|
In the twentieth century people in Chiapas felt that their poor and largely agricultural area had been ignored by the government since enactment of the constitution of 1917. One of the chief complaints was that many Indian farmers were required to pay absentee landlords, despite the fact that since the 1920s the Mexican government had been promising the peasants ownership of the land they had farmed and lived on for generations. Article 27 of the 1917 constitution guaranteed indigenous peoples the right to an "ejido" or communal land. As Mexico restructured its economy after the 1982 financial crisis the state sector shrank due to privatizations and reorganization while land reform became less of a priority (it had long since been completed in most of the country, with Chiapas as a notable exception). The Mexican government under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, an avid neo liberal, sought to modernize the traditionally closed and state dominated economy and increase its openness to trade. As part of this process Mexico repealed the constitutional guarantee of communally owned ejido's for rural communities. As the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect on January 1, 1994, the indigenous peoples of Chiapas - struggling to make a living with few resources - felt increasingly left behind. Such dissatisfaction led to the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Zapatista's, or Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), which began an armed rebellion against the federal government on January 1, 1994. In that year, thousands of supporters of the anti-globalization movement gathered in Chiapas, and it was from this meeting that the modern movement was born. The Zapatista's were in principle a peaceful movement that was pushed to use the force of arms to guarantee the indigenous right to ejido's Subcomandante Marcos, the face of the Zapatista's, succeeded in attracting international attention, with the innovative use of modern information and communication technologies for the struggle of the indigenous peoples in Chiapas. In August 2003, the EZLN declared all Zapatista territory an autonomous government independent of Mexico. Since then, the armed EZLN has been laying low to some extent working on the government level to implement health care and educational institutions in poor rural indigenous communities. |
Mexico Information: Inside
|
