On January 1st, 1994, a rebellion like no other broke out in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. That this was also the day when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect gave the insurgency an international dimension and an economic framework. The war, directed by a Clandestine Indigenous Revolutionary Command of the National Zapatista Liberation Army (EZLN), had been prepared for ten years, and it lasted twelve days. Since then, a difficult process of negotiations has been opened and halted several times. Meanwhile, the nation has faced two major political assassinations, a catastrophic currency devaluation, the uncovering of large-scale corruption linked to drug traffic in the family of the former president, the election of the first mayor of Mexico City from the leftist opposition party, and the loss of an unprecedented number of congressional seats by the party in power. These, and other major political changes in a country known for absolute control by the party that institutionalized the 1910 revolution, are part of an irrevocable wave of transformation that is sweeping the country, in spite of the entrenched resistance of the government, the Chiapas elite, and the army. The Zapatista uprising that erupted in the most insignificant corner of Mexico plays a key role in defining the future of the nation.

The Zapatistas are indigenous peasant men and women of diverse Mayan origin whose revindicative struggles originated shortly after the Conquest of Mexico. Through one of their military leaders and spokesperson, Subcomandante Marcos, they have managed to articulate a dignified vision of themselves and a vision of Mexico that includes them as full citizens, capable of determining their own fate, and not as marginal, unproductive, backward dwellers. The intelligent texts of Marcos-- humorous, tender, mordant, literary-- have been sent from the mountains or the jungle to the global cyberspace, creating a reverberation of sympathy all over the world. Young men and women in Mexico who are eager for change, intellectuals, small entrepreneurs and landholders hard-hit by the effects of free trade, have all become a second ring of Zapatista supporters. Yet peace is far from Chiapas, and justice even farther away.

The state is occupied by some 35,000 troops of a newly modernized, well equipped and well trained Mexican army. Hundreds of members of a state-of-Chiapas security force are seen in the highlands in their blue uniforms, armed. Disappearances, torture, even rape, indiscriminate assault and killings by paramilitary groups, and the most recent massacre of 45 men, women and children in the mountain hamlet of Acteal, are all signs of the deep distress endured by the communities of poor peasants and the incompetence of the Mexican government in addressing the problem peacefully and expediently. Negotiators have come and gone, the governor of the state has been changed twice, and the most powerful member of the executive branch next to the president, the secretary of government, has had to resign in view of the events in the highlands of Chiapas, the second man in that post to be forced from office during this administration.

What is at stake for Mexico? What is at stake for Mexicans in the resolution of this conflict? Never before in my experience has change come with such force over the country, not even in 1968 when the government repressed the student movement just before hosting the Olympic Games. The change has many points of origin, but the indigenous uprising seems to undergird them all. There is something at once terrible and beautiful happening in Chiapas; something that will not be stopped by soldiers, nor by political hand-outs. The people talk about a new light, a new dawn. They know, because they carry it inside them: they are involved in a process of awakening that is one of the most impressive features of the situation in Chiapas for any visitor. Tzotzil and Tzeltal peasants who hardly ever went to school, some of who do not speak Spanish, women as well as men, express themselves eloquently about their past and their future, about the historical moment they are living in, and about the solutions that the Zapatista option proposes. They speak with force, intelligence, and pride. There is no going back.

What is at stake? I attempt to answer the question crudely, from the experience of seven intensive days in Chiapas, (from December 29 to January 4, 1998) and a good deal of analytical reading, mostly of news and editorials (yes, some of it in the Internet...):

• A true opportunity for national change. Zapatismo is, first of all, an act of audacious imagination. Rooted in the deepest indigenous soil of Mayan origin, its language flirts with Shakespeare and Cervantes, Borges, Rulfo and Cortázar. Its visual images relate to Spielberg as much as to the inexhaustibly meaningful pictures of the Mexican Revolution. It is no wonder that popular art has created the ubiquitous cloth doll of the guerrillero and guerrillera: Marcos, Ramona, Ana María, Moisés... The humor of Zapatismo overflows from many communiqués from the Selva Lacandona. Durito, the pipe-smoking beetle who asks philosophical questions in the tent of Subcommander Marcos, has become as real as all the human characters who inhabit the pages of zapatista texts. Zapatismo addresses children. Zapatismo seeks to respond to the needs of women. Proposing a utopia that can be brought down to earth, Zapatismo invites all Mexicans to dream. But this creative audacity is not a matter of communications or public relations alone. The substance of Zapatismo is daring: to build autonomous communities of indigenous people in Chiapas, "to humanize Mexico" by reintegrating it to its ancient indigenous soul, denied for so long ("Never again a Mexico without us!"); to seek alternative economic development models. This utopia has been capable of amalgamating disparate forces for change in the country. To a fossilized political system, incapable of regenerating itself from the inside, the zapatistas bring a bold and original promise of transformation. A peaceful, negotiated zapatista victory is a victory for a more human, freer Mexico.

• A challenge to "the only game in town." With the demise of the Soviet Union, the Cuban crisis and the end of the Sandinista administration in Nicaragua, U.S. capitalism imposes its rules without restraint in the hemisphere. The original zapatista opposition to NAFTA and the subsequent efforts to articulate a critical view of neoliberalism are one of the most visible challenges to a system that Mexico, willingly or not, is committed to. The zapatistas unmask the inhumanity of Mexico's economic development model and its inherent contradictions. A governmental response to this challenge could open a national dialogue on Mexico's future under NAFTA, especially in the agricultural sector. In the zapatista vision, a socialist organization is not incompatible with strong democratic structures. Zapatismo says yes to globalization, but not at the expense of large numbers of people. This is fundamentally important for a country where more than forty percent of the people are unable to participate in the economic schemes of the hemispheric free market.

• The future strength of Mexico's civilian institutions and the process of democratization. The national consultation that the zapatistas proposed in the summer of 1995 connected them with Mexico's urban professional middle class, with vast numbers of people who found in Zapatismo a channel for their desire to work for change. In spite of the efforts of the Mexican government to exercise the same control that previous PRI administrations practiced, many sectors of the Mexican society are newly active and ready to participate in political decisions. The number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) operating in Mexico has grown dramatically. Continuing the trend that started after the 1985 earthquake, the civil society is stronger now than ever before. Zapatismo, even as an armed revolt, is an integral element of that trend. The zapatistas' efforts to detach themselves from the EPR (Popular Revolutionary Army) operating in Oaxaca and Guerrero is an important sign of their commitment to a peaceful process.

  The uprising coincides with a period of weak civilian institutions in the Mexican government and a strengthening of the roles of both Army and Church (Lorenzo Meyer, La Reforma, 1/15/98). In the context of Mexican history, the survival of democracy requires an army firmly controlled by civilian political organs and a clear separation of Church and State. A protracted conflict could delay the reform of the state institutions, for which there is pressure coming from different points in Mexican society. In addition, federal expenditures in the maintenance of a large, modern army for civilian control is a distraction of resources badly needed for education, health and other social disbursements, especially when falling world oil prices have reduced once again the federal budget of Mexico. In sum, Chiapas is a testing ground for Mexico's capacity to rise above the rampant violations of human rights perpetrated in Guatemala in the early eighties, under military control. A negotiated solution to the conflict will train the Mexican federal and state government in democracy and will open democratic spaces for all citizens. Conversely, failure to deliver a negotiated peace and the conditions for dignified and autonomous socioeconomic development of indigenous people in Chiapas could signal a greater hardening of the arteries of the Mexican state, with disastrous prospects for the future of the nation.

• Mexico's sovereignty and the United States. Since Mexico joined the GATT, many of its previously protected products have ceased to be competitive with US imports. NAFTA has rendered many medium-size factories and retail businesses obsolete. On the other hand, close to ten percent of Mexico's labor force has been or is dependent on work in the United States for survival, and the percentage is growing. Since 1980 the annual remittances of immigrant workers have doubled, reaching the $4 billion mark. Perhaps over 30 percent of those immigrants are undocumented and deportable, creating an irritation in U.S.-Mexico relations. Meanwhile the rest of that population is slowly beginning to acquire citizenship and become an integral and permanent part of the United States, strengthening the Chicano presence in the country with its mostly liberal politics.

  The US bail-out of Mexico engineered by President Clinton has further compromised Mexico's ability to dictate its own conditions in all dealings with its northern neighbor. It appears that drug-traffic interdiction has given the US a good reason to give military aid to Mexico, and the Mexican government a good reason to accept it. But where is this aid being used? In a paradoxical way, even the pressure exerted by US citizens on their own government on behalf of the indigenous people of Chiapas points to what Adolfo Aguilar Zinser calls a continuation of "tutelage" (La Reforma, 1/16/98). The conflict is inviting greater scrutiny of Mexico's governmental affairs on the part of the United States, responding to pressures from the left. Mexico's sovereignty is in question with or without a crisis in Chiapas, but the government's response leaves the country open for international disapproval and invites the foreign intervention that Mexican liberals so zealously have fought against since the middle of the nineteen century. In Chiapas, the sovereignty of Mexico vis a vis the United States is once again redefined and renegotiated. Chiapas says that we Mexicans are truly other, that we are really foreign, inassimilable to the design of another society with a different historical destiny.

• The future survival of indigenous people. The solution to the conflict in Chiapas will indicate whether ten million indigenous Mexicans are allowed to live and thrive in the next century. The groups that exist in the state of Chiapas and all over the country have resisted assimilation and extinction for five hundred years, paying the price with isolation and crushing poverty. The zapatistas have a clear notion on how to belong to the Mexican nation and still remain Tzotziles, Zoques, Choles, Mams, Tzeltales, or Tojolobales. In their vision, women play an important role of leadership. Yet the Mexican government is sure that the autonomy that the zapatistas propose will lead to separatism, not realizing that separatism, defined as marginality, is what the uprising was designed to cure. Over and over again the spokespersons for civilian zapatistas that we visited made us understand that autonomy is the indigenous way to participate in the full life of the nation. Mexico is a federal--not a centralist--republic, and such a concession, while problematic, should not be impossible to make. In some ways the discourse of the elites on indigenous inclusion in Mexico parallels the present-day discourse on the obsolescence of affirmative action in the United States. The statement "we are all equally Mexican" rings false because it has never been true. The conditions for such equality need to be built from the ground up and with extraordinary measures, capable of overcoming centuries of neglect.

  In Mexico, as in Peru and other Latin American countries, the existence of indigenous groups has been defined traditionally as a problem, even by those who sought to defend them. After the Revolution, intellectual-politicians like José Vasconcelos sought to incorporate them in the Mexican society through an aggressive method of education that would in effect erase their Indian identity; others, like the social anthropologist Manuel Gamio, founder and director of the Instituto Indigenista, opposed this view, but still did not advocate respect for the ability of Indian people to decide their future. Autonomy with integral participation in Mexican nationhood is the zapatista alternative to the social "assistentialism" that the government and other elites propose for Chiapas, and the indignity of social services currently offered by the Mexican Army, following the model of U.S. troops in Honduras during the eighties: painting a school and giving haircuts to the boys in the villages.

  The economic survival of indigenous groups is directly tied to the availability of land for cultivation, and this problem must be addressed legislatively and juridically in Chiapas and elsewhere. This would only be a way of keeping the promises of the Mexican Revolution. In Chiapas Mexico could recover not only its ancestral indigenous past, but its modern indigenous future.

I do not see an immediate solution in sight. That would require far more flexibility and trust that the Mexican executive has shown so far. But there may be some face-saving openings in the next few months, if the Acteal massacre is dealt with honorably and not simply through the scapegoating of a few villagers. The zapatistas will have to show a strong will for peace, resisting the temptation of intransigence. Mexican society has shown its support of their claims, and justice is on their side. But they may have to make difficult concessions at the negotiating table, perhaps postponing some legitimate demands for a post-peace national dialogue for the sake of a return to reconstruction.

The zapatista rebellion of 1994 held a mirror in front of Mexico's face. Through the zapatista process, we Mexicans have come to know ourselves better. Through the suffering of the people in the last four years, we are shown the depth of their convictions and the force of their claims. In Chiapas, Mexico is renewed.

Aurora Camacho de Schmidt
January 17, 1998
Swarthmore, Pennsylvania