La Jornada
April 28, 2001
by Adelfo Regino Montes (translated by Agustin J. Avila-Sakar)

The constitutional denial of Indigenous claims and fundamental rights is deeply rooted in the history of our country. In 1824 the first constitution, the same that gave birth to the present Mexican State, actually treated us as foreigners. Then, with the constitution of 1857 came an aggressive campaign of compelled sales of Indigenous communal property, aggravating the conditions of poverty, isolation and exploitation suffered over centuries by our ancestors. In 1917, after a painful revolution, a constitution was promulgated which, though guaranteeing the protection of Indigenous lands, laid the grounds for an ethnocidal institutional policy.

Today the Senate of the Republic has issued a dictum on constitutional reforms regarding Indigenous rights which, if approved by the Chamber of Deputies, will nullify the basic demands of our peoples and will be inefficient in the context of factual reality. The rationale is very clear: the idea is to acknowledge certain rights so that everything stays the same. We are specially concerned about the right to free determination and autonomy. As a matter of fact, the second article, section a, of the dictum "acknowledges and guarantees the right of peoples and communities to free determination and, as a consequence, autonomy...", but the mechanisms and forms that should make that possible and efficacious are not established.

Thus, the legislators of the Mexican Senate eliminated altogether fraction IX of article 115 of the Law Initiative put forth by Commission of Peace and Concord (Cocopa), that establishes the respect for "the exercise of free determination of the Indigenous peoples within each domain and at every level where they assert their autonomy, which may cover one or more Indigenous communities, according to the specific circumstances of each federal entity." In this sense, we have stated numerous times that free determination and autonomy are processes that require the communities themselves to define the domains (political, judicial, economic, cultural and social) and levels (communal, municipal, regional) of validity. Unfortunately, such right is completely nullified in the dictum approved by the Mexican Senate.

In a similar manner, the Senators ignored the second paragraph of the Cocopa Initiative, which states: "The Indigenous communities, as public right entities, and the municipalities that acknowledge their pertaining to a given Indigenous people, shall have the right to free association in order to coordinate their actions." In contrast the Mexican Senate dictates that only the state legislatures have the ability to establish the terms of free determination and autonomy, as well as the rules for recognizing Indigenous communities as public interest entities. This eliminates in one blow the possibility of including the possibility of including in the Carta Magna the criteria, mechanisms and forms that can make autonomy possible and efficient in the actual daily life.

In the absence of constitutional mechanisms that enable free determination and autonomy, Indigenous rights are being mutilated. Without constitutional recognition of the Indigenous community and municipality, and without the possibilities of their association -- rights proposed in the Cocopa Initiative- the reconstruction and development of the Indigenous peoples will remain only in speeches, instead of being part of an actual construction enterprise. As long as the territorial rights of our peoples continue to be nullified, their potential for sustainable growth with identity will be too far away, as far away as we are from peace today. If this is so, then the much desired constitutional reform on Indigenous rights is being cancelled, like in former times. What we got is not a reform that that truly benefits the Indigenous peoples, but only a set of limited declarations that will have no positive impact on the life of our peoples. This truth must be known by the civil society. We therefore ask the Chamber of Deputies to assume a responsible attitude and seriously retake the Cocopa Initiative. Like their predecessors they will be accountable to History.