Who is rebellion in chiapas

They embraced new forms of peasant organizing and new modalities for galvanizing community, including diverse sects of Protestantism.

In effect, new religions, new organizations, and even new cooperative production enterprises replaced ethnicity as the basis for building community. During the s, eastern Chiapas emerged as a region of opposition to the PRI in the organizing and political affiliation of the peasantry.

Immigrants from central and northern Mexico, who had been influenced by student activists among the survivors of the massacre in Mexico's Tlatelolco Square in , formed peasant organizations as alternatives to those of the PRI. After the debt crisis of , the state removed subsidies for fertilizer and dismantled the system of agrarian credit, and the influence of these alternative organizations spread as they developed non-government credits and market outlets.

Since , the government of Salinas de Gortari has further dismantled programs favoring peasants while embracing free trade that exposes crops to falling prices. Understandably, peasants of the region gave up hope for their future within the country's new economic system.

These circumstances help explain why peasants of eastern Chiapas, disaffected from the PRI in a region the ruling party has failed to control, should have risen in rebellion. But the Zapatistas themselves identify NAFTA and the government's abrogation of agrarian reform as sources of their discontent, critiquing the national project of economic restricting and the national state's seeming betrayal of Mexico's peasantry as a client group.

That the rebels have been winning support from peasant sympathizers throughout Chiapas in regions where energy development of the s and economic restructuring of the s have had their strongest impacts is reason enough to look to these developments for the roots of the rebellion.

The surprisingly nationalist vision of eastern Chiapas' rebels has its roots in a paradoxical outcome of oil export booms in many developing countries - the unexpected blight of agriculture.

After the OPEC crisis in , Mexico borrowed internationally to expand oil production for export and to finance ambitious projects of development.

Mexico, propelled by energy development, became more and more oriented towards foreign markets and away from food self-sufficiency. As peasants began to migrate into undocumented wage work in the United States, Mexico became dependent upon maize imports for its basic staple food, despite efforts of the state to buttress maize production through agrarian credits and subsidies.

The importation of corn from the North-American midwest touched off a debate as to whether Mexico needed peasants any more, and whether it wanted them in the cities, whose squatter settlements burgeoned, or in the countryside. These changes directly involved Mexico's southeast as Mexico developed the Gulf coast oil fields of Tabasco. Mexico also built two major new dams along Chiapas's Grijalva river during the boom.

Metropolitan areas close to the oil fields grew explosively, as did cities throughout the southeast whose commerce was spurred by energy development.

As a result, the Zapatistas have attempted to build alternative community structures and promote autonomous projects on the lands that were occupied during the early stages of the rebellion.

Scholarship on the Zapatistas is large and covers many different aspects of this movement. While some scholars celebrate the novel qualities of the EZLN for example, its desire not to seek power and its promotion of decentralized autonomous bases of support , others claim that outside activists have sought to mobilize local grievances to support their own political agendas.

More recent work has been able to provide more-detailed analyses of the local-level impacts of the rebellion, including greater attention to the participation of indigenous women. Several works examine the general context in which the Zapatista rebellion occurred. Some scholars emphasize the agrarian conflicts and prior history of local organizing. Harvey traces the emergence of campesino organizations in the s and s that demanded land redistribution and improved economic and social conditions.

Womack similarly highlights the social inequalities within a longer historical perspective. This author adds important material regarding the role of the Catholic diocese in supporting community-based organizations in Chiapas, and a section of thirty-two readings including key texts from the Colonial period up to Higgins uses international relations theory to see the rebellion as a response to the centralizing tendency of state formation in Mexico, which had rendered indigenous people largely invisible, at least in political terms, until Gollnick adds an important dimension by critiquing literary narratives that have also placed indigenous people in a passive role in the social history of Chiapas.

Against this trend, most recent scholarship gives greater weight to the agency of indigenous people. These overviews reflect the core issue of land conflicts in Chiapas, a theme that is also central to the film documentary A Place Called Chiapas Wild De Vos divides his analysis into parallel accounts of different individuals who represent to some degree the diverse economic and political interests at stake in this area of Chiapas, one of the main bases for the Zapatista rebellion.

Gollnick, Brian. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, Indigenous peoples not only gained from this rebellion the expansion of political rights, but also guaranteed greater preservation of traditions, languages and ways of living. The Mexican Government has failed to reduce poverty levels and improve the quality of life standards in Chiapas: violence, social inequality and human rights violations to indigenous peoples still remain.

However, as a consequence of the Zapatista revolt, the government has made efforts to overcome these problems by creating Federal agencies specialised in indigenous issues. The creation of the CDI can be seen as an example of these efforts.

Regardless of the shortcomings of these government agencies, their creation is a big step towards accelerating the development of indigenous communities. Mexico is a multicultural and multiethnic country. The EZLN movement played a fundamental role in representing the interests of these indigenous peoples by achieving protection of the rich Mexican indigenous heritage within the constitution.

The Zapatista struggle was effective as indigenous communities were given greater autonomy, challenging their previous subordinate position as seen by the Mexican Government. Table of Contents Back to Top. Rights Back to Top. Awards Back to Top. Additional Information Back to Top. Publicity material Bk Cover Image Full. Also Viewed. Experimenting with Ethnography. The Affect Theory Reader.

Selected Writings on Race and Difference.