by Uri Gordon, Freedom

Last week the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) released a declaration, setting out a new decentralized structure for the autonomous indigenous communities in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. To get more insight into this change and its significance, Freedom spoke to Bill Weinberg, a longtime journalist and anarchist in New York City. His book about the Zapatistas, Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, was published by Verso in 2000. He spent much time in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico during the 1990s, covering the indigenous movements there, prominently including the Zapatistas. In recent decades he has been spending more time in South America and is now completing a book about indigenous struggles in the Andes, particularly Peru. He continues to follow the Zapatistas and Chiapas very closely, and covers world autonomy movements on his website CounterVortex.org.

Freedom: Having read the declaration that the Zapatistas released regarding the change to their structure of autonomy, how would you explain the change, what do you think is the substance of the transformation, or transition, that this declaration announces?

Bill Weinberg: Well, I'm reading it as a response to new pressures, the resurgence of paramilitary activity in Chiapas targeting the Zapatista communities in particular. Now this is very closely linked to the narco gangs, which are trying to establish control on the Mexican border with Guatemala. And, it seems that it's a further decentralization of the movement. When they first announced that they were disbanding their autonomous municipalities, I was a little bit worried. That was what was in the fourth part of the new series of communiques, issued on November 6; but then, on November 13, they issued the ninth part, explaining the "new structure of Zapatista autonomy," which makes clear that they're essentially keeping in place a system of local autonomous governance, but it's going to be more localized.

They're actually breaking down the so called MAREZ, the Zapatista Rebel Autonomous Municipalities, into their constituent base communities, which are to be called Local Autonomous Governments or GAL by its Spanish acronym. And whereas according to the communique there were only a few dozen MAREZ, Zapatista autonomous municipalities, now there are thousands of GALs, local autonomous governments. And, from there, according to this communique, there's basically a series of structures where the GALs can come together on the basis of voluntary association, into a kind of federative structure if you will, into greater entities at the regional level. So the next level up are the Collectives of Zapatista Autonomous Governments, or CGAZs, and these are going to replace the so-called "good government juntas" which had coordinated the old autonomous municipalities, corresponding to the caracoles, the Zapatista community assembly meeting places, which had been constructed in several villages in Chiapas. And next, there's going to be a further level up from that, the Assemblies of Collectives of Zapatista Autonomous Governments, or ACGAZ, conforming to "zones," larger entities than "regions." So it appears to me that everything is becoming more accountable to the base communities, and that the largest structures which are formed on the basis of voluntary association or federative principles, if you will, are becoming entities that emerge from the spontaneous action of the base. So it seems to me that there's a further decentralization of the movement which is going on, and which I'm assuming is seen as more resilient.

Quite darkly, the translation of the communique, the official English translation online on the Zapatista website states, "The structure and disposition of the EZLN have been reorganized to increase the defense and security of towns" (meaning villages) "and Mother Earth in the event of aggressions, attacks, epidemics, invasion of companies that prey on nature," (meaning extractive industries) "partial or total military occupations, natural catastrophes and nuclear wars"! So, it seems that the Zapatistas are just as panicked about the state of world affairs out there in the jungles and mountains of Chiapas as I am here on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Freedom: So can you explain a bit more about what's been going on in the recent time with the cartels, with the Mexican police or military, and other forces that have been threatening the Zapatista communities?

BW: Well, back in the 1990s, in the years immediately following the 1994 Zapatista uprising, there were all of these paramilitary groups, basically organized at the local and regional level, which were forming an anti-Zapatista coalition, trying to terrorize the movement into submission. And that was being formed by local landowners, by the cattle barons. And also by the so-called caciques, the indigenous village bosses who were clients of what was then the ruling one-party dictatorship in Mexico under the PRI—the so-called Institutional Revolutionary Party, which was famously more institutional than it was revolutionary. And this, of course, climaxed in the famous massacre at Acetal in December of 1997, where about 40 members of a community were massacred—not even a Zapatista community exactly, but a peasant indigenous pacifist group called Las Abejas, meaning The Bees, who were sympathetic to the Zapatistas but not under their command structure. So that was the really hideous climax of the paramilitary campaign against the Zapatistas and communities that sympathize with them back in the 1990s. Then the PRI lost power in the national election of 2000—and the Zapatistas, I think, deserve credit for provoking Mexico's democratic opening. Because the PRI realized that they were going to have to bend a little bit, or they were really going to be faced with a revolution. That's actually the way things looked back in 1994, it was actually seen as a possibility. So that's when they started to actually allow more or less free elections. And, unfortunately, it was the political right rather than the left that most successfully exploited the democratic opening, with PAN, the National Action Party, coming to power under Vicente Fox, and the neoliberal reform only hastened after that.

But nonetheless, this did kind of break up the three-way nexus between the PRI, the official armed forces and the local paramilitary groups in Chiapas. The caciques generally continued to still be loyal to the PRI, near as I can tell. But maybe the degree of cooperation they were getting from the official armed forces, on a clandestine basis, began to lessen, and that nexus began to weaken. So in this process, the paramilitaries moved into some degree of abeyance in the first years of the 21st century. Vicinte Fox famously said that he would solve the dilemma of Chiapas and make peace with the Zapatistas "in 15 minutes"; of course he failed to do that, because the government still hasn't given them their minimum demand for peace, which is a meaningful constitutional reform instating autonomy for indigenous communities. There was a kind of a pseudo-reform, which the Zapatistas did not accept, that came out of the abortive dialogue under president Ernesto Zedillo in the 1990s, but there was never any real such reform, certainly none that was ever accepted by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. So while there wasn't any peace deal with the government, contrary to what Fox had hubristically promised, the violence went into abeyance in Chapas and the government was, to a certain extent, taking a hands-off approach and letting the Zapatista communities run themselves. So, maybe a "repressive tolerance" approach, to a certain extent. But what started to happen in the meantime was that the narco wars really, really went out of control—initially mostly affecting northern Mexico, and the entry-ports into the United States, where the rival Tijuana, Juárez and Gulf cartels were vying for control of those border crossings. But in the years after 2000 the violence began to spread throughout Mexico, basically making its way from the north southwards, with the cartels trying to establish control over trafficking routes through the entire country, as well as control of poppy cultivation and cannabis cultivation. And the violence also began to take on more of an actual paramilitary element, with groups like the Zetas emerging. And then Felipe Calderón, Fox's successor, also from the PAN, unleashed the army on the cartels—which only predictably had the effect of dramatically escalating the violence. So under his rule the violence really spread throughout the country, eventually reaching the south, most significantly Guerrero, but also increasingly reaching all the way down to Chapas, the southernmost state in Mexico. And it seems now that there's a real bid on the part of various criminal networks, perhaps some of them linked to the Zetas, to gain control over the Guatemala border and the entry points into Mexico. So in this context there's been a resurgence of paramilitary anti-Zapatista violence—not at the level that it was at back in the 1990s; but still, several people have been killed and there have been armed attacks on base communities over the past years.

Interestingly, in the initial communique announcing the reorganization, the communique of November 6 announcing the disbandment of the autonomous municipalities, Subcomandante Moisés, who signed the communique, obliquely referred to a new pressure in the growing power of the "disorganized crime cartels" in Chiapas. So it's a very typically Zapatista ironic or tongue-in-cheek rendering—not organized crime, but disorganized crime, implying how the cartels have become so fragmented with internecine warfare. That is, it's not exactly clear who's in control. It isn't like back in the nineties when there were the big three cartels from Tijuana, Juarez and the Gulf. Now it's a much, much more complicated picture. But they're even more violent now than they were back then.

Freedom: So just to make it explicit, how does that link to decentralizing the structure, how would that provide a resilience that was not provided by the previous one?

BW: You know, that's a really good question, and I might be able to give you a better answer if I was in Chiapas, which I'm not. But I think that generally, centralization gives your enemies a target to attack, right? So by further decentralizing, that might create more dispersed targets and make the movement more resilient that way. There isn't going to be any central focus point of Zapatista organization that could be targeted by these new paramilitary groups—if they are, in fact, new, which I'm not sure they are. Because, like I say, they went into abeyance, to an extent at least, when the PRI lost power, because the party had been like the glue that was holding together the alliance between the local paramilitary groups and the official armed forces. So, to what extent is that nexus still in a place? And of course, that's related to the larger question of the relationship between the cartels and the state. Because while Calderón sicced the army on the cartels, at the same time lots of his own officials, including military officials, were revealed to be co-opted by the cartels. There's been this extremely sinister development of cartel gunmen and militias that are actually wearing the uniforms of state or federal police in various areas of Mexico. So, where are they getting those uniforms? Are they knockoffs, or are they actually getting real uniforms? So it's an interesting question—to what degree is the old anti-Zapatista nexus between the paramilitaries and the official armed forces still alive? That's an especialy interesting question now, under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who is ostensibly of the left, but who is increasingly authoritarian and whose party, MORENA, ultimately traces a lineage back to the PRI, and who has been disavowed by the Zapatistas.

Freedom: This brings up the question of how decentralized, anti-hierarchical non-state actors can combat hierarchical non-state actors or semi-state actors like cartels or militias. This is a typical argument against anarchism, isn't it? "What will you do when the gangsters come for you when the police are gone?" So, does this change represent the Zapatista response, or does it show that they don't really have a response?

BW: I would opt for the former. I would say that, yes, this is the response. I mean, look, there's been a lot of criticism of the Zapatistas from the so-called hard left or ultras, as they call them in Mexico—that they set out with these big ambitions back in 1994 that they were going to overthrow the government and have a national revolution and march on Mexico City, but of course they haven't done that. So they've been taunted by the ultras as being actually "armed reformists." But I don't take that view. As I stated earlier, the Zapastas in large part provoked the democratic opening in Mexico, and they did in fact provoke constitutional reforms. Not something that they saw as fulfilling their demands, but nevertheless, a greater degree of autonomy has been granted under the Mexican Constitution for indigenous communities. And finally, most significantly, in spite of the limitations they've faced in the ongoing state of neither-war-nor-peace for more than a generation now in Chiapas, they've managed to preserve a self-governing autonomous zone. There are still large swathes of land, generally the poorer and more marginal and remote areas of the state, but nonetheless—large swathes of territory in the mountains and jungle of Chapas, which are not under the control of the government. Not the national government, state government, or the "official" municipal governments. They're under the control of the base communities. So it seems to me that they've already achieved a very great degree of resiliency in the face of all of the pressure that they've been facing, particularly the armed pressure from paramilitary groups, but also on occasion from government military drives against them—sometimes in the guise of drug enforcement, eradicating cannabis crops and so on, which is ironic given the Zapatistas' puritanical prohibition on drugs in their communities. Despite all this, they've managed to hang on to their territory. So I think in terms of autonomous self-government, they know what they're doing. I think that the facts demonstrate that. And they're transitioning to a new structure, which they're just announcing now, but I would imagine it's probably already been in place for a while. And it probably began to spontaneously develop, as something which is rooted in the smallest localities of the state, in the base communities, and is more organic and therefore more resilient.

Related to this is the whole question of indigenous leadership among the Zapastas, and the question of what has been, or perhaps still is, the role of the "cadre," so to speak. The notorious Subcomandante Marcos a few years back "abolished himself" and said the new voice of the movement was going to be Subcomandante Galeano, and we all assumed that that was just Marcos writing under a new name. But now, this most recent communique has been issued by Subcomandante Moisés, and Moisés was one of the original, indigenous, I believe Tzeltal Maya, leaders of the movement from the very beginning, and one of the leaders of the command structure of the military wing of the movement, the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee or CCRI. So there's also a sense that, as a part of this whole process of reorganization, the actual Maya leadership of the movement may be coming into its own more, whereas the mestizo cadre, to the extent that they've continued to exist, is becoming less relevant.

Freedom: There are obvious analogies to draw between Chiapas and other experiences of decentralist revolutionary organization during wartime, for example the situation in Rojava today, or the historical examples of Catalonia in the Spanish Civil War or the Makhnovshchina in Ukraine during the Russian Revolution. Do you think there is some kind of general insight to be drawn from these examples about the conditions of possibility for decentralized autonomy?

BW: I guess the difference is that the Zapatistas, in contrast to the situation in Ukraine a century ago and in contrast to the Rojava Kurds today, have avoided having to wage a very direct military struggle for defense of their lands, which in turn entails getting your hands dirty with certain political entanglements. I mean, anarchists don't like it when I say this, but it is a fact that the Rojava Kurds are being backed by US imperialism and have US Special Forces troops embedded among their ranks, and coordinated their military campaign against ISIS with the Pentagon. And similarly, the Makhnovistas had to cut a deal with the Red Army, which ultimately betrayed and crushed them, in order to fight the Whites and the Ukrainian nationalists. You can say the same thing about Spain, really. The anarchists of Catalonia had to make a pact with the Popular Front government in Madrid in order to fight Franco's forces, and then they were betrayed by the Popular Front government and crushed before Franco even took over. And the original Zapatistas of the Mexican Revolution, under Emiliano Zapata in Morelos state, had to make a deal with the more "moderate" Carrancistas to fight the federales, and were then betrayed and crushed by them after they'd taken power.

The contemporary Zapatistas have avoided tha—to a certain extent, just by having the good luck to be in a very remote and marginal and not very strategic part of the world. Although there is oil there, and the one thing which does now make it strategic is the fact that it lies along the Guatemalan border, which makes it attractive to the cartels. So to a certain extent the Zapatistas are now being drawn into the realm of potential entanglement, but thus far, they've been able to avoid that.

Freedom: Finally, if decentralizing is an attempt to defend communities from coercion, that might carry the danger of isolationism. But it looks like the Zapatistas are trying to maintain an internationalist perspective through that. Perhaps you can comment on how they are continuing to link what they're doing locally to world affairs?

BW: Well, I said that the Zapatistas sparked a political opening in Mexico. I think they also sparked a political opening on the global stage. The whole anti-globalization movement that saw its climax at the Seattle protests in 1999 was in very large part inspired by the Zapatistas, who of course timed their uprising to coincide with the North American Free Trade Agreement coming into force on January 1, 1994. And they've maintained those international links all these years, with the "Intergalactic Encuentros," as they called them, bringing activists from all over the world to their territories. This clear spirit of internationalism and multiculturalism, and exchange of emissaries with other movements, like the Rojava Kurds and so on. So this has all been very, very encouraging. Now, when in this initial communique of November 6 they announced that they were putting in place this new structure of autonomy, they said that they're going to close their territories to outsiders. And I was, again, a little bit worried that maybe this indicated that they were withdrawing from the world and abandoning this ethic of internationalism and becoming more isolated and insular. But that appears not to be the case in the new communique, and I would imagine that this is a kind of a temporary measure while they're actually putting this transition to a new structure in place. I would imagine that they are going to, in one form or another, maintain their "intergalactic" spirit.

———

This interview first appeared Nov. 21 in the UK anarchist journal Freedom.

Photo: Matthew T Rader via Freedom

Resources:

Enlace Zapatista
https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx

Moisés, Another EZLN Comandante
Chiapas Support Committee

From our Daily Report:

Zapatistas reorganize autonomous zone structure
CounterVortex, Nov. 11, 2023

Protest paramilitary attacks on Zapatistas
CounterVortex, June 15, 2023

Zapatistas vow to oppose López Obrador
CounterVortex, Jan. 5, 2019

Mexico: indigenous peoples form parallel government
CounterVortex, Jan. 6, 2017

Subcommander Marcos 'ceases to exist'
CounterVortex, May 29, 2014

Chiapas: Abejas mark 1997 Acteal massacre
CounterVortex, Dec. 23, 2012

See also:

MEXICO: WILL CANNABIS DECRIM DE-ESCALATE DRUG WAR?
by Bill Weinberg, Project CBD
CounterVortex, August 2021

DISMANTLING POWER
Zapatista Presidential Candidate's Vision to Transform Mexico from Below
by Benjamin Dangl, Toward Freedom
CounterVortex, August 2017

CHIAPAS: PORTRAIT OF THE RESISTANCE
Autonomy Under Siege in the Zapatista Zones
by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, CIP Americas Program
CounterVortex, February 2009

ZAPATISMO IN NEW YORK CITY
by Michael Eamonn Miller, NYC Pavement Pieces
CounterVortex, February 2008

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE LACANDON SELVA
Mexican State Plays Ethnic Divide-and-Rule in the Chiapas Rainforest
by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report
CounterVortex, November 2006

On Rojava:

SYRIA'S KURDISH CONTRADICTION
by Bill Weinberg, Los Angeles Review of Books
CounterVortex, October 2017

AGAINST THE IMPERIAL 'WE'
The Fight Against ISIS is My Fight
by Bill Weinberg, The Villager
CounterVortex, May 2015

SYRIA'S KURDISH REVOLUTION
The Anarchist Element and the Challenge of Solidarity
by Bill Weinberg, Fifth Estate
CounterVortex, February 2015

—————————-

Reprinted by CounterVortex, Nov. 21, 2023