Starting this presentation with the voices of members of the Movement in Defense of Life and Territory (Modevite) in Chicomuselo is not a literary resource, it is a way of moving us in the face of the seriousness of the situation in several regions of Chiapas; it is going against the government’s denialist discourse and failure to fulfill its responsibility as a State:
We share with you part of the reality that we are experiencing in this region. We are currently under a state of siege by two criminal groups that are fighting over the territory in full complicity with the army, the National Guard and the municipal president.
There is the presence of armed people in several points of the municipal capital that control entrances and exits to the town by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) with an exhaustive review and, those who are not part of this group, are physically assaulted and threatened; in the town people live with uncertainty and under pressure, intimidation and threat.
There is strong pressure on the communities, they cannot leave, the [Sinaloa Cartel] CDS is talking to the ejido bodies so that people go out to cover and protect their communities, some communities are also resisting being used by the CDS and are organizing freely to take care of the community, there is insistence from the organization leaders that the ejidos join the CDS to confront the CJNG and the army.
As a people of faith, we condemn all acts of violence. We continue to encourage the life of our communities through our struggles and resistance through peaceful means, through our being as a church that crafts peace and justice for the dignity of our people.[i]
My commitment in this issue of Ichan Tecolotl is in the direction that the Zapatista communiqués have had, which repeatedly take up the Popol Wuj and, at the end of 2023, invite us to “look far away.”[ii] It is in the direction of weaving a very long history, but, above all, it is in the direction of the indigenous peoples who feel-think, live and remember based on the spiral of time-space. From there, I invite you to read this issue that I titled: “Chiapas after more than a thousand, 500, 200, 100, 50, 40, 30 years…”, which is part of a larger reflection on the cycles of creation/destruction, the cycles of life/death that we have experienced as living beings and as humans, as well as the debate on the western and ancestral idea of human nature. To advance a few steps in that direction, in the Meeting Points section, with the help of the texts of my guests, I have sought to give four turns to the thread of time-space, named here as “parts.”
The First Part begins with one of the many poems by the popular educator, writer, anthropologist, translator and Tsotsil Mayan actress Ruperta Bautista Vázquez, who in her book Xojobal Jalob te’ / Telar Luminario tells us how humanity struggles to survive in the midst of violence and hopelessness. The work is inspired by the sacred book of the Popol Wuj, in her own life and that of the peoples to which she belongs. Her work is a tool of life, struggle and work. I weave it with the fragments of the book that the anthropologist and Jesuit Ricardo Falla (2013) works on with young men and women, pastoral agents, teachers, as well as Mayan leaders of Guatemala, in the 21st century, thus nourishing a tradition that Guatemalan Mayan intelligence has cemented by asking: what does the sacred book of the Popol Wuj tell us for our current lives and realities?
Next comes the Zapatista poetry in the voice of Comandanta Ramona, followed by the text of the community writer and Tseltal Mayan epigrapher Melquiades Martínez Nájera (Mech’) who, like Ruperta and Ramona, bridges pre-Columbian times with community and modern times. Martínez does so standing at a sacred site called today Toniná, located in the valley of Ocosingo, Chiapas, part of ancient Mexico, of the great Mesoamerica.
From a visual point of view, the cover also evokes that spiral of time-space. On the one hand, it takes us back to the times of the reign of the ruler of Toniná, Zots Choj Muan, and on the other, it places us in the Caracol “Resistance and Rebellion: a new horizon”, in the town of Dolores Hidalgo, where the participation of young Zapatistas in the celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the “beginning of the war against oblivion”, as the Zapatistas call that January 1, 1994, took place. Both events have occurred in a common territory but separated by approximately more than a thousand years and by very different societies and senses of war.
To evoke Zots Choj Muan is to bring to the table the times when “war becomes a way of life in Toniná”, when the “jaguar of war is completely unleashed” (Yadeun, 1993: 49).
When Toniná became the royal necropolis of the old Mayan Empire, Zots Choj stood in front of the highest temple of the entire sequence of temples of ancient Mexico [wearing] a nocturnal suit that represents him as the owner of all deaths (…) His attire has 40 representations of disembodied beings that include the jaguar of the underworld and the deities of each level, including those of the night sky (…) his scepter has two war shields at the ends, from which emerge two fantastic-type deities, disembodied and with articulated jaws. (Yadeun, 1993: 52)
As archaeologist Juan Yadeun, who has been in charge of the site since 1982, states, “there is no doubt that in Toniná there was an awareness of the historical passage through the alternating domination of four civilizations, of four eras (…) the Olmec, the Teotihuacan, the Mayan and the Toltec” (Yadeun, 1993: 73).
With the Spanish conquest and colonization, capitalism came to us and the patriarchies were established, while other ways of conceiving and practicing war were imported. In elementary school textbooks, it is explained in a very simple way—based on studies by specialists—that while the Spanish conquerors sought to convert, dominate, and even exterminate the enemy, the Mesoamericans—clearly recognizing their internal differences—even fought agreed battles to obtain captives, land, tributes, prestige, power, in order to continue reproducing the divine cycle of life/death within the magical-religious world in which they lived.
The pain and wound of the conquest still bleed today in very diverse ways. To explore it, in Part Two, Pablo Uc addresses the regimes of occupation, dispossession, and imposition that led to indigenous rebellions in the 18th and 19th centuries and, in the 20th, to peasant organization and movements for peace with justice and dignity. For her part, Ana María Parrilla focuses on what this September 14, 2024, turns 200 years old: the federation of Chiapas to Mexico. Parrilla explores the 18th century and highlights three characteristics that defined the future of what we now call Chiapas.[iii] The insurgency of that time allowed, he tells us, that “the Indians (sic)” expressed their dissatisfaction with both the tax burdens and the development of constitutionalism. And Elisa Cruz speaks to us about the latter when she presents the development of a little more than 100 years of struggle for agrarian rights and water in the Tseltal Mayan community of Aguacatenango, whose ancestry predates the conquest. A community that today finds itself between water tension and the siege of organized crime.
The Third Part contains two texts that address seed events that developed simultaneously in the second half of the 20th century. The first had to do with the effects in Chiapas of the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, the Second Vatican Council, which the then bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal, Jtatik Samuel Ruiz, attended. In his text, the Dominican Pablo Iribarren reflects from his experience on what it meant and how they lived what emerged as the incarnation of the libertarian gospel and the preferential option for the poor. Both Iribarren and Gerardo González highlight the founding role of what would later be the germ of the independent peasant organizations of Chiapas: the Indigenous Congress held in 1974, 50 years ago.
The second founding fact is dealt with in his text by González, when reconstructing the genealogy of the National Liberation Forces (FLN) that this 2024 celebrate 55 years of having been founded in the midst of the cold war and the dirty war and as part of the Mexican guerrilla movements. Just as the Mexican Insurgent Army was the genesis of the FLN, they were the genesis of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), founded in 1983. 41 years after that event, Araceli Burguete and Axel Köhler, from different but complementary perspectives, address some legacies of Zapatismo seen from the perspective of its women and its young men and women.
Burguete shows how thanks to the network created by the Zapatista political organization, the local effect of the peace talks, but, above all, thanks to Zapatista women with a degree, today there exists, distinctively, in the municipality of San Andrés Larrainzar, a group of young indigenous women who occupy positions as trustees and councilors. They embody the political rights demanded in the Revolutionary Law of Women issued 31 years ago. For her part, Köhler, taking an angle of Zapatista autonomy —the audiovisual production of the Tercios Compas—, shows us its counter-hegemonic sense in the face of individualism, private property and the commercialization of dominant communication. Specifically, she analyzes the production of short films that the Zapatista women themselves made to spread, internally and externally, their message: “women and men have the same value and rights.”
Part Four is made up of contributions that review the last three decades of Chiapas’ development, focusing on both structural and political violence. Daniel Villafuerte makes an analysis with statistics in hand and breaks down the crude and painful socioeconomic reality of the state, and the variegated time-space in which, he tells us, the effects of neoliberal globalization and poverty, in many cases extreme, coexist. María del Carmen García reflects on Chiapas in the context of the southern border and one of the effects of neoliberal globalization: the violence contained in the new processes of migration in transit and human mobility. García shows us why and how both are treated as a security issue with its concomitant military ingredient. For his part, Carlos de Jesús Gómez studies what has happened in Chiapas during the 4T government (2018-2024), in particular, the advance of criminal electoral political violence, as well as the various forms that violence has taken against those who mobilize, denounce and protest. All of this, he tells us, has weakened the credibility of the institutions and has made it difficult to consolidate a fair and transparent political system.
In the Anthropovisuals section we share more material to explore about the glocal legacy of the Zapatista movement in these times of civilizational transitions, polycrisis and crisis of alternatives? As colleague Dolores González says, interviewed by Laura Carlsen in the program Hecho en América (Rompeviento TV, 2024), addressing the State and the different levels of government: not only détente and containment is urgently needed, but multi-agency interventions with a multidimensional strategy. In addition, he adds, in Chiapas a multi-stakeholder presence is required as well as raising awareness not only of the seriousness but also of the complexity. We hope that this issue of Ichan Tecolotl will contribute in that direction.[iv]
Source: chiapasparalelo
