Chiapanecan Strategies:

Autonomy (Zapatistas)

versus

Strategic Pacification
(Mexican Government)

[Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds] tells how the supreme government was affected by the poverty of the Indigenous peoples of Chiapas and endowed the area with hotels, prisons, barracks, and a military airport. It also tells how the beast feeds on the blood of the people, as well as other miserable and unfortunate happenings.
Subcommander Marcos, August 1992
http://www.ezln.org/SE-in-two-winds.html

A Chiapas Story:

Two separate visions of the future of rural Mexico stand today in opposition:
The first, a indigenous and grassroots vision seeks a form of autonomous self-determination for all Mexican peoples;

the second, a government and elite view, seeks to continue a federalist vision of Mexico in which peoples and resources are directed by the central government and private enterprise.

Autonomy as envisioned by Zapatista strategists challenges both the nation-state identity and political and economic neoliberalism

i. multi-ethnic autonomous zones (Stephens 1995). This conceptualization directly confronts a core state ideology of åmestizajeπ, that is, the idea that the Mexican stateπs legitimacy to rule derives from its fusion of both American Indian and Spanish traditions under one state (Bartra 1975), and in so doing provides a popular challenge to the ideological equation of nation and state (Agnew 1998).

ii. limits to private resource control envisioned under both the revolutionary °Tierra y Libertad! ideology and communal property regimes common to southern Mexican indigenous communities challenge[1] economic neoliberalism. .[2] Provisions under consideration would regulate capital investment and environmental impact (Gonz·lez Galv·n 1996).

The deployment of autonomy as a popular strategy is controversial within the popular sector, and although principal obstacles to autonomy stem from government opposition, the purchase of politico-military opposition and its successful application in the Chiapas case, particularly the paramilitaries, point to two problems with the practical constitution of autonomous zones.

i. uneven distribution of land and resources within autonomous zones divides not only rich landowners against poor smallholders, but also ålandedπ indigenous peoples with communal holdings against virtually landless communities also of indigenous origin.

ii. the exclusionary discourse of autonomy: arguments for autonomy that, for political reasons, celebrate the uniqueness of indigenous social organization tend to exclude poor peasants who are for historical reasons located within majority indigenous zones

iii. If autonomy is not both pluri-ethnic and regional in scope, it will only reproduce existing state-community relations that have divided indigenous communities and reproduced state-party fusion.

In practice, however, the political process within Zapatista autonomous zones has brought together ethnically diverse indigenous peoples, resident mestizos and urban and international activitists.

i. The political process accompanying Zapatismo has allowed an experimental reworking of indigenous governance practices together with national Mexican practices (Bartra, Nash; e.g. Marcos 1998) while

ii. A conscious discursive construction of Chiapanecan autonomy combines elements from indigenous, Mexican, Latin American and international culture that locates collective action not in essentialist notions of indigenous communality, but in historical practice.

State Counter-Strategies: Bureaucratization and Military Intervention

Since the paramilitary attack at Acteal in the state of Chiapas, Mexico in December 1997, police actions designed to dismantle autonomous Zapatista communities are occurring despite agreements in place to respect Zapatista autonomy.

6 principal components of State strategy include:

Bureaucratization: The 1994 military offensive against the Zapatistas proved politically costly for the Mexican government, and so a cease-fire led parties to the negotiating.

i. Government autonomy language would reject the pluri-ethnicity and regionality of Zapatista language by excluding non-indigenous groups from autonomy and limiting autonomies to the municipal (county) level.

ii. government language would extend bureaucratic authority to define who is a Mexican Indian.

Zapatista negotiators rejected Mexican government language, and the Mexican government has since turned to alternative venues for constitutional change by proposing this set of reforms in the Mexican Congress and pursuing a multifaceted military strategy.

Mexican government standing army in Chiapas consists of between 25,000 (Mexican government figures) and 60,000 (NGO figures) government soldiers

Since the failed government offensive in 1994-95 when government troops refused to assault guerrilla positions, national army troops were replaced with elite Gafe rapid deployment units. [3]

Paramilitarization : (Map) Military modus operandi identifies landless and impoverished non-Zapatista communities geographically situated at the intersection of Zapatista-controlled areas and provides neocorporativist-style economic aid, development projects, and paramilitary training programs to develop them åparamilitary communities,π

i. Post-colonial latifundistas encouraged a high labor-to-land ratio in order to profit from the hiring out of laborers.

ii. post-revolutionary land reform aided some peasants at the expense others.

iii. excluded peasants were condemned not only to a life of poverty, but also, quite importantly, to the loss of communal traditions that serve as the basis for cooperative

This historic geography of inequality is exploited by the Mexican government in paramilitarization. Currently there are more than a score of paramilitaries operating in Chiapas, and many more spread throughout the southern Mexican states of Tabasco, Campeche, Oaxaca and Quintana Roo and Guerrero.

Infrastructure Development undercuts autonomy by strategically placing roads and command posts in Zapatista autonomous zones and slicing up the Lacandon jungle into militarily manageable segments

Rural Development occurs primarily as military-led development that binds rural Chiapanecos into social and market relations with military personnel and bases:

i. large-scale construction projects represent one aspect, roadway construction another, the thriving service industry in prostitution a third.

ii. The military has become Mexicoπs newest rural development agency. researchers have identified institutional supports (development projects, grants-in-aid) made available to paramilitaries by government agencies.[4]

iii. Military-led development dovetails with neoliberal discourse equating underdevelopment with indigenous backwardness. Many successful independent (non-government aligned) development projects have been dismantled by military actions, in an ironic twist, militarism creates underdevelopment, the remedy is development aidãand what better organization to deliver it than the Mexican military?

Political gerrymandering creates a new political geography to match military development.

i. Current long-standing municipio boundaries are being redrawn to place military bases at the centers of 30 new municipios.[5]

ii. In light of Mexicoπs 1995 New Federalist initiative decentralized government spending and gave new fiscal authority to municipios, the new municipal seats/military bases will be well situated to deny Zapatista communities financial resources in a decentralized manner difficult for human rights monitors to detect.[6]

Militarization is quite expensive, and so the 16 June 1999 announcement of a joint $23 Billion package was welcomed by the Mexican government.

i. IMF (4.2 billion), the World Bank (5.2 billion), NAFA (North American Finance Agreement: 6.8 billion) the InterAmerican Development Bank (3.5 billion) and US-based Eximbank (4 billion line of credit to purchase goods in the US.

ii. the World Bank, IDB and Mexican state provide employment and infrastructure,
the IMF and US support Mexicoπs currency.[7]

iii. Mexican government has committed $9 billion pesos. [8]

Neoliberalism & Militarism in Southern Mexico

Why does the Mexican Government Care?:

Mexican Neoliberalism: Ideology, Practice, Policy

åPrivate property is the incarnation of the notion of liberty, of individual sovereignty, of individual independence in front of power....[It is] a neurological center of democracyπ (Vargas Llosa 1992, 31).

Thinking back to last weekπs lecture on Mexican development strategies since the Revolution, we find several key problems:

i. Declining oil prices and continuing debt burdens

ii. Unequal income/asset distribution

iii. Financial liberalization is creating åfast capitalπ issues in which money sits in short-term, speculative investments rather than long-term Foreign Direct or Foreign Indirect investments

iv. The answer has been to try and liberalize the economy to permit greater capitalization

a. this overcomes, at least in the short term, consumer demand limitations resulting from unequality since it creates a new consumer class

b. it overcomes the debt and national asset problem by opening resources to foreign investment (and also national, possibly attracting Mexican assets held in foreign banks)

Locating Strategic Pacification:
State Economic Policies

Four key problems confront the practical application of neoliberalism by the Mexican state

Managerial state and neoliberal economic reform:

i. Mexicoπs ISI strategy is built on inequality: development occurred in the form of a luxury disarticulation (de Janvry 1981) that incorporated state workers and a labor elite as core consumers, and peasants and informal sector workers in a supporting role.

ii. Oil-based PCI sustained this unequal development during the 1970πs, but with the 1982 oil petroleum price collapse, economic uncompetitiveness and current accounts deficits resulting from the skewed development model, advances in workersπ real income gained during the 70πs have been lost: the Mexican minimum wage just 36% of its real 1981 value, rural poor experience malnutrition rates of up to 45%, a figure unchanged in 20 years.

Financial Market Opening and Investor Confidence

i. The strategy of financing development via åhotπ capital (portfolio rather than direct foreign investment) unraveled in 1995 in the ådecember disasterπ peso meltdown

ii. The outflow of hot underscored a new importance of popular protest: a proximate cause of the meltdown was the inability of Mexican authorities to resolve the Chiapas war. The popularity ratification of Zapatista autonomy figured prominently in investor uncertainty.

Democratic Openings versus Political Control

Neoliberalism poses two key challenges to Mexican technocrats:

i. how does one reduce expenditures without undercuting the integrity of the state, and

ii. how can a state with diminished capacity both undertake privatization, funding cuts and other neoliberal-informed actions and overcome popular opposition to these actions?

In Mexico the dirigiste character of the state has been sustained through fusion of state and party: the cyclical problem that plagues this fusion is that it must be renewed via elections.

i. corporativism to neo-corporativist transformation unsuccessful

ii. degraded bureaucratic networks make it difficult to distribute benefits and evaluate the impact of these distributions.

Popular Sector Protest and State

i. Intra-state negotiations between government-party affiliated (PRI) workersπ/peasantsπ unions and state industries/parastatals transferred to extrastate channels.

ii. reemergence and revitalization of right-wing populism.

So what of Southern Mexico?

i. Neoliberal reforms in Mexico have resulted in a fusion of image and economy where the need for fast money requires national capitalists, whether in private enterprise or the Mexican state, to present an image of stability that will bolster profitability and freedom from risk.

ii. Southern Mexicans are in the paradoxical position of providing both the most important challenge to that image (the Zapatista rebellion)

Neoliberalism and the Village Economy

Given the conflicted relation of independent producersπ unions and the state, inter-village solidarity likely holds the key to any possible construction of non-territorial autonomy. Solidarity is, however, must develop within the context of a radical revision of the social contract underpinning government-village relations.

i. Although the global sum of government transfers to indigenous communities has not changed, support reduced for social services, commodity price supports and government corporations, and increased for transport infrastructure. This changed state-peasant economic relation has a differential gender impact

ii. The Mexican government has rejected a post-revolutionary history of inalienable land rights in favor of privatization, yet many factors mediate the impact of reform on Mexican rural communities including

a. the type of land tenure

b. local pressures for land commodification

c. local political histories, changes to Article 27 permit alienation of land from peasants, this can only happen when the majority of peasants agree

d. Promotion of land reform by the new ProcuradurÌa Agraria

Whither Mexico? Hybridity, Autonomy & Neoliberalism

i. The national contours of neoliberalism are determined not only by international markets and multilateral institutions but also by local histories and popular counter-strategies.

ii. The existence of widespread and well-organized popular opposition suggests that neoliberalism may require statism in order to press its agenda of structural adjustment, privatization and market-opening.

iii. Statism requires not only practical and policy measures to contain popular resistance, but discursive means as well. Mexican history demonstrates that many Mexicans do not readily accept privatization and that the °Tierra y Libertad! Revolutionary ideology linking freedom to peasant ownership of land and popular control of subsurface resources and industrial infrastructure remains common currency in the popular sector.

Neoliberalism as practiced in Mexico, and perhaps by extension in other developing countries, operates in ways that undercut its ability to reproduce itself.

i. The Mexican state has attempted to enact neoliberal economic reforms while preserving its one-party political structure, yet neoliberal-inspired market opening has resulted in a rift between the state party and the mass corporatist organizations that previously sustained it.

ii. The Mexican political elite turned to a neocorporatist relationship in an attempt to develop a new electoral base around åsolidarityπ self-help projects, but neocorporativism has not been capable of securing long-term electoral advantage because it has not supplied the combination of surveillance, economic leverage and cadre accountability present under mass corporativism.

The Mexican situation raises questions about relation between neoliberalism, perhaps better termed global liberalism, and militarism.

i. First, these policies diminish territorial sovereignty by restricting the stateπs ability to manage its economy yet require that the state secure and expand private property in order to participate fully in world markets.

ii. Second, the end of commodity support prices, economic subsidies to industry, and social spending undercut the mass popular organizations that reproduce state authority.

iii. Third, cutbacks in social spending erode the social networks through which state cadre interact with non-state civil social organizations. The result is a combination of heightened class conflict and destruction of national venues where policies can be negotiated among affected social groups.

iv. When this is coupled, as in the Mexican case, with a situation where these same degraded state bureaucratic networks and mass corporatist organizations are necessary for the political reproduction of the state, military organizations provide one of few remaining options for regime reproduction.

Spatial practices are key for both Oaxacan and Chiapanecan popular movements concerned with the impact of neoliberal practice and also for the state.

i. Zapatista-style autonomy presents the most direct challenge to the neoliberal state by contesting both the state-nation relation and by privileging local authority over economic practices and the primacy of collective over private property.

ii. Oaxacan-style independent producersπ unions present a rather different spatial practice that has extended peasant control over regional means of production and along commodity chains from producer to international markets. Oaxacan practice does not directly challenge the nation-state equation, but does challenge fusion of party and state.

State counter-practices vary depending on the circumstance.

i. Zapatista-style autonomy has drawn the most direct attention from the state including a military strategy designed to spatially rework the economy around military-led development and political efforts to extend state authority over the definition of indigenaity.

ii. Oaxaca-style independent peasant organizations present a very different sort of challenge because, from a neoliberal standpoint, they are participating in the very markets that the state seeks to open. The state has turned to traditional tools of economic patronage in order to divide independent peasant unions, but the degradation of state institutions under neoliberalism has hindered this avenue of action.

The future direction of Mexican neoliberalism, and indeed the ability of the Mexican state-party to reproduce its own authority, hangs in the balance. Whatever the outcome, the structure of Mexican politics and the shape of both neoliberalism and the Mexican popular sector will be, indeed already are, fundamentally altered by this encounter. In sum, this case provides evidence for the centrality of popular opposition, and of class struggle more generally, to the development of capitalism.

Which Indigenism?: Neocommunalism versus Neocorporativism in Southern Mexico

Tad Mutersbaugh

Assistant Professor

Department of Geography

University of Iowa, IA 52242

tad-mutersbaugh@uiowa.edu

At about 11 am on 22 December, 1997, a group known locally as åLos Chorrosπ attacked a refugee community in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. With troops from the Chiapas state Seguridad Publica stationed only 200 meters away, the group hacked and shot to death 45 civilian Zapatista supporters, mostly women, elderly individuals, and children, even slicing an unborn child from a dead motherπs womb and smashing the child on a rock. The ensuing national and international uproar spotlighted fact that the massacre was foretold by national media, including a number of newspaper accounts[9] published and a television special[10] shown in the months and days just prior to the massacre, all of which reported the open paramilitary activity in the area and complicity by name of local governmental and military figures in arming and financing paramilitary activity. Despite widespread knowledge of these links, the SecretarÌa de GobernaciÛn of Mexico initially characterized the attack as a war of åindigenas against indigenasπ without any federal involvement.[11]

Subsequent analysis has focused on two points. First, government entities at all levels engaged in active or tacit support of paramilitary associations[12] as demonstrated by excerpts taken from an October, 1994 manual written for the National Defense Secretary (SEDENA) entitled åChiapas 94 Campaign Planπ calling for organization of paramilitary units.[13] Second, paramilitary organizations are based in communities which, although located in proximity to Zapatista base communities, share a radically different history. A long history of clientalism and unequal land distribution exacerbated in recent years by neoliberal economic reforms has constructed, for these communities, particularly acute conditions of poverty and disenfranchisement. Since 1994 this situation has been coupled with neocorporativist political organizational efforts and exploited by a post-1994 military geography of counter-insurgency (Aubry and Inda 1997).

AndrÈs Arbry and AngÈlica Inda (1997), drawing on the Diocese archives in San CristÛbal, Chiapas, explore the conditions that have constructed the land-scarce, impoverished, and labor-exporting character of this community. Unlike surrounding communities, the patronage connection linking the local cacique to the central Mexican government delayed land reform and regularization until the 1970s. A situation of labor surplus was encouraged by the Larr·inzar family, whose head, Don Manuel, is said to have once stated, while lashing workers engaged in carrying his wife and bronze sugar-presses (trapiches) to the hacienda,

åwhy buy mules when I have so many servants?π (åø Pa quÈ voy a comprar bestias se tengo harto mozo?π).

Under the administration of L·zaro C·rdenas, in what can only be characterized as a tragic failure of land reform, the previously landless peasant Erasto Urbina organized the workers to recapture the finca (recapture as the workers are indigenous peoples who previously owned the estate), but not before making deals to portion out the best parts of the estate, including the infamous gravel bank at issue in the Acteal massacre, to surrounding wealthy families. Declaring the remaining area an ejido (agrarian reform area), Urbina urged the workers to grab parcels, ultimately paving the way to future conflict: those who took immediate advantage were the house servants, mostly Tzotzile Indians, while the landless field workers with less status, mostly Tzeltal Indians, were left out. This excluded group became Los Chorros, condemned not only to a life of poverty, greatly intensified since neoliberal reforms in the 1980s, but also, quite importantly, to the loss of communal traditions that characterize indigenous Mexico and serve as the basis for cooperative management and labor organizational technologies (Mutersbaugh 1998a). The paramilitarization of 1997 took advantage of this past and present history of poverty to drive a wedge into Zapatista organizing in highland Chiapas, setting a landless community against surrounding communally-managed zones.

One more instance of neocorporativism is provided by the Los Chorros situation. During the paramilitarization from 1994-97, several government agencies stepped in to offer various forms of financial support and training to the community. The agreement signed by the region VII military commander has been noted, but also important were intergovernmental struggles between Prodesch (Chiapas Program of Economic and Social Development) and the INI (National Indigenous Institute). These not only set off group against group, but financed the disputes. In this case the direct payments typified by state corporativism resulted in a deadly atomization of an already weak social peace.

Although the paramilitarization of highland Chiapas represents an extreme instance of a regionally varied neoliberal-neocorporate policy mix, it is broadly indicative of the political economy of development present throughout southern Mexico, demonstrated by incidents such as the Aguas Blancas massacre in Guerrero, the Tepoztl·n Golf War in Morelos, and the struggle over coffee processing and marketing in Oaxaca.

Neoliberal Globals and Neocorporativist Locales

By now you are probably thinking, wow, thatπs interesting, but what is the connection with neoliberalism?

In essence, Iπm arguing that corporativism, or neocorporativism as the present Mexican form is termed, is linked to neoliberalism. In Latin America the experience of neoliberalism has been associated with the reemergence and revitalization of right-wing populism, or corporativism (Harvey 1996, Gledhill 1995). While much academic attention has been focused on the parallel emergence of left populism, e.g., soup kitchens, cooperatives, urban social movements, that have mobilized in protest against neoliberal economic policies (Esteva 1992; Escobar 1992, Walton & Seddon 1994), far less attention has been directed to the analysis of right-wing populism. In many instances a neoliberal corporativist form of right-wing populism directly challenges what I broadly refer to as neocommunalist (e.g. Zapatista, Oaxacan Coffee Producer Union) efforts to build progressive grassroots organizations and challenge neoliberal policies. The success of neocorporativism has been considerable, and serves as a caution to those who, in affirming the undeniable effervescence of alternative social organizations, fail to note the power of neocorporativism to corrupt and undercut progressive organizing and construct competing grassroots corporativist organizations. While I has originally intended to counterpose the neoliberal and the neocommunal, for reasons of time constraint I am focusing here on the connection between neoliberalism and neocorporativism, neocorporativism defined in the Mexican case as a move away from state sponsorship of mass civil organizations such as the National Peasantπs Union and the Mexican Workersπ Confederation, to direct state sponsorship of local organizations through a multitude of small grants projects through the aptly named Solidarity program.

Material practices associated with most neoliberal that packages reduce, reshape, and åright-size,π or in the words of Mexicoπs president Zedillo, åredimension,π (Aguilar Villanueva 1992) state-directed economic restructuring also construct the conditions of neocorporativism by

i) reducing economic alternatives for poor and undercutting economic bases of collective action. Mexico not only experiences a relative and absolute decline in the income of the poorest quintile, but has the distinction in Latin America of seeing a decrease in the relative position of poorer to wealthier workers (Berry 1997). The impact of wage stagnation on labor-exporting communities like Los Chorros in Chiapas is devastating.

ii) providing incentives for local clientalist rent-seeking through privatization, and

iii) directing state initiation of neocorporativist links that bypass traditional mass corporativist relations. In other words, while state neoliberal policies indirectly create the conditions for popular corporatism, the state itself requires corporativist networks to enforce neoliberalism. Indeed, this forms one of the central contradictions of neoliberal practice, viz., when existing communal groups such as the Zapatistas resist liberalization of property, usufruct rights, and collective institutions, this resistance must be broken. Neoliberalism, or the reduction of state economic influence, often requires an increase in state police power to enforce market liberalization.

Social Discourses of Neoliberalism

This array of neoliberal practices that simultaneously construct neocorporativism and undercut alternative neocommunal initiatives is strikingly silent with regard to these widespread empirical consequences, a condition I refer to as a discursive silence vis-‡-vis civil social institutions.

The social discourses, of which neoliberalism is one, are ideologically inspected, their ideological contours discerned, by framing them against alternative social discourses. They are also inspected by arraying their respective embedded geographical imaginaries against those of alternative social discourses.

This principle may be, has been, put into practice in two ways during the currnet debate over social movements.

i. a comparison of works on social movements demonstrates a parallelism between neoliberal utterances and some postmodernist works that recreates and preserves the discursive silence in neoliberal thought vis-‡-vis the local content of neoliberal civil society

a. discursive silence on the mapping of neoliberal civil institutions: issues of paramilitarism, cronyism, local clientalism empirically connected with neoliberal policy are evaded.

b. construction of binary opposition between the neoliberal global and the postcolonial local: neoliberalism works at a global level, local knowledge is postcolonial and oppositional to neoliberalism.

ii. geographical imaginaries embedded in neoliberal discourses may be compared with existing geographies.

a. labor market theory

While some neoliberal economic theorists predict that income distribution improves under trade liberalization since incoming capital focusing on labor-intensive industries would increase the bargaining position of unskilled labor, this has not, in fact, occurred, and the position of unskilled labor has worsened. Economic explanations for this empirical trend indicate that when a broader net is cast, other aspects of neoliberal restructuring undercuts this rosy income scenario. Economies of scale and capital intensity in export sectors aid relatively skilled workers while weakened minimum wage protection reduces the bargaining power of low income workers. In addition, the labor market expands through processes including a bumping-down of higher-skilled workers expelled from shuttered state-owned and desubsidized import-substituting industries, and rural-to-urban immigration triggered by a squeezing of middle peasants through reduced real producer subsidies (Gledhill 1995), and sharply lowered real incomes of rural wage-earners due to currency devaluation and reduced rural services (Gates 1996). Labor migrants are joined by families seeking medical and educational services. Add to this the possible adverse effects of financial reform that undercuts government aid to microenterprises, and a demographic factor that introduces new workers each year, and the neoliberal image of incoming capital soaking up a geographically constrained pool of unskilled wage labor appears overly shallow.

b. flowers versus paramilitaries

åThe bastions are crumbling, a thousand flowers are blooming, ferment and reform are in the air.... Things are really beginning to come alive, at long last.π

Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, 1985

The flowering of paramilitary organizations may not be what Secretary of the Interior Babbitt had in mind when, then governor of Arizona, he made this comment at a conference on neoliberal educational reform (1985, 21). Yet

Comparative Political Economy: Oaxaca and Chiapas

The present debate amongst Mexican Indians must be situated vis-‡-vis the changing geography and political economy of Mexican development. The social contract that has underpinned the state-Indian relationship since the 60πs is being radically redrawn through a simultaneous reallocation of government transfers from social services to infrastructure, and an unleashing of private capital through economic neoliberalism (Hern·ndez 1992). Since neoliberalism is itself highly varied and contradictory, neocommunal responses that are in opposition to specific local neoliberal practice often end up at odds with other neocommunal initiatives. Just as the support for paramilitary activity undercuts possibilities of, say, growth in tourism and local foreign investment, the corresponding need for secrecy and security inherent in Zapatista-style armed struggle clearly conflicts with initiatives to organize complex economic activities. In the coffee sector, the decision of the Mexican state to abandon institutional support for coffee production in favor of direct-to-peasant neocorporativist payments has forced peasants to organize rapidly in order to gain control of production networks. Where peasants once protested en masse for higher support payments, now they must organize the complex transport, milling and marketing of coffee as a peasant union while confronting state-party organized alternative networks that continue to draw on state funds and political connections to gain institutional rents.

The Zapatista (EZLN) military organization is the most visible and expression of neocommunalism, yet throughout Southern Mexico, peasants, indigenous persons, and urban dwellers have organized in producer unions, e.g., CEPCO Oaxacan coffee producers union (ParÈ 1991), a new peasantπs union (Hern·ndez 1992) and in organizations designed to challenge neoliberal initiatives in asset privatization and clientalism (Toledo 1992). Although highly eclectic, neocommunal initiatives typically assert a superordinance of collective asset ownership and communal control against a subordinate status for private right and usufruct, and the importance of a economic cooperation, all within the context of networked civil social organizations independent of state authority. Despite the breadth of neocommunalist responses, a shared (within Mexico) iconography and ideology usually including but certainly not limited to Emiliano Zapata and the Virgin of Guadalupe, and interpenetrating political organizations at the regional and national level, one must not overlook the contradictions that rive neocommunalism. First, organizations are composed of groups with radically different local histories, access to resources, and economic articulations. Second, neocommunal organizations seeking to coordinate regional economic cooperation, e.g., coffee producer unions, engender and inherit conflicts involving product quality and relative compensation. The internal dimension of these conflicts include intra-union disputes between regions, between villages, and within village associations over product quality, intrahousehold gender conflicts over womenπs and menπs relative compensation (Mutersbaugh 1998), and, intra-village conflicts pitting communalist versus corporativist organizations over production and marketing (Mutersbaugh 1997).

This comparative geography of neocorporativism and neocommunalism rests upon a comparison of two principal cases, the paramilitarization of the Chiapas highlands in response to Zapatismo, and the struggle over the merchandising of coffee in Oaxaca. The source material on Chiapas is secondary, taken from newspaper accounts of the tragedy in Acteal, from Zapatista web pages, and from scholarly publications. The analysis of the Oaxacan coffee sector, by contrast, represents ongoing field work in a Oaxacan community from 1987 to the present. During this period I lived for over a year in the community of Santa Cruz, and participated in a range of coffee production work from picking to tumpline transport, from local discussions of coffee quality to attendance at regional CEPCO (Coordinadora Estatal de Productores de CafÈ OaxaqueÒos) peasant coffee producer meetings. Most of the field research was undertaken via the ethnographic technique of participant observation combined with gathering of data on production inputs per unit of coffee produced. In addition, formal and informal surveys were conducted. My wife, Elizabeth Carmona Jaramillo, participated in womenπs co‑op project activities and womenπs productive and everyday reproductive labor. Her notes and insights are critical in piecing together the story of a gender-segregated production system in which women provide approximately 80 percent of coffee production labor, but receive far lower returns to labor than do men.

The Chinantec indigenous community of Santa Cruz could not be more different that Los Chorros of Chiapas, yet in both cases the combination of neoliberal restructuring and neocorporativist politics has had a significant impact. While Santa Cruz is a communal indigenous property stretching seven kilometers east-west and fifteen kilometers north-south where no land is privately owned, is possessed of land sufficient to meet the subsistence and coffee production needs of the 800 inhabitants, and is communally managed by majority vote of comuneros (men aged 18 and over), Los Chorros in Chiapas is privately held, has a land base insufficient to meet the needs of its inhabitants, and has no tradition of communal management. In the case of Santa Cruz, pressures have arisen internally for the approval of forms of semi-private property, and two opposing groups have formed to dispute the marketing of coffee. Despite these frictions, the structure of collective management itself is not under pressure. Los Chorros, on the other hand, has become a key provider of paramilitary assistance to the Mexican Army, and has developed an economy built on the extraction of åwar taxesπ from neighboring communities and travelers forced to stop at highway checkpoints.

Economic Neoliberalism and Local Corporativism

In a thoroughgoing study of Latin American countries, Albert Berry (1997) has concluded that the package of liberalizing policies has meant, in every case with the possible exception of Costa Rica, a significant increase in inequality, and an absolute worsening of real income for the bottom quintile which will not be remedied in many cases even by a prolonged period of growth.

Santa Cruz & the Oaxacan Coffee Sector

In the coffee sector, privatization of state-held coffee infrastructure has provoked a paroxysm of rent-seeking behavior as former beneficiaries struggle to control the installed plant and gain control of producersπ networks to ensure economically profitable and secure streams of coffee. Indeed, a massive wave of privatization of state enterprises has become a major point of contention within Mexico (Aguilar Villanueva 1992). The strong state-party fusion that characterizes Mexico has facilitated a rapidly shift from an import-substituting to an export-oriented production model: state officials become the owners of the newly privatized enterprises and personal earnings are derived from corporate rather than public rents (Otero 1996).

Land and usufruct privatization is a much more complicated issue. Several key differences mediate the impact of the reform of Mexicoπs Article 27 revolutionary agrarian reform act, including the type of land tenure, i.e., ejido land versus indigenous communal property, local pressures for land commodification tied to economic activity, e.g., location of land vis-·-vis urban or tourist zones, and local political histories (Gledhill 1995). Lynn Stephenπs (1997) work in central Oaxacan ejidos points out the centrality of land privatization to the Mexican neoliberal agenda. The reforms to Article 27 under former Mexican President Salinas de Gortari make possible the alienation of land from peasants, yet perhaps more important are efforts by the government to market the idea of land privatization to peasants, especially in economically valuable areas such as Stephenπs El Tule research site, a Oaxacan tourist destination. The new ProcuradurÌa Agraria formed in 1992 has promoted a steady stream of initiatives to push the issuing of individual land parcel titles to ejidos, sponsoring visits by agronomists and officials to communities, and publications including a history of Yecapixtla, Morelos, home base of Emiliano Zapataπs victorious revolutionary army, clearly indicating a link to the ProcuradurÌa although in fact it is a testimonial of the revolutionary period.

As an Indigenous community with distinct forms of tenure rights, Santa Cruz is not affected by de jure land privatization under the Article 27 reforms. Also, since remittances and off-farm wage income are less important than subsistence production, cash cropping, and government economic transfers in the form of subsidized foods and health and educational services, the increased inequality associated with neoliberalism is not as sharply felt. Nevertheless, Santa Cruz is clearly affected by a potent combination of commoditization linked to new road-building initiatives, cutbacks in government transfers, and coffee sector privatization. First the nurse was withdrawn from the village medical center, then a radical reduction in real teacherπs salaries and the ensuing teacherπs strike and poor attendance by teachers resulted in a sharp decrease in the quality of education (c.f. Gledhill 1995, 4), finally, as Luis Hern·ndez (1991) writes:

"Soon the winds of neo-liberalism beat down INMECAFE [the Mexican National Coffee Parastatal]. Financial crisis, bureaucratic failures and the fall in the price of coffee provoked the new sexenio (administration) to condemn it to a more or less rapid diminution of its traditional functions. The organization that during the 1982-83 coffee cycle had processed 44% of Mexican coffee was reduced, by the 1987-88 cycle, to processing only 9.6%."

INMECAFEπs dismantling stimulated a rash of rent-seeking behavior. Before pursuing the specifics of the unfolding neocorporate versus neocommunal clash over coffee marketing, it is useful to refer back to the discourse of neoliberalism. Taking up Babbitπs statement, it is interesting to note the image of the state as a åcrumbling bastionπ and the insinuation that any real flowering of civil society can only take place once the state has been shattered. Neoliberals are typically hostile towards any sort of state intervention in the economy: Vargas Llosa, for example, in his essay åAmerica Latina y la opciÛn liberalπ describes the state as Kafkaesque. (Perhaps Vargas Llosa would have done well to read The Trial as well as The Castle, since he calls for rule of law to replace state regulation). While Vargas Llosa recognizes the tremendous problem of inequality in Latin America, he opposes any redistribution of existing property: åprivate property is the incarnation of the notion of liberty, of individual sovernty, of individual independence in front of power. ...[It is] a neurological center of democracyπ (Vargas Llosa 1992, 31). This is really the fundamental contradiction of neoliberalism, and its difference from liberalism: neoliberalism wishes to do away with the state, to return to capitalismo a secas (simple capitalism, lit. ådryπ capitalism), yet there is an absolute refusal to consider fundamental asset redistribution.

The breakdown of INMECAFE has unleashed a political struggle to wrest control of the government-owned coffee processing facilities ãsome 12% of the total national capacityã that INMECAFE must dispose including 36 coffee mills, 3 drying centers, one sun-drying patio, three depulping centers, 12 dry Beneficios, 31 warehouses and 11 milling plants among the infrastructure wants to get rid of Hern·ndez (1991). Control of mills is important due to the volatility of the coffee market in which coffee must be milled quickly to take advantage of high prices. Most important are the crucial export permits that allow the organization that controls these permits to export a set number of quintales of coffee. This is an unequal battle because the largest Mexican growers have access to direct national and international contacts and lines of credit in dollars, both of which reduce costs (Hern·ndez 1991).

Three opposing groups initially vied for control of Oaxacan coffee. Besides the coyote merchant capitalist who travel with mule trains from community to community, two peasant associations competed for coffee. One group is associated with the ruling party through the CNC (ComitÈ Nacional de Campesinos/National Peasant Union), the other represents non-government aligned producers through the CNOC (National Coordinator of Coffee Organizations) associated CEPCO organization. This division into competing camps in the coffee trade was repeated in Santa Cruz: the PRI-Union (Union de Comunidades, CNC), so termed because of its explicit connection with the government party such that members voted openly en masse for the ruling Partido Revolutionario Institutional (no secret ballots in Santa Cruz!) represented interests once associated with the ex-cacique, while the Coordinadora (CEPCO) represents the Co‑op. As of 1997, however, the Union disbanded in Santa Cruz. Although local leaders derived benefits such as paid participation in regional conferences, the lack of local organization, unrealistic expectations, and a failure to provide generalized benefits to all members undercut the organization. The organization fell victim to the change in government policy that undercut mass corporativist organizations, and has been replaced by intensified coyote merchant capitalist traffic.

The debate in Santa Cruz, however, goes far beyond the problem of coffee marketing to focus on the future of commualism itself. In principle two diametrically opposed views pit privatization of land holdings on the one hand versus an intensified communalism that locates production away from households and in cooperative organizations on the other. In practice the debate is far more complex, involving not three major factions within the village, but also a gender split within the neocommunalist camp. The three Santa Cruz village groups include; caciquista descendants of ex-cacique families, cooperativista co‑op member families, and independent families aligned with neither group. The caciquista faction has successfully opposed most co‑op economic enterprise by joining with independent villagers to block usufruct, which, in this indigenous commune, must be approved by a majority vote. Although the caciquista group lost political control over communal resources in the 1970s, they still retain significant political assets outside the community, especially an alliance with powerful families in Usila, the municipal seat. If the commune is opened through privatization to outside investment they will be able to marshal institutional rents to profit economically. In some situations, however, cooperativists and caciquistas share similar interests. One such issue is cattle ranching, where both factions wish to open up more land to permanent cattle grazing, the co‑op for milk production and the caciquistas for private cattle ranching. Negotiations, however, are currently stalled around the issue of precisely what constitutes an association for the purposes of pasture exploitation, so the deforestation such an agreement would bring has not, as yet, been unleashed.

Although the specifics of land or usufruct privatization remain in check in Santa Cruz, the power of neoliberal images remains attractive to some while categorically rejected by others, depending on an individualπs status under the cruel caciquismo of Don Osorio and participation in the subsequent bloodless uprising that ended cacique power and reduced Don Osorio to ragged poverty.

Neocorporativism

In neoliberal theory, discursive silences are often as loud as utterances. Many equations such as private property or capitalism equals democracy are bantered about (Vargas Llosa 1992; Levine 1992), yet for Latin America, one might as easily say, following the empirical evidence, that neoliberal restructuring equals corporativism whether traditional or neo-. Much of the debate in contemporary Mexico focuses on the role of the state in constructing a new form of corporativism that bypasses traditional mass corporativist organizations, such as the CNC (Nation Peasant Union), the CTM (National Labor Union), and the FNOC (National Citizenπs Federation) that have formed the bastion of political power since political restructuring in the late 1920s (Otero 1996). This new or neocorporativism organized through PRONASOL (the national Solidarity program) and PROCAMPO (Program of Direct Aid to Farmers) allowed the government to direct funds directly to recipients and marginalize mass organizations (Otero 1996; Semo 1996; Stephen 1997). John Gledhill (1995) questions the importance of top-down analysis in Mexican political commentary. He argues that the ability of neocorporativist tactics are conditioned by lack of supervision at the local level, citing instances in which PRONASOL monies were openly appropriated by wealthy farmers (1995, 51). In fact local politics are of tremendous importance in determining the effect of neocorporativist actions. A good example of this is Jonathan Foxπs (1992) look at Mexican food systems. In the Oaxaca region that includes Santa Cruz, neocorporativism opened political space for alternative peasant organizing by providing money directly to cooperatives and communities.

Santa Cruz cooperativists were able to reap a tremendous advantage from the PRONASOL funds due to an organizational cohesion relatively greater that that of PRI-Union militants. The early distribution of funds clearly benefited the Union over the Co‑op, just prior to the 1991 congressional elections, for instance, a large batch of checks arrived for Union members. The changing politics of neocorporativism, however, ultimately undercut mass corporativist financial support to the PRI-Union, and the co‑op was able to compete effectively for funding, receiving Mexican governmental assistance for a complete furniture-making workshop plus training for furniture makers. PRI-Union members, however, used their village-level political power to effectively stymie co‑op usufruct rights to timber, thereby undercutting these gains. Thus although neocommunalist organizations have been able to use their advantage in organizational integrity to gain certain advantages, it is unclear whether they are sufficient to pose a significant challenge to neocorporativist structures.

The stymieing of neocommunal initiatives was repeated by the experience of CEPCO (Oaxacan Coffee Producersπ Union). Although organizationally successful, the organization must bear a tremendous burden of owning and operating milling plants while competing with private merchants on the one hand, and state policy on the other. In 1991, for instance, PRONASOL wanted to repay each peasant producer his post-harvest check individually, thus circumventing the CEPCO. This was pushed for national political reasons in order to reinforce the association between cash payments to peasants and the PRI party and to undercut the influence of CEPCO. In addition, by limiting CEPCOπs control of this capital fund, this strategy would have removed operating capital from CEPCO and eliminated CEPCO's planned peasant-oriented initiatives such as a life insurance plan, identification card, and a credit union to promote appropriate technical change and non-coffee rural development projects. Ultimately CEPCO won control, but the issue is revisited each year.

Conclusion

Ultimately the sort of stalemate strategy pursued by the Mexican government weakens both state corporativism and neocommunalism, and enhances the competitiveness of regional corporatisms completely beyond the control of either state or social movements. These structures are, in fact, quite strong in many areas of rural Mexico. Cacique political power, for instance, remains strong in Santa Cruzπ neighbor community of Zapotitl·n. Peasants are disposed of their lands and forced to work as wage-laborers on their own property. Under the reform to Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, these instances will no longer be remedied by agrarian reform, no matter how repugnant. The combination of three factors discussed in this paper aids in the construction of local corporativist, or clientalist networks unmediated by allegiance to the Mexican state or neocommunalist social institutions. First, increased income inequality and absolute poverty plus a failure to address extreme instances of asset inequality result in an increased burden of poverty for many, especially rural, Mexicans. Second, the enticement to rent-seeking behavior at the national and local level, whether through privatization of state assets or land and usufruct privatization, increases the political and economic power of political bosses as the expense of neocommunal civil society. Third, the neocorporativist strategy of the PRI does not create new links and allegiances to the government, but rather undercuts left organizations and PRI mass corporativist structures that play an important role in national policy debate.

The situation in Los Chorros is a clear example of where this potent political economy can lead, and given the interspersion of relatively strong indigenous and peasant communities with peoples living in conditions of terrible poverty, it is a situation that might easily be repeated throughout rural and even urban Mexico. While the rise of mass right-wing organizations does not seem likely given the existing strength of neocommunalist institutions, it is not a possibility that academics should be dismissed out of hand if significant strides are not taken to bolster communal civil society.

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