The Los Angeles Times recently featured an article on problems in agriculture throughout the world. The article made the point that more than enough food is grown each year to feed the entire population of the world. Still, more than 700 million people throughout the world face starvation each year and most of these people are poor peasant farmers. According to the Times, the explanation of this situation is difficult to understand and has something to do with a bias that most governments in the so-called "underdeveloped world" have against small farming.
I put the Times down in disgust, and my thoughts turned to what I had seen and learned in Chiapas. I thought of all the campesinos I had spoken with and how difficult and painful their lives were. And more, how clear it was that their lives and their situation were not the result of some mysterious bias against them, but the product of a whole system of imperialist domination. It is this system and its relentless drive to meet and intensify its needs and profits that distorts and deforms everything in an oppressed nation--including especially the small-scale peasant economy. Peasants are not able to grow even enough food to feed their families. Instead all resources--including the land, supplies, money and other forms of support--are focused on the production of "cash crops" for export and profit. As one campesino in a small mountaintop village bitterly put it, "We who grow everything are unable to eat. That's the way it is."
The dry and dusty town of Las Margaritas is a vivid illustration of how this system distorts and ravages the peasant economy. 38.5 percent of the people live in houses without plumbing or indoor latrines; and 72.7 percent of the houses have no drinkable water. 77.9 percent of the houses in this town have dirt floors and at least 83 percent of them are considered overcrowded. 55 percent of the hydroelectric energy and 20 percent of Mexico's total electrical energy comes from the state of Chiapas and yet 66.4 percent of the people in Las Margaritas have no access to electricity.
A paved two-lane highway runs from the commercial center of Comitán out to the town of Las Margaritas. Military vehicles, supply trucks and colectivo taxis shoot like bullets down this road to end up in the Margaritas zócalo. A few blocks past the zócalo the paved road ends and rutted dirt roads stretch out into the jungle. Large cargo trucks, carrying indigenous peasants on long trips back to tiny jungle settlements, leave the zócalo area on a regular schedule.
A young intellectual we met in the zócalo explained that the entire area was ruled by the municipal president--a textbook example of the caciques, the brutal political bosses in the Mexican countryside. She told us how he had called in the army during the Zapatista uprising and instructed them to go out and kill the campesinos. She also told us how this cacique had become fabulously wealthy in the first few weeks of the year by stealing aid money for refugees from the war--including the aid money designated for people who were allied with the municipal president himself.
Las Margaritas is also in the area where General Absalón Castellanos and his family are based--Castellanos is the murderous ex-governor who was held prisoner by the Zapatistas after the uprising. As you travel through the city and on out towards the jungle, graffiti denouncing Castellanos and other government officials is slashed across cinderblock walls.
Las Margaritas is one of the towns the EZLN took over on January 1. The town was still extremely tense. Army patrols--with tripod machine guns, M16s and AK47s--patrolled the streets. A couple of kilometers beyond the town limits the Mexican army set up a roadblock and an encampment, manned by a couple hundred soldiers. Tanks, other military vehicles and artillery sat back off the road with their guns aimed both at the road and out across the fields and towards the distant jungle.
We had hiked a few kilometers past the army roadblock by late morning. The sun was climbing high and the heat was beginning to bear down on us. A cart loaded down with a mountain of palm fronds and pulled by two huge oxen rolled slowly down the highway on two gigantic iron wheels. Another oxcart with two huge barrels of water on the back stood parked next to a newly planted milpa or corn field. A couple of campesinos kept travelling from the barrels out to the field and back with little cans of water. This was irrigation for the vast majority of peasant farmers in Las Margaritas.
A little beyond the irrigation wagon some dense bushes formed a natural wall around a milpa. A gravelly voice cursing out some oxen and trying to coax them into pulling a plow boomed out from behind the bushes. When we found an opening in the bush wall we spotted an old man whose gnarled hands were wrapped around one end of a plow that could have been a thousand years old. The man's arms strained almost to the point of breaking as he pushed and the oxen pulled--trying to plow up the hard dry soil. When he spotted us he seized the opportunity for a break and came over to talk.
"We're renting the land here, and they gave me this plot. When they want to take it back, they'll take it back. I have a cornfield. It's divided half and half--half for me and half for the owner. That's the way it goes. Because I worked for him before, he lent me this land.
"I have seven children. It's not really enough to feed them. If we can't find fertilizer and don't put down fertilizer then we don't eat, because the land doesn't yield much. So we have to pay for the fertilizer and there's really not enough money for fertilizer.
"I work in the milpa--cultivating it, fertilizing it, cleaning it out, picking the corn. I did beans before. There was a creek that went through here, but it's not here anymore so you can't really grow beans anymore. I don't know what happened to it, it just doesn't run through here anymore.
"It's very dry land here, just dust. When it rains, then you get water. You don't have to bring in irrigation. But when there's no rain, you don't eat.
"I've worked on the land all my life. There's no other way. I don't have my own land, not even a little piece. Just a house, ten meters. Maybe before my family had land, when they divided up the land for the `colonia.'
"It's a very bad life. You don't have anything like shoes, you don't know anything about good clothes. We grew up with rich people. It was almost like slavery. I'm 62 years old, and I've seen the way the bosses are when we work. Before, there was nothing you could do. We made like 50 cents a day. We would have liked to go to school, but they didn't let us go to school. So we never learned how to read. Maybe we learned a little how to read, but not how to write. I didn't have enough to eat. My father died--how was my mother going to feed me? My mother couldn't take a plow and grow food. She had to buy corn. She had to struggle to live. Where we used to live my mother and I worked together. But my mother's dead now, so I'm alone.
"I'm going to tell you the truth. I'm old. I'm not going to lie to you. The peasants are fighting. Because you can't go buy stuff in town, it's expensive. A day's work doesn't give you enough food. When meat costs 12 pesos, not even a full day's work will pay for that. You have to work two days for a kilo of meat! The life that we peasants are suffering under the patrón is that the `encargado' (overlord) is watching you. You're under them and you're under the boss. You wait for them to pay you, and you're starving. That's what peasants are suffering. When there's a fiesta or something, you can't go into town, it's like you're tied up. That's why people are fighting. Because we're the most fucked-over people around.
"It makes me mad that all the rich people have more land. That's why people are fighting."
The old man was deeply affected by the January 1 uprising. He had some hesitations and talked about being a little scared of war. Still, he was convinced that the uprising and the peasant rebels were deserving of active support. "The poor people, yeah, they're happy to see the struggle of the Zapatistas and sad at the same time, because people are struggling for their lives, trying to figure out how to eat. So it makes me sad and it makes me happy at the same time.
"They came here on January 1 and made a fiesta here. We didn't know what it would be. We were scared. We'd never been through a war.
"The Zapatistas came by and were resting in a large hall nearby, and then the Zapatista soldiers came to ask us for water and for something to eat. And we gave it to them because of the suffering that they have been put through.
"And then they told me why they had taken up these arms, why they are shedding blood. It's because of us, because we're poor. We're looking around, and the rich have nice cars and we walk around in leather sandals, with dust in our face, and we'll never have enough in our house. We know how to work. If there's land then we can eat, but there's no land so there's nothing. And we're just putting up with it.
"How else are you going to do it? It's just peasants that are fighting, no one else. If they come to make war, then we'll go. What else are we going to do? Life has to change."
The youth was from a village way out in the Lacandón forest. He found himself temporarily stranded in the city. His first language was Tojolabal, and he was a little nervous talking about his situation. While military and police vehicles rumbled through the streets on their nightly patrols, the youth quietly told his story.
"There are a lot of people in my town. Some houses were made out of corrugated aluminum, some were made of `azacate' [a kind of tall grass, like for thatched huts]. The biggest houses were about 8 by 10 meters. People didn't have money for bigger houses. The whole family lived in one house; one side is the kitchen, the other side is the bed, and it's really ugly inside. The rich people call these houses a `chiquero' [literally, a "cattle barn" or "pigsty"--RW]. People live in extreme poverty. Families have six or seven kids and everybody lives there, all jumbled up together. There were ten people in my family, in one house with two rooms. My mother, my father and eight children.
"In the jungle we grow corn, beans, squash, chile and coffee. Every family had their own land. We are abandoned. The peasants felt we were abandoned in the jungle. We don't have highways, we don't have electricity, we don't have anything. That's the aspect of the poverty of the peasants. There are people that grow oranges and lemons, they grow a lot of corn, but the problem is that they can't take it out to sell anywhere because there's no roads. There's nothing. So even though they produce, they can't have money because there's no way to sell their crops.
"There's a lot of coffee that goes to waste out there, because there's no transportation for it. Most of the coffee sits on the tree and rots."
Since the 1950s the Mexican government saw the colonization of the Lacandón forest as a kind of safety valve to pacify and divert peasant struggles for land--by relocating rebellious peasants to the forest and protecting the interests of the powerful landlords of the central highlands of Chiapas. But in the 1970s and '80s, new conflicts arose as peasant farmers clashed with cattle ranchers--who used their political influence to take over land that the peasants had cleared for growing corn. Now most of the beef grown in Chiapas goes to Mexico City. The peasants of Chiapas can't afford to buy it.
The campesino continued, "People need more land. There's some people who don't even have one piece of land. They can only lend themselves out as labor to other peasants. Others have land--maybe 1 hectare, maybe 1/2 hectare--it's just a place to live on.
"Those that have land are the fathers of the families; and the children that don't have land have to work on the land that belongs to their father. So the children want land of their own, for them to work and cultivate."
The young campesino explained how people in his village viewed the uprising. "Most of the people in my area joined the movement. The people in the town organized themselves--because of their poverty, which was very great. Some of them remembered Emiliano Zapata, that he freed the peasants and gave out land. They remembered that government had been one that had been in support of the peasants, and that's why they called themselves Zapatistas. Everything he did, he gave the peasants. And these same peasants, now they are needy once again.
"There were a lot of organizations among the peasants themselves. So everybody agreed then to be part of the Zapatistas. People in existing organizations decided to join the Zapatistas. This was before January 1994.
"There have always been organizations, many peasant organizations. People have always lived in poverty. So when they rose up on January 1, the organizations came out as well. When the conflict arose, they got involved too."
Complicated and delicate looking paper cutouts were strung across the roadways in preparation for the fiesta of the village's namesake saint. A posse of youth had come around us when word got out that we wanted to find out what people thought about the January 1 uprising. The people in this village had started to grow coffee when the government encouraged the cultivation of cash crops for export. When the bottom dropped out of the coffee market internationally, this tiny little village on a mountaintop in Chiapas was even poorer than it was before they grew coffee.
One of the youths was especially angry as he talked about how the land in Chiapas is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy. He spoke of how just a little more than a hundred people officially controlled 12 percent of all coffee lands in Chiapas and how that percentage was really very low since it didn't take into account all of the tricks--like registering relatives and employees as owners of land to get around the legal limits on sizes of farms--that the rich use to build their empires. He also pointed out that a few thousand cattle ranchers own more than three million hectares of pasture land--nearly half the territory of all landholdings in Chiapas. And most of these ranches were built through terror against the peasants and "illegal" land seizures by the rich.
When we reached the far end of the village, the crew stopped at a local general store to buy some sodas. One of the youths, Jorge, began to speak. "Here people sell coffee. In other countries, how much do they give for coffee? Because here it only goes for 2 1/2 or 3 pesos per kilo, when it's really expensive. And corn is 50 cents a kilo. Even though we work really hard. We can't make money that way. We suffer.
"What the government asks from us is a very low price, for coffee, corn, beans. We practically sell for nothing. On the other hand, the things we buy from the government--clothing, sugar, oil, even cookies--all that is expensive. To buy a change of clothes costs a lot of money, and it takes several days of work to make it up.
"We work around here. Some people pay a little money to work on the cornfields. But what you have around here are mainly coffee orchards. Some people have up to 2 hectares of coffee, and we go work there. You get paid maybe 5 or 6 pesos a day there. It's not dangerous, but it's difficult; work in the fields is always difficult.
"When it rains, it's cold and there's really no place to keep warm. You come back about 5 or 6 p.m., and it's far away. You might have to walk five or six kilometers. You get home maybe by 7 p.m., in order to make six or seven pesos. That's always the way it is for indigenous peasants."
The youths liked the New Year's rebellion for different reasons. Some of them thought that the uprising was good because it seemed to spark a flood of government aid to the village in recent months. Others were a lot more into fighting against the rich and their government. But the one thing that stood out in the whole crowd was the enormous potential that existed for the New Year's uprising to have taken deep root all over Chiapas.
The main problem these youth had with the rebellion was that they didn't know about it soon enough to join it. "I think it was a good thing. There are seizures in San Cristóbal and other municipios. They're always doing land invasions. But that happens always and people die. The government sends out Public Security, the police, the `judiciales.' They always harass the peasants. It's like they have us in their hands. If we go to the Office of Government to ask for land, they throw us in jail.
"The judiciales are only brave because they have their weapons. And also, the soldiers are in it only to make money. They're only brave because of their weapons. They can overcome the peasants because they know that we don't have weapons. If we had weapons like they do, then we could really confront them. They've inflicted casualties on us here, because they had weapons. They have airplanes, they do bombing, that's the advantage that the government has.
"Some people were happy. Others got mad. There was no communication--so we didn't know what this movement was about. We didn't know anything about the organization. When we went to see, the Zapatistas were already there and we didn't know anything. So some people got mad. And others thought it was good. Some people got scared, and others didn't."
The dirt road leading up to the ejido broke off from the main highway in the area. To get there we had to pass through two army roadblocks. Then our microbus also had to barrel through walls of flame that lined the road. Desperate peasants were burning off sections of the steep, rocky land along the roadside, trying to clear it in time for spring planting.
We were headed towards an ejido up where the dirt ended at the top of the mountain on the edge of a dense pine forest. A clear, deep creek tumbled over a rocky bed. Two dead snakes lay stretched out in the road. By the time we finally got to the ejido we were exhausted and thirsty.
The ejido was almost invisible until we came right up on it. It was a dense collection of dirt lanes lined with low, gray cinderblock houses. Women standing on the corrugated rooftops of the buildings raked out recently harvested coffee beans to dry in the sun.
We followed a youth down a zigzag jumble of a pathway to a meeting with a local activist. Fifteen minutes after we arrived at a little house the activist appeared at the doorway with a whole crew of young campesinos. As the youth stood guard, the activist spoke with us.
"Over 500 years, since the time of the Conquest, the indigenous people have always been marginalized. We've never had the opportunity to have justice, liberty, democracy so that the people can have their autonomy. There have been great histories of Mexico, there's been the struggle for independence, against colonialism, there's been the Revolution, and then again this year it came up again. We don't really understand it that well ourselves.
"We've never been given the possibility of governing in this country, our country. For 500 years, since our land was stolen from us and poor people were left without land. So people, what they demand now is land, and the land is concentrated in the hands of a few. Yes, that's our main demand. And to ask for justice and democracy. But we want it to be different from the way we have lived. We want our situation to change, from the level of the communities up to the highest level.
"Here we don't have roads, or any kind of services really. We don't have water, we don't have electricity. If we go out to the jungle, there are no roads. There are some openings in the jungles that cars can pass through. But this was done by transnational businessmen who came from the United States and Europe who take out the wood, take out the oil.
"And the communities here don't have schools, don't have medical care, there's no clinic here, there's no good teachers, all these things that the people want. Infant malnutrition is around here and in Los Altos [the highlands around San Cristóbal]. There is trachoma, a disease that comes from the water because there's no hygiene.
"The landlords and cattle ranchers say that we don't want to work. That's not true. People are determined to fight until their demands are met. Until they get the form through which they want to govern. So I don't think things are going to calm down in Chiapas until there's a solution to all of this.
"Although there's been a dialogue between the government and the armed group, we don't accept this `nothing but promises, promises' that the government makes. Since 1917, when our political constitution of Mexico was written, to 1993 there have been 347 amendments to the Constitution. There have been so many modifications, but nothing has benefitted the people. It's the same thing. There's been changes, but never, not once, have the indigenous communities been consulted about any of this. There have been demands, movements, complaining that we're not in agreement, but the government doesn't pay any attention to it. That's why the people have a justification to fight.
"The President of the Republic has made many worldwide tours and he always says in his reports and his meetings with other countries that in Mexico there is democracy, there's no distinction between peoples in Mexico, that this is the `First World' and there's democracy here. But when the people rose up, I think that people throughout the world understood that what he was saying is just a big lie."
The activist was very careful not to speak directly about the activities of the EZLN in the ejido itself since the Mexican army had a very heavy and threatening presence in the area. Still, he explained that the people on the ejido were all poor and enthusiastically supported--and were inspired by--the uprising.
"Suddenly, all over Chiapas, people are taking the land. There are two or three ranches and fincas around here that people have taken over. They're going to keep on doing that. That's their only hope. Whatever happens, people say, they have to do it. That's the only way. The government doesn't want to give a solution. The government says there's no more land to hand out. We can see that there's land here.
"The cattle ranchers every day are establishing themselves, and they're in favor of the government and the government favors them. They're the people with money. So it's easy for them to do. But we indigenous people are taking care and will see how to deal with it.
"You have to change society, and change the form of government. So that they respect indigenous and give indigenous people the opportunity to govern. That's the solution. We don't have any alternative other than governing. That it be the people who gove<%2>rn. When the governors are elected, it's their cabinet. And when there's an election, everything has been already elected. We never know who our authorities are going to be. For us, that's the only way."
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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