Why Mexico?

The struggle of the indigenous Mexicans:
a source of hope for the world

Why concern oneself with Mexico? Why not Guatemala, East Timor, El Salvador, Congo, Palestine, Sudan, Cambodia? Anywhere in the world where people are struggling to live in the face of enormous oppression? I cannot claim that the struggle of the (primarily) indigenous peoples of Mexico deserves to be singled out for special attention, because I do not know enough about other struggles. Probably they all have aspects that deserve special attention. But I am not Noam Chomsky; the task of encompassing so much information is beyond me. I am drawn to the struggle of (largely but not exclusively) indigenous Mexicans because I believe it may contain the seeds of humane survival for all the world's people. Of course that may not be unique to the Mexican struggle, but it is una lucha popular -a popular struggle- that has caught my imagination and led me to learn more about it.

The uphill struggle of the Oglala Lakota:
a source of personal despair

For a long time I've been convinced that what is called Western Civilization is, despite its many accomplishments, destructive of both people and the the rest of the biosphere. Indigenous peoples, who generally conceive of themselves as part of "mother earth", are oriented towards living in harmony with their natural environment, a concept that I think is essential for survival of the earth's rich ecological heritage. My interest in such cultures led me to spend the academic year 1994-95 as a visiting faculty member at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. At year's end I felt deeply discouraged, both about the prospects for the many good people on the reservation and for the world at large. It seemed to me inconceivable there was any way that what remained of the once-proud Lakota culture could survive unless there were enormous changes in American society as a whole, changes that seemed impossible to foresee in the near-enough future. Time, I thought, had just about run out for the Lakotas. And maybe -- probably -- was fast running out for all of us.

The Lakota, it seems to me, cannot overcome the havoc wrought on them by the European invasion of America, basically because they are being kept in a state of utter dependency. Without any real economic base on the reservation to replace the once-free-roaming bison herds that sustained them, they have been reduced to living largely in the margins of American society. No one can be expected to retain a sense of human dignity who is forced either to abandon his historical memory by hiding it from the social majority (off the reservation) or to remain on a permanent dole (on the reservation). That more than a few individuals nevertheless succeed, both on and off the reservation, is a tribute to the human spirit.

Not only the economic base -- the land -- has been largely stolen from the Lakota. The debased values of the dominant culture have infiltrated, undermined, and replaced much of their traditional culture. The U.S. policy of generating ethnic factions among them has been largely successful. The notion of blood being the determinant factor of one's ethnic group is now widely accepted among them; they characterize themselves as either "fullbloods" or "mixed." This belief -- that it is biologically accurate and objectively meaningful to think of "blood" this way -- has permitted them to become racist, in addition to being victims of "white" racism. Hatred of "whites" is not uncommon, though often hidden from the view of the dominant society. And much animosity exists between "bloods" (the "fullbloods") and "breeds" (the "halfbreeds" and other "mixed" categories). For a compelling, careful and thorough study of this "divide and conquer" strategy as applied to the Lakota see The Power of the Land: Identity, Ethnicity, and Class among the Oglala Lakota, by Paul M. Robertson, 1995 doctoral thesis at the Graduate School of the Union Institute.

The conquerors took their land, and are still taking it. We gave them racism. We gave them greed, competition for material gain, individualism to destroy communality, avarice for money, all those deeply divisive values that are tearing mainstream society apart before our very eyes. We gave them so-called representative government -- actually we forced it on them; we gave them retributive "justice", the system of lethally armed and motorized police and courts and judges and jails. We taught them the supreme importance of the nation-state for organizing and controlling peoples' lives, and the need to kill for the state in foreign wars to enslave other peoples by the economic strangulation in which the so-called third world is now suffocating. Above all, we taught them the supreme importance of greed for money and power and material possessions. Now we are all in this dominant ideological cesspool. And most people are suffering the consequences. Only a very small percentage of the world's people, the inordinately rich, can to some limited extent insulate themselves and their children from the terrible consequences.

Those consequences are everywhere -- on the Pine Ridge and other Indian reservations, in the cities of the U.S. and around the world, and in the vast impoverished rural and so-called "underdeveloped" areas where many of the world's remaining indigenous peoples still manage to survive, if only barely. The newspapers scream of them daily, for example, The Boston Globe of August 11, 1998 headlines a gruesome consequence: "Chicago boys, 7, 8, charged with killing 11-year-old girl", and goes on, "buddies ages 7 and 8, accused of hitting an 11-year-old girl on the head with a rock, molesting her and suffocating her with her panties, then taking her shiny blue Road Warrior bicycle . . . authorities believe the girl was killed for the bike." Even if this particular news item, based on what we know are frequently notoriously inaccurate first police reports of crimes, even if it proves to be false, the rapid proliferation of established cases of children killing children (and parents and teachers) makes clear that the dominant culture, the culture that produces these children, is beyond redemption. It must be transformed into something entirely, radically different if we are to have any hope of humane survival. What should that be? Mexico, I believe, provides one important clue.

The Mexican clue

Latin America -- more accurately South and Central America, the Carribean, and Mexico -- have long been regarded, at least since the Monroe Doctrine, as one giant reserve for unimpeded and almost exclusive exploitation by the U.S. and "the corporations for which it stands." Mexico is "only" the most recent western hemisphere beneficiary of this aid to Corporate America, aid that comes as humvees, "anti-drug-traffic" helicopters and other sophisticated counter-insurgency warfare technology, military advisors in the field to monitor and help insure that the Mexican Federal Army acts effectively to suppress rebellious indigenous Mexicans trying to protect themselves against the onslaught, International Monetary Fund (IMF)-enforced economic structural adjustment programs, and of course, forced privatization of the national wealth (ostensibly for the "modernization" of our backward neighbor), the better to siphon off that wealth and the profits based on it to Corporate America.

In 1996, shortly before I left on my first trip to Mexico, Jared James gave me a preliminary version of his paper, Getting Free: A Sketch of an Association of Democratic, Autonomous Neighborhoods and How to Create It. This is a seminal piece of work by someone who has been a wage slave, specifically, a typesetter, for much of his adult life. James argues that establishment of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods can be the basis for building a free social order. Less than two months later, as a member of a Grassroots International delegation to Mexico, I was in the small town of Guelatao de Juarez in the northern Sierras of Oaxaca. It is a phenomenal community, one that is still largely self-governing, following its traditional usos y costumbres -- uses and customs --, a system of largely democratic, autonomous community governance in place at least since the Spanish conquest. A realization, in part, of James's dream.

This village, primarily of Zapoteca Mayan Indians, has for half a millenium been able to maintain itself and its degree of autonomy largely intact, because of 1) its close-knit sense of communality; and 2) its remoteness from the centralized power of the Mexican nation-state in Mexico City, and from the state capital of Oaxaca in Oaxaca City. But the degree of local autonomy that it has traditionally held is now threatened by the penetration of market forces, institutionalized since 1994 by the so-called free trade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). There in Guelatao I learned about, and got from Fernando Ramos, a copy of a paper akin to James's, an effort to insure, at least on the local level, a good future society. Jaime Martínez Luna, the author of that paper, is a member of Comunalidad, A.C. : una actitud para el futuro -- Communality, A.C.: an outlook for the future. A.C. stands for Asociación Civil -- Civil Association. His paper, Comunalidad y Autonomía -- Communality and Autonomy -- is dated May 1995.

I was shocked! It was hard for me to imagine people living in cultures so vastly different coming up with projections for the future society they wish to live in that share as much as do the papers of Jared James, urban to the hilt, and that of Jaime Luna, in a remote, indigenous village in the mountains, who treasures the forests, fields, and the wonderful solitude of the Sierra Norte. Immediately I wanted to translate Getting Free into Spanish and Comunalidad y Autonomía into English, so that there could be an easy interchange of ideas. But my Spanish was inadequate, and still the project remains only partially completed.

I remain convinced that these ideas are key in what I hope will be development of a true civilization, one based on recognition that all human beings belong to a single race, the human race (homo sapiens), that all of us are sentient beings, all able to experience pain and suffering, and that the only true measure of a civilization is its success in reducing, to the greatest extent possible, the suffering of every single human being.

In early August, 1998 I returned from a short stay in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. There I learned of the efforts, in that Mexican state, of the indigenous peoples who are sympathetic to and in support of the Zapatistas, to form autonomous base communities. The Mexican Federal Government, under President Zedillo and his cohorts in the corrupt ruling party, has tried to abolish the self-declared autonomous municipios -municipalities (or counties)- with brutal counter-insurgency warfare tactics, but, from what I learned, I believe this effort to destroy the movement towards autonomous communities will not succeed.

For the reasons briefly sketched above, I believe the current struggle of those Mexican communities asserting their autonomy may be a crucial historical development, and in any case can be a source of great encouragement to all of us who hope and work for a better world.

--George Salzman, January 27,1999

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