San Pablo Etla
January 2008
From June to October 2006, there were no police in the city of Oaxaca (population 600,000), not even to direct traffic. The governor and his functionaries met secretly in hotels or private homes; none of them dared to show up at their offices. The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) had posted 24-hour guards in all the public buildings and radio and TV stations that it controlled. When the governor began sending out his goons to launch nocturnal guerrilla attacks against these guards, the people responded by putting up barricades. More than a thousand barricades were put up every night at 11 p.m., around the encampments or at critical intersections. They would be taken down every morning at 6 a.m. to restore normal traffic. Despite the attacks, there was less violence in those months (fewer assaults, deaths and injuries or traffic accidents) than in any similar period in the previous ten years. Unionized workers belonging to APPO performed basic services like garbage collection.
Some observers began speaking of the Oaxaca Commune, evoking the Paris Commune of 1871. Oaxacans responded, smiling: “Yes, but the Paris Commune lasted only 50 days and we’ve already lasted more than 100.” The analogy is pertinent but exaggerated, except in terms of the reaction that these two popular insurrections elicited in the centers of power. Like the European armies that crushed the communards who had taken over all the functions of government, the Federal Preventive Police of Mexico, backed by the army and the navy, were sent to Oaxaca on October 28, 2006, to try to control the situation. On November 25 those forces conducted a terrible repression, the worst in many years, with massive violation of human rights and an approach which can be legitimately described as state terrorism. The operation- which included imprisonment of the supposed leaders of the movement and hundreds of others- was described by the International Commission for the Observation of Human Rights (which visited Oaxaca in January 2007) as, “a juridical and military strategy…whose ultimate purpose is to achieve control and intimidation of civil population”. For the authorities, this strategy would dissolve APPO and send a warning to the social movements in the whole country.
This strategy is being employed to date, in January 2008, and has had profound impact in Oaxaca. There results increasing and exacerbated polarization. Some activists are in jail and others exiled out of Oaxaca or even Mexico. It has been impossible to identify all the disappeared; their families are afraid of revealing their names. Many professionals are now joining the usual migrants, out of fear or for lack of economic opportunities. Some people are afraid of exhibiting any support to APPO or participating in autonomous initiatives. Some others take for granted that the movement is over and the tyrannic governor will remain in office for the rest of his term (three more years), and are thus trying to accommodate themselves to that prospect. All this is true; there exist many symptoms of intimidation. However, the opposite is increasingly predominating. Marches are growing, as are sit-ins. Everywhere there is intense effervescence. Oaxaca is boiling. There is an increasing risk of violent confrontations in this highly polarized society, which may be used as a pretext for more authoritarianism. Many factors, however, may block this option and nourish the hope that the movement will be able to peacefully evolve and consolidate. The impulse for a profound transformation is very deep and strong and perhaps inevitable.
On November 23, 2006, a week before Felipe Calderón took office as the new, rightist and contested President, subcomandante Marcos, the speaker of the Zapatistas, declared that he "is going to start to fall from his first day" and that "we're on the eve of a great uprising or civil war." When asked who would lead that uprising, he replied: “the people, each in their place, in a network of mutual support. If we don't accomplish it that way, there will be spontaneous uprisings, explosions all over, civil war..."
He cited the case of Oaxaca, where "there are no leaders, nor bosses: it's the people themselves who are organized." That's how it is going to be in the whole country; Oaxaca serves as an indicator of what's going to happen all over. "If there isn't a civil and peaceful way out, which is what we propose in the Other Campaign," (see below) Marcos warned, "then it will become each man for himself … For us, it doesn't matter what's above. What matters is what's going to arise from below. When we rise up, we're going to sweep away the entire political class, including those who say they're the parliamentary left." (La Jornada, 24-11-06).
This is a clear definition of the challenges that lie ahead. The Zapatistas, like APPO, find themselves exposed to a two-pronged attack: the constituted powers and their paramilitary groups that systematically threaten them, while the institutional left tries to isolate, marginalize and discredit them. It will be difficult, in such circumstances, to achieve the articulation of "pockets of resistance" that exist throughout the country into the "web of mutual support" that the Zapatistas have been trying to create.
No one can nourish a solid expectation that the Zapatistas will be able to unify all the discontented into broad coalitions that could put into practice a "national program of struggle" in a great civil, democratic and peaceful uprising. But the alternative couldn't be worse: a government ruling by force and with the market; the reign of drug dealers spreading and deepening; increasingly violent forms of civil war exploding throughout the country, in which the people themselves, organized at the grassroots, confront the constituted powers, local mafias, paramilitary groups and their own demons.
Far from being anomalous, this looks like the current state of affairs in many parts of the world – as people coming from more than 40 countries discussed in the Zapatista meeting in Oventic, on January 1, 2007. In spite of dark prospects, the debates were a clear source of hope. They evidenced that today’s Zapatismo is no longer in the hands of the Zapatistas, but in the International of Hope, created 10 years ago. Nonconformity and discontent are not enough. Neither is critical awareness. People mobilize themselves when they think their action may bring about a change, when they have hope. And that is what more and more people have today.
What APPO is not
APPO remains a mystery, even for those who are part of it. The distortions introduced by the media and by some participants in APPO, who were using it to promote their own political and ideological agendas, have created extended confusion. Furthermore, its innovative character is a challenge to understanding the nature, meaning, and implications of this strange political animal.
Both insiders and outsiders still view APPO as a political organization. They assume that, like almost all of them, it is focused on the state and replicates structurally the apparatus which supposedly aspires to run. Like the state, it would be vertical and hierarchical. Its leaders, like state officials (elected or appointed), would routinely succumb to partisanship and corruption. Assuming that the people cannot act on its own, someone would be pulling the strings behind APPO. Surely, a group or a leader would be manipulating the masses.
Officials, parties, and commentators saw the insurrection, especially at the beginning, as a mere revolt. They were not altogether mistaken; it fitted well into the tradition of popular outbreaks that occur in the face of an unbearable oppressor or of a measure that constitutes “the last straw.” It was also seen as a rebellion, because it was an uprising of indomitable people affirming their dignity. By the thousands, by the millions, the people rebelled. “Enough!” was the cry of the rebels who suddenly emerged from every corner.
But this insurrection was neither a mere revolt nor just a rebellion. Revolts may be volcanic and irrepressible, but also ephemeral. They subside as quickly as they arose. They leave a permanent imprint, like volcanic rock, but they crumble. This is not what occurred here. This insurrection did not subside. Governor Ulises Ruiz embodied the source of discontent and displayed the worst traits of the oppressive system, but he was no more than the detonator of dispersed discontent. The people called for his ouster, yet his political corpse will fertilize a more lasting agenda of transformation. The process may sweep away such political relics of a bygone era in order to build, peacefully and democratically, a new society.
Nor is APPO a “mass movement” – whatever might be said by the conventional Left and even by some of its own constituent groupings. The masses are made up of atomized individuals grouped into abstract categories defined and controlled by others – passengers of a plane, pensioners, workers in a factory, voters, party members, demonstrators, etc. In the mass, people lose control over their capacity to move independently. The “mobilizations” of a trade union, a party, or a leader, organized and controlled from above, tend to demobilize people. Despite its overtones of radicalism, the word mass has ecclesiastical and bourgeois origins. It reduces people to the condition they share with material objects: being measured in numbers. The illusion that the mass of consumers controls the market, or that the mass of voters controls political power, serves to hide the real situation, in which people are continually stripped of political and economic power.
APPO’s huge marches seemed to be comprised of masses. Some groups thought that they had succeeded in creating a “mass movement.” To be sure, certain isolated individuals, identifiable with some category, participated on their own initiative as a way of expressing their support for the movement. Most of those who have participated in APPO, however, have done so not as individuals but rather as members of a group, on the basis of decisions taken within a community. They do not constitute masses.
Organizing a movement of movements
There in an increasing consensus that APPO is a movement, not an organization. Like any movement, it may have organizations within it – each with its own leadership, goals, structures, etc. “Fuera Ulises!” (calling for the resignation of the governor) emerged clearly as an expression of the immense popular discontent, but it cannot be viewed as a goal. There is no proposition or goal that defines APPO; it encompasses a diversity of intentions and trajectories. There is growing convergence around certain agendas – like producing a new Constitution or resisting capitalism – but even on these points there is no agreement on what they mean.
Neither the 30-member Coordinadora Provisional which operated from June 20 to November 12, 2006, nor the 260-member State Council which was formed on the latter date, can be taken to constitute or represent APPO; nor do they have governing authority. They carried out important functions, especially at critical moments, in disseminating information and guidelines, and also in coordinating specific actions such as marches. But they were never able to control the autonomous actions or initiatives of the participants. The Council was never able to assemble all its members, not even on its founding day. Far from being a source of weakness, however, this situation gives the movement a great force.
Looking more closely at APPO, one sees immediately that, more than a movement, it is a convergence of movements and organizations of very distinct types. Some of the movements are longstanding, like the indigenous movement and the movements of peasants, feminists, environmentalists, and defenders of human rights or of cultural traditions, etc. Other movements were formed or became more sharply defined with the emergence of APPO, particularly in the city of Oaxaca and in some other regions. In addition, APPO embraces a number of types of organizations. What has been called the “civic space” of APPO is made up of a large number of civic organizations and non-profits dedicated to the most diverse activities and closely linked to existing groups and communities. There are also political associations and organizations, some of them strictly local and others linked to national organizations and parties.
This great diversity implies disagreements and contradictions. Decisions of the coordinating bodies, which in principle must be by consensus, tend to be slow and difficult, often resulting in a lowest common denominator which is not always the best response to rapidly developing events. The underlying diversity, however, is at the same time an immense source of strength. APPO does not depend on a leader. Its strength arises not from any momentary episode but rather from powerful historical forces impelling people to strive for change.
APPO softly mutated from the condition of a mere event: an assembly to support Local 22 of the teachers union (after the repression they suffered during their strike), to a coalition of leaders of around 300 organizations which came to the meeting convened by Local 22. Very soon it fluidly mutated again to become an articulated convergence of political and social movements. However, when the issue was to evolve from the form revolt/rebellion to the structured organicity of a movement of movements many divergences emerged. There was an active promotion of a front of political organizations, to adopt the vertical structure of the latter. This proposal found continuous resistance. Most participants prefer the style of a movement, but APPO has not yet discovered the pertinent organizational form, as a web or network of social and political movements and autonomous organizations, collectives and communities.
Participation of Indian peoples
The state of Oaxaca has more natural and cultural diversity than any other Mexican state, and is the only one with an indigenous majority. With 5% of the national population, it contains one-fifth of all the country’s municipalities or municipios. This basic political unit of Mexico was created by the Spanish to divide and rule, and Mexican governments have used it in the same way. The municipal fragmentation of Oaxaca is maintained from two directions. The authorities imposed it to overcome resistance on the part of the indigenous peoples, but the indigenous peoples adopted the municipio as the unit appropriate to their struggles for autonomy. Four out of five municipios are governed on the basis of “usos y costumbres” – a euphemism to emphasize that the people as a whole exercises authority without electoral processes, arriving at its decisions in communal assemblies. The indigenous struggle also accounts for Oaxaca’s existence as the state with the highest proportion of communally owned land; more than 80%. Upon recovering their lands, the communities were able to express through them their own approaches to relations among people and with nature.
For many years, the federal and state authorities allowed the Indian peoples of Oaxaca to practice their own forms of government in most of the state’s municipios, beyond the reach of the Constitution, the law, and partisan politics – but not without overlaying these forms with an elaborate system of simulation.
The commemoration in 1992 of 500 years since the European invasion gave indigenous peoples throughout the Americas the opportunity to show the vigor and vitality of their initiatives. The governor who took office in Oaxaca at the end of that year found the indigenous people in full effervescence. On March 21, 1994, fearful that the Zapatista insurrection of January 1 would spread to Oaxaca, he offered the Indian peoples a “New Accord” giving them shared authority in the state government. Although the “Accord” was blocked by bureaucratic and cacique-type structures and remained mostly at the level of rhetoric, it had some important legislative consequences. On August 30, 1995, the reform of Oaxaca’s electoral law gave Indian communities the power to decide whether to choose their leaders through party-competition or through the traditional system of usos y costumbres. On November 12 of that year, when the reform was applied for the first time, 412 of Oaxaca’s 570 municipios opted for the traditional approach. None of them experienced the post-electoral clashes that were common in those which opted for the party regime.
The change had implications beyond any electoral outcome; it was understood as a strong expression of autonomy, involving many other aspects of the relationship between Indian peoples and the state. In some villages there began to appear graffiti declaring, “Here we do not allow political parties, least of all the PRI.” The new law, instead of enhancing state intervention, served to restrain it, by requiring that the authorities respect the will of the community.
On June 6, 1998, changes in Oaxaca’s Constitution were promulgated, and on June 17 a new Law on the Rights of the Peoples and the Indigenous Communities of Oaxaca was passed. The reforms granted self-determination, in the form of autonomy, to the indigenous peoples and communities. They also recognized them as juridical entities under public law. Many analysts consider the resulting regime the most advanced in the Americas in relation to concerns of the indigenous population. However, in action it is almost useless: the three branches of government ignore or openly violate it.
The timid openings that seemed to have occurred with the "New Accord" were drastically canceled in the corrupt and authoritarian administration of state governor José Murat (1996-2000). The discontent that had built up under his rule led all the opposition forces in the state to ally themselves for the first time in 2000 against the PRI, which up to that time had maintained effective control of the ballot boxes. Ulises Ruiz, the PRI candidate, lost the election, but managed to take the governorship by means of a transparent fraud. Ruiz is notorious as the PRI's leading expert in electoral fraud. All the electoral organs of Oaxaca were under his control and ratified his victory. The opposition challenged the outcome in the Federal Tribunal, which acknowledged the fraud but refused to nullify it, on the pretext that it was a local matter.
Those who despite all their lack of trust in representative democracy had taken the trouble to vote felt an enormous frustration. Three months after the election for governor came the municipal elections. In four fifths of the municipios, the people organized the elections in their own way. In those cases where the election was organized along party lines, the rate of abstention was overwhelming. In the state capital the new municipal president was elected by only 11% of the registered voters.
The new governor, lacking all legitimacy, governed despotically, constantly attacking the people's movements, the autonomous organizations, and civil society initiatives. The destruction of the natural and historical patrimony of the state, especially in the city of Oaxaca, produced by public works conceived with a distorted notion of modernization, generated immense discontent. He used federal funds to finance all sorts of useless projects, with the dual aim of winning votes and generating resources for the presidential campaign of the PRI. When the presidential election date (July 2, 2006) came close, the government intensified its pressure on the voters. No holds were barred: intimidation, threats, imprisonment, direct violence, buying votes, illegal use of public resources, etc. Never before, despite the PRI's long history of fraud and manipulation, had anything similar been seen. Ruiz thus helped create the atmosphere in which the movement would grow.
The Indian peoples were slow to join the movement. Although well known Indian leaders were involved from the beginning and there was visible indigenous participation even in the earliest marches, the discussions within the communities dragged on for months. In many cases the debate reflected a long-standing tension between the communities and the teachers, which made the communities reluctant to join in what they saw as a purely trade-unionist mobilization on the teachers' part. Although indigenous participation grew steadily, it was not explicitly encouraged by the APPO.
In late September and early October, 2006, however, major indigenous leaders, intellectuals and organizations joined in the call for a Citizens' Initiative for Peace, Democracy and Justice, which was inaugurated on October 12. Later that year, in the big march of November 5, municipal and community leaders had a significant presence. In the inaugural Congress of the APPO, it became clear that in several regions of the state indigenous participation had become well established, sometimes in the form of regional APPOs. In the predominantly indigenous Sierra de Juárez, for example, the Assembly of Zapotecan, Mixe and Chinantecan Peoples was formed and sent 23 delegates to the statewide APPO. Finally, the Forum of Indigenous Peoples of Oaxaca convened on November 28-29. The following aspects of this Forum deserve emphasis:
1. Authorities and representatives of 14 different indigenous peoples were present. Never in anyone's memory had so vast a range of peoples converged on their own initiative. Also present were numerous civic organizations that had supported the Indian peoples for a long time.
2. The Forum examined extensively, in a democratic way, fundamental issues for the Indian peoples, like self-determination and autonomy; land, territories and resources; intercultural indigenous education and communication; and human rights violations. It arrived at sharp and well thought out formulations, e.g., "education has been a new form of colonization."
3. The Forum publicly called for, among other things, the removal of the governor; it denounced violations of the law; it called for "strengthening the process of unity in diversity [including] closer organic and programmatic ties and joint activities among all peoples, sectors and movements"; it called for "strengthening the organization and joint activity of the APPO, above all stimulating at the grassroots level all the movements and organizations that make it up…"; it pointed out that "in Oaxaca the demands and hopes of society are no longer satisfied by the current laws, institutions and authoritarian practices of the political regime. In this sense Oaxaca has already changed; it cannot go back to an earlier condition"; it called openly for nonviolence and for democratic dialogue and concluded as follows:
“We Indian peoples wish to inform the society and government of Oaxaca, of Mexico, and of the whole world that the enormous abuse to which we have been subjected by the public authorities does not intimidate or paralyze us, as we have shown by carrying out this Forum. We are concerned that what little was left of the rule of law – continuously violated by Ulises Ruiz – has now been destroyed by the federal government. We are under an undeclared and therefore illegal state of emergency. This concerns us and prompts us to act with extreme caution. But it does not hold us back. Our path is clear and we are going to continue along it, in our own way, with our own tempo and rhythm. This path includes the transformation of all the norms and institutions currently defining our common existence [convivencia]. We are not going to achieve this by ourselves. But never again will we be excluded from the processes of conceiving and operating these norms and institutions.”
The urban-popular movement
More than half of the current population of the city of Oaxaca lives in popular neighborhoods formed, in the majority of cases, by illegal land-occupations of squatters. Their struggles to regularize their situation and obtain basic services were well known, but they did not seem to have a major presence in the social and political life of the city – except through the graffiti which could be seen everywhere. Most of these graffiti lacked meaning and creativity. They were only "signatures" [marcas] marking the territory of youth gangs, who in this way expressed their feelings of revolt and flung back at society the rejection they had felt. The authentic graffiti artists who conveyed political messages derogatorily called them marqueros – even though they themselves had begun their graffiti activity making marcas.
The sudden presence in the movement of groups from the popular neighborhoods and some from the middle class immediately posed a dilemma. It was not known to what extent the communal social fabric also existed in those neighborhoods. The barricades arose spontaneously as a popular response to the governor's attacks on the APPO encampments, and rapidly took on a life of their own, to the extent of becoming autonomous focal points for social and political organization. Long sleepless nights provided the opportunity for extensive political discussions, which awakened in many young people a hitherto nonexistent or inchoate social consciousness. The new graffiti manifested this aroused awareness.
On the barricades, new forms of anarchism – in both ideological and lifestyle applications – began to appear. The collectives on the barricades defended their autonomy ferociously and sometimes with a level of hostility that was hard to channel. Some groups occupied abandoned public buildings and began not only to live in them but to convert them into centers of cultural and political activity. The children and youth of these groups played a significant part in the movement, especially in confrontations with the police, which many of them were used to.
Paths of APPO
APPO is rooted in longstanding and very Oaxacan traditions of social struggle, but it is strictly contemporary in its outlook and its openness to the world. It owes its radicalism to its very nature: it is at ground level, close to the roots. It acquired its insurrectionist tone after trying all the legal and institutional methods of advancing its demands and finding them all blocked. But it does not dance to just any tune; it composes its own music. Where there are no markers, it blazes its own trail.
APPO is clearly a result of general discontent with the rule of Ulises Ruiz. Beginning with very concrete experiences, like the successful opposition to erecting a McDonald's in Oaxaca's central plaza, it quickly and clearly adopted the politics of a single NO and many YESes that characterizes many present-day social movements. This approach finds unity in the common rejection of an action or omission, a policy, an official or a regime, but allows at the same time for a plurality of affirmations, projects, ideals and ideologies.
The rejection of Governor Ulises Ruiz, which persists to this day among the majority of Oaxacans, increasingly becomes a rejection of a regime and of a whole state of affairs. Ulises Ruiz is just one embodiment of a government that is already considered unbearable. Corruption and authoritarianism did not begin with him, but they reached extremes under his rule that made them intolerable for the majority. For many APPO participants, rejection of this regime includes a rejection of capitalism.
The diversity of the innumerable movements and organizations makes it impossible to identify a single path for the APPO. There really are many YESes that are being put forward by its participants. Although there are clear overlaps and convergences among them, the propositions put forward by the indigenous movements, for example, are not identical to those advanced by environmentalists or human rights advocates.
Convergences and divergences can be observed in the following classification of the current struggles.
These examples are only the tip of the iceberg of themes that are discussed continuously in Oaxaca, in the most diverse ways. In many cases the debates dispense with technical terms and even with widely used concepts (like capitalism and socialism), but their content and orientation clearly express a radical critique of the status quo, along with a continuous search for alternatives and a commitment to fight for them.
In the midst of the daily struggle, an image attempting to express what has happened in Oaxaca is now circulating.
Years of fierce corruption and overflowing authoritarianism converted Oaxaca into a pressure cooker above a slow flame. Ulises Ruiz added fuel to the fire until the pressure hurled the lid off on June 14th 2006, with the repression of a teachers sit-in. APPO articulated the discontent brewing inside the pot and converted it into transformative action. The ferocity of the federal forces put a new heavy lid on top of Oaxaca on November 25th, but the fire continues. Small holes, that opened in the lid through people’s initiatives, alleviate the pressure, but they remain insufficient. The pressure continues to accumulate and in any moment will hurl the lid off once more. The experiences accumulated in the last year might provide ways to let the pressure escape in a more organized way, but nobody can foresee what will happen. There are too many forces at odds with each other.
Another metaphor can contribute to an understanding of what is coming. More than 35 years ago, in the final pages of La revolución interrumpida, Adolfo Gilly quoted some phrases from Leon Trotsky: “Without leading organizations, the masses’ energy will dissipate, like vapor not contained by a boiler. But be that as it may, what propels the movement is not the boiler nor the piston, but the vapor”.
What is this “real material, invisible and indefinable” that Trotsky calls “the masses’ energy” and compares with “vapor”? In contrast to this, adds Gilly, that material has “sense, understanding, and reason and because of this does not dissipate, like vapor, but endures transmuted in experience, invisible for those that believe that the movement resides in the piston and the boiler (in other words, in the organizational apparatuses), but existing in unexpected subsequent aspects of daily life.”
Oaxaca is still “at full steam”. Part of what was generated in 2006 has condensed itself into an experience and transformed into a behavior: it is in the daily attitudes of many people, who will never return to the old “normalcy”. Another portion of the “vapor” generated yesterday, or that comes up every day, propels many initiatives. And there is “vapor” that continues to accumulate, that raises the pressure and that perhaps is trying to redefine its course once it succeeds in liberating itself from everything still retaining it—which is not a boiler with a piston, but the oppressive lid of the repression that continues: political and police mechanisms blocking off the popular initiative.
The obsession to ascertain who generates that “vapor” persists, according to the prejudice that people can not take initiative themselves. It’s taken for granted that somebody, a person or a group, would be throwing rocks and hiding the hand: it would have manipulated the docile masses and would want to continue doing so. The media constructed their leaders, presenting as leaders people better adapted to the image they were creating to better prepare public opinion to the violent liquidation of the movement. The authorities did the same to organize co-optation and repression; they seem now to believe that the APPO will be paralyzed or at least disabled while those that supposedly lead the movement remain in prison. Similar attitudes have been observed in the left, inside and outside the movement. Those who think that what has happened would be inconceivable without a leading organization, now see it dissolved or weakened and want to renovate it or reconstruct it. Or else, when the absence of real leaders of the APPO is recognized, everything is transferred to the past: that deficiency would have provoked the evaporation of the spontaneous popular outbreak. The popular energy would have dissipated, like vapor not contained in a boiler.
When the question is not about seizing the State apparatuses, but about changing the social reality, the vapor, which continually condenses in experience, operates in its dissipation, spilling itself onto reality. Occasionally adapting itself in boilers and the pistons generated by the vapor itself and used for certain tasks, the vapor can not be contained in “organized apparatuses” nor be driven by “leading organizations”. For those apparatuses and organizations to be relevant and play a role, they should renounce the pyramidal structure, when a web is needed, and they must learn to lead by obeying. Furthermore, they should operate on an appropriate scale, adapting themselves continually to conditions and styles of the real men and women that are always the vapor, the impulse, and those finally determining course and reach of the whole movement.
Mechanical metaphors always fall short of the richness of real social processes. But the pot and the vapor are useful images to observe the complex present situation, in Oaxaca and greater Mexico, when what is most important seems to be invisible.
APPO’s Prospects
At the beginning of 2008 it is impossible to foresee how long the political classes will keep Governor Ulises Ruiz in office. A prominent social critic has noted that Ruiz’s continued incumbency “is a profound enigma and also a very severe insult to republican logic.” In the current conditions of social and political polarization, Ruiz’s continuation in a position of authority -which he is less and less capable of exercising- will impose increasing political costs on the dominant regime. In Oaxaca, this could lead to ever more intense and violent confrontations, and eventually result in a kind of open civil war. Many groups and organizations are dedicated to prevent such option, in order to follow instead peaceful and democratic paths of social transformation, but they may also fail in such attempt.
What seems entirely foreseeable is that the movement will not give up. Surely the different movements that comprise it will differ in their vitality and in their presence on the political scene, but none of them will disappear or become paralyzed. The APPO represents above all a great awakening. At the same time, the terrible impact of the savage repression of late 2006 is still felt widely. There are many ruined families, and there are widespread feelings of uncertainty, fear, and economic insecurity. Yet still, the movement is showing an immense resilience and is beginning to multiply its initiatives. Throughout the state of Oaxaca there is the conviction that we are on the threshold of a profound transformation. No sector and no aspect of Oaxaca’s reality have been untouched. The winds of change are blowing everywhere, in full force.
APPO embodies the transition from resistance to liberation initiated in Oaxaca by Zapatismo. Groups and communities that for centuries had resisted colonization and development, maintaining their own forms of organization and self-government, saw clearly the new threats posed by global forces and recognized the limitations and dangers of the fragmented regionalism into which many of them had fallen, confining resistance to their immediate spheres. As an alternative both to such fragmented regionalism and to globalization, there is now spreading the notion of localization. Locally based self-affirmation is preserved, but there is an increasingly powerful opening to other groups and communities, to form extensive alliances and coalitions with all those who are discontented with the system. Not only is there an awareness of the threats (including devastating attacks) against resistance movements; there is also a sense that resistance itself may have reached its limit. It can no longer be just a question of surviving in the face of a dominant regime; it is time to create, together with other groups and sectors, a regime that can replace it. Hence the need to advance from mere resistance, to liberation.
The APPO brought a fresh breeze of renovation to Oaxaca in a dark period of its history. It opened a new horizon of hope, whose innovative character, especially in terms of bridging cultural diversity and applying the assembly tradition to the present, is a source of inspiration for many other movements in Mexico and in the world.
Redefining Zapatismo
On January 1st 2004 the Zapatistas used the celebration of their 10th/20th anniversary -10th of their uprising, 20th of their creation- to redefine themselves. “20 years have thus elapsed”, said Comandante Abraham. “But we're just beginning”.
The Zapatistas had accomplished important advances in the consolidation of their social and political life in the zones under their control, with no support from the government: for thirteen years they have refused to accept public funds, even for schools or health centers. They had introduced significant changes in their structures, in the form of their new Juntas de Buen Gobierno. The report on the operation of these Juntas, which was presented in August of 2004, confirmed their usual style: they say what they do, and they do what they say. It also revealed the impressive progress they have made in the tasks that they set for themselves, and the no less impressive difficulties that they face.
“The indigenous villages”, the Zapatistas said, “should organize and govern themselves, according to their own ways of thinking and understanding, according to their interests, taking into account their cultures and traditions.” (La Jornada, 10-08-04). It is Zapatismo, they said, that communities make their decisions at odds with the dominant regime. “Ours is neither a liberated territory nor a utopian commune. Nor is it the experimental laboratory of an absurdity or a paradise for an orphaned left. It’s a rebellious territory in resistance.” (La Jornada, 2-10-04).
Above all, the Juntas “are proof that the Zapatistas don't intend to hegemonize or to homogenize the world in which we live with their ideas or methods. In Zapatista territories, there is no aim to pulverize the Mexican nation. On the contrary, it is here that the possibility of its reconstruction is being born”. (La Jornada, Aug 23, 2004). The Zapatistas are well aware of the fact that the existing powers will not fulfill the San Andrés Accords. Through their practical implementation in Zapatista territory they offer valid proofs that they don't produce the negative impacts which were used as pretext for the constitutional counter-reform.
Zapatista "government," observes Luis Hernández,
"…is not a regime, but a practice…a laboratory of new social relations… [that] recovers old aspirations of the movements for self-emancipation: liberation should be the work of those it benefits; there should not be authorities over the people; the subjects of the social order must have full decision-making capacity over their destinies. Their existence is not the expression of a moral nostalgia, but the living expression of a new politics." (Hernández, La Jornada Sept 7, 2004).
In their own way, as usual, the Zapatistas continue to test the speed of dreams, with a libertarian spirit. They are accompanied by those who come to learn and collaborate with them. During the period of the report of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, these others came from 43 countries and many regions of Mexico.
The terms that we use do not adequately describe the experience of what the Zapatistas are doing. The idea of government clearly implies people governing and people being governed, the division of society into these two classes of people in the hollow of an oppressive regime. It assumes a conjunction of institutional mechanisms by which those who govern are able to control the governed, like the monopoly of legitimate violence in the democratic nation-state. Perhaps for this reason, many indigenous communities do not use those terms to describe their own authorities, who don't have those same characteristics. Those terms are used only to allude to officials or institutions of the government, at any level, which they always perceive as alien, imposing, and oppressive. In calling their new bodies created to express the collective will Juntas de Buen Gobierno, the Zapatistas implicitly denounce the mal gobierno [bad government] of the dominant structure. But perhaps new words should be invented to express exactly what it means to “command while obeying” [mandar obedeciendo] – that the governed govern.
In June, 2005, the Zapatistas announced that they were consulting their bases about a political initiative that might put at risk all that had been accomplished up to that point. It was the result of a long process of consolidation of their political options in the Lacandon Jungle and of their continuous analysis of the context, characterized by the increasingly profound and general breakdown of the political class. The three branches of government as well as the political parties are continuously deteriorating. The spectacle is pathetic and painful, not so much because there are many things worth saving, but because of the consequences.
Since August of 2004, the Zapatistas have called for attentive observation of what is going on:
“The relentless and frenzied dismantling of the nation state, driven by a political class lacking professionalism and decency (clearly accompanied in no few occasions by some in the media and the entire juridical system), will result in a chaotic nightmare that not even primetime shows of suspense and terror could equal." (La Jornada, 20-08-04)
This is not an encouraging perspective. It is not about a necessary and sensible transformation for the progressive substitution of broken or useless parts in an obsolete machine. It is a turbulent and tense process in which the fragments of what used to be the Mexican political system try clumsily and uselessly to express themselves anew; or fight among themselves, clumsily and endlessly, guided by an eagerness to be rid of their rivals on a course which only in the illusions of those involved represents progress. In fact, the situation has all the indications of approaching a precipice.
In June of 2005 subcomandante Marcos recalled the context: the war declared by capitalism in the era of neoliberal globalization, what the Zapatistas have called the Fourth World War;
“Amidst the rubble produced in this war of re-conquest lies the economic base, the material base, of the traditional nation-state…The tools and forms of traditional dominance have also been destroyed or severely crippled … The destruction thus also reaches the traditional political classes.”
Through the communiqué the Zapatistas drew a line. They showed how the electoral marketing process pressures all the parties and candidates to accommodate themselves within the ideological center. They outlined the characteristics of each party and then felt it necessary to define themselves. ‘Up there’ [in the political arena], they denounced
"… indecency, impudence, cynicism, and shamelessness rule… We feel rage and indignation seeing what we see, and we will fight to prevent these shameless people from getting their way. For it is the hour to begin to fight so that all those ‘up there’ who scorn history and despise us will have to reckon and pay their dues.”
No one was surprised at the distance the Zapatistas took in relation to the dominant parties, but the communiqué distressed those in the ranks of the leftist PRD (Partido de la Revolución Democrática) or close to them, who nurtured hopes that the Zapatistas would fall in line with the campaign of their candidate or would at least leave him in peace. The strength and virulence of the criticism distressed them particularly.
The political classes and almost all the media adopted an elitist and dogmatic attitude towards the Sixth Declaration and displayed their racism, ignorance and nearsightedness. Although by so doing they involuntarily justified the Zapatistas, they thus made clear the magnitude of the risks taken by the Zapatistas, conscious as they are, based on experience, that these political classes can manufacture any kind of outrage, including one that might endanger everything that they have accomplished up to now.
The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, in typical Zapatista style, clearly specified their intention:
“This is our simple word to tell you what has been our path, and where we are right now, to explain how we view the world and our country, to say what we are thinking about doing and how we plan to do it, and to invite other people to walk with us in a large place called Mexico and an even larger place called the world.”
The Sixth is an effective synthesis of the years of Zapatista struggle and of their present perception. There is no way to summarize it and a careful reading is indispensable. In it the Zapatistas take the difficult initiative of articulating their vision to the thousands of organizations and millions of people in the ranks of the discontented, with the goal of transforming their current resistance -- which perhaps is going as far as it can go -- into a struggle for liberation. To unite them, the Zapatistas do not use an abstract doctrine, a political manifesto or a partisan hierarchical structure. They appeal to recognized moral principles, which alone can create favorable conditions for the meeting of and respect for the "different".
In a strict sense, the Sixth simply reiterates what the Zapatistas have said they would do since the beginning and have never ceased doing. In 1994 they liberated the hope trapped in the cowardly or complicit accommodation of all the political parties to the neoliberal agenda. People started to walk with the Zapatistas on unprecedented paths. Many groups, for example, accepted the challenge in the Fourth Declaration of Lacandon Jungle: to walk without the political parties or the government, though perhaps no one really reached as far the Zapatistas. In their territory, the communities have gone farther than ever in creating their own life without government support and at the margins of the political parties. Time and again the Zapatistas have tried not only to open themselves to others, but also to hand over the initiative to national and international civil society, as they have explicitly proposed since the National Democratic Convention of 1994, in their international encounters against neoliberalism, through their participation in the National Indigenous Congress, the National Liberation Zapatista Front, the March of Indigenous Dignity, the magazine Rebeldía and many other venues. For various reasons and circumstances they were not able to directly participate in organizational efforts. Today they have decided to run the risk of doing so.
The Sixth is a challenge to the imagination, to enable the social majorities to conceive a viable alternative to a corrupt regime based on violence, exploitation and oppression. Both the nation state and formal democracy are established on the premise that we are competitive and violent individuals who can coexist only if we are controlled by the state. The citizens’ struggle is thus reduced to participating in manipulated elections to choose the officials who will control them; to observing them and trying to make them accountable (which they never are); and to changing them periodically. For that reason, we continue to be exposed to the brutal and manifold violence of a regime that is supposed to protect us from our own violence. The time has come to put another regime in its place, joyfully and peacefully. That’s what the Zapatista initiative is about today.
The risks are huge and the Zapatistas are not exaggerating when the say that they could lose everything they’ve achieved up to now. They may remain alone, isolated, and in the end exposed to extermination. They are clearly aware of that possibility. I think that, despite all this, they are taking this initiative for consistency with themselves, because they trust the strength of what they have created in their own lives, and perhaps because they have no other choice. The current situation demands action. Looking back on what has occurred during the past ten years, the Zapatistas cannot continue to wait for civil society to articulate and take the initiative. They will appeal to the "pockets of resistance" that have been appearing everywhere, and with many of which they have established and maintained contact.
Hope
More than 30 years ago, Ivan Illich observed that, “The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force”.
In my view, there is nothing about the Zapatistas more important that their contribution to hope. Given the current situation in Oaxaca, Mexico and the world, we are still hoping for the best but prepared for the worst. In our context, hope is not the conviction that something will happen, but the conviction that something makes sense, whatever happens.
Notes
“When I say mobilize I mean mobilize, I mean that a people must be more mobile than it is – that it have the freedom of a dancer, the purposefulness of a soccer-player, the surprise-factor of a guerrilla warrior. One who treats the masses as a political object will not be able to mobilize them; he only wants to give them orders. A package, for example, has no mobility; it is merely sent from one place to another. Mass rallies and marches immobilize people. Propaganda which paralyzes rather than giving free rein to their autonomy has the same effect; it leads to depoliticization.” Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Elementos para una teoría de los medios de comunicación, Barcelona: Anagrama, 1976, 10.
“One can say that the concept of mass, which is purely quantitative, applies to people in the same way that it applies to anything that occupies space. True enough; but in this case it has no qualitative value. We should not forget that in order to arrive at the concept of human masses, we have abstracted out all the traits of people except for what they share with material things: the possibility of being measured in numbers. And thus, logically, the human masses cannot be saved or educated. But it will always be possible to mow them down with machine-guns.” Antonio Machado, Prosas, Havana: Editorial Arte y Cultura, 1975, 239.
It is not possible here to give even a minimal account of all the incidents in the evolution of APPO, but one central fact stands out. Local 22 of the Teachers Union initiated a trade-union struggle around certain economic demands which momentarily took on a political expression, but which never lost their original aspect. Once the economic demands were satisfied (at least on paper), its mobilization ended. APPO, on the other hand, undertook from the very beginning a political and social struggle. It continuously supported the trade-unionist struggle of Local 22, but did not allow itself to be defined by it. This contrast gave rise to all kinds of tensions, which came into the open at the end of September, 2006, when the teachers decided to return to classes and end their mobilization while APPO was facing the arrival of the Federal Preventive Police, holding its constitutional convention, issuing its Citizens’ Dialogue Initiative for Peace, Justice and Democracy, and holding a large forum of indigenous peoples. The tensions are also evident inside Local 22, as many teachers participate actively in APPO and are even trying to transform their trade-union struggle into a political one. Rank and file teachers continue to be an important part of APPO, in open defiance of the trade-union leadership. Amidst accusations of treason the general secretary of the union stepped down in February 2007 and a year later the complex process to elect his substitute continues.
Apart from these tensions between APPO and Local 22, there have been other tensions within APPO. Some of these reflect the distinct styles, concerns, and strategies of the participants. For example, the dominant opinion in APPO favors a peaceful and democratic movement, explicitly opposed to all forms of violence, whereas some organizations and individuals consider it necessary to use violence, not only in self-defense but as part of the struggle. The most important tensions are between strictly local movements and organizations and those that are the expressions of national organizations. The local groups, while ready to offer and receive solidarity from outside, and aware of the national and global ramifications of their struggle, remain primarily concerned with local issues; they resist pressure on the part of the national organizations to subordinate APPO to national or international political/ideological agendas (especially those of political parties).
Although these tensions have affected the functioning of APPO, especially by blocking certain agreements and decisions in its coordinating bodies, it has been possible to limit their effects. Still, it is conceivable that the unity and coherence achieved up to now may weaken as APPO enters a new phase and as some organizations bet on its collapse or abandon it to pursue their agendas elsewhere.
Murat led an aggressive offensive against the popular movement. Now a representative in the Federal Congress, he is under indictment for financial irregularities.
The amuzgo, chatino, chinanteco, chontal, chocholteco, cuicateco, huave, mazateco, mixe, mixteco, tacuate, trique, zapoteco and zoque peoples.
These struggles for democracy can be classified as follows:
A very specific struggle attempts to perfect formal democratic processes. Everybody recognize the vices of the electoral campaigns and procedures. Some people promotes legal and institucional reforms to improve those processes and put an end to electoral fraud.
Second is the struggle to introduce participatory democracy, that is, to bring citizens and their organizations into the running of government, eliminating arbitrary decisions by the authorities. This involves a number of specific mechanisms:
Popular initiative. Citizens should be able to formulate the norms and the laws under which they live. If they gather enough signatures for an initiative, the local Congress should be obliged to consider it and even to approve it.
Referendum and plebiscite. Citizens should have the opportunity to approve or reject decisions, policies or programs of the government.
Recall. Citizens should have the power to recall any elected official. Under such legislation, Ulises Ruiz would long ago have been forced out of office.
Participatory budget. Many citizens are fed up with officials who persist in imposing programs and public works often directly opposed by the public.
Transparency. Timely and complete information should be provided regarding all acts of government, so that they can be adequately monitored.
Social control. Citizens and their organizations must have the power to actively combat corruption through supervision of administrative processes.
The third and final struggle, and the main challenge to the APPO, is to place formal and participatory democracy at the service of radical democracy, the democracy which has been practiced from time immemorial in the indigenous communities and municipios and is usually associated with autonomy. The idea now is to extend this way of governing to the entire society, beginning with the formation of autonomous regional bodies.
While the struggles around formal and participatory democracy focus on legal and institutional reforms, the struggle for radical democracy focuses on popular initiative – on what the people themselves can do to transform the conditions under which they live. For centuries, the communities were able to use their own forms of government, against the dominant institutions and outside the law and the Constitution. This experience is being used now to bring about immediate practical changes, on the basis of an organized effort, with the conviction that through this process, enough strength and capacity will be accumulated to impose the legal and institutional changes that are needed, as was done in 1995 to end the practice of simulation in what are now called "municipios por usos y costumbres."
Some groups, small in size but highly visible and organized, maintain a Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy largely abandoned elsewhere (which includes Stalin among its exemplars) and defend positions superficially grafted onto a socialist framework. Broader groups embrace a critical position regarding socialism, viewing it as a historical phenomenon whose end is nearing and whose theoretical construction has important deficiencies as argued by Harry Cleaver. (See Harry Cleaver, “Socialism,” in Wolfgang Sachs, Ed., The Development Dictionary, London: Zed Books, 1992). This broader current appears not to have much interest in such socialist experiments as that of Venezuela. The overall tendency, grounded in indigenous traditions, seems to be focused in leaving behind socialism as well as capitalism.
There has been a very intense debate, inside and outside the APPO, about the character and traits of a "people's government" [gobierno popular]. Some believe that it is necessary to seize the organs of the State, getting rid of the established authorities in order to install in their place "people's representatives" who would use State power to serve the people. This "people's government" would be installed as a substitute for the present rulers. Other question not only the feasibility of this approach (under present conditions) but also its justification. They believe that oppression and authoritarianism are inherent in the apparatuses of the State and that the supposed "people's representatives," once in control of these apparatuses, invariably become corrupt, regardless of how they came into that position – whether by genuinely democratic election, by revolution, or by sudden attack [golpe de mano] (as would be the case in Oaxaca). According to this view, it is not enough to change the ideology of those who run the state; all its institutions must be radically modified. Moreover, this transformation must be carried out by the citizens themselves, through their own initiatives and actions, from the bottom up, and not the reverse.
Boards of Good Government are communal governing bodies in autonomous municipalities and communities.
Signed in 1996, alter complex negotiations between the Zapatistas and the Federal Government, the Accords included the constitutional recognition of the Indigenous peoples and their right for self-determination. The Government, however, did not honor its word and instead of the constitutional reform agreed in San Andrés the Congress produced a counter-reform.
Those risks include: