Catholic New Times on Chiapas
New Liberation News Service
/* ---------- "Catholic New Times on Chiapas" ---------- */
Chipas uprising story
The following is the lead article in the current issue of Catholic
New Times, Canada's independent Catholic fortnightly (published
Jan. 13, 1994).
By David Webster
January 1 was supposed to be a great day for the "new" Mexico of
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as he led his emerging modern
state into the North American Free Trade Agreement. But is was an
entirely different Mexico that took centre stage.
The poverty-stricken indigenous face of the country was thrown
into stark relief when long-simmering tensions burst into an armed
uprising in the southern state of Chiapas. The Mexican
government's response was to blame outside agitators and parts of
the local Catholic Church, especially Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia
and others who work with him.
"The military and government are accusing people working with
human rights organizations who have protested against what is
going on in Chiapas of being guerrillas,S said Suzanne Rumsey,
executive director of the Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights
in Latin America (ICCHRLA). Rumsey led a delegation that left for
Chiapas on Jan. 10.
The delegation went "to respond to an invitation from our partners
(Mexican human rights groups) to be a kind of witness and an
accompaniment to them during this difficult time," she said one
day before leaving.
Also on the delegation were James Weisgerber, national secretary
of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops; Stan Mackay, the
first native Canadian moderator of the United Church; Marthe
Lapierre of the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and
Peace; and Gerard McKenzie of the Ligue des Droits et Liberts
(League for Rights and Freedoms). The initial invitation for the
fact-finding mission came from Bishop Ruiz, Rumsey said.
"I think this event and what comes out of it will really set the
agenda" for those in the Canadian churches who want to stand with
the church and poor in Chiapas, Rumsey said, adding that she hopes
this delegation is just the first of several. The group will be
back in time to present its findings at the annual consultation
with human rights groups held by the department of foreign affairs
on Jan. 19 and 20.
The Chiapas uprising may have surprised the international press,
but it had been brewing for a long time. The Zapatista National
Liberation Army was training guerrillas in the highlands and
gearing up to fight the Mexican army as early as last spring. The
issues behind the conflict go back much further.
"The causes of the current conflict lie in the situation of
poverty, backwardness, the lack of resources and the
marginalization under which the majority of the people in this
region live," Bishop Ruiz told CNT's Jenny Cafiso in a telephone
interview. Ruiz and the two other bishops in Chiapas offered to
mediate, but had not yet received a response from the Zapatistas
as this issue went to press.
In the meantime, the Mexican army poured into the south. Within a
week of the uprising, one fifth of the army -- 12,000 well-armed
soldiers -- were in Chiapas to fight an army they said consisted of
just a few hundred guerrillas. "The government is trying any way
it can to keep control of the situation, and ... they have the
machinery to do it," Rumsey noted. This is an election year in
Mexico, and the governing Institutioanl Revolutionary Party is
desperate to avoid embarassment.
The initial response from the army and local authorities was
brutal, with indiscriminate bombings and attacks on civilians as
part of the crackdown that drove the Zapatistas out of cities they
captured and back into the highlands along the Guatemalan border.
Authorities tried to pin the blame for the uprising on foreigners:
Guatemalan guerrillas, Nicaragua's Sandinistas, even an un-named
"Canadian woman" and "green-eyed German man."
"There is this obsession with looking for who has provoked this,
whether they are foreigners, or others, as if this conflict had
immediate causes, instead of focusing on the concrete situation as
it exists now which is one of pain and extreme suffering for all
to seeS Bishop Ruiz said. RSuffering is suffering. We don't need
to look for the ulterior motives for the conflict or for
ideologies -- hunger does not have an ideology."
Authorities also accused Ruiz of instigating the uprising by his
support for Rradical Indian causes." Ruiz, who has headed the
diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas in the central highlands of
Chiapas for 33 years, has been a loud voice in support of
indigenous Mayan Indians, who make up at least 70 per cent of the
state's 3 million people.
Most of them speak little or no Spanish and have guarded their
culture and traditions since the conquistadors planted the Spanish
flag in their country. Some indigenous villages have even expelled
evangelical Christians and Catholics in order to protect their own
religious traditions. It's that indigenous pride that the
Zapatistas tapped into with their declaration that "we are the
products of 500 years of struggle.... The dictators are applying
an undeclared genocidal war against our people for many years."
In 1822 a government official sent to Chiapas reported that "the
Indians remain most ignorant and are very degraded, because in
this part of America they have been treated with much contempt and
they have been forced always into very humiliating submission."
Over 170 years later, their standing in the eyes of Mexico's
elites has not changed. Chiapas ranks last in the nation in adult
illiteracy (69.6 per cent) and percentage of school-age children
attending class (71.3 per cent).
Bishop Ruiz, a northern Mexican by birth and a leading liberation
theologian known throughout Latin America as Don Samuel, has
worked hard to change that. He founded the Fray Bartolom de las
Casas Centre for Human Rights in the diocese, the state's most
important defender of basic human rights, particularly the rights
of indigenous people. The Centre now receives funding from the
Canadian government. When the uprising started, the Mexican
government refused to allow its director, Father Pablo Romo, to
return to Chiapas.
In October, Ruiz was awarded the prestigious Letelier Moffat Human
Rights Award for 1993 by the Washington-based Institute for Policy
Studies, which cited him as "a major human rights activist in
Mexico for 30 years (who) has often clashed with military and
civilian authorities as a result of his reports on human rights
abuses and his efforts to stop the eviction of the local
indigenous peoples from their lands."
Ruiz's strong positions Rseriously offended the Holy Father,"
according to papal nuncio to Mexico Geronimo Prigione. An attempt
to remove him as bishop was overturned when more than 15,000
indigenous people marched in San Cristobal to support him. "The
attempt to remove Don Samuel Ruiz ... is an attack against the
indigenous people in an attempt to leave them with no protection,"
wrote the indigenous movement Xi'Nich. The local support was
backed by letters from around the world (see CNT, 21 Nov. 1993).
Bishop Ruiz, Bishop Felipe Arizmundi Esquivel of Tapachula and
Bishop Felipe Aguirre Franco of Tuxtla Gutierrez have called on
both sides "to seek a truthful and respectful dialogue" and
offered themselves as mediators. "The Mexican Bishops conference
has supported the position taken by the three bishops of Chiapas,"
Ruiz said. Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu also offered to mediate
and supported the bishops' initiative.
Ruiz does not support the violent path chosen by the Zapatistas,
but sympathizes with them nonetheless. "The economic situation in
this region is difficult for everybody," he said. "Those of us who
are in a particular social and economic bracket feel the problem,
but not the desperation, while others do not only feel the
problems, but also experience an existential frustration and
therefore the subjective conviction that at this one point there
are no other alternatives than the one of taking up arms."
The Mexican government has recently been touting the country's
booming stock markets and its growing number of super-rich (Mexico
now stands fourth in the world in the number of resident
billionaires). The technocrats that dominate the ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party do have ideas about how to deal
with the grinding poverty of Chiapas, but they are not plans that
would benefit the poor.
The Mexican revolution that started in 1910 gave the country a new
constitution that legalized the ejido system of collective land
ownership. In the 1940s, President Lazaro Cardenas began a
sweeping program of land redistribution that benefitted the ejidos
and the campesinos (peasants) working on them. The governing
Institutional Revolutionary Party has Rmodernized" itself since
then, however, and now wants to do away with the ejidos. The North
American Free Trade Agreement makes the survival of the communal
farms a long shot.
"The original spirit of the constitution was to protect the basic
right of every Mexican to education, health and land.... This
spirit of the constitution has changed radically to facilitate
NAFTA and NAFTA negotiations,S said Sinu Romo of the Canada-Mexico
Working Group, a Toronto coalition formed to protest against the
bombings in Chiapas. "This revolt is a direct result of the
negotiations."
Trouble was already brewing when President Salinas proclaimed
NAFTA, the last straw that prompted the Zapatista uprising. NAFTA
will tear down the tariff walls that have kept the price of corn
grown by ejidos and small producers relatively high. Free trade
with a neighbour that boasts one of the world's largest grain
surpluses will change all that, flooding the markets and making it
impossible for the ejidos to compete.
A likely result would see campesinos leaving the land to join the
already-teeming slums of Mexico City or the maquiladora zone along
the U.S. border, where they could serve as a cheap pool of
unskilled labour. Meanwhile, the land in the south would be freed
up for wealthy ranchers who have been encroaching on the ejidos
for years as they depleted their own land, making Chiapas the site
of one quarter of the official land disputes in Mexico.
As one Zapatista leader declared, "NAFTA is the death warrant for
the indigenous people of Mexico."
Citizens' groups in Mexico have been fighting NAFTA since it was
proposed, without making a dent in the international press, which
has portrayed Mexicans as largely united behind it. Opposition
leader Cuahtemoc Cardenas (son of the man who redistributed land
to the ejidos), who many Mexicans believe won the last
presidential election but was denied office by ballot-rigging, has
called the current deal unacceptable and called for renegotiation.
None of this made much impact until the Zapatistas forced the
world spotlight on Chiapas by their uprising on the day NAFTA came
into effect.
With the highlands of Chiapas almost made-to-order for guerrilla
warfare, the war could go on indefinitely. That could be bad news
for human rights advocates. Rigoberta Menchu said she was
concerned "over how the work of indigenous, peasant and popular
organizations of Chiapas could be affected, along with that of the
Christian Base Communities and the Catholic Church.S She also
called for measures to protect her fellow refugees from the
long-running war in neighbouring Guatemala, many of whom are
living at camps in Chiapas.
Bishop Ruiz was afraid the conflict would create a flood of
internal refugees fleeing the war zone and the human rights abuses
of the army. "People are very nervous, nothing like this has ever
been seen. With army planes circling over the villages,
bombardments, people are very afaid. Instead of staying in their
homes they move, there is panic."
The only consulation for many is that it could have been worse. "I
think the fact that the world spotlight has been on them has
helped to prevent a blood bath," said ICCHRLA's Rumsey. But she
added that "my concern is that the media tend to refocus their
spotlight rather quickly.... I really worry that this may be used
as an excuse for widespread repression."
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