A steady drizzle left streaks of rain across the windshield of the colectivo taxi as it climbed further up into the mountains towards San Juan Chamula. The taxi, a modified passenger van, struggled under its load. Every inch of space inside was occupied by people, turkeys, fruits and vegetables from the market and other necessary supplies. A model of a Quetzal, a beautifully colored long-tailed bird that can't survive in captivity, hung down from the taxi's rear view mirror. Mexican country music blasted out from the tape deck. Most of the passengers were Tzotzils headed back home after a Sunday trip to the market in the city. Every now and then the taxi pulled over to the side of the road to let off passengers at footpaths headed into the hills or to pick up passengers hiking up the road.
Halfway to Chamula we sped past a billboard sponsored by a "concerned citizens" group--"Indians Achieve More with Dialogue. Say No to Arms!" Although San Juan Chamula is in the highlands around San Cristóbal, it was not one of the hotbeds of rebellion. The billboard spoke volumes about the impact of the New Year's armed peasant uprising and how worried the local authorities were. As we soon discovered, many of the indigenous peasants living in Chamula supported the uprising. And the local authorities--not convinced about the power of highway billboards--had also asked the federal army to be prepared to protect them against the Zapatista forces.
We were on our way to check out what was happening in Chamula because this municipio is the center of a lot of social conflicts--all of which have been intensified by the January 1st uprising. Chamula provides a good look at the conditions of life for the indigenous peasants in communal territories. It is also an area run from top to bottom by caciques--the corrupt political and economic bosses tied to the federal government and ruling PRI politicians.
San Juan Chamula is a huge rural municipio about 30 miles north of San Cristóbal. It is home for about 100,000 Tzotzil people and it is famous for its religious rituals. The huge old colonial-style church that dominates one end of the town square is a major tourist attraction and moneymaker for the Chamula authorities. The people of Chamula led a major indigenous uprising against the government in 1869.
Here the communal system of land ownership is somewhat different from the ejido lands--where the government is the landlord. The land in the municipio is communal land--technically it belongs to the entire Tzotzil community of Chamula.
The population of Chamula is almost entirely indigenous people, but as you enter the town, the class divisions among the people stand out. At first the buildings are all brick or stucco-covered cinderblock with sturdy rooftops. There are paved roads. You see a lot of cars and big TV antennas, patios and high fences. This is where the wealthier Chamulans live. This is where you find the caciques, the local political bosses, businessmen, landowners and their henchmen.
This is where the local government meets. When we arrived at the town square we found dozens of indigenous men dressed in the traditional handmade, black wool poncho--the chuj--gathered up in small knots as they waited for a meeting of the town council to begin. Some of the men carried polished sticks with them--a practice known as `carrying cargo' that indicates the person has some specific religious and community responsibilities.
A short walk up the road brings you to another Chamula. The pavement stops and the dirt road rises, rocky and rutted, into the hills. It is up in these hills where the majority of Chamulans live, trying to eke out a survival. The contrast of these two sections of Chamula hints at the complex social and class relations that determine everything in Chamula.
The drizzle remained steady and cold as we climbed up the dirt road. Streamlets of mountain clay rolled down the hill, staining shoes, boots and feet. The houses are adobe, mud, sticks. They are covered by corrugated metal or thatched rooftops. Sometimes the adobe bricks are covered with a hard paint or stucco-like surface. Many of the shelters are rectangular but some are rounded huts. All of them are tiny--typically one big room that shelters an entire family. In some parts the settlements are dense--houses squeezed in between tiny plots of farmland. In other parts it is mainly parajes--settlements of only a few houses. The plots of land here are tiny and the poorest of the campesinos often have to seek out work in the hot lands--the big farms in lowland areas outside Tuxtla or in the state of Tabasco. Some work for six pesos a day in the fields of big Chamula landowners.
As we walked up the road, there was a field pockmarked with water holes and wells. Three women stood up to their knees in a cold water hole doing the laundry. Another woman carried a huge vase full of well water on her head as she started across the field up into another hill. A few horses were tied up further out in the field. To the left of the road a stick and mud shelter balanced on top of a small hill. An old man pushed aside the blanket covering the door. Inside he had costales of grain and corn standing next to stacks of firewood. We greeted him and stopped to talk.
"We were born here. Everyone here has a little piece of land. It's little pieces here, little pieces there. It's communal land. So when you die, the land is still here and it passes down to your sons. We grow a little corn, a little potatoes, a little beans.
"I have two sons. Each one has his own land; it belongs to us, and then I give it to them. We divide it. When their sons are grown, there'll be another division of the land. That's how we do it. By then, the land is really small--the corn harvest won't even last for the year. You'll only have enough to eat elote [fresh corn on the cob]. There won't be any left to store. If you buy corn, then you can store it. But you have to buy it. Three or four lonas and you can have corn for the year.
"Other people take their crop to the market, but we work and earn money here from cutting firewood. We don't earn a lot, just a little bit, maybe 10 to 20 pesos a day. But if people have a little fiesta, then the money's gone. We don't sell the firewood in the city. We store it in the house for later.
"So we make about 10 pesos a day going up in the hills and cutting firewood, or gleaning other people's cornfields, doing carpentry work, breaking up the earth for planting. Not everyone here has little pieces of land. Some have a lot of land. That's how it is. There's some that sell land and also buy it. If they have money, then yes, they can buy land. But we don't have money so we don't buy anything."
Shortly after we left the old man, we met a young campesino playing with his children out in front of a small cinderblock house. His house was set back off the road and seemed to be part of a small settlement. There were a few old trucks parked in back of the house. "This is my land here. My father was born here, and he inherited it from my grandfather. And since I was born here I inherited the same piece of land from my father.
"I work on the land, my own land. It's just a square little plot. Each piece is about 10 or 15 meters square. There's different pieces, some over here, some are over there. It's about three hectares altogether.
"I also work in the hot lands, the same as here, planting beans and corn seasonally. We pay 500 kilos for renting the land. That's in the hot lands, a six-hour ride from here. We are indigenous people from all over. The problem around here is that when we go down, we get paid 10 pesos a day, and the family stays here, taking care of the house and each other.
The young man strongly supported the rebellion. Like many people in the area, he didn't have that much information about the Zapatistas or their program but he measured things by whether or not they seemed to help the campesinos.
"I'm quite happy with the events of January 1. There were others that wanted to fight and not slave over land that wasn't ours. What I see, I'm happy about it, because we small people don't have land and don't have work. We just have our families. If it helps us, the poor indigenous people, then I'm happy about everything.
"The Zapatistas are fighting because they want more land. The Zapatistas are all indigenous people. And off of that, most of what I've read about I've been happy with. Some people say that they're good, and some people say that they're bad. So we don't know for sure what the way out is. We don't really know whether it is better to follow the Zapatistas or follow the government. We don't have information.
"I would like to have more land, to change the way I can support my family. Doing things this way, with the land in little pieces, is not enough. And also, the price for corn is very low, and so is the price for beans. Corn is at 750 pesos per ton. Beans are at 2.2 pesos per kilo. We sell it wholesale where we work, maybe two to three tons at a time. I bring some sacks home for my family. And save some to plant the milpa.
"Well, I'd like to have a better life. But there's just a little bit of land around here. We'd like to have more land, to make our lives better."
The rain had stopped and we were ready to head back down into town. The campesino walked out to the roadside with us and I asked him how he would view a countrywide uprising of the peasants. His eyes lit up and he laughed before he spoke. The rebellion had clearly had a big impact on him and he had done some thinking about these types of questions before. "I would like to see that kind of struggle. We don't like the way the government steals land. Why doesn't the government give land to the campesinos if it's the peasants' land so they can develop the land. Not only the mestizos that have more, like some land that is 200 to 300 hectares. They should be equal to the campesinos. Equal land. The peasants should have some land. Thirty-forty hectares for every peasant, for every head of the family, so that you could benefit.
"The cattle ranchers have more support from the government, more government aid. Why is it that they get more support? And there's no aid for the peasants. Why is that? That's why poor peasants are fighting. We suffer with our families. We don't benefit. And there are others who are even poorer than I am. There's others who don't even have one piece of land. They just look for work. Maybe they find it and maybe not. They're starving--and their poor families! Here in Chiapas there's no more work. And then people leave to look for work in Tuxtla and in Tabasco as peones and other little jobs that will pay you. Some people sell Chiclets, some sell ice cream or sno-cones, that's it, that's what poor Indian people do. That's what we suffer."
When the Spanish first colonized Chiapas they recruited loyal henchmen among the indigenous people. These people were crucial to the enforcement of Spanish colonial rule. Hundreds of years later, from 1915 to 1920, an army called the mapaches terrorized the indigenous campesinos of Chiapas. They used violence to stop the land reform of the Mexican revolution from spreading to Chiapas and they helped the local landlord class grab huge landholdings--a number of which still exist today. These are some of the historical roots of the cacique system that rules many of the indigenous areas in Chiapas to this day.
In Chamula the caciques are a gang of local bigshots among the indigenous people and they control everything. They are the ones in charge of all the transportation and construction. They run loan shark operations and control access to farm implements, fertilizer and technology. They control all of the government funds and international aid money that comes into the area. They have the final say over the communal land and how it gets used and distributed. They are in charge of the production and distribution of posh--a powerful alcoholic drink that has devastated generations of Chamulans. They are in charge of the church and all of its money-making operations--from the tourist trade to fireworks at the various religious holidays. They also control the local government and are very tightly tied into the federal government operations of the ruling PRI party. And, in exchange for all of the benefits given them, the caciques make sure that the PRI is never short of winning votes come election day. In some areas the caciques have even been known to cast the vote for everybody living in the area they control.
The caciques in Chamula--and every other municipio in Chiapas--benefit from the semi-feudal oppression of the peasants in the rural areas of Chiapas. And their armed gangs enforce that oppression with ruthless terror campaigns.
In Chamula, cacique control has produced an intense and decades-long religious war. In the name of protecting indigenous culture the caciques have expelled more than 30,000 people from Chamula because <%1>these peasants have converted from the local mix of catholicism and Mayan religion to different brands of evangelical protestantism.
There are a lot of very complex contradictions operating in this situation.
The caciques have long used religion to control and rip off the peasants. Many peasants who get on the bad side of caciques have been ruined for life by having extremely expensive religious and civic responsibilities thrust on them by the caciques. Many campesinos end up deep in debt to the caciques because the religious fiestas involve paying fees and tributes to the caciques and huge tabs for alcohol and food.
In Chamula the caciques have had conflicts with the Catholic Church, especially the liberation theologists and the local Bishop Samuel Ruiz--nicknamed the Red Bishop for speaking out against the oppression of indigenous peasants. This was one of the factors that led the caciques to break with the local church and take up an orthodox version of Catholicism combined with Mayan religious practices. The cacique religion is so pro-government that it even celebrates a "San PRI" among all of the other saints in their particular brand of religion.
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A small minority of the expelled people have been traditional Catholics. But the vast majority of the people driven out of Chamula have been the evangelical protestants. One of the things that made the caciques mad is that the evangelicals don't participate in all of the religious fiestas and duties and they don't drink--so the caciques don't make as much money off them. The caciques could not let this non-participation go unpunished. The expulsions have also been a source of increased landholdings and wealth for the caciques in land-starved Chamula.
At the same time, the evangelical churches of the converted peasants have their own political agendas, mostly tied to U.S. imperialism and sections of the Mexican ruling class who hoped to use protestantism to counter the influence of the Catholic Church. There are many different evangelical sects operating in Chiapas.
One long-time protestant evangelical influence in the area is the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a branch of Wycliffe Bible Translator which translates the bible into various indigenous languages. The Institute was originally invited into Mexico in 1936 by the reform president Lazaro Cárdenas (father of today's Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas) to undercut the influence of the Catholic Church which opposed his policies. In 1983, indigenous groups protested the influence of foreign missionaries and the Mexican government ordered the Institute evicted from Mexico. The U.S. Embassy intervened on behalf of the Institute. At the same time, conservatives in Mexico's Interior Ministry supported the Institute because they thought it would be useful against left-wing Catholic priests.
I knew that throughout Latin America Protestant religious forces are generally associated with pro-U.S. and fascist political movements, so I was interested to hear that in Chiapas some evangelical peasants were playing a positive role in the class struggle.
I found out that in the spring of 1992 a group of evangelicals had a major shoot-out with a group of caciques on the edge of San Cristóbal. At that time, this was the most intense armed confrontation San Cristóbal has seen in years. And, more recently, a big battle between expelled people from Chamula and the caciques broke out in San Cristóbal when the expelled people kidnapped the mayor of Chamula and held him prisoner as part of their struggle against the continuing expulsions.
The expelled peasants have been involved in a number of recent land seizures throughout the state. Many of their communities are rumored to be very supportive of the EZLN. They believe that taking up arms is the best way to petition the government against the expulsions and the caciques.
As a Maoist, I was struck by this recurring theme: on one hand the peasants wanted radical changes in their lives and were willing to take up arms, and on the other hand their movement had clearly not grasped the necessity of seizing countrywide state power. The view of "armed-reform" is widely shared among the peasants of Chiapas generally. For example one delegation of evangelicals presented a petition to the Zapatistas asking them to take up the cause of the expelled people in their negotiations with the regime.
Many of the campesinos driven out of Chamula have moved south and established new settlements and towns throughout the state--including in the Lacandón rain forest. The towns are usually recognizable by their names--New Bethel, New Jerusalem, Paradise and other religious references. Thousands of expelled people are camped in settlements on the edges of San Cristóbal. It was in one of these squatter settlements that I first met Juan and María, a young indigenous couple driven out of Chamula about eight years earlier.
We met in their small plank house. As we spoke, María's grandmother stood over a large cooking pot on a fire in the back yard. She was cooking up river snails that the family had gathered earlier in the morning. Inside another room María's father lay blind and dying from diabetes--he had never been treated and was unable to afford the medication which could now only ease his suffering.
Juan began by talking about the New Year's uprising. "We didn't know what was going to happen, back on January 1. That was when all the stuff happened, about 2:30 in the morning. Then lots of carloads of people went by on the periférico [the highway that surrounds the city], people with backpacks and weapons and stuff. They were all going to the center of the city, and they tore up the entire city hall. All the records, the desks, all the papers--everything there--the doors, the glass, the windows. We were scared, we thought they were going to come over here. But no. Because the peasants don't have any reason to pick fights with other peasants--but only with the rich and the mestizos. So they're only fighting against the government. They're fighting because for a long time now they've been asking for help from the government. That's how the problem began. And it was never resolved. And so they came with arms. Because that's how problems get resolved."
Juan then moved on to talk about being expelled from Chamula. "We lived in Chamula for years and years before coming to San Cristóbal--from the time of my grandparents and their grandparents before that. We were all born there. And then we came here to San Cristóbal because we accepted evangelism. In our community they don't like that. They don't want that. And that's why we had to come here to look for a piece of land."
Juan stood up to tend to María's father. He began to rearrange some of the ears of corn hanging over the rafters to dry so they could be ground up. As he did he talked about how they were driven out of Chamula and what happened to their land. He was very angry that the caciques were seizing the land of the expelled and using it to enrich themselves and reward their followers.
María broke in with an angry voice. "When they expel people they beat you. They take the girls, they beat the women with sticks and stones. Then they burn the houses. That's how they get people to leave. They run you off. You can't do anything. One woman had a house and they burned it all down. They throw people in jail, they pour cold water on you, fire on you. The caciques get together. And they come to take the house, and mistreat the people. The men in the town approach the young women and bother them, they rape them. Sometimes they come after you with sticks and make you run. And then they take you in a trailer away from Chamula, off to the hills for two to three days. You can be locked up for five days without eating, as a punishment. If not, they'll throw gasoline at your house. Those are the problems the caciques are making.
"That's the problem right now. The government can't fix it. That's why the Zapatistas came to fix it, to see if there is something that could be done about this problem."
María started to gather up some firewood while she told of the new difficulties they found in San Cristóbal. "If we go to sell in the market, they throw us out of there. They don't let us sell anything, and we're just trying to get something so we can eat. The president has these police. Or the unions will send the police. There are those who have a good spot for selling, and then people come who don't have a spot and they don't like it, so then you have problems. They don't let you sell. Those that have made payments, those that have pull, they only look out for themselves. But those who come from these poor communities and really need to sell so that they can have food and clothing, they don't let you sell. We need to sell so that we can give food to our children, or like my mother who's sick and needs to buy medicine. We can't, because they don't let us sell.
"We can't live like that. And if my husband goes to work, they don't pay well. It's not right. It's not enough to buy medicine. Twenty, twenty-five pesos to buy a little bottle of medicine, and we have to buy corn and beans to eat. They don't want to pay you well. In San Cristóbal they make a lot of money, but they don't treat their workers well. Sometimes, if you sell firewood, the federal police take it away. If you sell charcoal, they take it away. If you sell wooden boards, they take it away. They don't want us to sell anything! So how are we gonna eat? Are they going to just leave us here and let us all die of starvation?"
Juan finished up the story. "We're looking for a little plot of land somewhere. We can't grow food here because there's so many of us. And they aren't giving us work. Really, it's barely enough to eat. That's why we're poor. That's why everyone is fighting.
"Now there are a lot of compañeros who are occupying lands in places where there is a lot of land. People have large plots of land, and the poor are taking it away from them. So that's what they're doing right now. That's what's happening now. The rich have more land; that's why they're beginning to take the land away from them.
Over the last decades thousands of people have been driven out of Chamula and other towns only to wind up as cheap labor in San Cristóbal. They work as construction laborers, truck loaders and a dozen other difficult and dangerous jobs. The unluckiest among them end up desperately trying to sell single cigarettes and chiclets in the zócalo--just a few pesos away from homelessness and starvation. Since the New Year's rebellion many of these folks have become very bold in struggling against their oppression.
A few weeks after we arrived in Chiapas we came across one group of expelled people who had seized some land on the edge of the city. There were a couple of hundred of them and they set up plastic bags and nylon tents for shelter as they lived on the land to stake their claim. Shortly after they seized the land the local authorities sent the police and other armed thugs to drive them off of the field. Three days after the authorities attacked, the expelled people were back.
It was nightfall by the time I was able to speak with anyone from the land seizure. A group of us stood around a small campfire. As we spoke some men on the outer edges of the field kept an eye out, watching for suspicious cars or trucks. The people at the land seizure expected another attack. It might be the police again, or, it might be thugs hired and paid by the government or wealthy and reactionary private citizens in San Cristóbal. There were also rumors that angry cattle ranchers who fled from their ranches in Ocosingo at the time of the uprising were threatening to come into the city. The wind whipped up the flames as little children piled dried corn husks on the fire.
Jorge, a middle-aged man with a weather-beaten face began the discussion. "We are basically treated like animals. We are all expelled people and we are abandoned here. We are expelled people from different `municipios,' different towns. We're staying here, it's like a `plantón' [sit-in]. We are expelled people, we don't make good wages, we have children, we pay rent, our wages aren't enough for us to pay the rent. That's why we want to take the land, because we're poor."
José--in his late teens, impatient and eager to fight--cut in: "If we were rich and made a lot of money, if the government paid us a lot of money, then we could live. But that's not the way it is, so here we are. We have to try and take something. We work as bricklayer's assistants, things like that. And here we are."
Jorge nodded and picked up the theme. "We're paid like peones, 15 pesos a day. It's not enough.
"We work six days a week, and on the seventh day we rest. The governor made an order that we should work from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Because they're `licenciados' [people with university degrees] and governors, they rest early. They look at us as `indios' [a disrespectful term for indigenous people]. We're suffering, being oppressed. They see us work from the morn<%2>ing to the late afternoon. And we're being killed by work. We don't eat very well, we don't eat like the rich do with their meats. We eat nothing but vegetables with a little bit of beans. We've come from all the neighborhoods surrounding San Cristóbal."
José kicked some corn husks into the center of the fire. "The way that we're suffering now, it's because there's no place to live. That's why we need land, and why we're taking this land. We don't have any place to live, so we have to rent. But we make very little money. It's not enough for food, for anything, for clothing, shoes, other things that our families need. We don't have many things. We're suffering."
José began to talk about how poor people supported the armed uprising in January and how the rich and the government opposed it. Jorge broke back in, his voice trembling with anger. "Let them stop it then... Public Security came to scare people, to take people off the land. They came to scare us, so we wouldn't put up these tents anymore. Public Security came from the `periférico' [the highway that circles around San Cristóbal], and from the market. And when they got here, they saw that there was people's clothing, and they took their lighters and set fire to the clothing. People's houses were standing, and everything burned.
"Some people were taken to jail as well, so they'd stay there. So they wouldn't come back here and do it again, so they wouldn't speak out or ask for help, right? Thirty people. Six people were taken to Tuxtla, to Cerro Hueco. And the rest are here in the municipal jail in San Cristóbal de las Casas."
José turned to walk away but then came back to have the last word. "So they sent Public Security to take us to jail. But for us, what's jail if we don't have a place to live? We ask for help, but the government ignores us. So we took this place. You can't let them get away with things. You have to fight them. You can't be afraid of them. We don't have any reason to be afraid of them. Because if they come to evict us, it'll be because the government is paying them to do it. Others come because of the cattle ranchers. As for us, we are very poor, we don't have weapons--we might have weapons but very few. Some people have weapons, other don't. But we need a lot of help if they come here to confront us, if Public Security comes to run us off. We have to rise up. We poor peasants have rights too. That's what we're doing. We have to confront the Public Security if they come. We indigenous people have to be in agreement with each other, those of us that are here, we have to be in agreement. We are agreed to confront them. We shouldn't be afraid of them. That's my statement."
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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