Mexico is now plagued by guerrilla uprisings in its poorest states, the most theatrical and celebrated of which is that of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas under the leadership of the enigmatic, pipe-smoking Subcomandante Marcos. The rebels have made the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) a focus of their fury and have cleverly used the Internet to air their complaints. While free trade certainly is contributing to the economic problems of the Mexican underclass, the depopulating of rural areas and growth of the cities is an almost inevitable trend that even the most dramatic gestures by Marcos and his followers are unlikely to postpone. NAFTA has become a scapegoat for the modernization of Mexico.
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References
1.
1. So called after Emiliano Zapata, guerrilla fighter during the Mexican Revolution who was assassinated in 1919.
2.
2. The use of the Internet by Marcos is especially notable. His press releases and those of his followers can be found on Chiapas-L, which is an open, unmoderated discussion list concerning the conflict in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, and its ongoing status. New papers on the subject are welcome. Press releases are also covered. Chiapas-L is an activist list, including efforts to help Mexico's indigenous communities, social service, activism, fund-raising, and so on. The list focuses on the Zapatista National Liberation Army, the peace process, negotiations, Chiapas, human rights, and the like. To subscribe to Chiapas-L, send an E-mail to majordomo@profmexis.sar.net with no topic, but in the body of the message, simply write “subscribe Chiapas” with your name. “Chiapas-L Discussion List,” H-LatAm@h-net.msu.edu, 17 July 1996.
3.
3. Deedee Halleck, “Zapatistas On-line,”Report on the Americas (North American Congress on Latin America), 28(2):30 (Sept.-Oct. 1994).
4.
4. “The privatization schemes of the Salinas government dismantled a large part of Mexico's economy and concentrated wealth and power in what the president considered to be big, competitive conglomerates for our [Mexico's] entry into the world scene. The losers were small- and medium-size businesses, lacking credit, and Mexican society as a whole, lacking the public investments that had once had repercussions across the whole economic board, stimulating further payments, employment, production, and a healthier balance of payments.”Carlos Fuentes, A New Time for Mexico (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), pp. 78-79.
5.
The first message to go out from Chiapas was a stirring one: “January 1, 1994.... We are the inheritors and the true builders of our nation. The dispossessed, we are millions, and we thereby call upon our brothers and sisters to join this struggle as the only path, so that we will not die of hunger due to the insatiable ambition of a 70-year dictatorship led by a gang of traitors that represents the most reactionary groups.... To the people of Mexico: We the men and women, full and free, are conscious that the war that we have declared is our last resort, but also a just one....JOIN THE INSURGENT FORCES OF THE ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY.”Halleck, “Zapatistas On-line,” p. 30.
6.
6. “Cognoscenti speak of over 400 communiqués and letters in a year that, at this writing, still has 100 days left. My eyes have seen a diskette.”John Ross, “The EZLN, a History: Miracles, Coyunturas, Communiqués,” in Shadows of Tender Fury: The Letters and Communiqués of Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, trans. Frank Bardacke et al. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1995), p. 13.
7.
7. Ibid.
8.
8. Andrés Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos: Guerrillas, Stockbrokers, Politicians, and Mexico's Road to Prosperity (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1996), p. 216.
9.
9. The claim has been made that “there IS a whole section of gobernación [the department of the interior] that spends all day monitoring lists such as Mexico2000 and trying to interfere with the free discussion of Mexico on the Internet generally.” R. C. Whalen, “Mexico2000 Discussion List,” mexico2000@mepd.org, 3 July 1996. Some Mexican discussion lists that had used Mexican servers were in fact relocated out of fear of government meddling. Ibid. “There are 120 centers of telephone espionage installed in the principal cities of the country. The espionage centers are operated in a coordinated effort by the Attorney General of the Mexican Republic.... These espionage centers are staffed and operated by dozens of operators that call themselves `gamas,' `tecolotes,' or `gaviotas'.... Back in Monterrey, the listening center is located in the Manchester Building and carries the nickname `La Cueva' (the cave). In room 301 of that building, the listening devices operate 24 hours a day. The Manchester Building is located at 2110 Ignacio Morones Prieto Avenue in the center of the city.”“South of the Border Down Mexico Way,”Unclassified: Quarterly Publication of the Association of National Security Alumni, no. 34, p. 3 (Fall 1995).
10.
10. Douglas W. Payne, “Salinastroika: Less than Meets the Eye,”National Interest, p. 47 (Winter 1994-95).
11.
11. Halleck, “Zapatistas On-line,” p. 32.
12.
12. Numerous World Wide Web sites and lists have developed to plot the fortunes of Chiapas. See the lanic gopher, lanic.utexas.edu, at the University of Texas.
13.
“ `Postmodern' is an idea that the left ought to avoid. `Modern' was a bad enough way to name an age, saying nothing about it except that it is `now,' and `postmodern' is even worse, giving us as the naming characteristic of our time nothing more than `after now.' I continue to think of our age as `Late Capitalism,' even if it doesn't seem to be as late as we hoped.”Frank Bardacke, “Dear Sup, Much Obliged,”Shadows, of Tender Fury, trans. Bardacke et al., p. 265.
14.
14. Different both in sophistication and in technology: “The infection cyberspace spreads today is far more virulent than the bubonic plague. Anathema to government, the `net carries the virus of freedom.”Declan McCullagh, “Plague of Freedom,”Internet Underground, 1(9):33 (Aug. 1996).
15.
15. Gary Chapman, quoted in Christopher Clausen, “Welcome to Post-Culturism,”American Scholar, 65(3):379 (Summer 1996).
16.
16. Internet messages relating to the revolt originate in an amazing number of countries. The ability to alert everyone on the Internet to possible future human rights violations may have saved lives. Amnesty International and Global Exchange have made use of E-mail to publicize threats made by the police and army and to call attention to prisoners who might otherwise “disappear.” See, for example, “Urgent Action,” Chiapas-L@profmexis.sar.net, 2 Aug. 1996.
17.
17. But a comparison of the messages sent out on the Net with what the conventional press has received in releases does not bear out the contention that there is some sort of Internet style to Marcos's statements. See Shadows of Tender Fury, trans. Bardacke et al., passim.
18.
18. In a sending dated 24 Mar. 1994, he wrote: “For those that no one sees. Greetings brother Zapatista-moles. We have shown thanks for your patient and obscure work. The black night of infamy comes again. The end of our cycle is near. We promise you that we will shine intensely, so as to outdo the sun, before disappearing forever.” Quoted in Halleck, “Zapatistas On-line,” p. 31.
19.
19. Soldiers found in a camp hurriedly abandoned by him, along with his pipe, Microsoft Windows manuals. Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, p. 48.
20.
20. Marcos writes, “White people accuse him of being black. Guilty. Blacks accuse him of being white. Guilty.... Traitor Indians accuse him of being meztizo. Guilty. Male chauvinists accuse him of being a feminist. Guilty. Feminists accuse him of being a male chauvinist. Guilty. Communists accuse him of being an anarchist. Guilty. Anarchists accuse him of being orthodox. Guilty.” Quoted in Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, p. 261.
21.
21. Ibid., pp. 265-66.
22.
Much of what Marcos says is reminiscent of the “guerrilla-intellectual work” of the dependencistas supporting revolution as an alternative to capitalism, polemics that do not seem to take into account what has happened since the collapse of the Soviet Union. See Gabriel A. Almond, A Discipline Divided: Schools and Sects in Political Science (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990), pp. 229-244.
23.
23. Above Marcos is the even more mysterious Commander-in-Chief Germán, presumed to be Fernando Yánez. With the rise in the popularity of Marcos, Germán has gone further into the shadows, but there are those who think that he remains the ultimate authority. The son of a Monterrey doctor, his father and grandfather were Freemasons and according to his brother, “Each of us, when we turned fourteen, joined the Hope and Fraternity Association, a Masonic lodge where we learned to speak in public and get involved in community affairs.”Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, p. 254.
24.
See also idem, “Educating the Mexican and American Presidents,”Hoover Papers in International Studies, I-95-12 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Hoover Institution, 1995).
25.
25. Zedillo, who is poker-faced and wooden and about as lacking in charisma as it is possible to be, comes from an extremely humble background. Ironically, it may be that Marcos has much more of a claim to be middle class than Zedillo. At the present time (Aug. 1996), Zedillo is perceived as wavering in his commitment to reform. He has gone to Tabasco to appear approvingly with the governor, Robert Madrazo, who was charged with criminal fraud by Zedillo's attorney general. All charges have been dropped.
26.
26. See Juan E. Méndez, “Human Rights and Chiapas Rebellion,” testimony before U.S., Congress, House, Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, Current History, 93(581):121 (Mar. 1994).
27.
27. Charles C. Cumberland, Mexico: The Struggle for Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 274.
28.
28. Paul B. Carroll and Dianne Solis, “Mexico's Zedillo Stumbles in His New Job,”Wall Street Journal, 6 Feb. 1995.
29.
29. To the contrary, “the debate as to whether Mexico needed or could even afford peasants sharpened after 1982, as the international community of bankers and neo-liberal economic planners forced Mexico to accept austerity and economic restructuring in the wake of crisis over its $96 billion foreign debt.”George A. Collier, “The Rebellion in Chiapas and the Legacy of Energy Development,”Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 10(2):375 (Summer 1994).
30.
Comparisons between the two stock markets, American and Mexican, are particularly interesting when studying the psychological aspects of the Mexican crisis. In ways, the Mexican stock market has had the excitement and has displayed the speculative fever that the American market did at the end of the 1920s. There has been a lack of concern about developing protective instruments such as a futures market. The results for individual investors are rather similar, too. Regarding the U.S. situation, “wrote Sidney J. Weinberg, a senior partner in the famous investment house of Goldman-Sachs Company: `The public got scared and sold. It was a very trying period for me. Our investment company went up to two, three hundred, and then went down to practically nothing.... I don't know anybody that jumped out of the window. But I know many who threatened to jump. They ended up in nursing homes and in insane asylums and things like that.' ” Quoted in Lewis Lipsitz, American Democracy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986), p. 438. The same sort of group hysteria was about in Mexico in 1994.
31.
31. “Salinas himself had achieved an image control with the press that nearly matched that enjoyed by American President Ronald Reagan in his heyday. But suddenly his grasp on events had slipped. `Before, it was as though he was a type of king, or God, who made no mistakes and all he touched ran marvelously, like a magician. Now we know that was a very partial view. We focused on the economic situation in general and lost sight of the social question,' noted Salinas sympathizer Susan Kaufman Purcell, the vice president for Latin American affairs at the Americas Society.”Conger, “Mexico: Zapatista Thunder,” p. 115.
32.
32. What can be learned from the U.S. experience and applied to the current Mexican situation? One conclusion could be that, in such a severe downturn, the government has to intervene, no matter how convinced the leadership is that the long-range policy should be one of less government. In the United States, gross investment fell enormously between 1929 and 1933. The gross national product plummeted. Construction virtually ceased, and unemployment soared. In such circumstances, psychological considerations over-power economic considerations.
33.
33. Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, p. 20.
34.
34. Social Sciences Team, Centro Antonio de Montesinos, “Indigenous Peoples, Poverty and Violence,”Centro Antonio de Montesinos, Analysis #82, analysis@uibero.uia.mx, 25 July 1996.
35.
35. “Writing during the agitated days of Mexican political life recorded in this volume, I have recalled the insistence with which Pedroso repeated Rousseau's famous phrase `In the end, it all comes back to politics.' We cannot imagine Jean-Jacques saying, `In the end, it all comes back to technology.' ”Fuentes, New Time for Mexico, p. 197.
36.
36. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., and William A. Owens, “America's Information Edge,”Foreign Affairs, 75(2):29 (Mar.-Apr. 1996).
37.
37. What Mexico needs is something like the School to Work Opportunities Act. It needs its own version of Tech Prep. But it had not even had the advantage of the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. In other words, the country had not come to terms with the fact that real success in the post-NAFTA era depended partly on a radical change in attitude toward vocational and technical education.
38.
38. In analyzing the current situation, historical comparisons are always dangerous. Obviously, no two events are exactly the same. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, there are striking similarities between the current Mexican economic situation and the American situation in the 1930s. The American depression had its roots in the exuberance and optimism of the 1920s, when, at least for the American middle class, there was an apparently unprecedented prosperity. The stock market soared, and there was a general attitude that things were just going to get better and better: optimism, faith in economic individualism, and confidence in the free market were prevailing beliefs. In an election campaign speech in 1928, Herbert Hoover denounced the Democratic Party and government intervention in the economy: “In effect, they abandon the tenets of their own party and turn to State socialism as a solution for the difficulties.... It is a false liberalism that inserts itself into the Government operation of commercial business. Every step of bureaucratizing of the business of our country poisons the very roots of liberalism—that is political equality of opportunity.” Herbert Hoover, speech, New York, 22 Oct. 1928, quoted in Richard Hofstadter and Beatrice K. Hofstadter, eds., Great Issues in American History: From Reconstruction to the Present Day, 1864-1981 (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1982), pp. 332-333.
39.
39. Mary Beth Sheridan, “State of the Unions: Mexican Labor, Like Its Leader, Is Showing Signs of Age,”Los Angeles Times, 11 Mar. 1996, quoted in List Mexico2000, mexico2000@mep-d.org, 13 July 1996.
40.
40. There has been no clear answer as to how an already poor underclass can be protected from further shocks brought about by the free market. The connection between those who do benefit and the political Right seems well established. A resurgence of the Right's latent political power is perhaps one of the underlying reasons why the income share of the very small percentage of Americans in the top brackets has bloated (the top fifth now have 44.6 percent of the total national income while the lowest fifth have only 4.4 percent) and the number of poor in America has increased. For starters, in what was to become a long litany of special interest legislation, the Revenue Act of 1978 awarded 75 percent of all its tax reductions to the wealthiest 2 percent of the country. World Almanac, 1995, p. 326.
41.
41. Mexican Update #81, MEXPAZ_information information@uibero.uia.mx, 17 July 1996.
42.
42. In 1970, 25.4 million Americans, or 12.6 percent of the population, were living below the official poverty level specified by the U.S. Department of Commerce. By 1980 these figures had increased to 29.3 million and 13.0 percent. By 1990 the figures were 33.6 million and 13.5 percent. At the beginning of 1993, there were “officially” 36.9 million Americans living in poverty, and that was 14.5 percent of the population. World Almanac, p. 383.
43.
The combination of inflation and recession will throw the government budget into chaos. The economic turmoil, especially the devastation of the nascent middle class, will in turn produce political turmoil. Much of the hard-won progress of the last 12 years will be reversed.”Robert L. Bartley, “Mexico Suffering the Conventional Wisdom,”Wall Street Journal, 8 Feb. 1995.
44.
44. It needs to be emphasized that NAFTA is not going to help Chiapas. In Mexico, where at least 30 million people are outside of the money economy altogether, the campesino or farmer-peasant sees very little cash at all and has no government safety net staving off malnutrition and homelessness. Exports do not help most Mexicans. Eighty percent of Mexico's exports are by 750 firms that produce exports, that is, 2.8 percent of the companies that even try to export are responsible for 80 percent of actual exports. Peter Rashkin, “Mexican Labor News and Analysis #13,”News, 1(3), 16 July 1996, List Mexico2000, mexico2000@mep-d.org, 19 July 1996.
45.
45. See John Charles Chasteen, “Fighting Words: The Discourse of Insurgency in Latin American History,”Latin American Research Review, 28(3):83-111, esp. pp. 102-103 (1993).
46.
46. Rather, they are increasingly irrelevant in a technologically engrossed society. “Occasional outbursts of rage and despair from the inward-oriented sector of Mexican society will inevitably erupt, but, as the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas demonstrated, these can be contained and managed.”Jorge G. Castañeda, “Mexico's Circle of Misery,”Foreign Affairs, 75(4):100 (July-Aug. 1996). In Mexico there are perhaps 25,000 computers that are on-line. “Mexicans Struggle to Get Online,” List Mexnet, mx-internet@csgrs6kl.uwaterloo.ca, 17 July 1996.
47.
The Internet encourages building interactive electronic communities, but, in a region like Chiapas where many do not even have electric power, the prospects of being part of such communities are nil. For more on electronic communities, see Arthur Armstrong and John Hagel III, “The Real Value of On-line Communities,”Harvard Business Review, 74(3):131-141 (May-June 1996).
48.
48. “Mexican Rebels Convene International Protest Forum,” Chiapas-L@profmexis.sar.net, 31 July 1996.
49.
49. “Mexico's Zapatistas, Barzón Debt Group Set Pact,”La Realidad, 21 July 1996, in Mexico2000news, news@mep-d.org, 22 July 1996.
50.
50. John Ross, “Guerrero Report,” Chiapas-L@prof.mexis.dgsca.unam.mx.
51.
51. Latin American subaltern studies are now in vogue, “subaltern” referring to subordinated peoples of popular culture.
52.
52. However, discussions should avoid a renewal of the arguments of the 1920s and 1930s that the treatment of minority history as a digression from the great issues is not accidental but part of a hidden agenda.
53.
53. Unfortunately, land reform is basic to their demands—and that offers little prospect of actually raising them from poverty. In the long run, “short of building dikes in the Pacific Ocean,” land reform is not going to solve the campesinos' problems. See Mitchell A. Seligson, “Agrarian Inequality and the Theory of Peasant Rebellion,”Latin American Research Review, 31(2):140-157 (1966).
54.
54. Clausen, “Welcome to Post-Culturism,” p. 380.
55.
55. Pro-guerrilla graffiti in San Cristóbal and other Chiapas towns had appeared in English for benefit of the cameras. Halleck, “Zapatistas On-line,” p. 32.
56.
56. See Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, pp. 22-23.
57.
57. For example, when he called a convention of opposition groups in Aug. 1994, he was given Mexican government money to host the meeting! The government provided trucks, latrines, and speaker systems, and it helped string electric wires. The reason apparently was that President Salinas preferred to have the meetings than to have a disruption during the forthcoming elections. Ibid., pp. 142-43.
58.
58. Ibid., pp. 153-54.
59.
59. Ibid., pp. 150-51.
60.
60. It is often forgotten that President Hoover did try various remedies for the growing economic problems. But the remedies he tried were limited in nature, and that was not what the situation demanded. See John A. Krout and Arnold S. Rice, United States History from 1865, 20th ed. (New York: Harper-Collins, Harper Perennial, 1991), p. 224.
61.
61. It was Roosevelt's charismatic leadership and an increase in the money supply that can be singled out as major contributions to helping America work its way out of the Great Depression. In the present Mexican crisis, what is needed is strong executive leadership along with a willingness to preserve liquidity and not sacrifice the country's future because of unbending attitudes about inflation and the money supply. In the present situation, building confidence has to take precedence over other concerns, no matter how important such other concerns may be in the long run. This is a time for bold action; the percolation theories of Hoover and Dawes did not work for the Americans, and they will not work for the Mexicans. But while the comparison with the Great Depression is interesting, there is a significant difference between Roosevelt's day and the present: the sea change in attitude toward the free market. We never before have lived in a time when there was so much unanimity about the values of the free market. Taking its lead from the United States, the Mexican educational and administrative elite has become almost completely entrepreneurial in attitude. What is worrisome is that this is occurring in a country where the poor, represented by the Chiapas insurgents, are very poor indeed, far poorer than in the United States.
62.
62. Lenin made little headway until the Russian army was beaten. Churchill was a political outcast until it appeared that Germany might defeat Britain. Hitler himself required economic chaos to turn his image from that of a clown into that of a towering leader.
63.
quoted in Mexico NewsPak, 3(9), issue 61, p. 6, May 22-June 4, 1995.
64.
64. See Ulises Beltán and Marcos Valdivia“Accuracy and Error in Electoral Polls: Mexican Electoral Polls in Comparative Perspective” (Paper delivered at Wapor Regional Seminar “Quality Criteria in Survey Research,”Villa La Collina, Cadenabbia, Italy, 27-29 June, 1966), passim.
65.
65. Marcos is at http://www.peak.org/justin/ezln/ezln.html, and his enemies, the Mexican government, are at http://www.electriciti.com/mexinfo/mexagncy.htm. Martin Langfield, “Mexico's Zapatista Rebels Ride the Internet,” Chiapas-L@profmexis.dgsca.unam.mx, 13 Dec. 1995.
66.
66. “ `You have to go to war. But what to wear?' declared the caption beside a composite photograph of the Zapatista commander in Colors [magazine], `Camouflage visual dynamic: light, photogenic... ideal for the soldier who goes from war to war and doesn't have time to change.' ”Mark Fineman, “Zapatistas in Transition from Fighting to Fashion,”Los Angeles Times, 21 Apr. 1996.
67.
67. “Marcos Speaks of War, Politics... and CD-ROMS,” Chiapas-L@profmexis.sar.net, 26 July 1996.
