| Overview
Inputs from the Politics of Today
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It all broke into the open in Chiapas in January
of 1994: the Zapatista rebellion by Maya communities, with a masked
intellectual for their spokesman. Armed bands took over town governments.
They raised the old question of land.
They got their story out, using the Net, and using connections that they soon made to intellectuals in Mexico City and the farther world. The most effective instrument of publicity was conflict itself. Army units came in, aiming to clear the area. Peace-makers, and some radical politicians, and some clergymen in the region, called for a stand-down between forces. Speeches and communiqués proclaimed the cause of negotiation, or mediation. "Statesmen" denounced their opposite numbers as agitators. The rebellion in Chiapas quickly became a transnational event. Governments and private individuals, taking an interest in the conflict, precipitated reactions from the Mexican government. Into it, too, came one massive input that goes less noticed in the United States, though highly visible in Mexico. This is the activity of "NGOs," the Non-Governmental Organizations that establish for their participants identities outside the nation-state framework. NGOs can be organizations of any stripe: religious as well as political, conservative as well as radical. Often the term is reserved for radical or religious groups that mobilize for human rights. Sometimes, on either the left or the right, humanitarian organizations serve as cover groups recruiting for some political agenda. Up to a point, any political establishment would prefer to co-opt NGOs rather than go to the trouble of repressing them. That limit point is reached when the NGOs challenge a government's political base. In Mexico, the observers they introduce can describe actual relations between the government's local supporters (whether ranchers or social workers) and the supposedly passive population of inditos ("little Indians"). |
Refugees from the conflict gathered into temporary settlements of their own -- where they were more vulnerable than ever to paramilitary attack.
Late in 1997, the question of the paramilitaries, along with that of
the foreign observers, came to a head. Local units in Chiapas, supposedly
acting on their own, but clearly linked to the state government, the PRI,
and the Army, carried out attacks on refugee communities, culminating in
the massacre of 45 persons at Acteal. In response, new groups of
observers came from abroad, adding their numbers to the ranks of volunteers
already working in the area on a longer-term basis. Some foreigners
were working to build political consciousness among the Mayas, and to empower
them for communicating with the outside world. In the spring, the
Mexican government began expelling foreigners whom it accused of interfering
in Mexican politics -- including 126 Italians swooped up at one time in
May.
These expulsions, and the claim that observers were violating national
sovereignty, present us now with one link back to interpretations of the
U.S.-Mexican War. It is not that such observers were in any serious
way like Anglos infiltrating Texas in 1830. Rather, a strict defense
of the idea of sovereignty, at any time, can contribute to seeing
war as a simplistic conflict between two nation-states. This applies
especially to the 1846-48 war, in which the interests of indigenous peoples
formed the great feature that did not fit neatly into any two-nation interpretation.