5 REVOLUTION IN TIMES OF NEOLIBERAL HEGEMONY
This chapter will analyse the ways in which the MST and the EZLN address issues of alliance with other social and political actors and will assess the results of their political strategy for broader social change at the national level. I will look at the relationship the two movements have established with different sectors of civil society and the strategy they have adopted towards existing political parties and the state. The chapter will show that both the MST and the EZLN, although collaborating with left-wing political parties, have placed priority on changing the correlation of forces within civil society and by participating in, or trying to generate, a national movement of opposition to neoliberal policies. However, as I will make clear, neither movement has been able to strike an alliance with other peasant organizations, and neither has been able to generate the broad national coalitions it would like to see emerge. In my view, although recognizing the peculiarity of their experience of control of a territory that generates autonomous rural communities with politicized grassroots members, the MST and the EZLN have presumed that other organizations have the ability to adopt the same confrontational tactics that they have adopted. This shortcoming explains why they have had difficulty in finding allies with similar perspectives on radical social change. Within their respective national societies, the MST and the EZLN argue for radical social, political and cultural change, while most social movements and political parties on the left in Brazil and Mexico are mainly engaged in seeking incremental changes within the existing national political structures, often through clientelist or corporativist links with political parties or the state. In some ways, the MST and the EZLN swim against the current when compared with most left-wing social forces in Brazil and Mexico.
With regard to the way they approach state institutions and political parties, the MST and the EZLN have departed from a similar position of attempting to engage with state institutions and political parties of the left but have moved towards divergent strategies. The MST, although it has constantly criticized the state, has always remained open to dialogue and negotiations, while the EZLN, after negotiating with the state on two occasions (in 1994 and in 1996), decided in 1997 to break off any dialogue with the state, accusing it of not negotiating in good faith. As a consequence, MST settlers are able to pressure the state for funding and programmes, while the Zapatistas have broken most ties with the Mexican state and the EZLN has called on its member communities to decline any state funding and refuse to participate in any state programme. As for their respective positions towards political parties, throughout its history the MST has maintained a strong alliance with the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT), while the EZLN has moved from an attempt to build an alliance with the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) to a complete rejection of the electoral process and a ferocious denunciation of the state and the PRD. As a consequence, the EZLN has concentrated almost all of its effort on building an alliance with progressive sectors of Mexican civil society.
I will argue that this early divergence in strategy towards the state and political parties, as shown by the MST on the one hand and the EZLN on the other, is due to three main factors: the different circumstances of struggle of the two organizations; the different results of their negotiations with the state; and the differences in the types of links and relationships that have existed between each movement and political parties. My analysis of the politics of alliance of the MST and the EZLN and their relationship with the state and political parties is inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the extended state and its influence on the role of the Modern Prince, which I have already presented in Chapter 3. What it is still necessary to further specify is his understanding of the role that the Modern Prince is supposed to play in relation to other classes within civil society, and the combination of actions in both civil society and political society.
The strategic conclusion that Gramsci draws from the importance of hegemony for power is that a radical social change cannot simply be carried out through the seizure of state power. Political actions need to target the institutions of the state and the transformation of the economic structure, but imply a long-term process understood as a moral and intellectual reform of society in which the working class is transformed from a subordinate class into a leading class, and ultimately into a hegemonic class. As seen in Chapter 3, all this is the task of the Modern Prince and the organic intellectuals. Hegemony, in its revolutionary sense, is thus a political practice that seeks to change reality, specifically the correlation of social and political forces, through the gradual acceptance by various groups within civil society of the particular political project that has been initiated by the Modern Prince. The actions of the Modern Prince are thus expected to lead to the formation of a broad revolutionary class alliance that Gramsci calls a ‘historical bloc’. The political project that mobilizes this historical bloc cannot simply be a doctrine or an ideology that represents the interests of the popular classes and of society at large, but more importantly has to translate into a set of ideas and values that are accepted and internalized by all the members of the historical bloc.
As already noted, for Gramsci it is within the institutions of civil society that the ruling class generates and maintains the consent of the governed and it is thus within this sphere that bourgeois hegemony needs to be challenged in the first place. However, political society and civil society should not be understood as strictly separated spheres. They should rather be conceived as two interrelated spheres with a dialectical relationship to one another. That said, Gramsci’s analytical distinction suggests that he recognized that a different dynamic existed within each sphere. For instance, consent, but also politicization and social mobilization of subaltern classes, develops within civil society and is not bound to the same set of procedures that characterize politics within political society (institutional politics). Civil society mobilization can obviously have an important impact on institutional politics, at the same time that decisions within political society can limit the range of options open to social movements within civil society. This distinction between political society and civil society led Gramsci to constantly evaluate the consequences of events and developments in one sphere or the other.
State power, radical social change and the corporatist legacy in Brazil and Mexico
Historically, the strength of the Latin American left lay in its capacity to simultaneously mobilize and politicize the working classes while fighting to take state power through elections or armed revolution. In addition, most revolutionary movements in Cuba, Chile, Peru and Nicaragua also promoted forms of class power through the creation of neighbourhood councils, factory committees, cooperatives and other forms of collective self-management or self-government. The privileged form of political organization, as was the case throughout the world, was the political party, which subordinated all the different movements (unions, peasant organizations, shanty-town associations) and struggles to its strategy of gaining spaces of power through negotiations or alliances with nationalist forces or taking state power on its own. In many Latin American countries, communist parties, even if they were often quite small, were successful at supporting and coordinating actions and mobilization. During the period of military dictatorships and authoritarian rule of the 1970s and 1980s, one of the main objectives of the juntas was to disarticulate or annihilate left-wing political parties, rendering them illegal, repressing and ‘disappearing’ their militants. The mobilizations that led to the fall of authoritarian regimes in the mid-1980s and the subsequent protests against the early phase of implementation of neoliberal policies were thus not carried out by political parties, but by social movements (Eckstein 2001 [1989]). Several scholars, comparing them to movements in Europe, argued that these were ‘new social movements’ (Slater 1991; Alvarez and Escobar 1992).
Since the early 1990s, some researchers working on new social movements have emphasized the emergence of ‘new forms of doing politics’, the construction of ‘new forms of social power’, and the shift in strategy from a focus on the conquest of state power towards a ‘search for autonomy’ or an ‘alternative society’ (Calderón et al. 1992: 24, 28). Others have highlighted that one of the main goals was the ‘transformation of the dominant political culture’ (Alvarez et al. 1998: 9) and the development of ‘a project of a new sociability’ (Dagnino 1998: 52). Compared with movements twenty-five years earlier, which had ‘strong state/political orientations’, new social movements were ‘searching for their own cultural identities and spaces for social expression, political or otherwise’ (Calderón et al. 1992: 23). Regardless of theoretical perspective, analysts observed that these social movements shared a profound distrust of the state and political parties and were reluctant to collaborate with them. However, some observers could not but caution against hasty generalizations, stressing that social movements, although suspicious of manipulation and jealous of their autonomy, did not always shy away from political parties (Hellman 1992, 1995; Dagnino 1998: 56; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001).
It would be difficult to argue to the contrary in the cases of Brazil and Mexico, where many social movements participated in the creation and development of the PT (Keck 1989: 180; Riethof 2004) and of the PRD (Hellman 1995: 169; Carr 1996; Anguiano 1997). In fact, it would be even more difficult to argue that social movements refuse to collaborate with parties if one studies contemporary peasant movements. One of the fundamental characteristics of new peasant movements has been their constant engagement in coalition building with other political forces, including parties (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001: 112) and active participation in electoral politics (Veltmeyer 1997: 156). Here, even the EZLN, which has not established a permanent alliance with the PRD and which decided to reject electoral politics in 1997, could not be said never to have attempted to influence electoral politics.
Zapatismo, however, has brought back an old debate within the left. Should a revolutionary movement ultimately seek state power in order to change society, or should its objective be to change society from within in order to abolish the state and replace it with new political institutions controlled by the labouring classes? Should and can it combine both objectives? Can a revolutionary movement use the contradictions within the capitalist state to occupy institutional spaces and pressure for policies that can reinforce popular struggles without being co-opted?
The MST and the EZLN have very different understandings of the role of state power within the process of social change. However, for these social movements, the question of state power is a very practical one. It is a question to be approached by taking into consideration the actual history of national state formation and the concrete experience of each movement with the state, as shown in Chapter 2. After forty years of broken promises and betrayals from state officials, many indigenous subsistence peasants in the Lacandona jungle of Chiapas have come to see the state as the main class enemy. The Zapatista rejection of state power and their decision to build forms of self-government derives as much from this experience as from an ideological reflection on how best to radically transform society. In contrast, throughout its history the MST has had a dual strategy towards the state and has always believed that it was important to struggle for political space within the state, be it at the local, regional or national level, with the legislative or executive branch, or even within specific ministries or state agencies. The success of its struggle for land depends on the state’s decision to expropriate land and allocate resources to agrarian reform settlements. Hence, the MST has, at times, confronted state policies while negotiating and collaborating with the state on other occasions. Thus, it is important for the MST to influence or count on allies within the state. However, like the Zapatistas, the MST has always privileged the politicization of its membership by promoting broad political participation in the organizational structure of the movement.
The corporatist legacy and left-wing parties in Brazil and Mexico During the twentieth century, the relationship between the state and civil society in Brazil and Mexico followed corporatist lines. The state created political organizations in order to control the popular classes and impede the development of autonomous organizations. In Brazil, this was carried out first during President Getulio Vargas’ dictatorship by linking unions to the state and later by creating the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro (Brazilian Labour Party, PTB) in 1945, while in Mexico the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Revolutionary Institutional Party, PRI), which remained in power under different names for more than seventy years, was so omnipresent in society that people have referred to it as the party-state. The clientelist legacy of corporatism is thus much denser in Mexico because popular classes were organically linked to the regime as early as the 1930s until 2000. In Brazil, no party has stayed in power that long, and peasants began to be a subject of attention from the state only in the late 1950s.
Until the mid-1980s, Brazil and Mexico were ruled by authoritarian regimes, Brazil under a military dictatorship from 1964 and Mexico under a one-party state from the 1920s. In both countries, the process of transition to liberal democracy was very slow and controlled by the ruling elite. In Brazil, the transition had two distinctive dynamics. On the one hand, the transition was being negotiated from above, as several sectors of the bourgeoisie and the upper middle class wanted to move to a civilian regime in which they would have more power. On the other hand, it was pushed through by the rise of social movements, particularly the new unionism in the city and the countryside, which led to the creation of the Central Única de Trabalhadores (Workers’ Unitary Union, CUT) and later the PT. In Mexico, although the 1968 student movement and the subsequent rise of underground guerrilla movements in the 1970s signalled rising discontent, the transition was much slower than in Brazil. Although the right-wing Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, PAN) was making some headway in municipal elections before, the transition really began to unfold in the run-off to the presidential elections of 1988 with a split inside the PRI between neoliberals aligned with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the official presidential candidate, and the nationalists led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Banking on his prestige and popularity, Cárdenas broke with the PRI and built a coalition to support his candidacy (the Frente Democrático Revolucionario, Democratic Revolutionary Front, FDR), which later became the PRD. By the early 1990s, most left-wing parties ended up dissolving and merging into the PRD, and the leaders of the old left subordinated themselves to the PRI runaways. The great majority of the social movements stayed with the PRI, except for a few independent movements, such as the Asamblea de Barrios of Mexico City or the Coalición Obrera, Campesina e Estudiantil del Istmo (COCEI) of Oaxaca.
Throughout their history, the PT and the PRD have opposed neoliberal policies. However, beyond a return to a modified developmental-populist state, neither elaborated an authentic alternative political project. The PT emerged from a process of radicalization of unions and the rise of popular movements that wanted to create a political party that would truly represent their interests. It inherited a militant culture that emphasized politicization and participation of the grassroots membership and combined street mobilizations with inventive experiences of direct democracy, such as participatory budgeting. Internally, made up of several highly organized tendencies, the PT was extremely dynamic.
Until around the turn of the century, the PT was primarily a party of activists and organized tendencies. In 1982 its membership totalled 245,000 and it is said to have reached around one million members in the late 1980s. The most active petistas (PT members) belong to one of the numerous tendencies whose ideologies range from different variants of Marxism to European-style social democracy. Tendencies have their own leaders, meetings and newspapers, and are constantly negotiating to influence the party, and to have some of their members appointed within the party, to PT governments or as candidate for office. Until the 1990s, the majority tendency was ‘Articulação’, which was dominated by the autênticos. In the early 1990s, Articulação was split into three tendencies, making the internal politics much more dynamic but also less cohesive. Reflecting this diversity, PT’s ideology has always been eclectic and has evolved over the years. When it was created, most petistas called themselves socialists but criticized socialist regimes of eastern Europe for not respecting democratic rights. At the same time, most of them were also very critical of the inequalities inherent in the capitalist system and the restrictive character of liberal democracy. Many also argued for a democratic revolution that would redistribute wealth and implement forms of direct democracy. Since the end of the 1990s, the PT has moved to the centre, and some of its prominent leaders have accepted many of the precepts of neoliberalism (see Sader 2011: 43–66). To some extent, this has been influenced by the need to broaden its electorate. In 1982, in the first presidential elections in which the PT participated, Lula garnered a disappointing 3.5 per cent of the votes. In 1989, Lula managed to obtain 47 per cent, but lost to Fernando Collor de Mello. In 2002, after two other consecutive failed attempts against Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula obtained 61 per cent in the second round, and the PT finally reached its goal of winning the presidential election.
Nothing in the history of the PRD resembles the trajectory of the PT. Despite the fact that many left-wing parties that had merged into the PRD had a long history of involvement in peasant and working-class struggles, most of them, with the exception of the Partido Socialista Unificado de México (PSUM), the heir of the Mexican Communist Party, were rather small in terms of numbers, and rarely achieved national coverage. Most of the smaller parties were composed of a few thousand activists who adhered to the different strands of Marxism, such as Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc. The PSUM was the biggest party and included a broader array of ideological tendencies, even including social democrats and Eurocommunists (Carr 1996: ch. 9). Owing to the political reform of 1978, which lowered the percentage of votes necessary to be allocated seats in the Federal Congress, by the end of the 1980s many of these small left-wing parties had already started to move away from mobilization and direct involvement in popular struggles to privilege participation in the electoral process and internal battles within parties (Anguiano 1997: 71–9). However, none of them could have been said to be anything close to a mass party of the kind the Brazilian PT was already. Once the ex-priístas took control of the PRD, they brought with them the old PRI practices of personal rather than ideological loyalty in the internal processes of the party. Although mobilizations were important in the earlier years of the party, the more the PRD integrated within the political regime the more electoral politics came to dominate the party. As with the PRI, the PRD’s relationship with social movements has been characterized by the co-optation of leaders and clientelist links with the grassroots. Electorally, the party has been relatively successful. It has been governing Mexico City since 1997 and its candidates have won several state governorships.
As both parties became further integrated into the political regime, both Brazil’s PT and Mexico’s PRD began to accommodate their discourse to neoliberalism and adopted a narrower understanding of politics, increasingly restricted to elite negotiations in the corridors of parliament.
The MST: occupying all possible political spaces
Since its creation in 1984, the MST has always recognized the need to participate on all fronts (rural workers’ unions, small farmers’ organizations, coalitions against neoliberalism, and political parties). But it has also been conscious of the need to maintain its autonomy with regard to political parties (Wright and Wolford 2003: 41; Fernandes 2000: 83–93; Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000: 26; Scherer-Warren 1988: 257). The MST has thus always adopted a political strategy that attempts to have influence over or establish alliances within both civil society and political society.
The first and most important struggle of the MST is the struggle for agrarian reform, followed by the modification of agricultural policy, as well as general opposition to the neoliberal policies of the Brazilian state. Hence, the first and most important interlocutor with which the MST interacts is the Brazilian federal state. Most of the actions of the MST are geared to pressuring the state to accelerate land distribution, to improve credit schemes, and to support programmes for the country’s small agricultural producers. However, more broadly, the MST understands that the support of certain sectors of society can be very important in winning these battles with the state. Hence, to achieve its particular goals as well as its more general goals of transforming Brazilian society, and following a relatively standard strategy for the traditional Latin American left, the MST has called upon ‘workers, intellectuals, small businessmen, retired people, housewives, and students’ to join them in order to elaborate a ‘Programme of the Brazilian People’ (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000: 24). Hence, the MST believes that it must first give priority to collaboration and establishment of alliances with other peasant and workers’ organizations and later extend these to other groups that radically oppose neoliberalism.
Breaking isolation and stigmatization and leading the struggle for agrarian reform During the mid-1980s until the early 1990s, the MST was mainly focused on the task of creating a national organizational structure. However, the context of democratic opening initiated by the ruling military junta under Figueiredo in the late 1970s, and the subsequent negotiations that occurred in the 1980s for recasting features of the political system, also allowed many MST militants and leaders to acquire political experience outside the movement through their involvement in the new unionism and in the creation of the PT. The first national campaign in which the landless participated was the Diretas Ja campaign in 1983/84, which was a campaign led by the PT to demand the organization of direct elections for president. However, the two most important events of the 1980s for rural political actors were the elaboration of the Primer Plano Nacional de Reforma Agrária (First National Plan for Agrarian Reform, PNRA) in 1985 and the rewriting of the Constitution by a Constituent Assembly in 1988.
Given that the support of the rural sectors had been an important factor in the negotiations between the democratic forces of the Alianza Democrática, the coalition of parties of the centre-right, and the military dictatorship, the democratic forces had promised to carry out an agrarian reform once they assumed power. With the exception of the MST, which at the time was still a minor organization, all rural organizations participated in the elaboration of the PNRA and supported the government of the Alianza Democrática, which, under the leadership of Tancredo Neves, took office in 1985. However, very quickly, progressive forces within the alliance lost ground, and the PNRA was transformed so substantially by conservative elements that it never managed to carry out the plan that would have enabled 450,000 landless families to settle within the first four years of democratic rule. As I have already described in Chapter 2, something very similar happened with the negotiations around the agrarian clauses of the Constitution of 1988, the only other institutional transformation that could have guaranteed agrarian reform. Nonetheless, in spite of this adverse political context, 89,350 families were settled between 1985 and 1989 (Fernandes 2000: 268).
The presidency of Fernando Collor de Mello (1990–92) was marked by the further marginalization and repression of the MST. Having close links with conservative sectors of the Brazilian ruling class, including the landed class, Collor de Mello had no intention of carrying out any kind of agrarian reform. During his administration, political harassment of the MST increased, land distribution faced countless judicial, budgetary and administrative delays, and programmes of technical assistance were terminated. Collor de Mello barely distributed land. According to official statistics, Collor is said to have settled 38,428 families, but many independent studies question those numbers, arguing that the true figure is between 15,000 and 23,000 families (Coletti 2005: 193), very far off the numbers promised in the PNRA. Because of the climate of harassment, land occupations decreased during this period, and the MST retreated by trying to consolidate its settlements. After Collor de Mello’s impeachment in 1992 on the grounds of corruption, his successor, Itamar Franco, took a more sympathetic attitude towards the MST and agrarian reform. Franco named Osvaldo Russo, who was close to the Confederação Nacional dos Trabalhadores na Agricultura (CONTAG), as the head of INCRA. He also met with the MST leadership in February 1993, and saw to it that the laws that were supposed to clarify the criteria for land expropriation established in the 1988 Constitution were finally passed in 1993 (ibid.: 195). The political harassment of the MST decreased and land occupations resumed again, and 65,565 families gained access to land between 1990 and 1994 (Fernandes 2000: 269).
Prior to 1994, the MST focus was mainly on simple resistance, consolidating its organizational structure, establishing its modus operandi with regard to land occupation, and elaborating the broader political objectives of the movement. For instance, in its National Plan for 1989–93, the MST highlights very clearly the internal tasks for the following years. One of the most striking objectives that the MST set for itself, only four years after its creation, was the need to ‘professionalize’ the movement, by guaranteeing the development of an organizational infrastructure and by developing training programmes, both political and technical, for all levels of its leadership and membership (MST 1989: 18–19). The issue of the training of the membership became ‘the political priority’ of the organization’s executives at all levels (ibid.: 18). The movement was also conscious of the need to work internally on a communication strategy that would link the movement across Brazil, and decided that it would use a printed journal as its main medium. The issue of the isolation of the movement was also a theme that preoccupied the leadership at the time. Hence the Second National Plan also pointed to the need to develop public relations and propaganda skills to convey the message of the MST to other sectors of society (ibid.: 16, 19).
With this Second National Plan, the MST moved forward with its intention to ‘masificar’ (massify) the struggle for land by multiplying land occupations and expanding into new regions where conditions were favourable for the development of a mass movement. Two regions were selected for this phase of the struggle: the impoverished north-east region and Pontal do Paranapanema, in the westernmost region of the state of São Paulo. Navarro contends that the MST acquired a national dimension when it ‘discovered’ the potential of the state of São Paulo and moved its headquarters to the capital of that state (Navarro 2000: 39). According to Navarro, the MST started to gain media coverage when the mass media of São Paulo, where national broadcasting centres are located, began covering the land occupations that were occurring in Pontal do Paranapanema almost on a weekly basis. From that platform, the MST became an ‘obligatory spokeperson’ on the issue of agrarian reform and on settlements (ibid.: 39). Thanks to this visibility, the use of land occupation as its main form of struggle and innovative mobilization strategies, the MST began to lead the struggle for agrarian reform. It cannot be said, however, as we will see below, that it was yet considered anything like the leading organization of the peasantry.
It was during the first administration of President Cardoso that the MST really came to have the stature of a national movement. In July 1995, the MST held its third national congress. Here the delegates established two priorities: to continue the struggle for agrarian reform and to oppose the neoliberal policies of the Cardoso government (Coletti 2006b). From that point on, the MST was transformed from being a movement centred on the struggle for land and agrarian reform into a movement of resistance against neoliberalism. However, most of its actions and the public interventions of its leaders were still centred on issues related to land or agriculture. Even if its political tactics of direct action, such as land occupation, public building sit-ins and street marches, were already common practices in many of the regions where it was present, the MST had not until then really caught the attention of the Brazilian public. A series of factors can explain the increased visibility of the MST during this period: a more moderate response from President Cardoso to the MST’s demands, two massacres of landless people in 1995 and 1996, and the March to Brasilia in 1997 (Ondetti 2008).
Violence, selective assassinations and disappearances have always been tactics used by Brazilian landowners to impede the emergence and mobilization of rural organizations that challenge their dominance of the countryside. However, even though the numbers of deaths in rural conflicts were already high by the mid-1990s, the press had paid little to no attention to this fact. But in 1995, in the municipality of Corumbiará in the state of Rondônia, nine landless people were killed by the police, 138 wounded and 350 imprisoned (Galdino 2005: 147). The press covered the massacre, and the struggle of landless people began to be publicized. A year later, on 17 April 1996 in Eldorado dos Carajás in the state of Pará, repressive forces killed nineteen MST activists. This time, the news reached an international public. Within a few days of the event, the story was the subject of an article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times and appeared on the front page of Le Monde in France (Comparato 2000: 203). President Cardoso, fearing protests from human rights groups and possible damage to his international image, decided to cancel his imminent visit to the United States (ibid.: 204). A few weeks later, on 2 May 1997, hoping to show that agrarian reform was among his priorities, Cardoso received a delegation from the MST in Brasilia. These events broke the isolation that had been imposed on the MST by the rest of Brazilian society, and in 1997 the MST decided to counter-attack and organized the National March for Land Reform, Jobs and Justice. The march, two months long, proceeded to Brasilia in three columns1 of MST families (men, women, children and elderly people). The participants arrived in Brasilia on 17 April 1997, exactly a year after the Eldorado dos Carajás massacre. This was the first major protest against Cardoso’s government (ibid.: 86) and it drew media coverage almost every day. Moreover, the march also helped the MST to connect with other poor Brazilians (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000: 22). During the two months that the march lasted, in every town they visited, the landless were met with support and admiration. According to an account given by Mario Schons, a Sem Terra: ‘When we left São Paulo for Brasilia, we had food for two weeks. … But after that it was the people we met on our way who fed us. When we arrived in Brasilia we had so much food left that we were able to send it to the nearby encampments. So in this sense, society supported us’ (Cadji 2000: 34). Hence, during this time, the Sem Terra were able to break with the image of illegality, banditry and violence that the corporate media had attached to them. Once again, the international media picked up the story and reported on the march.
During the march to Brasilia, the MST inserted its struggle for land into the broader struggle against neoliberalism. Thus, when they were received by President Cardoso in Brasilia at the end of the march, they invited representatives of artists’ groups, the Church, trade unions, women’s movements and indigenous peoples to be part of their delegation (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000: 23). The effect of the march on the progressive sectors of Brazilian society was surprising. According to Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez: ‘Eduardo Suplicy, an important member of the moderate wing of the PT, compared the march on Brasilia to the Civil Rights March on Washington led by Martin Luther King in 1963’ (ibid.: 22). Indeed, the march to Brasilia was ‘the first victory of the lower classes over the neoliberal policies implemented by the Brazilian state’ (ibid.: 23). In the context of the retreat of the Brazilian left in general, the MST represented for many the emergence of new possibilities. The MST as a movement felt the effects of this new visibility and support: not only did the number of land occupations increase, so too did the number of families involved in the occupations. In Gramscian terms, the march to Brasilia allowed the MST for the first time to break the neoliberal hegemony by publicizing its struggle nationally as a peaceful and democratic one, and connecting it to the broader issues of inequality and injustice in Brazil.
Fighting criminalization by increasing occupations and mobilization During the second term of Cardoso, arresting the growth of the MST became an important priority for the government, and thus Cardoso adopted a much more militaristic approach towards the movement. He created the ‘Department of Agrarian Conflicts’ within the federal police force. Undercover police and informants infiltrated the movement, and from 1997 onwards the head of Cardoso’s military cabinet reported to him daily on the activities of the MST (Comparato 2000: 60). Later during this second mandate, Cardoso created a ‘crisis cabinet’ with a dozen specialists who assisted him in dealing with crisis situations, among which rural conflicts and the activities of the MST were priorities (ibid.: 63). On 27 December 2000, in order to discourage land occupations, the Cardoso administration passed a decree prohibiting INCRA from conducting the audits (visturías) that can lead to expropriation on land occupied by landless families (Coletti 2005: 237). According to the decree, families that decided to occupy land regardless of this decree had to wait two years for INCRA to conduct its audit on whether or not the occupied property could be expropriated. Also during this second mandate, the Cardoso administration created and implemented a series of programmes intended to undermine the social base of the MST. One of them was an agrarian reform programme conducted through the postal system, whereby landless families could register their demands for land in a post office and wait to be called to be allocated land. The federal government was incapable of responding to the demands it received from citizens seeking land. Of the 574,590 persons who submitted an application, the government interviewed 103,225, and only 16,390 were selected (ibid.: 236). In 2000, Cardoso also carried out a market-friendly agrarian reform, called ‘Banco da terra’, which, instead of expropriating land, lent money to landless families in order to enable them to buy land from willing landowners (ibid.: 234–5). The programme was a failure. The price of land rose and many families ended up in debt.2
Regardless of the disadvantageous context, the MST continued to carry out direct actions during Cardoso’s second term. For instance, the ‘March of the Hundred Thousands’, which reached Brasilia in August 1999 and demanded Cardoso’s resignation, was very successful, although it did not attract the same amount of media attention as the first march. On the contrary, the media represented the MST as a violent, criminal and uncompromising organization and facilitated Cardoso’s strategy. In May 2000, the MST coordinated the simultaneous occupation of INCRA offices in nineteen states to ask for the release of credits for planting, to denounce the reduction of credit for small producers, and to demand an increase in the INCRA budget from 1.3 to 4 billion reis (Comparato 2000: 107). In January 2001, in the context of the first Social Forum held in Porto Alegre in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the MST, in coordination with Via Campesina, invaded a property of the Monsanto company in order to destroy the genetically modified maize that was being grown there (Coletti 2005: 241). This act would mark the beginning of a new phase of direct action in the MST struggle, as it was the first time the movement directly confronted the interests of a multinational corporation. In October of that same year, members of the MST and the MPA simultaneously occupied banks in ten states, forcing the government to reschedule the debt of settlers and small farmers (ibid.: 242).
Since then, the MST has continued to pursue direct action in order to remain in the public eye. Although it held back during the first year of the Lula government, it resumed its actions in July 2003 with a march to San Gabriel in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the stronghold of the fazenderos in that state. Another march to Brasilia was undertaken in May 2005. In each case, the media coverage of the event allowed the MST to put the issue of agrarian reform on the political agenda and present its views on the matter.
The rise of the MST as a national political actor coincided with the decline of radicalism in Brazil, particularly in the union sector. On the one hand, this situation explains why the MST gradually became the most visible opposition movement to the Cardoso administration and its neoliberal agenda. On the other, since the MST was seemingly the only movement capable of successfully confronting the Cardoso government, this situation also had the effect of putting the movement in a position of power with regard to other popular organizations. However, at the same time, the MST’s radicalism was at odds with the strategies and tactics adopted by other groups and organizations within civil society and institutional politics. The MST was not able to change this situation and turn itself into the leader of a ‘radical agrarian historical bloc’.
The MST’s strategy towards civil society The support of the Catholic Church and the Comisão Pastoral da Terra (Pastoral Land Commission, CPT) was crucial in the emergence of the MST. At the beginning, many MST leaders and many of the MST’s closest advisers were actually members of different ecclesiastic orders which worked with the rural poor. However, by the end of the 1980s the movement had its own leaders, who replaced the religious leadership. Still, to date, the CPT remains one of the most important allies of the MST. Being an institution of the Church, and given that the Church resembles an NGO, the CPT is very important in forming public opinion, influencing state policies and conducting studies. Hence, the MST works closely with the CPT on many campaigns, studies and lobbying efforts. The CPT does not, however, have the capacity to mobilize thousands of people in the way that a social organization can.
In its second National Plan (1989–93), the MST highlighted the following objectives:
37. The construction of an alliance between workers and peasants. The construction of a permanent alliance between workers and peasants, as much in concrete struggles as in strategic struggles, is one of the principal challenges that will allow the struggle for agrarian reform to move forward. …
39. Search for unity within the struggle. It is necessary to search for a minimal consensus among the various rural leaderships on the nature of agrarian reform and to understand that such a consensus can only be possible among those who are involved in concrete struggles.
40. The construction of a new union structure. The current union structure limits the struggle to its most backward, corporatist character, and impedes the development of a revolutionary character, which the union movement also has. (MST 1989: 12)
The political strategy of the MST towards civil society is mainly geared to building an alliance with organizations. Among those organizations, the MST has tried to privilege rural unions and other peasant movements. The MST has not been able to forge a strongly unified rural alliance that would bring together the most important rural organizations that work for agrarian reform. In the countryside, the closest allies of the MST are the Movimento dos Atingidos par Barragens (Movement of those Displaced by Hydro-electric Dams, MAB) and the Movimento dos Pequeños Agricultores (Movement of Small Agricultural Producers, MPA), both of which the MST helped create. These movements seem to follow the leadership of the MST because of the similarity of their interests and their political perspective. The MST could be said to be the leading organization of the more radicalized sectors of the peasantry. Often these two groups provide a way for the MST to reach out to rural constituencies other than landless people. To this effect, the MST has decided to use its system of service cooperatives, in which MPA members participate, to politicize small farmers.
The MST and rural unions: radicalizing the struggles and internal democratization Rivalries between the MST and the CONTAG, numerically the most important rural organization of Brazil with 8 million members, are much more important than the tensions that exist between the MST and the rural branch of the Central Única de Trabalhadores (Workers’ Unitary Union, CUT). Although there are channels of communication between the CONTAG and the MST, each organization regards the other with great suspicion, mainly because they have opposing trajectories and political views. The CONTAG, for instance, after being ‘purged’ of communist leaders, was allowed by the ruling military junta to continue organizing rural workers during the military dictatorship (Galdino 2005: 132). Hence, by offering a series of state-funded social services, the CONTAG became integrated into the corporatist branch of the state (Houtzager 1998), which made it much more conciliatory with the government. The CONTAG, being from the outset the target of the rural new unionism, opposed the creation of the MST and the process of radicalization of some Sindicatos de Trabalhadores Rurais (Unions of Rural Workers, STRs), which represented both rural workers and small farmers (Coletti 1998: 241–54). The CONTAG saw the threats to its privileged status within the political system, and sought to keep its hegemony in the countryside.
The CONTAG exercised great influence on the first democratic government of the Alianza Democrática. Because it had been a key supporter of the Democratic Alliance, the CONTAG was able to influence the first elaboration of the PNRA and have some of its members appointed to important state institutions dealing with agrarian issues (Coletti 2005: 77–8). The CONTAG had used its huge membership and political power to secure the lion’s share of future land reform. According to the first draft of the PNRA, rural unions were supposed to be involved in all stages of the expropriation process of unproductive latifundios (ibid.: 85). Within this context, the MST’s methods, especially land occupations, threatened the stability that the CONTAG saw as necessary for the success of the negotiations for the 1988 Constitution, which never materialized as they wished. Moreover, in order to attempt to curtail the rising influence of the MST during his presidency, Cardoso privileged the CONTAG as the more legitimate and representative rural organization. For these reasons, a strong alliance between the MST and the CONTAG has never developed at the national level.
Although some important divergences exist between members of the CUT and the MST, local unions from the CUT are major allies of the MST. In many regions of the Brazilian countryside, the MST has developed a strong alliance with the rural branch of the CUT, and, by extension, the local sections of the PT (Galdino 2005: 135). Many members of the MST are very active in their rural union, to such an extent that in certain regions the MST and the rural unions coordinate their actions, be they organizing encampments or social mobilization. However, considering the diversity within the MST and the CUT, the collaboration between the two organizations can also be said to have varied according to the regional context and the objectives of the struggles of rural unions.
In general terms, the MST’s relationship with the CUT has also evolved over the years. The MST and the CUT were very close in the early 1980s when both movements were emerging and when they formed the ‘new unionism movement’. The two organizations shared similar views on issues of strategy and tactics, as direct action and grassroots democracy dominated their political culture. For instance, during the 1980s, the CUT became known for its combative strikes, which strengthened it organizationally. At that time, the CUT, like the MST, had a broad understanding of what constituted working classes. They did not limit themselves to representing the interests of their constituency, but understood their respective struggles as a battle for citizenship rights that could only be acquired through the eradication of socio-economic inequalities within society at large. Thus they tackled issues such as education, health and housing (Riethof 2004: 34, 36; Antunes 2012). Later, after a failed attempt to carry out a national general strike against the Cardoso government in 1996, in the light of the increased threat of unemployment, the CUT distanced itself from a strategy in which strikes were a key element in favour of one that emphasized negotiations (Riethof 2004: 38–41; Antunes 2012).
In the countryside, because of the specificities of each region, it is difficult to identify a general tendency. For instance, in the sugar-cane regions of the state of São Paulo, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s that rural unions went through a process of radicalization and affiliation to the CUT. However, this process was carried out by creating new unions (Sindicatos de Empregados Rurais, Unions of Rural Employees, SERs) that represented rural workers exclusively, whereas former rural unions (STRs) represented rural workers and small-family producers (Welch 1999). An alliance between the local SERs and the MST was more difficult because, according to many leaders of the SERs, the interests of rural workers were not necessarily compatible with those of peasants (Coletti 1998). For this reason, MST settlers in São Paulo tried instead to win over the leadership of their traditional local union (STR) who were also affiliated to the CUT. As a result, if the MST and other rural movements were the only organizations conducting land occupations in the early 1980s, by the early 1990s many unions affiliated with the CUT also started to carry out land occupations. In addition, even the more conservative CONTAG also began conducting land occupations (Coletti 2005: 212, 226). The success of the MST in the 1990s thus led to the temporary radicalization of rural movements under the Cardoso governments. However, if the effectiveness of the methods and the leadership capacities of the MST was recognized, the CUT and to an even greater extent the CONTAG were unwilling to give up the leadership of the rural workers’ and peasant movement. Instead, something like a triumvirate developed, with each organization leading its members and like-minded organizations.
However, with the affiliation of the CONTAG to the CUT in 1995, the leadership of the rural branch of the CUT, like its urban counterpart, began signalling an intention to move towards the path of institutional integration. Today, like the CUT in general, rural unions also favour participation within the conselhos de desenvolvimento rural (rural development councils), neo-corporatist regional consultative councils inscribed in the Constitution of 1988. In contrast, the MST has continued to be involved in intense confrontation with the state. Until the mid-2000s, it multiplied land occupations and highly visible public actions, such as marches and sit-ins that have attracted media attention. Depending on the leadership of the regional STR, the MST still counts on the support of local rural unions, but not on them siding with the MST instead of their national leadership. Great regional variation thus exists across rural Brazil in regard to the relationship between the MST and rural unions belonging to the CUT.
Hence although they remained very close allies, as the years passed this divergence in approach and tactics generated some tension between the MST and the CUT. This was clear in my conversation with Geraldo José da Silva, from assentamento Fazenda Timboré in the municipality of Andradina in the state of São Paulo, who was a member of the MST state leadership for four years (1988–92) and who, since that time, has been very active in the STR, which is affiliated to the CUT. From his position as a CUT leader, Geraldo José da Silva criticized the MST for being too radical, too ideological, and often too vertical in its ways of making decisions, and for not taking the time to negotiate with the state. Da Silva contrasted the MST’s ‘ideological position’ against the reinforcement of state institutions with the pragmatic position of the CUT as follows:
Before, INCRA used to notify the fazenderos fifteen days in advance before auditing their property. Some public servants from INCRA even helped the fazenderos. Fazenderos would put up fences, transfer cattle from one place to the other, and register workers and so on in order to reach the productivity criteria. The CUT held discussions with INCRA in order to do the audits [visturías] in various fazendas at the same time. The MST was against these audits because they would reinforce ITESP [the institution in charge of agrarian reform in the state of São Paulo] and thus reinforce the state. For the CUT this might have very well reinforced the state but at least also the agrarian reform. Well, the agreement was signed in 1999 and 162 fazendas were visited at the same time and fifty-six were found unproductive in 2000.
Critiques of the orientation taken by the CUT in recent years can also be heard from the MST leaders. The MST believes that the retreat of unionism and the acceptance of institutionalism by unions are due not only to the strength of neoliberalism but also to the co-optation of CUT and PT leaders, who have ceased to represent the masses, leading them to abandon the goal of changing society (Stédile, cited by Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000: 26). But beyond these critiques from both sides, the MST and the CUT continue to present a common front on agrarian reform. Their divergences are mainly ideological and tactical.
Mobilizing against neoliberalism in the mists of institutionalization Since it was under the second Cardoso government that deeper tensions started emerging between the MST and other rural movements, mainly over ideological issues and strategies to transform society (Navarro 2000: 38), it was also during this period that the MST deepened its contact with other civil society organizations. In its first national meeting in 1984 in Cascavel in the state of Paraná, the MST declared its commitment to three broad objectives: acquisition of land; agrarian reform; and a more just society (Cadji 2000: 33). In its second National Plan, the MST reiterated that ‘strategically, our alliance has to be with workers and rural workers’, but that ‘conjunctural alliances should be struck with all interested sectors in order to confront the main enemy’ (MST 1989: 14). The plan also stated that ‘the construction of alliances should obey the priority of expanding the mass movement and breaking the isolation of the countryside’ (ibid.: 14).
In terms of strategic goals, a contrast between the MST’s objectives outlined in the national meeting of 1984 and those of 1995 shows that the MST realized the importance of inserting its struggle for land and agrarian reform into a much broader perspective of transforming Brazilian society. The objectives referring to society as a whole were, however, still farther on the left than those of other major organizations: ‘to build a society without exploiters and where labor has supremacy over capital; to seek social justice and equality in economic, political, social, and cultural rights; to spread humanistic and socialist values in social relationships; to oppose any kind of social discrimination and strive for greater women’s participation’ (Cadji 2000: 34).
As the MST has often criticized the government for legalizing land possession in the Amazon instead of expropriating unproductive land in the rest of Brazil, it has often worked in collaboration with the rubber tappers’ union and the indigenous peoples’ movement (Wright and Wolford 2003: 241, 328). The MST has also participated in and organized a variety of campaigns, such as the Latin American Cry of the Excluded since 1987, the Citizen Caravan in 1993/94, the No Payment of the Foreign Debt Campaign in 1997, the No Genetically Modified Organisms Campaign in 1998, and the Campaign Against Slave and Child Labour in 1999 (Galdino 2005: 150). In 1993, the MST also tried to reach out to urban movements by helping to organize a coalition of popular organizations called the Central dos Movimentos Populares (Central of Popular Movements, CMP), and by promoting the construction of an alternative ‘popular project’. This popular project has taken form gradually through various discussion meetings and the creation of a consulta popular (popular consultation) in order ‘to [mobilize] the population and [stimulate it] to participate in the formulation of economic, social, and cultural policies for all Brazilians’ (Martins 2000: 40). The consulta popular has focused on issues such as employment, education, housing, food, health and culture (ibid.: 42). The MST has since pursued its direct action tactics, but under conditions of decreasing unemployment and increased public welfare they no longer seem to attract as many people. The MST has thus been playing a pivotal role in reinvigorating popular mobilization by participating in national campaigns to recover national sovereignty, such as ‘A Vale é Nossa’ and ‘O Petróleo é Nosso’. The first campaign began in 2007, as an effort of social movements and civil society organizations to reverse the highly irregular privatization by President Cardoso of the world’s largest state mining company, Vale do Rio Doce, in 1997. Its high point was a popular referendum in September 2007, in which 94 per cent of the 3.7 million participants voted against the privatization. In 2008, the second campaign, now to avoid the privatization of the oil sector, was launched in collaboration with the oil workers’ union and other organizations. Grassroots assemblies were held to discuss and elaborate a legislative project that would ensure state control over the sector and the reinvestment of oil revenues in social policies. The campaign culminated in August 2009 with the submission of the legislative project signed by 1.3 million people to the Brazilian Congress. Beyond all the contradictions involved in the revival of the developmental state, tactically the MST campaigns represent an opportunity to recompose a broad coalition of forces against neoliberalism, through which it can win support to put the agrarian reform back on the political agenda.
Apart from participating actively in the campaigns of the CMP and playing a leadership role in it, the MST has not had much success in linking up organically with urban movements. The CMP seems to be no more than a forum where popular organizations can coordinate certain actions or campaigns and maintain a certain degree of communication, but is has not turned into a movement with a coherent political capacity to seriously challenge neoliberalism. Recently, the urban movement with which the MST has been able to develop a better working relationship has been the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (Movement of the Homeless Workers, MTST). The MST helps to train leaders and members of the MTST. Although this collaboration is fairly recent, it is one of the most promising for the MST, because the Sem Teto movement has the potential to develop some of the characteristics that explain the strength of the MST. By gaining control of a territory – that is, of a section of a neighbourhood or a complex of buildings – the Sem Teto can begin to build ‘relatively autonomous communities’ with their autonomous structures of power. This process is still in its initial phases, and it is not certain that the MST will be able to sustain a long-term alliance with the Sem Teto movement.
The difficulty that the MST has in translating the solidarity of and support for its struggle into organized political power can be explained by the tendency towards institutionalization that predominates within Brazilian civil society organizations, as it does within unions. In the 1980s, popular movements and NGOs within Brazilian civil society were known for being extremely active and involved in challenging the dominant political culture and opening political space (Dagnino 1998). However, in more recent years studies have shown that many of these movements and organizations have become more and more institutionalized, as they participate in the various consultative or decision-making channels created to complement institutional politics (Lavalle et al. 2005; Baierle 2005). This institutionalization is seen by some as a positive development because it allows civil society groups to better represent poor people and influence policies (Lavalle et al. 2005). However, it can also be seen as a negative development because, with the institutional and economic reforms of Cardoso and their continuation by Lula, these channels no longer allow for the mobilization of poor people as they once did (Baierle 2005). For the MST what this means, however, is that many popular movements and civil society organizations are favouring collaboration and participation over mobilization and confrontation. This does not mean that civil society organizations and movements will not participate in mobilization or other forms of direct actions against the government. It does mean, however, that these forms of actions will tend to be considered complementary rather than central, and hence will not form the basis for a strong alliance with other organizations.
If understood in terms of political support, the MST strategy towards civil society has been relatively successful. Regardless of the difficulty of building a positive media image while mass media are under the control of corporate interests, the landless have learned from their experience during their national marches and other direct actions. They have also been successful at generating and maintaining the support of unions, popular organizations, church-based groups and leftists of all affiliations. Many surveys that have been conducted over the years have shown that landless people in Brazil have the support of a significant proportion of the population (51 per cent in 1995, 77 per cent in 1997 and 63 per cent in 2000), while the acceptance of land occupation as a legitimate means of pressuring the government varies greatly according to the formulation of the survey question that is used (Comparato 2000: 191). This relative success generated the impression within progressive sectors that the MST, thanks to its dynamism, had replaced the CUT and the PT as the main force of opposition to neoliberalism (Riethof 2004: 38). However, this image has changed as the number of land occupations has diminished and the MST has lost one of its sources of dynamism.
The MST’s strategy towards institutional politics: at the service of the struggle Most of the mobilizations of the MST (those centred on land, credit, housing, education, healthcare services, infrastructure, etc.) confront or pressure state institutions directly. Logically, the political coloration of each government has made a significant difference in the responses to MST pressure. For instance, the first wave of settlements in the early 1980s in the state of São Paulo benefited from some support (donations of tractors and machinery) by Governor Franco Montoro (1983–87). I was also told in interviews that the PT government of Olivio Dutra in Rio Grande do Sul (1998–2002) had found innovative ways to accelerate land expropriation and direct more financial resources to that goal. The MST has clearly distinguished between negotiating with a sympathetic government and dealing with a government that ignores or persecutes its organization, as was the case in the state of Paraná in the mid-1990s. Hence, throughout its history, the MST has been involved with the creation of the PT, the Diretas Ja campaign and all the subsequent electoral campaigns at local, state and national level. The movement has nevertheless been very cautious in its political strategy with respect to institutional politics. Autonomy from political parties and politicians has been one of the guiding principles of its relationship with political society actors. A preference for direct contact with politicians and state officials has been another important strategy guideline in the relationship between the MST and political society actors.
The leadership of the MST has met numerous times with the Brazilian presidents: once with Itamar Franco in February 1993, five times with Fernando Henrique Cardoso between 1995 and 2000, almost yearly with Lula da Silva after June 2003, and once with Dilma Rousseff after the mobilizations of June 2013. These meetings with the highest political authority in the country signal that the MST has, since 1993, been considered a legitimate and important interlocutor on the issue of agrarian reform. But for the MST, these meetings have meant more than mere legitimacy because many of the meetings have, in fact, produced concrete results. For instance, after the MST leadership met with Itamar Franco and pointed out a few clauses of the new Agrarian Law that would slow down expropriation, the president vetoed them (Coletti 2005: 195). Similarly, after meeting the leadership of the MST in April 1997, Fernando Cardoso presented some legislative modifications in order to facilitate expropriations and resolve conflicts over land that had been signalled by the MST (Comparato 2000: 81–2).
Although the MST leadership has met with presidents, it is often congressmen and congresswomen who have offered to act as mediators between the executive and the MST. Most of the time, they have been PT representatives, but there are also other left-wing parties that have offered to assist the MST (ibid.: 144). The MST has sometimes agreed to work with elected officials, particularly to gather information about – and attempt to influence – the legislative process. For instance, in the Federal Congress the PT has participated in the creation of a group called Núcleo Agrário that discusses legislative priorities with rural social movements. In an interview with a Brazilian newspaper, João Pedro Stédile, one of the main leaders of the MST, mentioned that in the legislature of 1998–2002 the movement counted on the support of at least seventeen deputies of the PT, four from other left-wing parties, and five senators from the PT (ibid.: 158–9). This is still fewer than the eighty-three deputies who form the bancada ruralista, which defends the interests of the landowners (ibid.: 150). Thus, the Núcleo Agrário appears not to have much weight, considering that there are a total of 513 federal deputies in the Chamber of Deputies. Stédile’s words are clear, however, as to what the MST expects or does not expect from the Congress:
We value the Parliament as a space to be occupied, where we can have people that defend the agrarian reform, but we do not treat it as a priority. In other words, we think that the correlation of forces in our society can be altered if workers organize themselves and conduct a mass struggle through mobilizations and pressures. The Parliament is only the reflection of this correlation of forces. (Stédile in Jornal do Brasil, quoted in ibid.: 156)
Nationally, the MST has chosen not to run for political representation or participate in government. However, at the municipal and state level every local MST section can decide its own position with respect to institutional politics. By and large, up to the present the MST membership has been working alongside PT militants during electoral campaigns, and some MST members have individually participated in the party. But the MST, as an organization, has resisted the idea of becoming organically linked to the PT, hoping that the PT, once in government, will remain congruent with its ideology, or at least provide better channels of communication for its demands. However, it is the position of the MST national leadership, as well as of the grassroots membership, that this collaboration with the PT should not divert the movement away from its mobilization strategy, especially when the PT holds power. For example, Armando, a MST settler from Fazenda Macali, in Ronda Alta in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, echoing many other assentados, told me: ‘When the government is ours, it’s worse. The MST stops organizing protests. When the government is from other parties, we go out to protest, to demand credit … When it’s ours, we are scared; we let them resolve things for us. We need to continue pressuring.’
Participating directly in electoral politics: being the voice of peasant struggles In the case of older settlements in southern Brazil, in order to have more influence and presence in local politics, settlers have decided to become directly involved in local politics under the banner of the PT (Wright and Wolford 2003: 321). Elected MST settlers have occupied seats in municipal councils of Paranacity in the state of Paraná and in Ronda Alta and Pontão in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, among others. They have been mayors in Ronda Alta and Pontão as well as in Sumaré in the state of São Paulo. In addition, two well-known members of the MST (Dionilson Marcon and Frei Sérgio Görgen) have been elected representatives to the state congress of Rio Grande do Sul.
The cooperative assentamento COPAVI in Paranacity in the state of Paraná discussed the idea of having one of its members run for a seat on the municipal council. The members of the COPAVI decided to allow it, but as is evident in Jacques Pellenz’s comments, the settlement had no illusions about the impact that participation in local politics would have on the balance of forces at the local level:
It had always been one of our preoccupations to participate in the community, to have some influence in the decisions of the municipality. If you don’t occupy the space, it ends up always being occupied by the right. We participate without illusion. Politics is a little bit like a straitjacket. We have no illusion that big changes are going to happen there. The position of the MST is not to participate in government. We agree, we don’t want to be occupying the position of minister, but legislative positions are another thing.
No matter how small the impact might be, a presence in local politics can help MST members in the relationship they are bound to establish with the state at the local level. The testimony of a settler from assentamento Fazenda Annoni in the municipality of Pontão in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, José Estevan da Silva, helps to clarify the role that a political representative close to the MST can have:
We came to the conclusion that we had to get involved in local politics. In Pontão, the mayor was a fazendero. We had no political representation to help us with our administrative dealings and create some pressure. Our numbers allowed us to elect two representatives. We discussed that necessity. The settlement proposed eight names, then discussion continued and we reduced it to three. There was a sort of campaign within the settlement. At the end there was only one left, we sent him and he won. That was in 1996. Also, the person who won as mayor was a settler of the MST, but we were still in a minority in the chamber [municipal council], so then we started to mobilize to pressure the chamber and that produced some results.
Although seeking local office is a decision that is discussed and agreed upon collectively by the settlement, the participation of these MST members in local politics is not as representatives of the movement but as individuals. Their actions are nevertheless closely followed and monitored by settlers and most of the time the elected official has to give a percentage of his/her salary to the MST. This is the case because, beyond the practical reasons highlighted above, in strategic terms the movement sees political representation as a way of amplifying its influence within Brazilian society. These MST members turned political representatives can thus work as public spokespersons for agrarian reform and other related social issues. A national leader, Judith Strozaki, told me that participation in local and state politics had to be in line with the overall mission of the MST, which is ‘to organize the poor in the countryside and in the city’. The idea behind this approach to the role of elected official is that a political representative is in a better position to access the media, intervene in public debates and call gatherings and meetings. In Gramscian terms, participation in institutional politics should serve the objectives of mobilization and organization in civil society to intensify class consciousness and popular pressure for agrarian reform and other state policies for popular classes. But, as the same national leader told me, experience has shown that political representatives, because of their busy agenda, end up ‘administering the institutional machine and are left with very little time to organize the people’.
This shortcoming is not the only danger of participating in local or state politics. Participation in politics can also become a divisive issue among the membership and the leadership of the MST. An example of such a division happened in the region of Joia in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in 2001 when the election of a candidate to the state legislature caused a schism within the movement.
Internal tensions around electoral politics Wendy Wolford (2010) has argued that there is an important distance between MST settlers and the leadership, who have a preconceived idea of what the ‘ideal settlers’ should be, often based on the experience of the MST in southern Brazil. This leads the leadership of the movement to impose its views on the grassroots membership. She is partly right. There are ‘historic leaders’ in the MST and the movement does ‘export’ leaders from one region (particularly the south) to others. But what is most striking about the MST is that it is constantly creating new leaders who emerged out of the encampment period. This has even been recognized by their most vehement critics, who argue that the most recent wave of MST leaders (from the mid-2000s) is more radical than previous waves. As we have seen, the process of encampment and land occupation clearly contributes to the emergence of more politicized, critical citizens, who are able to collectively (or sometimes individually) negotiate with the state and with the movement. In the history of each MST settlement, there are plenty of stories of small and big victories against the state and less talked-about, but no less important, stories of victories of the grassroots membership over attempts by the local, regional, state or even national leadership to impose certain decisions without sufficient consultation. Who wins, the grassroots membership or the leadership, will depend on the specific case and internal correlation of forces. The following is a description of such a case, which speaks of the dynamic nature of internal politics within the movement.
In 1998, Dionilson Marcon, who became a settler in 1994 through the MST, ran with the support of the MST for the state legislature and won under the banner of the PT. In 2001, as the legislature was up for renewal, the issue of choosing which candidate the movement would support came up for discussion. Many settlers were satisfied with the work that Marcon had accomplished during his first term and, as he stated his intention to seek another term, he got support from many of them. The issue divided the grassroots members, but also brought out a division between the MST leadership and part of the membership. According to Valdecir ‘Zorizo’ de Olivera, from assentamento Rondinha in the municipality of Joía, the sense among many settlers was that Marcon should be allowed to run for at least another term, during which time the decision on the issue of re-election could take place, and that eventually the no-re-election rule should be imposed on the candidate for his third term. According to Valdecir:
Marcon accepted, so the question of discussing names began and Frei Sérgio’s name emerged. The movement identified another person, a sympathizer of the MST, João Klein, the mayor of Barrera. But it was finally Frei Sérgio. I believe it was a somewhat manipulated process. Then the municipality of Palmeira das Missões proposed to support Marcon. Over 90 per cent were in favour. The guideline coming from the leadership was that we had to campaign for Frei Sérgio.
It was within this context that the MST leadership and the coordinating committee decided, without consulting the base, not to permit re-election. According to Claudemir Moselin, from the regional leadership of the municipality of Pontão,
… when the issue of the re-election came up, the MST positioned itself against it, so it would not promote ‘personalismo’. Certain members and leaders campaigned for Marcon, but there was a real problem: the discussion on re-election wasn’t very broad, it was a discussion limited to the leadership. Marcon was expelled and two others were reprimanded.
Valdecir, one of the reprimanded members of the MST, explained that his decision to campaign for Marcon, regardless of the position of the state leadership, rested on the fact that there had not been, as was recognized by Claudemir, a real internal discussion. In a surprising result, both got elected on 6 October 2002. Valdecir, who remembered the numbers very well, recounted to me:
Marcon got 44,000 votes and Frei Sérgio 44,300 votes in all the state. Marcon got 19,600 votes in Palmeira das Missões, Ronda Alta, Sarandí and Pontão; Frei Sérgio 9,000 or 10,000 votes less. Here in Joía, Marcon got 430 votes and Frei Sérgio 400. It was very divided. At the end of the year, there was a discussion in the regions. In Joía, four comrades, including myself, were disciplined and couldn’t participate until June 2002, not even in the cooperative. In Sarandí, one comrade was disciplined and replaced in the regional coordination, and Marcon could not speak for the movement for an undetermined period.
For some MST settlers, such as Ari Marcon (not related to the candidate) from assentamento Fazenda Annoni in the municipality of Pontão, the dice were loaded from the very beginning of the process.
The no-re-election rule was a pretext for Frei Sérgio’s candidacy. The question of re-election was never discussed at the base. It was a decision at the top. The objective of the leadership was for Frei Sérgio to be state representative this time and federal representative the next.
Whatever the case may be, what this division highlights is that divergent views, conflicts of interest and tensions arise between the MST membership and its leadership. The fact that Marcon won regardless of the position of the MST leadership speaks to the independence of MST settlers. However, the way this conflict was resolved speaks even more to the organizational capacity of the MST and the dynamism of the relationship between the membership and the leadership. In effect, a year after the suspension of Valdecir and the other MST members who had campaigned for Marcon, a meeting to debate what had happened was called. As Valdecir described this reconciliation process to me, beyond some bitterness, I could sense his satisfaction with the measures taken by the MST to avoid similar problems in the future:
In Joía a workshop on the political path of the MST was organized. There were about a hundred participants. The comrades and I were reintegrated, and people criticized the ‘verticalism’ of the decision to not allow re-election. It was decided that no more candidates be presented for the moment and that a state meeting would be called on the question of elections and that the issue would be discussed in the núcleos and in the settlements. The regional and state coordinating committee recognized the mistake and agreed to organize the meeting. It will be held in September [2003]. Five representatives will go to the meeting, two from the settlement leadership and three from the núcleos. We are seeing the meeting as a preliminary one. It will be followed by meetings in settlements and núcleos.
According to Valdecir, one of the regional leaders of the MST, there are many lessons to be learned from the conflict, and steps were being taken to prevent it from happening again:
The mistake was recognized and we are working so it won’t happen again. Never had something like this happened before: a decision coming from the top. I think it was useful. It reminds the movements that the núcleos are what is most important. It is important for our way of seeing decision-making. There are the ones that see it as ‘let’s take the decision we want in the direction and let’s send the report to the people later’, without calculating the consequences. And there are those that recognize the importance of the núcleos. The question of the re-election rebalanced things. The two camps recognized that the movement is more important than a re-election.
Nevertheless, other MST members, such as Terezinha Marcon from assentamento Fazenda Annoni in the municipality of Pontão in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, were disillusioned with the movement’s leadership and withdrew from participation: ‘The leadership does not listen to the bases … Many times we send proposals and the leadership accepts what it wants. There is no way we can make our voice heard. The only option that is left sometimes is to stop participating.’
This particular conflict around the choice of a candidate to an important elected position raises many questions about the MST position with regard to institutional politics, but most importantly: are the rewards of having a representative worth the risk of a division within the movement’s membership? The way the leadership imposed a decision, bypassing decision-making practices and structures at the level of the settlements, but also the response this action generated from a sector of the membership, suggests that relationships between the two groups are very dynamic. The fact that the leadership had to organize a workshop to review and reflect on the process indicates that the leadership is accountable to the membership. However, the effects of this type of imposition on the membership can vary according to settlers, and can range from Terezinha’s withdrawal to Valdecir’s intention to work within the movement to ensure that núcleos are a central component of decision-making.
Beyond this very particular case, the manner in which the MST at the national level has decided to deal with the issue of participation in institutional politics appears to be a temporary strategy. Some members within the MST think that the movement should not get directly involved in politics and should instead concentrate on its mobilization strategy and in supporting the settlements. This dilemma appears very difficult since the more the movement grows, the more the political question will become problematic. The ‘political question’ is even more problematic today, after eleven years of PT rule at the federal level.
The PT in power, neo-developmentalism and neo-corporatism
The accession of the Workers’ Party to power in 2003 has been less than a blessing and more than a curse for the struggle of the MST. As we have seen, the MST brings together landless rural workers, involved in land occupation through the creation of encampments, and settlers, struggling to remain on the land after having conquered land through the movement. Both sectors of the membership depend on each other in many ways, but it is clear that both need each other to make progress on their side of the struggle. Landless families occupying land and pressuring the state to expropriate land and turn it over to them need settlers to be successful once they have been given land. Similarly, settlers need growth in numbers in order to have more political and economic power, and this can only be achieved through land occupations. Lula’s and later Dilma’s policies have pulled the rug from under the feet of the MST by weakening this unity and splitting the membership of the MST. Indeed, as we will see, on the one hand, the policies of the PT administrations have slowed down the pace of land distributions, while improving the support to settlers without drastically changing the model of agriculture. On the other hand, by significantly expanding cash transfers to families living in extreme poverty, they have drastically reduced the number of people willing to join an MST encampment.
Lula’s victory in 2002 was the culmination of twenty-two years of dedicated efforts on the part of hundreds of thousands of activists. The Lula and the PT that won the presidential elections of 2002 were not those of the early 1980s, not even those that opposed the neoliberal reforms of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002). In order to win the 2002 election, Lula had to go a very long way to tone down his leftist image, choosing José Alencar Gomes da Silva of the right-wing Liberal Party as his vice-president. By the end of the second round of the 2002 election, he even had to publish his ‘Carta ao Povo Brasileiros’ (Letter to the Brazilian People), which critics dubbed ‘Carta aos Banqueiros’ (Letter to the Bankers), because in it he promised to keep inflation down, the budget balanced, the internal debt under control, and honour Brazil’s foreign debt (Sader 2011: 54–5).
Lula did not govern in a way that would distinguish him from his immediate predecessor. If one takes his monetary policy and the latest reforms to the public sector’s pension plan into consideration, one could even say that his government represented a continuation of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s agenda. In the formation of his first cabinet, he had to balance individuals from the ‘establishment’ with individuals with social activist credentials. For instance, for the position of director of the Central Bank, Lula appointed Henrique Mereilles, former president of BankBoston and a member of Cardoso’s Partido Social Democráta Brasileiro (Brazilian Social Democratic Party, PSDB). For minister of finance, Lula chose Antonio Palocci from one of the most moderate wings of the PT. On the other side of the political spectrum, Lula chose Olivio Dutra, former governor of Rio Grande do Sul with affinities with the left of the PT, as his minister of cities. Marina Silva, an activist who sided with Chico Mendes in the protection of the Amazon, was made minister of the environment. Nowhere was this attempt to balance forces more evident and contradictory than in the ministries that deal with rural issues. Roberto Rodrigues, former president of the Brazilian Association of Agribusiness, became minister of agriculture while the Ministry of Rural Development, responsible for agrarian reform, was put into the hands of Miguel Rossetto, former vice-governor of Rio Grande do Sul, from the left of the PT, and sympathetic to the MST (Löwy 2003).
Lula also followed in Cardoso’s footsteps by promoting the interests of agribusiness and large agricultural producers because of the large export revenues they generate. Early in his mandate, he lifted the ban on GM crops and made the production of ethanol from sugar cane, controlled by large capitalist farmers and corporations, one of the new economic ‘engines of growth’ of Brazil (Fernandes et al. 2010). Here, Lula went even farther than previous governments, by providing billions of dollars’ investment in infrastructure to transport ethanol to markets in Brazil and abroad, as well as credits for the day-to-day operations of the industry (Vergara-Camus forthcoming). With respect to the distribution of land, Lula had promised that he would settle 550,000 families. He did not quite live up to his promises. In his first mandate, the government stated that it had distributed land to 448,000 families between 2003 and 2007, but several experts contest these numbers and argue that most of the actions were legalizations of old settlements. According to these experts, Lula settled only 192,257 new families in his first mandate (Fernandes 2008: 79).
Although it held back during the first year of the Lula government, the MST resumed its actions in June 2004, by launching a series of land occupations throughout Brazil and undertaking another march to Brasilia in May 2005. To compensate for the lack of swift agrarian reform, Lula’s government took some steps to help small agricultural producers. Debts were renegotiated and partially cancelled and credits were increased and made available before harvest. Lula also sought to integrate family producers into the different agricultural commodity chains. In the case of biofuels, in December 2004 the federal government created the Programa Nacional de Produção e Uso de Biodiesel (the National Programme of Production and Use of Biodiesel, PNPB), which reduces taxes for enterprises that buy a minimum amount of the agricultural input from small producers. The PNPB also facilitates credits for small producers who want to acquire equipment to allow them to integrate into the biodiesel commodity chain (Vergara-Camus forthcoming). Critics who have studied the application of the PNPB argue that the programme does not effectively give the means to peasant producers to collectively set up their own production infrastructure, but rather subordinates them to large agribusiness corporations operating in the sector (Fernandes et al. 2010: 808). What this policy, like many others of its kind, shows is the typical PT way of dealing with popular demands. It simply introduces a requirement on capital to ‘integrate the poor’ and pays them for this ‘service’ by way of tax exemptions or other benefits. Alongside this, very often the PT will use the state. For instance, the Lula administration also decided to buy up to 30 per cent of food crops from small producers for its poverty-relief programmes. However, since it depends on the president’s will and the collaboration of municipal governments, this measure is another way of reinforcing the clientelist pattern between small farmers, the PT and the state.
For Lula’s re-election bid in 2006, the MST remained silent throughout the campaign, giving its support to Lula only a few days before the second-round vote. Even though Lula’s policies had been disappointing for its militants, the MST was not ready to turn its back on the PT. The MST still believed that social movements had to concentrate on pressuring the state into adopting measures more favourable to popular sectors. Lula’s balancing act between capital and popular sectors seems to have only partly confirmed this analysis. In 2008, in comparison with 2003, the budget for infrastructure and sustainable development for agrarian reform settlements increased tenfold and the credits that help families that have been awarded land to set up their farms increased fivefold (MDA and INCRA 2010: 49, 83). In September 2009, Lula’s administration sent to the Congress a legislative project revising – although only for a small proportion of the territory – the productivity indexes that determine which properties are subject to expropriation. This had been a long-standing demand of rural movements because the existing indexes were based on the productivity and technological level of 1975. The same month, Lula also sent his own legislative project regarding oil exploration and exploitation to the Congress. The project included elements proposed by the O Petróleo é Nosso campaign, such as a social fund, but also provided ample opportunities for the private sector. However, these two mild measures seemed to respond much more to the electoral calendar of the presidential elections of 2010 than to a real commitment to social movements and organized sectors of the working class.
An unambiguous governmental decision came at the end of Lula’s administration. On 26 June 2009, by ratifying Decree 458, which legalizes 67.4 million hectares of Amazonian land (equivalent to the size of England and France combined), in the face of criticism from his former minister of the environment, Marina Silva, Lula definitively sided with the landed class. This decision was very controversial because, even though thousands of squatters will be able to legalize their access to land, several clauses of Decree 458 could open the door to a new round of illegal land grabbing and consolidation of large latifundios in the Amazon region, which will directly benefit the large capitalist farmers and agribusiness. Agrarian reform statistics for the end of Lula’s second mandate cast further doubts on how much the PT is committed to agrarian reform. According to official sources, his government distributed land to 614,000 families during his two terms, making him the president who has distributed most land in the history of Brazil, ahead of Cardoso, who benefited 541,000 families. However, scholars of the agrarian reform, such as Ariovaldo Umbelino de Oliveira from the University of São Paulo, have once again questioned these figures and contend that most of the distributions, as in the time of Cardoso, were actually legalization of land that was already being farmed and that Lula distributed land to a mere 211,000 new families (Arruda 2011). This lack of commitment to agrarian reform has continued under Dilma Rousseff, who, in her first year, expropriated only twenty-eight properties, fewer than any president since 1992, when the then incumbent, Collor de Mello, was strongly against agrarian reform (Caramante and Carvalho 2013).
The effects of conditional cash transfers on the membership base of the MST Traditionally, the different levels of government had the ability to establish programmes that addressed extreme poverty and food insecurity. In the countryside, one of the most common measures has been the distribution of food baskets (cesta básica) to poor families by municipal governments in collaboration with state and federal ministries. These very often depended on the political will of local politicians and/or the political mobilization and pressure of local social movements. Throughout its history, the MST very often pressured local governments in order to access food for their acampados and acampadas. However, these programmes were not very important although they did cover a large proportion of the rural population. The creation and expansion by Lula of a Conditional Cash Transfer programme first called Fome Zero and later Bolsa Família for families living in extreme poverty has dramatically changed this situation.3
CCTs issued by the federal government began with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 2001, but this policy instrument gained real momentum when President Lula da Silva came to office in 2003. Indeed, the federal government has placed CTTs at the centre of its poverty alleviation strategy ever since. The budget for these programmes has increased from 0.03 per cent of GDP in 2003 when President Lula took office to 0.44 per cent of GDP in 2012, the first year of Dilma Roussef’s administration (MDS 2013: 13). In addition to CCTs, there are also various Non-Conditional Cash Transfer programmes. The rural pension plan, the assistance to the disabled and the assistance to the elderly are probably the programmes that have contributed the most in reducing extreme poverty. In 2009, 24 million people were receiving social security transfers, 6.6 million unemployment insurance, while the Bolsa Família reached 12.4 million people (IPEA and SPI/MP 2010: 14). In 2010 in Brazil, 26.4 per cent of the total population was covered by Bolsa Família, while this percentage was just over 20 per cent in 2005, two years into Lula’s first administration.
After evaluating the success of Bolsa Família and identifying the remaining challenges, on 2 June 2011 President Dilma Rousseff launched the most recent poverty alleviation programme, called Plano Brazil Sem Miséria (Plan Brazil without Misery). The programme aims to locate and include the 16.2 million Brazilians still living in extreme poverty. Brasil Sem Miseria is organized around three axes: 1) guaranteeing income; 2) providing access to public services; and 3) productive inclusion. This last axis seeks to complement the cash transfers with other income-generating opportunities, such as support for the creation of micro-businesses and cooperatives, employment-enhancing training, such as adult literacy and skills development, the employment of beneficiaries of cash transfers in public works, or the purchase of food by the different levels of governments from family farmers in situations of extreme poverty.
Bolsa Família was very rewarding for President Lula and the PT in the electoral arena (Hunter and Power 2007) and has had a significant impact on the reduction of poverty. However, it has not reduced the stark income inequalities in Brazil, and since it has not been accompanied by a distribution of land, it has not tackled one of the root causes of inequality and poverty in the countryside. Nonetheless, it has had a profound impact on the MST, which no longer finds as many recruits for its land occupations (see note 7, p. 305). Even worse, considering the long clientelist history of Brazilian politics, in addition to the fact that eligibility depends on a simple declaration of income by the beneficiary, these anti-poverty programmes have demobilized poor landless peasants and have made them once again potential clients of political bosses.
From a Marxist perspective, we could characterize President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (2003–10) policies as ‘neo-developmentalist’ because they favoured the sectors of the national bourgeoisie whose activities are centred on the domestic market (Morais and Saad-Filho 2011). However, it is also important to recognize the ‘neo-populist’ character of its social policies because they allocated poverty-alleviating funds to popular classes along clientelistic lines. Lecio Morais and Alfredo Saad-Filho (2005: 4–6) argue that Lula’s first government represented a ‘losers’ alliance’ composed of several sectors that had not benefited from the policies of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994–2002). Among these ‘losers’ figured the traditional manufacturing elite of the south-east, who favoured nationalist and expansionary policies, and several ‘notorious right-wing oligarchs, landowners,4 and influential local politicians from the poorest regions of Brazil’ (ibid.: 6). What Morais and Saad-Filho could not foresee, however, was that some class fractions of this ‘losers’ alliance’, specifically traditional landlords from the states of São Paulo, Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso and Goiais, would manage to use the state to relocate themselves within the dominant ‘historical bloc’ by linking themselves to the sugar-cane ethanol industry. This alliance is clearly related to the lack of agrarian reform, as land distribution in regions where sugar-cane production is dominant has been stalled ever since the ethanol boom (Vergara-Camus forthcoming).
How to act with the PT in government remains a puzzle for the MST. The movement is divided as to the steps to take in order to rebuild a popular political alternative for poor Brazilians, but there are no signs that the MST will invest its activist time in the construction of the Partido Socialismo e Liberdad (Socialism and Liberty Party, PSOL), created in 2004 by PT parliamentarians expelled for criticizing Lula’s policies. The MST’s pragmatic position towards institutional politics and the local nature of the militancy of MST members within the PT seem to weigh more than the need to create a new political instrument for the labouring classes. At least for the moment, many MST members still prefer to use the PT machinery to wage their local battles in their municipalities and states, even if it means sacrificing the possibility of more far-reaching change. The MST’s critical support for Dilma Rousseff, the presidential candidate of the PT, at the end of the second round of elections in 2010, signals that the movement is not ready to change its strategy. The MST seems to share Emir Sader’s analysis that the PT is a ‘hybrid, contradictory government, in which on the one hand finance capital played an essential role, and, on the other, there was an increasing development of redistributive social policies’ (Sader 2011: 64).
Zapatismo: building ‘another way of doing politics’
When in the early weeks of 1994 the EZLN insisted that its political project and strategy were not about taking state power but rather about changing the relationship between the rulers and the ruled, it generated enormous confusion within the left. When Subcomandante Marcos, through his communiqués, developed the ideas of mandar obedeciendo and autonomy, things became a little clearer for its leftist supporters since many sectors of the left were able to relate to the idea of self-government and popular power. However, if for most people on the left in Mexico mandar obedeciendo and autonomy could be translated into concrete practices in the case of indigenous communities, the majority of Zapatista urban supporters and the EZLN itself have had great difficulty in conceptualizing how this strategy could apply to the urban and national context. The achievements and the setbacks of the Zapatista national strategy in recent years are, to a great extent, outcomes of that difficulty.
Being a semi-clandestine organization: the greatest barrier The EZLN, it should not be forgotten, is a guerrilla movement. However, it is not a traditional guerrilla movement because the use of arms has an objective different from the one it had in traditional Latin American guerrilla movements. The EZLN has not unleashed a ‘campaign of revolutionary violence’ against state targets or elements of the ruling class, as previous guerrilla movements would have done. For the EZLN, the use of arms is not considered a solution to the injustice caused by capitalism and the implementation of neoliberal policy. Rather, the Zapatistas have presented their decision to take up arms as the last political option open to them in the particular circumstances of Chiapas. They stated very early on that the use of arms was not a means to take state power but rather a means to force the Mexican state and society to listen to their demands. The use of arms was never elevated by the Zapatistas to the status of a universal solution, but was rather presented as an exception, a limited and partial response, with specific ends, to extreme circumstances. Hence, very early on, on 20 January 1994, the EZLN made sure to recognize and underline the importance of all forms of struggle, including elections (EZLN 1994b: 103).
Hence, although symbolically significant internally, nationally and internationally, arms have not been the main political advantage of the Zapatistas in the battle for public opinion in which they confront the federal government. On the contrary, the Zapatistas have used the undeniable conditions of poverty and marginalization of the indigenous population of Chiapas, as well as the clear lack of response on the part of the state, to their advantage. For instance, the recognition by the entire political class – including President Salinas – of the dramatic situation of poverty in which indigenous people lived was one of the first victories of the EZLN. Hence, surprisingly, the use of arms, although rejected by the great majority of the population, came to be tolerated in the case of indigenous Zapatista peasants, especially once they made clear that they sought a political and negotiated solution to their demands, and suggested that they would give up their arms once a political solution was reached (EZLN 1994c: 165). However, the fact that the Zapatistas possess arms, and that they have attracted worldwide political support, has obliged the federal goverment to seek negotiations with the EZLN.
Considering that it is a very poorly armed guerrilla movement, the EZLN came to rely on national and international support to avoid being crushed by the federal army. Fortunately for the EZLN, many sectors of Mexican civil society, from the rural and urban popular classes to the middle classes, and the intelligentsia, recognized the EZLN’s demands as legitimate ones and pressured the Salinas government to declare a truce within two weeks of the outbreak of the guerrilla offensive. As the years have passed, this support has evolved, but it still remains a fundamental factor in the conflict that pits the EZLN against the federal government.
While securing and defending access to land and the construction of autonomy have been the main concrete objectives of the EZLN in Zapatista territory, the EZLN has had to build national support for its struggle in order to protect its achievements in Chiapas and to defend itself against military encirclement and offensives. Because of this peculiar context of ‘armed peace’ or ‘low-intensity warfare’, and because the EZLN is still a semi-clandestine organization, the way the EZLN relates to other political actors in Mexico differs greatly from the way the MST does in Brazil. The first major difference is that most EZLN proposals, even if they have sought to build a national anti-neoliberal movement, have, in practice, tended to be more embedded in the short-term conjuncture than in the longer-term horizon of the construction of a political movement. The second major difference is that, in contrast to the MST, as a result of the conflict, the EZLN has been literally blocked from expanding outside Chiapas, although it has expanded outside its initial stronghold in the Lacandona jungle to other indigenous regions of Chiapas. The third major difference is that at the national level the EZLN, unlike the MST, has not struggled for a concrete objective such as an agrarian reform programme. At the beginning of the uprising, the EZLN had very ambitious plans, and indigenous autonomy was one among many other Zapatista demands. As I will show, it was partly despite the EZLN’s initial inclination that indigenous autonomy became its main concrete objective.
Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos Subcomandante Marcos is, at the same time, one of its greatest assets and a major limitation to the politics of the EZLN. Since the very beginning of the uprising, thanks to his image, charisma, impressive general culture, sense of humour, irreverence, literary talent and clever use of the mass media, Marcos caught the attention of the Mexican and international public. His image and his discourse are probably the elements that Marcos has learned to use most effectively to generate the sympathy of people from radically different ideological backgrounds. On the one hand, Marcos’ image – the military uniform, the ammunition across his chest, etc. – is reminiscent of Che Guevara and attracts numerous militants of the radical left. On the other hand, Marcos’ discourse, which reframes the traditional Latin American revolutionary imaginary in terms of radical democracy, distinguishes him from previous generations of guerrilla leaders and attracts the support of more moderate sectors of the Mexican left. In addition, many symbols of the EZLN link the current guerrilla with a ‘collective imaginary’ based on the Mexican revolution and previous peasant rebellions, which is still extremely important among popular sectors (Rajchenberg and Héau-Lambert 1996; Gilly 1997; Vergara-Camus 2000: 96–100).
Moreover, thanks to his university education and knowledge of Mexican popular culture, Marcos has been able to reach a great diversity of audiences, from intellectuals and university students to workers and peasants. Hence, although other Zapatista leaders – such as Comandantes Moises, Tacho, David, Ramona and Esther – have made numerous public interventions, it is Marcos who plays the role of transmission belt between the EZLN and Mexican civil society, and the international network of supporters. He is the main spokesman of the EZLN, and it is with him that Mexican political leaders, organizations and intellectuals enter into dialogue. This centralization of the public image of the EZLN in Marcos’ persona, because it has not permitted the diversity of opinions that must exist within the EZLN to be known, has actually been detrimental to the movement.
During the first few years following the uprising, Subcomandante Marcos benefited from a high level of sympathy, and a surprisingly good relationship with intellectuals, who in Mexico, because they are allocated space in newspapers, magazines and television programmes, are particularly important for orienting public opinion.5 From 1994 to 1997, the ideas, proposals and events promoted by the Zapatistas and Marcos were generally received positively by most of the left-wing forces. However, as Marcos’ critique of the ‘political class’ and the PRD became more corrosive, his political position, irreverent style and relative intolerance of opposing views started to irritate many leftist intellectuals. If the counter-insurgency war against the EZLN, unleashed by Zedillo from 1997 to 1999, prevented many left-wing intellectuals from publicly criticizing Marcos, the election of Vicente Fox in 2000 created an environment in which many believed that criticism of Marcos would not have dramatically negative consequences on the Zapatista struggle. Hence, since 2000, the relationship between Marcos and left-wing intellectuals has deteriorated, and many who were Zapatista supporters have now distanced themselves from the movement. In recent years, Marcos’ temperament and attitude towards intellectuals has thus caused the loss of important supporters among the Mexican intelligentsia and middle classes.
The EZLN, through Subcomandante Marcos, constantly intervenes in Mexican political debate in order to convince other actors that are close to its positions. All the communiqués of the EZLN are published by the national newspaper La Jornada, which maintains three correspondents in Chiapas. When communiqués are important, they are discussed by the right-wing journal Reforma, which had maintained a correspondent in San Cristóbal de las Casas until the mid-2000s. Until then, every time the EZLN published a communiqué, the press sought the president and his minister of the interior for their opinion. Still to this day, every time the EZLN presents a proposal for an event, a meeting or a campaign, intellectuals discuss it in the pages of La Jornada, the weekly magazine Proceso, and sometimes the more conservative newspapers Reforma and El Universal. Hence, even if it is no longer the novelty it was in the first few years following the uprising, the EZLN still resonates with significant sectors of Mexican civil society.6
The relationship between Subcomandante Marcos and leaders of popular movements is not as easy to assess, because it is not conducted through the media and does not benefit from any significant media coverage. Hence, very little is known about the exchanges and dialogues that Marcos has had with leaders of indigenous movements, workers’ movements or peasant movements. What is clear, though, is that the EZLN has refused to enter into any kind of alliance with organizations that have any kind of links to political parties. Marcos has avoided commenting on any of the initiatives presented by dissident sectors of the corporatist structure of the PRI and has been extremely intolerant with leaders of independent popular organizations that have chosen to engage in negotiations with the state. Hence, through Marcos, the Zapatistas have consciously chosen not to add their voice to certain struggles and have sought alliances only with movements that remain autonomous from political parties and the state, which in Mexico are still a minority. The EZLN has thus effectively cut itself off from major political actors, only to rely on sporadic contacts with groups of supporters.
Combining mere survival of the organization with the refounding of the nation The Zapatista national strategy has had many objectives since 1994. First and foremost, over the years, the main objective has been to maintain a network that can support the movement at particular moments of the conflict with the Mexican state. The second objective has been the formation of a broad opposition front with other popular organizations from the left, including political parties. The main goal of this front was initially to defeat the one-party PRI system and its neoliberal policies and contribute to what they call ‘the refounding of the nation’. In all its most important communiqués from 1994 to 2006, the ‘Declarations of the Lacandona Jungle’,7 the EZLN has argued the necessity of organizing a national Constituent Convention to write a new Constitution, in which a new relationship between indigenous peoples and the state was but one aspect. The other major aspect, in the eyes of the EZLN, is a transformation of the relationship between the rulers and the ruled in such a way that it could be the grounds for reviving non-capitalist relations. In other words, contrary to what some have argued, the politics of the Zapatista is not only anti-politics or anti-state (Holloway 2002), but also a politics of radical democratization of the state, whereby power would be distributed and exercised differently. The Zapatista national strategy has been oriented to creating the conditions to reach these goals. All the political organizations that the EZLN has proposed have had the mandate of promoting a Constituent Convention that would allow for the participation of all sectors of civil society, and not only the representatives of political parties. Certainly for the Zapatistas, the idea of a Constituent Assembly was one of the ways to make a national impact and mobilize social and political forces towards longer-term social transformations than simply displacing the PRI from power. The third objective has been the construction of a new type of political organization inspired by Zapatismo that would orient its actions towards the organization of civil society rather than electoral politics.
Ever since it burst on to the national scene in 1994, the EZLN had benefited from an important show of support from many sectors of Mexican society, particularly among the popular classes and the middle-class intelligentsia. Emerging at a moment when the Mexican left was still not fully integrated in the political system, the EZLN became a major reference point for popular movements and progressive sectors of civil society. However, the liberalization of institutional politics in the 1990s through the integration of the PRD into the party system changed the political context, rendering Zapatista attempts to build bridges with the PRD and civil society organizations and movements much more difficult. But very distinct patterns of collaboration have developed over the years between the EZLN and civil society actors, and between the EZLN and sectors from political society.
The EZLN’s strategy towards institutional politics: a short story that repeats itself From the very beginning of the uprising, the guerrilla movement clearly stated that its struggle and demands had national dimensions. Hence, the federal government, or, better, the state at large, was the main interlocutor of the EZLN. Indeed, in the first Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, the EZLN called on the powers of the Union to dismiss president Carlos Salinas de Gortari and form a transitional government that would guarantee free elections (EZLN 1994a: 73). Hence, the EZLN did recognize political institutions even though it did not recognize the power-holders in these institutions. Moreover, the EZLN was very careful always to remain symbolically within the nation by grounding its discourse on national symbols of independence, the revolution and the Mexican Constitution (Vergara-Camus 2000: 95–101).
In contrast to the relationship that the MST has with actors of Brazilian political society, and owing to the Zapatista rejection of state power and institutional politics, the relationship between the EZLN and Mexican political society has never been very fluid. During the first years following the uprising, the EZLN was much less dismissive of electoral and institutional politics than it is today. The position of the EZLN with respect to institutional politics evolved according to its reading of the dynamics of the new institutional politics in transition.
The visit of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the leader of the PRD, to Zapatista territory in May 1994 was the first formal meeting between the EZLN and a member of political society. The EZLN had invited Cárdenas to exchange opinions on the Zapatista demands and to hear from him which positions he would adopt in the event he became president. Although they acknowleged Cárdenas’ ‘irreproachable struggle for democracy and against the authoritarianism of Salinas’, the EZLN did not hesitate to criticize the PRD for not practising democracy internally (EZLN 1994b: 237). Hence, from the start, the EZLN made public its criticism of political parties and the PRD, which had until then represented the main opposition force and had suffered from the assassinations of hundreds of its grassroots militants. However, throughout the 1990s, the EZLN never attacked Cárdenas, understanding that he was highly respected by broad sectors of Mexican society. This has not been the case with any other Mexican politician.
Early attempts: linking civil society mobilization with institutional politics The EZLN entered national politics in 1994, when the democratization process was in its infancy and when the main objective of opposition forces seemed to be the ousting of the PRI. The Zapatistas thus used their early popularity to attempt to link social mobilization within civil society with the electoral struggle, and organized the Convención Nacional Democrática (National Democratic Convention, CND) in July 1994, a month before the presidential elections and called for the formation of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Movement, MLN) in January 1995. Similarly, with the objective of providing civil society, especially indigenous people, with a new institutional settting for political participation, from October 1995 to February 1996 the EZLN carried out negotiations for the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture with the Mexican state.
The CND, organized from 6 to 8 August 1994 in the Lacandona jungle, was the first attempt by the EZLN to establish formal links with the different sectors of the Mexican left and to present its vision of the political agenda for the forces of the left. The CND was also for the Zapatistas a way to enter the national arena in order to try to influence both the presidential elections and, beyond the elections, the formation of a coalition of popular forces against neoliberalism. The EZLN saw the CND as the first step towards the organization of a Constituent Assembly in charge of writing a new Constitution, which would reverse the modifications to the social clauses of the Constitution of 1917 and respond to the new demands for greater political participation (EZLN 1994c: 297). Following the event, through the ‘Second Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle’, the EZLN proposed turning the convention into a national organization open to any Mexican citizen. In the eyes of the EZLN, the purpose of the CND was nothing more and nothing less than to ‘organize civic expression and the defence of the popular will’ (EZLN 1994e: 275; Womack 1999: 284). In order to carry out this task and to contribute to the refounding of the nation through a new Constituent Assembly, the EZLN proposed to the CND that it organize at the grassroots level in ejidos, neighbourhoods, municipalities, workplaces, schools, etc., across Mexico in order to gather ‘the popular proposals for the new constitutional law and the demands to be fulfilled by the new government emanating from its constitution’ (EZLN 1994e: 276; Womack 1999: 284). On the immediate political horizon, the CND was to decide on a programme of struggle that would include the call for a transitional government that would put an end to the party-state system and presidentialism. Finally, on the electoral front, the CND would call upon the Mexican people to vote against the party-state system and would organize in order to defend the popular will (EZLN 1994f: 299). Hence, by calling for the formation of an umbrella organization and a Constituent Assembly, the EZLN was attempting to place itself in the role of the initiator of a new national-popular historical bloc that would aim at bringing down the PRI.
The victory of the PRI presidential candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, a result that many on the left had not predicted, cut these ambitions short, and forced the EZLN to reconsider its strategy and alliances. In September 1994, in a communiqué that presented the Zapatista analysis of the presidential election, the EZLN acknowleged the trajectory of some leaders of the Partido Acción Nacional (Nacional Action Party, PAN, the major right-wing party in Mexico) who had been opponents to electoral frauds organized by the PRI in the 1980s,8 and considered them possible participants in an opposition front. However, the idea of inviting them to join the MLN was abandoned in favour of a clearly left-wing opposition movement. Indeed, in November 1994, the EZLN proposed the idea of creating the ‘parliamentary branch’ of the CND by inviting independent deputies and senators to declare themselves ‘parliamentarians of the convention’ and ‘to pledge to follow the indications of the CND’ (EZLN 1995b: 124). The EZLN, through its ‘Third Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle’, later called for the MLN to organize the resistance against the Zedillo government and coordinate efforts with political parties, especially the PRD. The EZLN proposed that the objective of the MLN should be the formation of a government of democratic transition that would focus on the following tasks:
1) [eliminate] the party-state system that would actually separate the government from the PRI; 2) reform the electoral law that would guarantee clean elections … and hold new general elections across the country; 3) convoke a Constituent Assembly for the elaboration of a new Constitution; 4) recognize the particularities of indigenous groups, and their right to inclusive autonomy and citizenship; 5) give a new orientation to the national economic programme … by favouring the most dispossessed sectors of the country, the workers and the peasants, who are the principal producers of the wealth that others appropriate. (EZLN 1995d: 192–3; Womack 1999: 293)
Since no parliamentarian accepted the idea, the EZLN responded with another of its incendiary yet contradictory communiqués, in which it criticized the political class for its ‘cynicism’ and for ‘backing down’ in the name of a ‘disguised gradualism’, but at the same time the EZLN continued hoping to form a coalition with cardenismo (EZLN 1995c: 148). If these initiatives did not prosper, it was due to a great extent to the fact that the Zapatista proposals of not recognizing Zedillo’s victory, forming a transition government and calling for a Constituent Assembly were far from being a priority for the PRD. First, the PRD did not think it had the capacity to contest the results of the elections. Secondly, the PRD had been struggling for years to win elections and have its electoral victories recognized, so it was not ready to challenge the Mexican state. Even though it was born, in part, out of a split within the PRI between nationalists and neoliberals, and even though it presented itself as a critic of the free market policies of Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the PRI, the PRD was not seeking to fundamentally transform the political system, but simply to be integrated within it as a player like all other players. In fact, this search for integration and the institutionalization of the parties from the radical left had been a tendency since the political reform of 1977 (Hellman 1988: 258; Anguiano 1997: 87–9).
Hence the failure of the Zapatista strategy, to a great extent, can be explained by the decision of President Ernesto Zedillo to negotiate electoral reform with the PRD. In a contradictory twist of history, the Zapatista rebellion and the possibility of seeing the radicalization of the electoral left forced the Zedillo government to negotiate an electoral reform that the president probably would not have accepted under other circumstances. As a result, the PRD became further integrated into the political system, and at the same time this integration cut off the possibility of a real alliance between the EZLN and the PRD (Anguiano 1997: 159, 162–3; García de León 2002: 252). In addition, Subcomandante Marcos’ constant attacks on the PRD and the party’s own fall into factionalism and electoralism ended up terminating any significant links between the EZLN and the PRD. However, the EZLN attempted on several occasions until 2001 to find ways to reach out to political society.
The betrayal of the San Andrés negotiations and the definitive rejection of institutional politics In subsequent years, with specific regard to elections, the EZLN moved towards a much more ‘case-by-case’ attitude based on the evaluation of the local conditions in which elections were taking place. In the mid-term elections of 1997, the EZLN maintained a position of ‘sceptical support’ towards the PRD and electoral politics at the national level, and even congratulated Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas for his victory in Mexico City. However, the EZLN also argued that, given the high level of military presence and political repression, there were no suitable conditions for democratic and free elections in many other regions of Mexico (EZLN 1997a). As I will demonstrate below, from 1994 to 1998, even though it became ever more cynical about political parties, politicians and institutional politics in general, the EZLN attempted to build bridges with the PRD and various federal legislators. Like the MST, the Zapatistas had not completely abandoned yet the idea of using the spaces within institutional politics to mobilize sectors of civil society. But unlike the MST, they also wanted to attempt to change the institutional settings of the Mexican state in favour of indigenous and civil autonomy.
The EZLN used the negotiations of the San Andrés Accords, which took place from October 1995 to February 1996, to put into practice its idea of pushing for a Constituent Assembly. After the federal government had voted on a law that called for a negotiated solution to the conflict in Chiapas and gave some guarantees to the EZLN,9 the EZLN pushed the government to accept a series of talks that would touch upon all the major national issues. The idea was to transform the different dialogues into something equivalent to a Constituent Assembly. The talks were supposed to be comprised of six separate dialogues: 1) Indigenous Rights and Culture; 2) Democracy and Justice; 3) Well-Being and Development; 4) Conciliation in Chiapas; 5) Women’s Rights in Chiapas; 6) End of Hostilities (EZLN 1995e: 445–6).
The first issue was indigenous rights and culture. The EZLN invited well-known scholars and leaders of other local and national indigenous movements to sit on its side of the negotiating table or to attend as guests, which gave the talks a real national character (Rus et al. 2003: 17). At the end of this dialogue in 1996, the government signed the San Andrés Accords with the EZLN and promised to transform them into legislation and to have them ratified by the Federal Congress. But the federal government broke off talks right at the beginning of the second dialogue on ‘Democracy and Justice’, and all of the EZLN’s attention and that of its supporters within civil society and political society turned to indigenous issues.
In November 1996, the Comisión para la Concordia y la Pacificación en Chiapas (Commission for Agreement and Pacification in Chiapas, COCOPA)10 worked on a legislative text. According to Jaime Martínez Veloz (2005), a deputy of the PRI and a member of the COCOPA, both parties agreed to the text in late November, but Zedillo finally rejected it in December (Rus et al. 2003: 19). The refusal by the Mexican state to uphold what it had signed in San Andrés was a major turning point in the conflict between the EZLN and the Mexican state. From then on, the EZLN has dedicated the greatest part of its efforts to getting the state to respect its signature and the movement’s political agenda has been limited, to a large extent, to indigenous issues. The Mexican state has thus managed to limit the influence of the EZLN and downplay its national character. In this context, the Zapatista proposal for ‘refounding the nation’ has not been given serious consideration by any other forces of the Mexican left, as they have been more preoccupied with either localized or sectoral demands or electoral politics.11 Antonio García de León argues that the PRD did not have a real commitment to the recognition of the San Andrés Accords and the ratification of the COCOPA law, but rather that it used it as a platform to make progress on other issues. He points out that: ‘It is striking, for instance, that the parliamentary delegation most interested in achieving peace was not the PRD’s, as one might expect, but that of the PRI, headed by then senator Pablo Salazar, and local representative Juan Roque Flores’ (García de León 2002: 264).12 It is possible that this fact was also known by the Zapatistas and further undermined the relationship with the PRD.
In 1997, the government of President Zedillo unleashed a counter-insurgency campaign against the Zapatista autonomous municipalities and tried to isolate the Zapatistas by attempting to co-opt the EZLN’s political base through micro-development programmes, infrastructure works and poverty relief programmes, which had already began in 1994 (Rus and Collier 2003: 53–4). The Mexican army intensified its actions within Zapatista territory, destroyed the infrastructure that the Zapatista autonomous municipalities had built, imprisoned dozens of Zapatista supporters, and encouraged the creation of indigenous paramilitary groups. One of the worst atrocities of this campaign was the massacre of 18 children, 22 women and 6 men in the village of Acteal on 22 December 1997 (Rus et al. 2003: 18). When the state tried to further weaken the EZLN by attempting to co-opt its social base, the EZLN adopted a position of resistance and, in a manner similar to that in which the MST responded to Cardoso’s attempt to isolate them, intensified its efforts to mobilize Zapatista supporters within Mexican civil society.
Regardless of the growing distance between the PRD and the EZLN, from 1994 to 1998 the PRD denounced the government’s military strategy in the conflict and appeared to be pushing for the recognition of the San Andrés Accords. The 1997 elections were, however, the last opportunity that the Zapatistas gave to electoral politics to convince them of its potential to bring about political change. Since 1998, as the years and electoral campaigns passed and the new electoral politics became more and more characterized by the excessive pragmatism of politicians and political parties – including the PRD – the EZLN definitively rejected electoral and institutional politics as a path for social change. Echoing the criticism of many sectors of the left (Anguiano 1997; Semo 2003), the EZLN accused the PRD of clientelism, opportunism and electoralism (Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos 1998a, 1998b).
However, even in July 1998, in the Fifth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, when it was promoting the popular referendum on the COCOPA law on indigenous rights, the EZLN addressed itself directly to federal legislators, asking for their support during and after the campaign (EZLN 1998). This time, more than usual, the EZLN recognized the role of political parties and traditional politicians:
This is the hour of Congress. After a long struggle for democracy, headed by the opposition political parties, there is in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate a new correlation of forces that hinders the arbitrariness typical of presidentialism, and points with hope to a true separation and independence of the branches of government. The new political composition of the lower and upper chambers presents the challenge of making legislative work dignified, the expectation of turning Congress into a space at the service of the Nation and not of whoever happens to be president … We call on the deputies and senators of the Republic, from all registered parties, and on independents, to legislate for the benefit of all Mexicans. To command in obedience. To fulfil their duty by supporting peace and not war. Making effective the division of powers, to oblige the federal executive to stop the war of extermination it has under way on Mexico’s Indian populations … To support firmly and fully the Commission of Concord and Pacification, so that it can effectively and efficiently carry out its work of helping in the peace process. To answer to the historic call that demands full recognition of the rights of Indian people … (Ibid.; Womack 1999: 368–9)
However, this ‘rapprochement’ did not last very long. In November 1998, Subcomandante Marcos recognized in an interview that it had been a mistake to judge and criticize other political forces – ranging from the PRD to some sectors of the PRI and the PAN and even to other guerrilla movements – as if they were monolithic entities (Gallegos 1998). But in May 1999, Marcos returned to the fray with a communiqué that criticized the attitude of the ‘political class’ as a whole for having already started the campaign for the presidential elections of 2000 and being preoccupied in internal battles instead of focusing on the real problems of society (Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos 1999).
In sum, from 1994 to 2000, the EZLN tried on many occasions to establish an alliance with the PRD or some kind of relationship with other actors of political society. However, as it saw that politicians were not interested in bringing down the PRI and later as it suffered a defeat at the hands of the state in the San Andrés negotiations, Subcomandante Marcos turned to fierce criticism of electoral and institutional politics, as well as politicians and political parties. The appeals of the EZLN’s initiatives directed towards political society gradually also lost credibility. The Zapatistas and Subcomandante Marcos are, however, guilty of not having taken into consideration the different agendas of other political forces. The EZLN has not, for instance, been able to understand that not all political forces on the left were ready to embark on a confrontation with the whole political system. As a result, the Zapatistas have tended to want to impose their view and agenda on their potential allies, and they have not been willing to find grounds to negotiate common objectives.
From the Zapatista perspective, the coup de grâce to institutional politics, political parties and politicians came in April 2001 with the adoption, by all political parties represented in Congress, including the PRD, of a Law on Indigenous Rights that does not correspond to the spirit of the COCOPA law. For the EZLN, as one Zapatista told me:
The indigenous law that was voted on by the Congress is not the one we had negotiated with the government. It was treason. All the politicians betrayed us. It was demonstrated that politicians only want power for themselves in order to make money. The PRD also betrayed us. The PRD also can go to hell! The politicians of the PRD also only want power for themselves, not in order to do what the people want. The Zapatistas, we don’t struggle for power. We don’t want power. We want a dignified life and that the rulers rule by obeying, doing what the people want, not for themselves, not so they can fill their pockets.
These perceptions of betrayal of Zapatista indigenous peasants have pushed the EZLN to reject any relationship with the forces of political society, to reinforce their lived experiences of autonomy in Chiapas as the appropriate path for social change, and to continue to focus exclusively on the organization of a resistance movement within civil society.
The Zapatista decision not to collaborate with the PRD or any other party is not likely to change, since the PRD is moving ever farther from its initial opposition roots and has even recently struck local alliances with the party ideologically more to the right, the PAN, in order to block the PRI. Given López Obrador’s failure to rally the whole party around him when he adopted an insurrectional stand in 2006/07, and the rise of several contenders within the party since then, the battle for the PRD’s presidential nomination in 2011/12 brought to the fore once again all the dirty politics inherited from the PRI. Since he no longer held any public office and thus was not in a position to rally allies, López Obrador began losing ground within the PRD. He created a movement, the Movimiento Regeneración Nacional (National Regeneration Movement, MORENA), to pressure the PRD from outside and campaign for the candidacy of the left. When he lost to the PRI candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, in the presidential elections of 2012, his inability to rally the more important figures of the PRD around him led him to resign from it, and turn MORENA into a party. Obviously, all this political manoeuvring has degraded the image of the PRD and López Obrador even further in the eyes of the Zapatistas.
The EZLN’s strategy towards civil society: organizing those without organization Certain scholars have celebrated the fact that the EZLN supposedly abandoned class-based politics in favour of identity politics, and alliances with groups from civil society at large (Burbach 1994; Rubin 2002). However, in reality, much like the MST in Brazil, since 1994 the EZLN has called for a fairly traditional class alliance between peasants, workers and popular sectors. This focus on forming an alliance with popular sectors, although more evident in the earlier years, is still the predominant objective of the EZLN. It can be seen in all the calls to action that the Zapatistas have launched through their several ‘Declarations of the Lacandona Jungle’. When asking for support for its campaigns or inviting recruits to participate in the creation of an organization, the EZLN calls primarily on the popular classes, such as workers, peasants, the urban poor and teachers. Then it always attempts to mobilize the middle sectors, such as students, progressive intellectuals and professionals, and marginalized groups, such as gays and lesbians, youth and transgendered groups, etc. (see Vergara-Camus 2000: 165–7).
The strategy of the EZLN towards sectors of civil society has been to push for their mobilization and to help organize civil society as an independent force, i.e. one that operates outside the orbit of political parties and the state. Hence, the EZLN, through the communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos, has tried to intervene in all major national conflicts and issues (e.g. electoral campaigns, the FOBAPROA bank rescue programme in 1995, the threats to privatize electricity in 1997, the strike at the UNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico) in 1999/2000, the repression in Atenco in 2006, and so on. The Zapatistas thus have tried to generate a movement of resistance to neoliberalism outside institutional politics and located in civil society. Subcomandante Marcos has explained this Zapatista perspective in the following words:
Society has to organize to resist. We use the example of Juárez in the midst of the French invasion a lot … How that movement decided not to clash with the French army, but rather to resist and wait until it exhausted itself and the process of exhaustion in France obliged the army to retreat and another alternative to emerge. What Juárez did was to keep the nation organized, resisting in very difficult conditions, but avoiding its decomposition. We [the Zapatistas] say, ‘Now we have to organize the people for that and then exercise power.’ But now, there is nothing to exercise, and even less after the new electoral reform … Voting will not solve the problems of social decomposition. And since the government continues within its logic, this will not be solved. Hence, we have to organize society, not so it can make demands on the government – that is why we distance ourselves from populism – but rather in order to solve problems. (Subcomandante Marcos, cited in LeBot 1997: 303)
In contrast to the MST in Brazil, which has been more successful at working with organizations than with unorganized groups, the EZLN has had more success in working with supporters that engage in solidarity with the Zapatistas as individuals rather than through organizations. Throughout the years, the EZLN cannot be said to have built a strong alliance with organizations, such as the MST has built with the CUT, for instance. The EZLN has been almost absent from the peasant movement that, although it seems to have been at a low point at the time of the uprising in 1994, managed to re-emerge forcefully in 2003 with the ‘El Campo no Aguanta Más’ (‘the countryside will endure no more’; see below) mobilizations (Bartra 2003; Hernández Navarro 2003). The EZLN has also not shown a particular interest in creating lasting links with major trade unions that struggle to democratize their corporatist and clientelist unions. The exception to this tendency has been the EZLN relationship with indigenous movements through the Congreso Nacional Indígena (National Indigenous Congress, CNI). This exception may be due to the fact that the EZLN and the indigenous movement, through the process of negotiation of the San Andrés Accords, established direct ties and a common ground from which to work. Following this line of thought, the fact that the government abandoned the dialogues after the first round of talks on Indigenous Rights and Culture cut off the EZLN from the possibility of building with other sectors the same kind of platform it had with the indigenous movement. It would not be surprising if that was one of the main objectives of the federal government when it withdrew from the dialogues.
The fall of peasant unity in Chiapas to the hands of corporatism The first important setback for the EZLN in the politics of alliance formation with popular movements took place at the state level in Chiapas. In the aftermath of the uprising in 1994, the most important independent organizations of Chiapas recognized the Zapatista demands as legitimate and, even though they disagreed with the use of arms, decided to support the EZLN. Two coalitions were quickly formed: 1) the Consejo Estatal de Organizaciones Indígenas y Campesinas (State Council of Indigenous and Peasant Organizations, CEOIC), bringing together organizations that had land and autonomy as their main demands; and 2) the Asamblea Estatal del Pueblo Chiapaneco (State Assembly of the Chiapan People, AEDPCH), which brought together all kinds of popular groups that identified with the other Zapatista demands (Villafuerte et al. 1999: 166).
The EZLN welcomed the support, but, having the federal state as its main interlocutor, chose to give priority to national problems rather than local ones. Yet there was a basis for a strong alliance between the EZLN and other peasant and indigenous movements in Chiapas. As a matter of fact, the Zapatista uprising unleashed a significant wave of land occupations throughout the state, conducted by independent organizations as well as by organizations linked to the PRI. Heading the negotiations with the state, which would eventually have to deal with these occupations, could have been a platform for an alliance between the EZLN and other independent peasant movements in Chiapas. This is what the EZLN was expecting to do, but it wanted to finalize the negotiations in San Andrés before dealing with the concrete land issue in Chiapas. The Zapatistas asked the indigenous peasant organizations to wait to enable them to negotiate collectively with the federal government. However, divisions within the CEOIC quickly emerged as peasant organizations started to negotiate separately with the federal government. The alliance was terminated in 1996 when the state and federal governments began signing individual agreements with independent peasant organizations which legalized their land occupations while representatives of the federal government were negotiating the San Andrés Accords with the EZLN (ibid.: 188–97; García de León 2002: 263). Hence, while independent peasant movements were closer to the EZLN in terms of class, ethnic composition and goals, these factors were less important when the possibility of securing concrete gains presented itself to these organizations. For the Zapatistas, the opportunity of leading a ‘radical agrarian historical bloc’ in Chiapas was lost to the far longer-standing capacity of the state to co-opt peasant organizations.
From support network to force for radical change It is really within unorganized sectors of civil society (especially in Mexico City and San Cristóbal de la Casas in Chiapas) that the EZLN found most of its support. The EZLN has been very inventive in its relationship with those sectors of civil society. It has managed to maintain high levels of support among broad sectors of society by organizing two national plebiscites, by holding six forums or meetings (to which we have to add the four different meetings in August 2005 in preparation for the ‘Other Campaign’; see below), and by sending three delegations of Zapatistas to Mexico City and all regions of the country.
Throughout the years, the EZLN has managed to maintain an impressive network of supporters who assist it in the preparation and running of the different referenda, meetings and campaigns it organizes. Overestimating the political capacity of this network of supporters, the EZLN attempted to turn this very diverse network within civil society into the social base for a national political organization. However, this task proved very difficult because of the kind of supporters that the EZLN had attracted. Indeed, Zapatista supporters within civil society came from a variety of political backgrounds and with varying organizational experiences (small revolutionary parties, the PRD, popular movements, collectives, NGOs, etc.) and, apart from their sympathy with the Zapatista struggle, did not share a common ideological and political background.
The first attempt to create an organization came in 1994 when the EZLN called for the formation of the MLN, which would be a coalition of three forces: the PRD, the EZLN and the CND. This latter organization was meant to be the place where non-partisan members would participate. With the MLN, the Zapatistas sought to ally formally with the PRD but also sought to oblige leftists to opt for a unified militancy. The objective was to organize sectors of the non-electoral radical left around the CND, and the institutional left around the PRD. Thus, with time, since it could bring together forces potentially closer to the EZLN than to the PRD, the CND had the potential to become the political wing of the EZLN. However, the CND quickly became the arena for sectarian battles of the non-electoral radical left (Sánchez 1998: 36), and it never managed to agree on a common position with regard to the PRD (García de León 2002: 257, 260). It was in 1996 that the EZLN finally turned to the task of organizing a national Zapatista movement that clearly defined itself in opposition to the PRD.
In January 1996, in the context of the negotiations for the San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture, the EZLN organized the Convención Nacional Indígena (National Indigenous Convention). The most important indigenous organizations in Mexico participated and, although some differences existed with regard to the institutional framework in which autonomy would be exercised, agreed on the idea of autonomy and the need for its constitutional recognition (Bartra and Otero 2005: 400). Although very close to the EZLN, the CNI acquired a life of its own, and, it can be said, began to represent a unified voice for the Mexican indigenous movement. Three congresses have been held since 1996, making the CNI the only political organization initiated by the EZLN with a real national political capacity. The experience of the CNI represents the only instance in its history of the EZLN being able to work with another organization. The ratification of the latest indigenous law in April 2001, which the CNI and the EZLN rejected, has maintained the alliance between the two organizations, but no major mobilization or common strategy has been developed since.
In early July 1996, in the context of preparations for the second round of San Andrés negotiations, which were supposed to deal with ‘Democracy and Justice’, the EZLN organized the Foro Especial sobre la Reforma del Estado (Special Forum on the Reform of the State). The objective of the forum was to meet with other social movements and political organizations to elaborate a proposal for an alternative vision of society. For the Zapatistas, the forum was also a way to create a dialogue parallel to the legislative debates on the reform of the state that political parties were undertaking with the federal government. In addition, the forum was supposed to be a space where the EZLN could build an alliance and a consensus that it could bring to the second round of San Andrés talks. In turn, this consensus could also become the basis for a national political organization inspired by Zapatismo. However, as mentioned earlier, the retreat of the federal government from this second round of talks cut that possibility short. This second round could have been very important for the future of the EZLN, as the forum with sectors of civil society did not generate a detailed political plan but rather a minimal consensus around general demands and orientations, which necessitated other venues to develop into a real alternative political proposal. Once again, the Mexican state blocked the EZLN’s plan of being the initiator of a collective will organized around a national-popular project and a popular historical bloc, and of playing a leading role within it.
The failure of the attempt to create a national Zapatista organization Because of the militarization of Chiapas by President Zedillo, the years between 1997 and 1999 were marked by a succession of Zapatista meetings, referenda and initiatives that were very successful in keeping the conflict in Chiapas on the political agenda, but not particularly successful in generating a strong coordinated opposition movement. In September 1997, the EZLN organized ‘The March of the 1,111’, for which 1,111 Zapatistas were sent to Mexico City for the creation of the Frente Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Front of National Liberation, FZLN). In November 1998, in San Cristóbal de las Casas, it organized the ‘EZLN/Civil Society Encounter’ to prepare for and organize a national referendum on indigenous rights in order to pressure the government to recognize its commitment to the San Andrés Accords and the COCOPA law. Prior to the referendum, which took place on 21 May 1999, the EZLN sent 5,000 Zapatistas to all Mexican states to promote it.
The founding congress of the FZLN was held in Mexico City from 13 to 16 September, and through a communiqué, published in La Jornada on 14 September, Subcomandante Marcos expressed the view that the FZLN would be the organization in which the EZLN would participate once a peace treaty with the federal government was signed. The founding documents were very ambitious and somewhat vague as to the kind of actions that the FZLN would be carrying out. The document emphasized greatly the need for a new kind of political organization:
We need a political force that does not struggle for state power or with old methods of doing politics, but rather that struggles to create, add, promote and empower citizens and popular movements, without trying to absorb them, lead them, or use them; a political force that adds its struggle to the other forces to allow for a real democratic transformation; a political force that struggles so that political action can be a space for citizens. (FZLN 1997: 4)
We need a space for participation that, with social movements, can organize the demands and the satisfaction of the rights of popular sectors, can organize resistance and the development of forms of self-management, can recognize the appearance of new social actors and accompany their mobilizations, can organize and propose citizens’ vigilance over rulers, and can create new spaces of mobilization. (Ibid.: 5)
The FZLN, of course, intended to be this new political force, which would not seek state power but rather organize civil society with the objective of generating forms of autonomy and self-government. The FZLN intended to achieve this goal with campaigns of mobilization through which it would seek to insert itself within, and to influence, social movements. Where social movements did not exist, it would help create them. However, lacking concrete struggles of its own on which to focus, like other popular movements, the FZLN gradually turned into a solidarity network for the Zapatista rebels, more than an autonomous organization focused on the transformation of Mexican civil society. The FZLN was also criticized by many for being as sectarian as the CND had been (García de León 2002: 273). The EZLN observed the FZLN from afar, and included it in all its calls for action, but from 1999 onwards did not privilege it over other organizations.
With the failure of all its organizational attempts between 1999 and 2005, the EZLN reverted to its sporadic and spontaneous relationship with civil society sectors (students, popular movements, collectives, NGOs, etc.). One of the first events through which the EZLN re-established its contacts with its supporters in 1997 was the organization of the popular referendum on indigenous rights, which lasted from November 1998 to May 1999.13 After this successful attempt, the EZLN concluded that, for the moment, organizationally the only movement it was capable of maintaining was a network of local and regional coordinating committees, which eventually could become the skeleton of its national movement. The EZLN submitted the following proposal to its supporters within civil society:
3. We propose that you become the bridge between the Zapatistas and social and citizens’ organizations, movements, and individuals, and all those with whom you work.
5. To build a whole information network that will really be able to impede the possibility that any of us can be attacked without the others knowing about it and responding to and supporting [the subject of the attack]. (EZLN, cited in Hernández 1999)
Concretely, the EZLN also called on this network to mobilize in support of the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas (Mexican Union of Electricity Workers, SME) in their struggle against the privatization of electricity services, and the UNAM students in their struggle against the privatization of free public university education, both of which were in 1999 the main struggles against neoliberalism in Mexico. Beyond this proposal to create a resistance network, and its continued dialogue with the CNI, the EZLN has not tried to develop alliances with other sectors of society, even if recently the peasant movement, with which it shared many demands, has started to re-emerge from years of political disarray.
From the March on Mexico City to the Otra Campaña Knowing that the COCOPA law on indigenous rights and culture would have to be ratified by the Mexican Congress, the EZLN still believed that pressure from civil society could force the Congress to pass the law. It decided on a long march on Mexico City, dubbed La Marcha del Color de la Tierra – the largest ever organized by the EZLN – in February/March 2001. After having waited for President Vicente Fox, elected in 2000, to define his government’s position on the issue of indigenous rights, the EZLN decided, once again, to take the initiative. The Zapatistas sent Subcomandante Marcos and all members of the top leadership of the EZLN on a political journey from Chiapas to Mexico City to convince the Mexican Congress to ratify the COCOPA law. The enthusiastic response of hundreds of thousands of people all along the route as participants made their way towards Mexico City reconfirmed the support that the Zapatistas had garnered within Mexican society, especially among indigenous people, peasants, workers and sectors of the middle class and youth. The arrival of the comandancia of the EZLN at the zocalo14 in Mexico City in March 2001 was one of the biggest mass events in recent Mexican history. However, although this march was successful in revealing the level of Zapatista support throughout the country, a result that obliged political parties to allow a Zapatista delegation to speak at the tribune of the Mexican Congress, the Congress did not approve the COCOPA law but passed something very different.15 According to Díaz-Polanco, the PRD, in a minority in Congress, was outmanoeuvred by the legislative adroitness of the PAN and PRI, which lured it into voting for the general content of the law with a promise to negotiate specific sections subsequently. This obviously never happened (Díaz-Polanco 2004: 337). All hopes for a real law on indigenous autonomy in Mexico slowly died as the different states of the Mexican federation ratified the constitutional amendment and the Supreme Court rejected the claims of more than three hundred indigenous municipalities (ibid.: 338).
The year 2003 was a high point for peasant movements in Mexico. As a result of the dramatic generalized crisis in the countryside, eighteen peasant organizations – including the Confederación Nacional Campesina (National Peasant Confederation, CNC) and the Congreso Agrario Permanente (Permanent Agrarian Congress, CAP), which were traditionally linked to the state – came together in a national opposition movement called ‘El Campo No Aguanta Más’. The movement carried out a series of demonstrations from January to April and managed to get the federal government to sit at a negotiating table to discuss the situation of rural producers and the current agricultural policy. This was the first time since the late 1980s that peasant organizations had presented a common front, articulated around a unitary proposal that included the principles of food sovereignty, the renegotiation of NAFTA, the revision of Article 27 of the Constitution, and the rights of indigenous peoples (Bartra 2003).
In response to the movement, the Fox government proposed the Acuerdo nacional para el campo: por el desarrollo de la sociedad rural, la soberanía y la seguridad alimentaria (The National Agreement for the Countryside: for the Development of Rural Society, Food Sovereignty and Security), which was signed on 28 April 2003. Surprisingly, the EZLN, which repudiated NAFTA in its first Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle and has made the struggle against neoliberalism one of its main battles, has been completely silent with regard to this new movement. The presence of peasant organizations affiliated to the PRI is most probably the main reason why the EZLN has not established links with El Campo No Aguanta Más. At the same time, according to some analysts, even though it shows the growing strength of the peasant movement, the government proposal did not address its main demands since it did not compromise on the renegotiation of NAFTA or on revision of Article 27 (ibid.; Hernández Navarro 2003). Hence, in some ways, this agreement on the countryside is reminiscent of the historic practice of the Mexican state of signing agreements with social organizations only to calm social discontent without substantially modifying its policies – a practice that the EZLN itself suffered from in the case of the San Andrés Accords. By taking the approach it did, the EZLN seemed to have decided to forfeit the possibility of influencing a broader spectrum of sectors of Mexican civil society.
After a period of reassessment of their strategy, the Zapatistas decided to elevate the experience of autonomy to a higher level by creating the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (JBGs). From 2001 to 2005, the EZLN remained mostly silent, focusing on consolidating the structure and the functioning of its autonomous municipalities and the JBGs. After more than four years of waiting, the EZLN decided, in 2005, to take the offensive once again. Thus began the fourth phase of the Zapatista struggle. In June 2005, the EZLN issued the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle and called a series of meetings with Mexican civil society organizations to set the groundwork for a new national movement. The activities of La Otra Campaña (the Other Campaign), named to suggest that the presidential electoral campaign that preoccupied Mexicans was not the only campaign under way, began in January 2006 and were meant to be a sort of ‘reconnaissance’ tour across Mexico. Subcomandante Marcos would tour the country to meet face to face with organizations interested in joining a national Zapatista movement, one that would not enter electoral politics in any form. In the second phase of the formation of this future Zapatista organization, members of the EZLN would be sent from Chiapas to the various regions of Mexico to help organize the new movement. Because of the timing of the Other Campaign’s launch – in the midst of the presidential electoral campaign of 2006 – it did not get the attention that the Marcha del Color de la Tierra of 2001 had received. When Subcomandante Marcos harshly criticized elections as a path for social change and associated Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the PRD candidate in the presidential race of 2006, with neoliberalism and the heritage of Carlos Salinas, many leftist intellectuals were infuriated. But Subcomandante Marcos was echoing the criticism that many on the left shared, which included the preoccupation with López Obrador’s highly personalist and populist style, his opportunistic use of popular mobilization without real politicization and participation, his ties to Carlos Slim, who benefited from the privatization of the state-owned telephone company under Salinas, and the presence of several close collaborators of Salinas in his team. The attack was not a turnaround in the Zapatista position towards institutional politics, but rather a reminder that for the EZLN social change would not come by changing politicians at the top but rather by changing the way of doing politics from below. The objective was to clearly establish itself within the radical left and build alliances from there. However, tactically it cost the movement the support of more moderate sectors of the left.
On 4 May 2006, just a few days after the Zapatistas reached Mexico City, the federal police attacked the village of Atenco, killing two, sexually assaulting more than thirty women, and imprisoning over two hundred people. The event halted the EZLN ‘caravan’ in Mexico City, as it tried to coordinate efforts to liberate the prisoners. A few months later, in December 2006, the PRI governor of the state of Oaxaca called upon the federal police to violently repress the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, APPO), which had been undertaking an experiment in self-government, taking control of numerous neighbourhoods of the state’s capital city. Although several groups within APPO were strongly influenced by Zapatismo and the political practices of the movement mirrored their own, the EZLN remained distant from the process, and only expressed its solidarity with it. In a sense, this speaks to the limitations of the Zapatista strategy, because in the absence of direct organizational links that could have been created over the years through coalition-building, the ideological influence of zapatismo within APPO did not lead to a national protest movement. The Oaxaca case suggests also that popular organizations that negotiate with the state, such as teachers’ unions, can escape corporatism and be the basis for radical politicization and self-government and eventually be the seed of radical social change.
The EZLN seemed to have taken this view because it established links with some groups from the APPO, and with groups from Atenco and Mexico City, notably the Movimiento Popular Francisco Villa – Independiente, an important squatter movement. However, Zapatistas have not changed their attitude towards traditional organizations, and the Festival de la Digna Rabia (Festival of Dignified Rage) in January 2009 looked more like a return to their ‘politics of events’ than the beginning of the construction of a broad coalition of mass organizations. The repression that many popular movements faced under President Felipe Calderón (2006–12) was not enough to lead certain movements to align themselves with the EZLN. Most of them were still awaiting the results of the forthcoming presidential election, which many predicted would see the comeback of the PRI, before deciding on their strategy.
In August 2013, the EZLN organized what it called the ‘escuelita Zapatista’ (the small Zapatista school). It invited over two thousand supporters from Mexico and abroad to visit Zapatista communities in their different regions of influence and directly learn from these communities how they had been organizing their responses to the problems generated by neoliberalism. The objective behind this new move was to attempt once again to reinvigorate its relationship with activist groups within civil society, but also perhaps to influence the emergence of other forms of self-governing communities in other parts of Mexico.
A shared dilemma: radicalization in times of neoliberal hegemony
Building a rural or national coalition of organizations to oppose neoliberalism and struggle for radical social change in their respective countries has turned out to be a task that far exceeded the organizational capacities of the MST and the EZLN. Regardless of clear objectives, and the development of campaigns, marches and other types of direct actions involving actors from civil society, neither the MST nor the EZLN was able to become the leader of a ‘radical agrarian historical bloc’ and even less a ‘national-popular historical bloc’. The MST was able to establish its leadership over the most radicalized sectors of the peasantry, but although it managed to radicalize the struggle for land in the 1990s was not able to get its leadership accepted by the CONTAG and the CUT. It cannot be said that there is in Brazil anything like a ‘radical agrarian historical bloc’. The MST did, however, manage to carve out a space for itself alongside them and its participation is almost mandatory in any discussion on rural issues with the government. The national strategy of the MST yielded modest results, and though they did not contribute to the emergence of a national-popular historical bloc against neoliberalism, the demands of the CMP were partly met by Lula.
In Mexico, thanks to having negotiated the San Andrés Acccords, the EZLN did manage to have its leadership recognized by the indigenous movement until the mid-2000s. However, the Zapatistas were outmanoeuvred by the state on two fronts. First, it prevented them from forming and leading a ‘radical agrarian historical bloc’ in Chiapas, as the indigenous peasant organizations chose the short-term goal of securing land through individual deals with the state instead of collective negotiations. Secondly, by refusing to recognize the San Andrés Accords and stopping the process of negotiation that would have led to the discussion of broader issues, the state did not allow the EZLN to be the initiator of the refounding of the nation, in which they could have played an important role.
The failure to build a national coalition is also due to the fact that in Brazil and Mexico, unlike in Venezuela, fundamental social change did not become the objective of a historic bloc of popular social forces. As most organizations were choosing insertion into the political regime and falling victim to the corporatist tradition, the MST and the EZLN found themselves going against the current, without real allies for their national strategy. For the MST, the task of building a coalition has become more difficult in recent years owing to the institutionalization of the CUT and many movements and civil society organizations. Nonetheless, even though the MST adopts a more radical perspective then most organizations, it has decided to continue to collaborate with them in specific campaigns with the objective of influencing them and gaining support for its cause. The EZLN faced an even worse situation because it was trying to build a political front while remaining a semi-clandestine organization, subjected to varying degrees of counter-insurgency violence. The Zapatista decision to refuse to collaborate with organizations that do not adopt their policy of resistance further diminished the number of potential allies and impeded them in their attempts to influence social movements and coordinate actions.
Another factor that has distinguished the MST and the EZLN has been their way of working with left-wing political parties. In the case of the MST, members have participated directly in the party politics of the PT and, to a certain extent, have been able to influence it from within over the years. Hence, even though at the national level the PT started moving towards the centre, MST members found space in which to push their demands and occupy positions of political representation. The EZLN, by contrast, was a clandestine organization and its members never participated within the PRD. The EZLN was limited in its strategy to trying to influence the party from outside without really having much in common in terms of political perspective. Hence, the two movements have also adopted different strategies with regard to political parties and the state. The MST recognizes that social forces seeking radical social transformation cannot progress without counting on allies within the state. They thus give their support to the PT in the hope of effecting change in public policy. The disappointing achievements under Lula’s administration have generated a discussion within the movement, but as yet no real break with their traditional pragmatic attitude towards institutional politics. It is still uncertain, though, how the militants and the leadership of the MST are going to rethink their traditional alliance with the PT. In contrast, the Zapatistas believe that the capitalist state cannot be reformed and that new working-class institutions and ways of doing politics should replace it. They nevertheless still attempted to build bridges with the PRD until 1998, at which point they came to the conclusion that the PRD was simply another version of the PRI. The endless episodes of internal fraud, corruption and intrigue to control the party or choose candidates for elected office have confirmed the Zapatista analysis. However, their complete rejection of elections has cut them off from large sectors of the population that could have otherwise been allies.
The MST’s more pragmatic politics of alliance has probably yielded more short-term results than the Zapatista maximalist one. The results, however, if we consider the way Lula combined strong support for capital with small concessions to popular sectors, have been very modest. The MST has accepted that in the current context what has been achieved is the most that can be expected. The EZLN refuses to limit itself to this perspective. In Brazil, however, the Workers’ Party’s successive federal administrations might end up being a very serious blow to the hopes of thousands of landless people and small-farmer families of the MST who expected to see their party govern in a manner different to Cardoso’s. Such a result could mean the discrediting of the PT, the political class and institutional politics in general in the eyes of MST members. Or it could also simply be the ‘normalization of politics’, when, as is the case in the Western world, the population sees institutional politics in terms simply of choosing who will administer the system and not much more. The consequences are worse for the future of the MST’s land struggle. As we have seen, the effects of the PT’s policies have discouraged landless people from joining encampments and have disarticulated the union between acampados and settlers that had been the strength of the MST’s activism. It is still uncertain, though, how the militants and the leadership of the MST are going to rethink their traditional strategy. Will this disappointment with the PT mean that the MST will re-orient its efforts towards the development of a broad coalition of social movements clearly opposed to neoliberalism? The coming years will answer this question.
In Mexico, the EZLN, almost since it adopted a public profile in 1994, was always very sceptical of political parties and institutional politics more broadly. Even though its positions varied from ‘critical and covert support’ of the PRD and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas to outright criticism of both the party and the leader, since 1998, for the EZLN, social change did not include breakthroughs of the left within institutional politics. The EZLN strategy was thus to develop relations with sectors of Mexican civil society and try to give them an organic cohesion. As we have seen, the EZLN was never able to succeed in this task because it was obliged by the refusal of the Mexican state to honour the San Andrés Accords to turn all its attention to mobilizing civil society to put pressure on the state. The efforts of the EZLN were also unsuccessful because the great majority of Mexicans still believe that elections are the appropriate path by which to improve their living conditions, and most organizations still fall under the corporatist tradition. The unwillingness of the EZLN to participate directly in a process of coalition-building prevented its proposals from going forward. With the publication of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle, the EZLN decided to move to a new phase in its national political strategy: direct involvement in the creation of a national movement. Events did not allow this and the EZLN retreated once again. The whole process was begun anew in 2013 with the escuelita Zapatista.
Both movements have developed a formidable resistance capacity – resting on their access to land and their ability to partly disconnect from the market – that other sectors lack. As I have shown in the previous chapters, control of the means of subsistence and production by MST and EZLN members is at the heart of their ability to resist and to implement development alternatives. Surprisingly, however, they have not put this advantage centre stage when they have attempted to join forces with other groups within civil society. Indeed, neither the MST nor the EZLN has underlined control of the means of subsistence and production as a foundation for building their resistance to neoliberalism. To be sure, the Zapatistas, having underlined their indigenous character, differ somewhat from the MST in this respect. Subcomandante Marcos has presented indigenous communities (and indigenous culture more broadly) as a space where alternative (non-capitalist) ways of life are possible. Nevertheless, the EZLN has not suggested how non-capitalist social relations could emerge or re-emerge in other settings within Mexico. The political strategies of the MST and the EZLN have not yet been accompanied by a serious reflection on how a network of alternative economic relations might be built and reinforce an enduring alliance with other groups. For both organizations, the focus of their strategy has been mainly political.
What remains surprising, as much in the case of the MST as in the case of the EZLN, is that they have both focused much more on ways of building political alliances than on ways of building an alternative political structure that could become the basis for a broader social transformation, as in the case of their own experience of creating and maintaining ‘autonomous rural communities’. This decision can probably be explained by their own analysis of their success, which, given that it is in line with a long tradition within the Latin American left, is understood as resulting from a breakthrough in the level of class consciousness and in the political will of the social base, rather than in terms of the emergence of networks of ‘autonomous communities’ that control their own means of subsistence and rely on their own autonomous structures of power. It should be said, nevertheless, that if creating autonomous rural communities is a concrete possibility in the countryside, albeit extremely difficult to achieve, this possibility is far from being self-evident in the urban context.