Transcripts
"Letter from Chiapas"
by Donatella Bernstein
6 March - San Cristobal de las Casas
Given that the British press has barely reported on the Zapatistas in the past, or at present, I thought you might like to know that in Mexico a March for Peace started here on 25th February when the Zapatistas and Sub-Commander Marcos came out of the jungle and began a 10-day march on the capital, taking in all the most controversial areas of conflict in the southern states.
The march, heavily protected by rings of reporters and foreign observers, met up with the National Council of Indigenous People, and approved a Bill of Rights for Indigenous People demanding recognition of local cultures and languages, self-determination for the communities which to this day function along a parallel administration run by their elders, ignored by local authorities, and a right to communal lands usurped by large-scale ranchers and absentee landowners. The texts are heavy with references to dignity, safeguarding of culture and right to democratic self-representation, hardly revolutionary demands.
The march occupies the screens here 50% of the time on air, and La Jornada has been running articles on the march, the Zapatistas, the indigenous council and related subjects in 70% of its pages for the past week. San Cristobal was teeming with reporters, as this is the first time Marcos has spoken in public for years, fearing assassination attempts since Chiapas has been turned into a military occupied zone.
What is intriguing is that Marcos and the other guerilleros should have deemed it safe to come out in public now, and if Vicente Fox is not aiming to exterminate them and says he is open to dialogue, why has this change occured at this particular moment?
In fact, Vicente Fox has been widely reported as saying he wants to open dialogue with non-governmental organisations, wants to invite the Zapatistas to negotiations for peace and is interested in opening the political arena to citizen participation. But we all know which way his cowboy boots point: one of his first diplomatic steps was to meet George Bush, an old friend and fellow cowboy with similar backing in similar states.
Neo-liberals are fond of talking about citizen participation, by which they mean a public-relations exercise to brainwash people into acquiescence with their agendas.
Fox's other pet initiative is the so-called Puebla-Panama Economic Agreement, which is supposed to 'develop' the southern region and the states between Mexico and Panama. The Zapatistas are virulently opposed to this plan which would steamroll the region into another area up for grabs by foreign investors who would exploit the indigenous population as slave labour (this is part of their recurrent history) and repatriate profits.
The precedents for this type of 'development' nearly destroyed the rest of Mexico a few years ago, and this is the country which most feels the colonisation of its powerful northern neighbour which is all-pervasive. Already it is a dumping ground for illegal US merchandise such as DDT and a whole spate of drugs and products banned for domestic consumption. The latest is that powerful multinationals are distributing free corn seeds to campesinos which are genetically modified. In fact most tortillas in circulation are made with genetically modified seeds. The second year they pay for the seeds, and are unable to grow anything else on the soil. It seems these seeds deplete the soil altogether, so that after a few years these people will not be able to eke out even the subsistence level they now survive on, dramatically worsening migration to the already swelling city favelas (Mexico City is about to exceed 25 million people).
As one interviewee on television said, referring to Vicente Fox's 'new' approach, ' we will believe something has changed when 40,000 native indigenous children stop dying every year and when Mexico's poor comprising 40% of the national population begins to decrease'.
Donatella Bernstein
© Friends Of Le Monde Diplomatique
