All is not politically harmonious among the various Tzotzil communities in the mountains around Zinacantán, Chiapas. A recent conflict is reported by Alex Contreras Baspineiro
at
http://narconews.com/Issue33/article961.html, the first of a series of four good articles. Here's a perspective the articles leave mostly unexplored.
Water is the flashpoint. A minority of the communities around Zinacantán identify with the Zapatistas.
These, or some of them, have been barred from the wells they shared with neighboring communities whose allegiance is to traditional political parties, mostly Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). People from places other than Chiapas are helping the Zapatista communities by having tank trucks of water delivered to their makeshift, usually hidden, cisterns.
As a result, some of these benefactors and some of the truckers had, in a series of incidents before the violent incident Alex Contreras reported, been attacked, detained, and threatened by residents. During at least one of these tense confrontations, not a single recipient of the water made any move to rescue or in any way help the endangered benefactors and truck crew; they were nearby.
I've seen no evidence that this is anything but a controversy among indigenous neighbors. Alex Contreras' report, for example, pictures it as purely a local controversy. The Zapatista communities' exclusion from the wells is said to be related to the refusal to contribute their fair share to upkeep of the facilities such as wells, roads, clinics (in some places Zapatistas have their own, better than the government's), and electricity. As Contreras reports, "The people of the Zapatista communities now reject all government programs." Some contend this refusal to participate and pay is unreasonable, some contend barring them from the water is unreasonable. But it seems reasonably clear that the only actors from outside the local communities are those who are sending in the replacement water.
Should people from elsewhere get involved? I don't intend to invoke "outside agitator" canards; outside agitators are mostly the best people I know and they mostly have done laudable and heroic things. But have things around Zinacantán reached the point where their services are appropriate? Who is to decide? Who has enough information to decide intelligently, whether barring some from the wells is merely a local enforcement technique to get them to pay their fair share or a violation of rights worth disruptive help (or meddling)? What other factors are at work? It's certainly important that these problems seem to arise where a minority of the communities are Zapatista.
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The Highlands, History, and Harvard
Submitted May 3, 2004 - 11:00 pm by Al GiordanoAl comments:
I'll preface my remarks, as someone who first entered Zinacantán 17 years ago, that I try very hard to stay away from generalizations when speaking of this very layered, complex, diverse, group of small communities that exist within the municipal borders of Zinacantán.
Forty-six years ago, when the the Harvard Chiapas Project descended on Zinacantán - its town center just ten kilometers from the former state capital of San Cristóbal de Las Casas - it was an anthropologists wet dream: a Tzotzil-speaking town of about 2,400 residents, so close to an urban center that the Ivy Leaguers didn't have to actually live in the community, with the people, sharing the same impoverished conditions under which they lived, as they purported to "study" it.
Since then the population of Zinacantán has more than quadrupled (that's what the Mexican State says: it's really hard to tell, because it's difficult to get an accurate census: indeed, this current "water war" was partly provoked by the State using university students to do a new "census" that asked very inappropriate questions about political leanings of the residents.... it was after that "census" that those who declared sympathy with the Zapatistas, or aversion to the current town political bosses, began getting screwed by the town officials on the question of access to water.)
I think it is also very difficult to make generalizations like "A minority of the communities around Zinacantán identify with the Zapatistas." When reprisals come for expressing certain political sympathies, those views tend to remain underground and more difficult to measure. The statement could be true, but it very well could be false. It would be equally wrong, but no less equally wrong, to say "a majority identify with the Zapatistas." The fact is that nobody knows.
What we do know are the things backed up by common sense:
- Water is life.
- Without water, there is no life.
- You take away my water, you kill me.
- Human beings have a survival instinct.
- Before most human beings let others kill us, we prefer to kill them first.
You take away my water? I kill you. I suspect that most people on earth are like me.I don't know but I would suspect that the residents of most hamlets of Zinacantán do not pay water, service, electric, whatever, bills promptly if at all. The two most important words in the Tzotzil language, as I've listened, are Chabal Tak'in: "There is no money."
To accept the official spin that the Zapatista sympathizers are the only ones not paying bills I think is a fairly long reach. What we do know, though, is that the ones who are openly simpático are the ones who got their water cut off.
Again: to cut off somebody's water is an act of terrorism equal to pulling the trigger on a pistol at close range to someone's cranium.
More interesting is the history if we follow it some steps back, to before this water problem, to before the need for delivery by water trucks, to when the land of Zinacantán could, by itself, provide all the water needed for just 2,400 residents.
How did the town grow so fast? For that is what caused the water shortage.
Which brings me back to Harvard...
...and to the outside agitators known as "anthropologists."
Who is to blame for the current "local" conflict in Zinacantán? I blame Harvard... and the anthropologists.
As John Gledhill of the University of Manchester writes in this very interesting (even if it is academic) report, the anthropologists (like too many journalists) have motives of fame and fortune that are extrinsic to good anthropological practice. And this dynamic has fallen very heavily upon Zinacantán:
Again, why did the Harvard anthropologists choose these two communities to invest their time (and considerable money) in?
Because Zinacantán and Chamula are close enough to a city that they didn't have to live there to do their studies!
So Harvard, over decades, threw a lot of money around Zinacantán (indeed, neighboring communities consider Zinacantán and Chamula to be "ricos" or rich, even though by gringo standards they are still quite poor). Harvard dumped a ton of tak'in (the Tzotzil word for money literally means "shit of the sun," which was how the shiny gold coins of the Spaniards were monikered) in Zinacantán... mainly to get "informants" (the anthropologists really do use that word for their "sources"), translators, and to set up their projects of data collection, to bribe the local caciques (political bosses) to allow their presence, sometimes even to compell "cooperation" by the locals... and the result was that Zinacantán grew economically wealthier than other peasant farmer communities...
This economic "noveau riche" dynamic - all from Harvard anthropology money - also led to a faster population growth in Zinacantán... thus leading to the point where there were more thirsty people than water to quench their thirst, that of their farms, etcetera.
Resentments were created as some communities got this money while others did not.
Finally, let's fast forward to the past three or four years, when Governor Pablo Salazar (very strongly supported by evangelical - read, "born again" - sects in the United States because he is not a Catholic but, rather, one of them) supposedly "broke" the ruling PRI party's hold on Chiapas in a coalition campaign that included backing by the PRD and PAN.
Pablo, as a Senator, was a PRI member. He was better than most PRIistas. But he was one of them, too. He made a very opportunistic move, timed his "break" very well, and ended up with the Governorship (and after three-plus years, he has lasted longer than most Chiapas governors). A lot of the other PRIistas in Chiapas followed the same model. And in some towns, including Zinacantán, they adopted the yellow-and-black Aztec Sun logo of the (supposedly) "center-left" PRD.
But they are not PRD militants in the way that, say, Mexico City governor Andres Manuel López Obrador (with the credo of "never betray the indigenous") are PRD militants. The PRD already has all kinds under its sol azteca. (In fact, the pro-PRD daily La Jornada has noted that many PRD factions around the country have repudiated the actions of the Zinacantecos who act under that party's banner to put a gun to the heads, er, I mean, to shut of the water of their openly pro-Zapatista rivals.
Is it a local conflict? Yes. Is it only a local conflict, indigenous on indigenous? NO!
The roots of the conflict - too many people on not enough water - were planted when Harvard and its anthropologists arrived in 1957. This conflict is not the result of ancient indigenous rivalries. In the long term of history, it is very new. It is simply the consequence of how U.S. academia has behaved in indigenous América... and most demonstrably in Zinacantán.