La Jornada, México, D.F.
April 30, 2001
Gilberto López y Rivas (translated by Agustín J. Avila-Sakar)

Treason has been finally accomplished. The Congress of the Union has turned its back on the Indian peoples by passing a Law of Indigenous Rights that violates the San Andrés Accords and casts doubt over Vicente Fox's willingness for peace, as well as that of the legislators of every political party.

The approved Law leaves the acknowledgement of peoples and communities, as well as their rights to free determination and autonomy, to the correlation of forces within the states of the Union, thus eliminating the peoples' exercise of autonomy over the domain of one or more communities and at every level where they assert it; the Law uproots Indigenous peoples' and denies them the right to a collective use of their lands; furthermore, it smuggles in a "lock" that legitimizes the property forms of the Salinist counter-reform of Article 27 of the Constitution, an item that was supposed to be matter of discussion at the third dialogue assembly; the Law denies Indigenous peoples the right to be recognized as public rights entities; it minimizes their right to political participation; it establishes official measures against their autonomy, due to its open welfare character and because it considers Indigenous peoples as "victim subjects" and passive objects of the State's actions.

For Indigenous peoples land is part of an entire cosmogony. In addition to being the source of their scanty economical resources and the material basis for their production, the land is the bearer of their spiritual wealth, the means of contact to their world, the seat of their existence; it is the nucleus of their identity as peoples and communities; the space where family ties reside, and, by extension, a link to past generations, parents, grandparents, and future generations, children, grandchildren.

Time is reckoned in the land. The land captures sweat and suffering, hope and happiness. From the land one contemplates the morning and the night, and feels the cold and the heat. Nature is not dissociated from people, as in the great cities, but exists in tight interrelationship with them. In short, for Indigenous peoples land is not just another merchandise, susceptible to alienation. On the contrary, land is the source of their material and spiritual wealth; the condition for existence. With the denial of the right to a territory and to the collective use of the land, goes the denial, too, of the millennial social content of the land.

In summary: the reforms passed by Congress favor a perspective of distrust and discrimination against Indians, full of locks expressing the fear of the oligarchy, the new "encomenderos" and the professional politicians, all to the detriment of the Indigenous mobilization and the exercise of their autonomy.

Treason was forged in the Senate of the Republic. That Chamber issued a dictum under the hegemony of the legislators of the PRI and PAN, and with the complicity of senators of the PRD, who shared the secrecy of the document until just a few hours before it was open for voting at the plenary session.

None of the PRD members that had been working on the subject for a long time were consulted, neither were any of those that participated in the Cocopa, nor any of those who hold leader positions in the Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs of this party. Over them, preference was given to treaties and "agreements" with senators from other political organizations. No argument could win the single abstention vote that would break the unanimity desired by the PRI and PAN, a vote that would have allowed the PRD deputies at least a minimum margin of maneuver. Instead, what prevailed were personal-oriented and irresponsible arguments.

Later, during the voting session in the Chamber of Deputies, the vote cast by the PRD senators in favor of the aborted reform would be used by other parties to make fun of the PRD. The dignified attitude of the deputies contrasted with the lack of congruence of their Xicoténcatl colleagues.

One should clearly identify the intellectual authors of this blow against peace and dialogue, in addition to the well-known Manuel Bartlett Díaz and Diego Fernández de Cevallos. Vicente Fox Quezada is responsible for this perverse game. On the one hand, he sends a Law initiative to the Senate of the Republic; on the other he congratulates that Chamber for the runt engendered. The presidential joy, as always cheered by a corresponding media campaign, demonstrates that there was always an agreement between the Executive branch and the PRI-PAN legislators in order to obtain a reform that would maximally undermine the right of Indigenous peoples to exercise their autonomy.

Vicente Fox is the number one craftsman of this feline action; he gains political advantage out of a strategy which, in reality, betrays the national Indigenous movement. Like his presidential predecessor, he will try to manage the conflict and defeat the EZLN without renouncing to the use of weapons. There can be no doubt about it: the political elite did not get the message of reconciliation and peace that the Indian peoples brought before the Congress at San Lázaro; with this reform, the elite has lost the historical opportunity to acknowledge the multicultural essence of the Mexican nation.