EZLN, however, when women do manage to be politically active, they continue to be over-represented in sectors corresponding to their traditional gender roles as caregivers (e.g. education and health) and under-represented in sectors corresponding to the gender roles of males (e.g. production, politics, security or the military). This representation speaks to the strength of the entrenched character of gender roles. Drawing from my fieldwork experience, women’s participation is higher in the MST when compared to the EZLN. This difference can be explained by three other factors that distinguish the MST from the EZLN: 1) the rule of parity across the organizational structure; 2) the existence of a separate exclusive sector for women; and 3) an organizational commitment on the part of the MST to gender issues.
Autonomy: an alternative form of building people’s power
To begin to grasp the significance of the development of an autonomous political capacity carried out within the MST and the EZLN, it is important to refer to the lived experiences of marginalized people with the state in Latin America. People who join the MST often experience humiliation in the face of the Brazilian state. In the southern region of the country in particular, humiliation is a form of prejudice strongly based on class difference. For example, many landless people I interviewed mentioned that before entering the MST, they were not treated as citizens. They were not treated as people with rights or as people with a political voice. The lived experiences of Mexico’s poor indigenous peasants with the state structures are even more humiliating than those of the Sem Terra. For most indigenous people, the institutions of the state are alien to them. Because they often do not speak Spanish fluently, they are discriminated against, are badly treated, or are often defrauded by mestizos or indigenous intermediaries. In this context, the MST and EZLN experiences of autonomy converge: they have both emerged as responses to the exclusion from (and discontent with) state institutions.
For Sem Terra and for Zapatistas, autonomy means the construction of a different kind of popular power: one grounded in participation and one capable of opposing state policies and institutions that they consider unjust, undemocratic and unrepresentative. But also, in practice, the decision-making structures of the MST and the EZLN replace the state or, at least, oblige the state to make concessions. The struggles of the MST and the EZLN are not struggles demanding that elites live up to their moral obligation of protecting their subordinates (Scott 1976: 10, 192). As we have seen, and as I will further explain in Chapter 5, both movements seek to fundamentally transform that relationship. However, these experiences of autonomy will retain a radical character only as long as they encourage and allow for the participation of their grassroots members and for the accountability of the leadership. They will weaken if they fail to maintain that focus, as is argued by Wendy Wolford (2010).
Having said this, the autonomy of Zapatista communities is very different from the autonomy of the MST encampments and settlements. For one thing, the autonomy of MST encampments and settlements is not asserted as such, although they do take on the function of the state in many areas. Secondly, and more importantly, Zapatista autonomy, unlike autonomy in the MST, is part of the continental indigenous struggle for the recognition of collective and cultural rights and the right to self-determination. Accordingly, for indigenous people connected to the EZLN, land claims are linked to control of a territory and its natural resources. This emphasis on territorial control constitutes a major difference between the EZLN and the MST approach and an extremely important one. Zapatista autonomy, by addressing directly the issue of control of a territory, and hence the control over natural resources by indigenous people, is much more ambitious than the de facto autonomy of the MST camps and settlements. By challenging absolute property rights, Zapatista autonomy challenges the power of the state at its very core. It challenges the state’s monopoly role over capital investment decisions.
Wendy Wolford argues that ‘once MST members receive land, the government becomes their landlord, creditor, educator and overseer’ (2003b: 513). Even if the state provides most of the financial resources, contrary to Wolford’s opinion, the state is not the ultimate overseer in the MST settlement. The advantage of the MST, in comparison to many other social movements, is that it is not simply a mediator between the state and the settlers. On many issues, the MST settlers are the overseers, deciding answers to questions that run from the type of pedagogic orientation that will be followed in their schools to the type of healthcare philosophy they prefer to the type of technical assistance they want. Moreover, political decision-making in the settlements adopts the forms and practices established by the MST. In other words, the MST represents and articulates ‘autonomous rural communities’ that, regardless of the ‘normalization’ of political life that characterizes settlements, can foster relatively good levels of social mobilization of the militancy.
If we focus on the social relations and practices within settlements, the MST’s replacement of the state is even clearer. If the state is conceptualized as an alienated form of power that is experienced as a sort of external power above the community (and this is the way many MST settlers see the state), Wolford’s statement does not hold. It does not hold for two reasons. First, certain expressions of the state, such as its institutions and personnel, are relatively absent from the settlements and state programmes and services are not implemented from above but have to be negotiated with the community and the movement. For instance, the settlement Fazenda Anoni in Sarandi in the state of Rio Grande do Sul fought for many years to have the state fund the construction of a primary school on the settlement premises.20 Once the school was approved, the state wanted the school to function according to the programmes and norms of the Ministry of Education, while settlers wanted to implement the programme and pedagogy that the MST has developed over its more than twenty years of struggle. The settlers also wanted the teachers to be chosen from the settlement since many of them had followed the MST training programme for educators and had many years of experience as educators during the period of encampment.
The objective of the MST with respect to education, inspired by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, has always been to link it with their struggle for land and to promote the self-esteem of rural people and the emergence of values such as responsibility, collectivism and solidarity. MST pedagogy thus parallels its organizational forms and practices as schools are organized as self-governing bodies where students, teachers and parents are involved in the administration of the school. In the encampment ‘Seguindo o Sonho de Rose’ in Julho de Castilho in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, I attended a meeting on a Saturday where children gathered with educators in the school assembly, discussed the problems that arose during the week, and found collective solutions.
As I was told by the director of the school in assentamento Fazenda Anoni, today appropriately called Escola Chico Mendes, ‘The education that is given in the schools of Brazil is not an education that values peasants and peasant life. It is made for the city and promotes urban life.’ Hence settlers wanted to continue implementing the MST experience with education. They demanded that the settlement be given the responsibility for the development of the programme, while the state provided the funding. After many months of negotiations with the Ministry of Education, the settlers won many of their demands. Their pedagogy was accepted as long as they also covered the objectives of the ministry and a certain number of teachers were selected from the settlement. The current programme follows Paulo Freire’s educational precepts, emphasizing rural life and linking theory with practice, through, for example, the maintenance of a small plot where students grow all kinds of vegetables. The governing body of the school is made up of a series of levels, starting with the classroom núcleos to the school assembly, where students have as much representation as the other members. Students are responsible for many tasks, such as facilities cleanliness, sports and the school journal.
The second challenge to Wolford’s argument above revolves around the fact that political authority in the MST lies in the hands of settlement representatives at the different levels of decision-making and leadership (núcleos, sectors, coordinating committees, etc.), which are linked to regional and national levels of the organization and not to the state. As we have seen, this authority is based on formal and informal sources of power that are often tied together through an experience of collective struggle and solidarity, from the past period of struggle for land to the present period of settlement. This local focus does not necessarily mean that these types of authority and power structures within settlements and the movement in general cannot, at some point, be experienced as external and alienated forms of power by certain settlers. What it certainly means, however, is that in some circumstances settlement structures might be even more difficult to transform than those of the state since they rely on a communitarian experience of empowerment. When this situation arises, many avenues are possible for discontent among settlers, ranging from withdrawal from and indifference to the decision-making process, to continued participation with the objective of changing the correlation of forces within the settlement.
Burguete Cal y Mayor (1998a: 147–50) associates the idea of autonomy with the demand by indigenous communities for democratization at the communitarian and local level. The development of autonomy represents a measure against the usurpation of power by local and regional caciques (local bosses) and a recovery of sovereignty by the community through the recovery of certain forms of participation in the process of selection of representatives, in assemblies, councils and committees. With respect to the Mexican state, Zapatista communities are building their autonomy in relation to the limitations of the current political structures, which, until recently, did not include a specific and particular institutional form that would allow for the participation of indigenous peoples who demand to have certain levels of self-determination over the territories they inhabit.
In this way, autonomous municipalities, as spaces of direct and effective local participation, have changed the logic of local politics and have helped to build a collective political subject, identified with its own political structures and its own political project. A communiqué from the women of the ejido Taniperlas of the autonomous municipalities of Ricardo Flores Magón, on 15 April 1998, expresses this understanding of autonomy eloquently:
The autonomous municipality is not in any way arbitrary or an imposition, as some want to make it. It is the result of a broad agreement among communities that make up this Autonomous Region and that have supported our majority organizations. It does not divide or usurp authority. On the contrary, it unites us in a common effort to get out of the poverty we live in, to build our alternative for the future without the need for dependency. We ask ourselves if we need authorization or permission for this. The municipality also neither imposes nor obliges the minorities that have not agreed. (Women from the ejido Taniperlas, reported in La Jornada 1998)
In many of my conversations with Zapatistas, these types of declarations, emphasizing that decisions taken really do come out of a consensus and that all important decisions are taken in assemblies within communities, were recurrent. Similarly, during the fieldwork, I was able to observe a self-identification of the Zapatistas with EZLN political structures – in the case of the autonomous municipality of Ricardo Flores Magón – that is not commonly found among modern citizens and their country’s institutional political structures, which are increasingly seen as corrupt. This self-identification is based on the conviction by Zapatista bases de apoyo that the power that is exercised within and through the EZLN is the power of the people, the power of the poor. It is also due to the concrete results achieved by the movement, especially in the areas of education, health and conflict resolution.
Regarding education, like the MST, most EZLN autonomous municipalities have developed their own pedagogy and curriculum with the help of solidarity groups, NGOs and volunteers. However, they have also had to tackle a much more basic problem. One of the main problems with official schools in indigenous communities has traditionally been the high rate of absenteeism of primary teachers from their post. According to the testimony of many Zapatistas in the community, corroborated by my own fieldwork observations of the ‘extended holidays’ taken by the teacher of the official school, state-appointed primary teachers often leave their post for lengthy periods of time. The fact that, most of the time, they are not from the community where they teach and thus are not ejidatarios seems to be a major reason for their prolonged and recurrent leaves. The very low salaries paid to rural teachers can also be a reason for their absenteeism.
Whatever the past reasons for teachers leaving their schools unattended may be, many Zapatista communities have sought to find a solution to avoid this problem by forming their own education promoters. The Ricardo Flores Magón Autonomous Municipality decided to train community education promoters who would take charge of elementary education in their home community. A training programme of community education promoters was thus set up. National practitioners, following popular education philosophy, accompanied and assisted with the elaboration of the curriculum and the basic training of educators. The objective is to have at least one education promoter for each community. However, in trying to achieve this goal, communities face many difficulties, such as the very real subsistence needs of teachers or the need for sufficient income on the part of education promoters.
Many strategies have been tried, such as providing subsistence support to the education promoter through labour service on the milpa or encouraging young women, who tend to stay in the community more than young men, to become education promoters. For example, Zapatista families had offered to help the education promoter in Santa María (who was landless but working his elderly father’s land) by collectively cultivating his father’s milpa in his place. The education promoter refused the offer, arguing that he was in need of money and had to seek employment in the city. As for cases where young women have been encouraged to become education promoters, their continued work in that position is likely to end once they marry. Unless the Zapatista families are able to modify the sexual division of labour within the household, women will still be the sole care providers for children and will be inclined to shift their efforts from being educators of others’ children to the care of their own. In both cases, therefore, the problem demanding resolution remains, once again, securing family subsistence and reproduction. This challenge can be met in different ways but in the long run will probably have to involve a combination of the modification of land tenure and use, the collective work of community members, the transformation of gender roles, and some kind of salary. In a conversation with the person responsible for issues of education in the community, I was told that the autonomous municipality was thinking of giving education promoters a symbolic salary. When I asked where the money would come from, the person could not or would not give me an answer. Considering the demographic pressure on land in Zapatista communities and the scarce resources with which Zapatista municipalities have to work, this challenge will not be an easy one to overcome.
As for the area of health, the Zapatistas of the Ricardo Flores Magón autonomous municipality have built a clinic where they provide medical attention for the whole population, Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas, located in Arroyo Granizo in the Cañada of Santo Domingo on the northern fringe of the Lacandona jungle. It is staffed by four people: two Zapatista health promoters who coordinate the work of a network of community health promoters and are in charge of the pharmacy; one voluntary doctor who works twenty days and rests ten days; and a volunteer dentist who comes to the clinic for one month every three months. The clinic maintains a pharmacy with conventional pharmaceutical drugs that can treat the majority of the illnesses to which people are exposed in the region. At the time of the fieldwork, this clinic was about to receive equipment to conduct simple surgery.21
According to testimonies from Zapatistas, a few months after the autonomous clinic opened, local priístas negotiated with the federal government to open a clinic. Soon, the federal government started the construction of their own clinic that would rival the Zapatista one and would be located just beside it. The whole community forced the construction contractor to leave town with all his equipment. The feeling that was conveyed to us by the health promoter was that for years the community had asked for a clinic and the state had never answered their demands. Deciding to build a clinic because the Zapatistas had built their own was ‘too little, too late’ for the majority of the community. The health promoter told me, ‘It only generated frustration and anger within the community.’ After a few months, the construction of the state clinic resumed. The official clinic functioned with a resident doctor for less than a year, when the doctor left the town. At the time of the fieldwork, the clinic was abandoned and the state maintained only a casa de la salubridad (health house) staffed with a part-time nurse. One of the Zapatista health promoters told us that one of the main problems faced by official health facilities in the region was to make sure that doctors brought in from other regions would stay.
In addition to building the health clinic, the Zapatista communities of the Ricardo Flores Magón autonomous municipality also took the decision to set up a community-based health programme in 1996. They sought the support of a Mexican NGO that has helped with the training of community health promoters since 1997. According to the Zapatista regional health coordinator, 120 persons started the training but in 2003 only 35 completed it. Of these 120 persons, 30 dropped out definitively. At the beginning of the programme, 15 of the members of the training group were women, but eventually only four stayed on. According to the clinic’s health promoter, the social pressure on the women from their communities was too strong and only in the case of the four who stayed was their commitment to the programme strong enough to overcome the gossip and mockery to which they were subjected by some members of their community.
The challenge of keeping a health promoter in a community differs from the problems that are faced by an education promoter, since the duties of a health promoter do not keep that person away from his or her family and agricultural tasks. Health promoters still have the time to cultivate their milpa and attend to their children. Still, health promoters are like any other subsistence peasant in the community. If they have no access to land in order to survive, they might very well have to migrate either temporarily to nearby towns or states or for prolonged periods of time to central and northern Mexico or even the United States.
To a certain extent, even non-Zapatistas have acknowledged the popular character of the EZLN structures of power and the organization’s concrete achievements. Moreover, a contest for legitimacy that pits the state structures against the Zapatista autonomous structures of power is currently under way in Chiapas. An incident between Zapatistas and priístas that took place during our fieldwork in Santa María illustrates this point. During a day when we were absent from the community, priísta authorities of the ejido accused the nine-year-old son of a Zapatista ejidatario – a representative on the JBG – of having stolen a calf. Even though the calf was found that same day in a ditch, the father was arrested and put in the ejido jail. Later that night, the father broke the wooden door of the jail and went back to his house. The next day, he went to work on his milpa and carried on with his day as usual. In retaliation for this offence, in the evening, when many men rest and socialize in the centre of the village, priístas put locks on the autonomous school, the only physical Zapatista symbol in the community. At that time, the tension that had been building for days increased, and insults and threats began to be heard from both sides. Zapatistas broke the locks, and the tension escalated until all the Zapatista families (men, women and children) gathered with wooden sticks, ready to fight the priísta authorities, who had been joined by some of their supporters. In the midst of shouts and insults, rumours started to circulate that one priísta was armed with a rifle and was ready to kill the accused Zapatista and that other priístas were going to burn down the school. Luckily, people on both sides calmed down, priístas promised to take the issue to the state authorities, and most of the people ended up going back to their homes. The Zapatistas did not see the conflict ending there, however. Our Zapatista neighbour stayed up that night guarding our cabaña and the school, after returning the machete he had borrowed from me that day and asking me to keep it close to me and to secure the door of the cabaña. The following days were very tense, all kinds of rumours flew about, and the representative on the JBG received death threats.
After the conflict, people from both sides raised the possibility that a commission from the autonomous municipality or the JBG might come to try to settle the dispute. What was surprising, though, was that neither the Zapatistas nor the priístas took the idea that the EZLN commission would rule in favour of the Zapatistas for granted. On the contrary, the Zapatistas made a real effort to document the incident, asking my wife and me to help them write a report. As for the priístas, they threatened not to wait for the commission to come but to go directly instead to the autonomous council of the autonomous municipality to present their case and seek punishment for the Zapatistas. The priístas then abandoned the idea, thinking that, since we were foreigners, we had filmed or photographed the whole event, in which case their culpability would be revealed.
According to what we could gather from conversations with Zapatistas during our fieldwork, the experience of the JBG was at the time still under evaluation, and it was not guaranteed that it would continue. This new experience of autonomy that the JBG represented, which was further removed from the communities, had to demonstrate to the Zapatista bases de apoyo that the powers of the JBG do not infringe upon or reduce the level of participation in communities and municipalities. Today they are fully accepted by the communities.
Experiences of autonomy have been and will be crucial for the development of zapatismo. Such experiences are the Zapatistas’ most tangible result. These experiences are also crucial because, after the clandestine experience of the guerrillas, they represent a second laboratory for the construction of popular power by the EZLN as an organization. They are perhaps even more important than the experiences during the clandestine period of the EZLN because they are public experiments that are confronting traditional and official structures of power. Since 1994, contrary to what had happened before, this struggle for recognition and legitimacy among Zapatista and non-Zapatista communities has been carried out relatively openly. An exhaustive evaluation of the experiences of Zapatista autonomy is very difficult if not impossible to carry out because of the difficulties of doing research in an environment as conflictive and secretive as the one that exists in Zapatista territories. The two developments described above suggest, though, that, considering the circumstances, the results are impressive.
First, the movement has expanded outside its region of origin and has now a significant presence in the northern, highlands, and frontier regions of Chiapas. In this latter region, the EZLN has even made headway in municipalities where the indigenous caciques linked to the PRI were dominant. The appearance of the EZLN in these regions has generated violent reactions from these indigenous elites, as happened in the case of Zinacantan near San Cristóbal de las Casas (Hernández Navarro 2004). Secondly, the EZLN has been able to develop some institutionalization, with an internal division of labour, and a geographic and political allocation of authority. It has been able to provide crucial services such as health and education and seems to be gaining legitimacy within the regions where it has a presence.
For the Zapatistas, the autonomous communities and municipalities and the JBG are also clearly socially and racially differentiated spaces. They represent the political decision-making bodies of the poor and indigenous people. From the perspective of indigenous rights, as I have argued in the previous chapter, these experiences of autonomy fall clearly under the umbrella of the continental struggle to reclaim rights to self-determination and self-government by indigenous people (Assies 2000). For the indigenous Zapatistas, this struggle means the end of their political subordination and the revalorization of indigenous culture and practices. However, these changes do not constitute the sole meaning of autonomy. For Zapatistas, from the very beginning the idea of autonomy meant the construction of a structure of self-government within civil society that could be a first step in what Subcomandante Marcos called the ‘autonomization of civil society’ (EZLN 1997b: 147–8). By this idea of ‘autonomization of civil society’, Zapatistas were referring to the creation and development of forms of popular power apart from and alternative to the state, to the creation and development of structures of popular sovereignty organized democratically for and by the poor and clearly identified with an anti-neoliberal revolutionary project. The limitations to the development of Zapatista autonomy, due to the fragmentation of part of its social base and the relative loss of visibility of the EZLN since 2000, can be explained, as I will show in Chapter 5, by the EZLN’s inability or unwillingness to establish lasting alliances with other local peasant and indigenous organizations, national movements and political parties, as well as by its decision of not collaborating with the state.
In this chapter, we have seen that the MST and the EZLN perform the functions that Antonio Gramsci attributed to the political party. They politicize, organize and train their membership to acquire the capacity to be ‘organic intellectuals’ capable of self-governement. These movements are able to do this because one of the major strengths rests on the fact that they control real spatially delimited rural communities. In the case of the MST, encampamentos are created from scratch before they become assentamentos, while in the case of the EZLN their inhabitants had to be convinced to join the organization. However, in both cases the MST and the EZLN establish autonomous structures of popular power that facilitate consciousness-raising and the politicization of the membership. They achieve this because they are organized around a series of assemblies and on the basis of rotating leaderships that distribute representation responsibilities among several individuals and decision-making bodies across the community. Women have had to struggle within the organizations to be recognized as equals and be able to actively participate, and within their household to modify the sexual division of labour. While the most dangerous moments of the struggle for land substantially modify traditional gender relations, the normalization of politics favours the return to traditional gender roles in Brazil as well as in Chiapas. However, the MST has established a principle of parity in all representative bodies of the organization, creating a women’s sector within the movement, and showing greater commitment to the principle of gender equality, which has produced better results than shown by the EZLN. These experiences of exercise of power by women and men are the basis of the autonomy and mobilization capacity of the MST and the EZLN that allows them to confront, challenge or negotiate with the state. In many areas, the movements also take on the functions of the state. However, in the case of the EZLN, this autonomy is also embedded in a struggle for decolonization and for self-determination rooted in an indigenous nationalism.
The development alternatives presented by the MST and the EZLN do not rest only on the construction of a different kind of polity than the one that is at the root of representative liberal democracy. They are also based on the existence, maintenance and possible development of an alternative logic of production oriented towards self-reliance and the satisfaction of human needs. I will explore some of the features of this logic of production in the next chapter.