NY Times, September 11, 2005
Where Poverty Drove Zapatistas, the Living Is No Easier
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.
PATIHUITZ, Mexico - The shooting war between the Mexican government and
Zapatista rebels in these fertile hills ended long ago, but the struggle
for the hearts and minds of ordinary people like Rigoberto Álvarez goes on,
with no clear winner in sight.
Mr. Álvarez spent 15 years in the Zapatista rebel army, training in the
mountains of southeastern Mexico, but quit four years ago, at the age of
46. Why? He had eight children he could not afford to educate. The
government was offering cash incentives for each one in school.
"If I don't find a way to put them through school, my children won't learn
to read and write any more than I do," he said as he waited for hours
recently under a broiling sun for the chance to enroll his son in a new
secondary school. "The struggle is too long. I am already old."
In recent years, the government has poured more money into roads, health
clinics, schools and electrification projects in the mountainous
backcountry where the Mayans live. Patihuitz, for instance, has
electricity, running water and the new secondary school (the classes are to
be held in a borrowed house). Officials have handed out cash scholarships
and roofing materials.
The Zapatistas, who long ago ceased to be a military threat, have set up
communities that reject government aid and organize community projects. In
some places, they have also set up farming cooperatives and small factories.
But the grinding poverty that provoked the first rebel uprising in 1994
continues to trap the Indians. Neither the rebels' attempts at
self-government nor the government's antipoverty programs have done much to
change the odds against indigenous children in these rugged, jungle-covered
mountains, according to Mayan farmers inside and outside the Zapatistas.
"It's the same as it ever was," said Manuel Marín, a 46-year-old farmer in
Patihuitz, as he gathered beans from one of his fields. "There is no way to
change this life."
Many adults are barely literate and speak little or no Spanish. Most of the
schools the government has built are too small. Secondary schools are
scarce and charge enrollment fees.
The new clinics are often short of medicine. And while the cash grants for
children in school buy food and clothes, they are not large enough to make
saving possible, many parents say.
"Chiapas continues to be the poorest state in the country, as it was in
1990," said Julio Boltvinik, a professor at the College of Mexico who
studies poverty. "The indigenous people really don't have anything that we
would call a humane, dignified, modern developed life. They are living in
an abysmally precarious state."
Nearly everyone works hard, but there is little profit for most. The 1994
free-trade agreement with the United States has driven prices for corn and
beans brutally low. Government crop subsidies and supports have
disappeared, erasing any gain from new welfare programs.
As a result, farmers here must spend more to grow crops like corn than they
can make selling them. So most now farm only a small section of their land,
growing just enough corn and beans to survive and leaving the rest fallow.
They look for other ways to earn cash, either hiring themselves out as
labor for better-off farmers in the region or migrating to northern Mexico
or the southern United States to pick fruit, several said.
"Things are going down the tubes faster and faster," said Peter Rosset, an
American professor who runs a center for agricultural policy in Oaxaca.
"You can't spend your whole life selling things for below the cost of
production. That leads you to move to L.A."
Complicating matters has been the protracted conflict with the rebels, who,
in January 1994, marched out of the Lacadona jungle and took over seven
towns and dozens of large ranches, dividing the land among poor farmers who
used to work on them for about 70 cents a day. A year later, the army drove
the guerrillas, led by Subcommander Marcos, back into the mountains. Since
then, an uneasy cease-fire has reigned while peace talks have dragged on
without resolution.
The rebels have declared they will not cooperate with the government until
it fulfills promises it made in a 1996 accord to allow Indians to govern
themselves to a large extent in regions where they are the majority. In
2003, frustrated with the inaction of Congress, the Zapatistas pushed ahead
on their own, setting up five governmental centers with clinics and schools
to oversee dozens of what they call "autonomous municipalities."
The region, as a result, is a patchwork of rebel-run villages, military
bases established by the Mexican government and villages where
pro-government Indians are a majority. Army trucks with troops rumble up
and down the roads. Rebel centers are closed to most outsiders and reporters.
Subcommander Marcos, meanwhile, seems more intent on pushing mainstream
politicians to the left than on trying to consolidate rebel territory or
improve the rebels' agricultural output.
In the last month, he has held a series of meetings with unionists,
left-wing politicians and community groups, calling on them to carry out "a
national leftist, anticapitalist program" with the goal of "a new
constitution, which is another way of saying a new agreement for a new
society."
The rebel leader has also attacked the most popular leftist candidate,
Andrés Manuel López Obrador, suggesting that he and his party will sell out
ordinary working people once in power.
Mr. Marcos's anticapitalist talk seems out of touch with the daily life of
many Indians here.
A new constitution is the farthest thing from the mind of Pepe Luna López,
for instance, who lives in San José del Carmen, a Zapatista autonomous
community right next to the government-run village of Nuevo Morelia.
Mr. López, who is 35, has seven children ages 4 to 16. They all sleep in a
leaky one-room shack with dirt floors and walls of slender poles. None of
the children are in school; he refuses to send them to the government
school a quarter-mile away and the Zapatista government has sent no teacher.
He farms only two acres of his five, and has no source of cash. His clothes
are rags. He does not go to the health clinic down the road in Nuevo Morelia.
"We are resisting," he said. "We cannot accept anything from the government
because they have not kept their word."
Another Zapatista farmer, Silvio López González, lives across the street
from Nuevo Morelia's government school and health clinic. He, too, will not
send his two children to either. But he acknowledges he is not much better
off than he was before the 1994 uprising.
"We have 20 years in the struggle, and we are not even halfway there," he said.
For 30 years, Mr. Álvarez has lived in a small village called Tierra
Blanca, once solidly in the rebel camp, above the main road about three
miles away from the Zapatista center known as La Garrucha. He has 10 acres
and a wood shack with a thatched roof. His eight children and his wife
sleep on boards above the dirt floor.
Two years ago, however, the government took electricity to Tierra Blanca.
And when it started offering scholarships for children in school, Mr.
Álvarez gave up the rebel cause and accepted the cash - about $30 a month.
His only other source of hard currency was a few coffee trees on his land,
which he said brought in about $400 in a good year, $200 in a bad one.
He has also accepted the government's roofing and is building a new house
next to the old one.
His eldest son, Rigoberto, completed the sixth grade, then migrated to Baja
California to pick tomatoes for $800 a month. He turned 15 in May, far away
from home.
Mr. Álvarez's eyes filled with tears when he explained that he could not
afford to send Rigoberto to a secondary school; the nearest one then was
two hours away. It is his second son, Alfonse, 12, who will go to the
school in Patihuitz, a 45-minute walk away.
Education, he says, is the only way to break the chain that binds his
children to his mountainous plot of earth.
"Otherwise we die, and the children stay here suffering," he said. "That's
the end of it. There is no other step."
