Self-Defense in Mexico

Indigenous Community Policing and the New Dirty Wars

Luis Hernández Navarro, Ramor Ryan

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781469654539, 9781469654522
• eBook ISBN: 9781469654546
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

In Mexico and across other parts of Latin America local Indigenous peoples have built community policing groups as a means of protection where the state has limited control over, and even complicity in, crime and violence. Luis Hernández Navarro, a leading Mexican journalist, offers a riveting investigation of these armed self-defense groups that sprang up around the time of the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Available in English for the first time, the book spotlights the intense precarity of everyday life in parts of Mexico. Hernández Navarro shows how the self-defense response, which now includes wealthier rancher and farmer groups, is being transformed by Mexico’s expanding role in the multibillion dollar global drug trade, by foreign corporations’ extraction of raw minerals in traditionally Indigenous lands, and by the resulting social changes in local communities.

But as Hernández Navarro acknowledges, self-defense is highly controversial. Community policing may provide citizens with increased agency, but for government officials it can be a dangerous threat to the status quo. Leftists and liberals are wary of how the groups may be linked to paramilitary forces and vulnerable to manipulation by drug traffickers and the government alike. This book answers the urgent call to understand the dangerous complexities of government failures and popular solutions.

1 Renaissance in the Zapatista Mayan World

The EZLN and Self-Defense

“Did you hear?” the communiqué asked, succinctly. “It is the sound of your world collapsing. It is our world coming back. The day that was the day was night. And night will be the day that will be the day.”

On December 21, 2012, the date of the Thirteenth Mayan Baktún (cycle), some forty thousand Zapatista Mayan rebels peacefully and silently occupied five towns in the state of Chiapas. It had been a while since their last public appearance—more than a year and a half to be precise, May 5, 2011, when twenty thousand marched in San Cristóbal de las Casas to support the National March for Peace and Justice, called by the poet Javier Sicilia.

Those same streets had first seen them on January 1, 1994, armed and on war footing. More than just a return, the Zapatista march marking the end of the Baktún was a reaffirmation of their strength. After all, it can’t be said that the Zapatistas returned, because they never left.

Founded in 1983, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) has been active for more than thirty years. It grew underground for a decade, and then in 1994 made its appearance in public for the first time. Since then, it has been loud at times and silent at other times, but it has never been inactive. Repeatedly declared dead or irrelevant, the Zapatistas have always bounced back.

Just three weeks before the mobilization, Enrique Peña Nieto assumed the Mexican presidency. The return of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI) to Los Pinos marked the end of one cycle of political struggle and the beginning of another. With its massive mobilization on December 21, 2012, the EZLN anticipated many of the events that would happen in the country in the coming years. In some way the EZLN announced the collapse and resurgence of the two worlds alluded to in their communiqué.

After twelve years of government by the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, PAN), 2012 brought a series of changes in a new political environment. The most obvious was the return of the old PRI dinosaur to the National Palace in the form of one of its toughest factions: the authoritarian Atlacomulco group. Another was the signing of the Pact for Mexico, an agreement between the leaders of the three major political parties which attempted to alleviate social conflict but in the process excluded ordinary Mexicans. One more was the launch of National Crusade Against Hunger, a government program to combat poverty, clearly part of a counterinsurgency policy. The reorganization of the left political parties, with the formation of the National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, Morena) was yet one more novelty in 2012. Finally, there was the emergence of new social movements, and the formation of armed and belligerent civil associations focused on restorative justice, resisting dispossession, and confronting public insecurity. These are the key developments that mark the new epoch.

This irruption of community police and armed civil groups across almost one-third of the national geography was not unconnected to Zapatismo—not because the rebels sponsored or controlled them, but for other reasons. First of all, the very existence and continuity of the Zapatista autonomous project set a precedent and provided an inspiration for those embarking on the path of community policing.

Secondly, the Zapatista struggle opened up a new space legitimizing indigenous demands and provided a template for a new kind of struggle in which community security and justice were key factors.

Since first appearing on the national stage, the Zapatistas have identified as both a warrior and a guardian force. “We come from a race of warriors,” said Subcomandante Marcos in March 2001, during the March of the Color of the Earth, as he outlined the Zapatista vision and origin to the National Indigenous Congress in the community of Nurío, Michoacán. “The blood of the ancient Mayans runs through us, it gives us life and arms us. We are warriors.”

“We are the last of a generation of men and women whose collective mandate has been to be the guardian and heart of our peoples. We are guardians; we don’t take anything from anyone, and we don’t allow anyone to take anything from us.”

While the insurgents have expressed their support for other indigenous communities embarking on the road of self-defense, this does not imply that they are one and the same. A distinguishing feature of Zapatista self-defense is that it is part of an ambitious and radical project of social transformation from below, with the construction of autonomy as its guiding principle.

A new cycle of peasant and indigenous struggle for self-defense began with Zapatismo. The formation of the Regional Coordinator of the Community Authorities (La Coordinadora Regional de Autoridades Comunitarias, CRAC) in Guerrero was deeply influenced by the rebel insurrection. The Ostula Manifesto, proclaimed in Michoacán in 2009, which reaffirmed the inalienable right to indigenous self-defense, clearly has the seal of approval of the Zapatista insurgents. The dynamics of the Michoacán self-defense groups would be unthinkable without the precedent of the Chiapas uprising.

Of course, the history of peasant self-defense groups in rural Mexico does not begin or end with the EZLN. Many years before the uprising in Chiapas and in the most diverse regions, the struggle against the guardias blancas (white guards) of cattle ranchers and gunslingers in the service of caciques and hacendados (large landowners) forced several peasant nuclei to organize and take up arms to defend themselves against repression. Even Lucio Cabañas’s guerrilla forces in Guerrero had a strong component of self-defense in the beginning.

Nevertheless, Zapatismo represents a watershed in terms of indigenous self-defense.

In a February 1994 interview published in La Jornada, Subcomandante Marcos told Blanche Petrich and Elio Henríquez that beyond being a politico-military organization for revolutionary transformation, “the EZLN was born as a self-defense group.” It was a force that the indigenous of Chiapas made their own, explained Marcos, in order to confront “a very arrogant armed group—the landowners’ guardias blancas—who take their land away and mistreat them, and by doing so, limit the social and political development of the indigenous people.”

“Then the compañeros saw that the problem was not limited to the self-defense of one community, or one ejido [communal land],” continued Marcos, “but it was necessary to establish alliances with other ejidos, with other communities and began to form larger military contingents, but still with the idea of self-defense. There was a stalemate until the supreme government had the brilliant idea of reforming Article 27 and that was a powerful catalyst in the communities. Those reforms closed down all possibility of legally owning community-held land, and ultimately, kept them as an armed self-defense group.”

Finally, he concluded, “the election fraud of ’88 came and there the compañeros saw that the vote was not of use either because it was obvious that it was not respected. These two factors were the triggers, but I think the reform of Article 27 radicalized the compañeros most of all. It was like closing the door for indigenous people to survive in any kind of legal and peaceful manner. That is why they rose up in arms, so that they could be heard, because they were already tired of paying such a high price in blood.”

Absalom and Zapatista Justice

Wolonchán occupies a special place in the geography of Chiapas ignominy. In 1980, the Mexican Army massacred a group of peasants in that community located in the municipality of Sibacá. At least twelve were murdered and their bodies incinerated. General Absalón Castellanos Domínguez was the head of the Thirty-First Military Zone. A grandson of Don Belisario Domínguez, he governed the state between 1981 and 1988, an era marked by increased repression and the expansion of his own properties.

On January 3, 1994, the Zapatistas took him prisoner on his El Momón ranch. The general and his bodyguard, René Rodríguez, were seized by hundreds of insurgent militia men and women, many of whom (or their children) were peons from these very ranches. For a few hours, the hull of the old family ranch became the tyrant’s prison. Later, he was transferred to the warehouse of a coffee organization in the municipality of Las Margaritas, and from there to the Zapatista headquarters at La Realidad.

Put on trial before a people’s court on January 13, Absalón Castellanos Domínguez was found guilty—not only of the Wolonchán massacre but also of violating the human rights of indigenous people, robbery, dispossession, kidnapping, corruption, and murder. Furthermore, the insurgents found him guilty of driving the indigenous population of Chiapas to take up arms “against the injustice of closing all legal and peaceful routes for their just demands during the period in which he served as head of the State Executive in Chiapas.”

Despite the extent of the grievances and charges, the rebel resolution condemned him to live “until the last of his days with the shame and embarrassment of having received the forgiveness and the kindness of those who have been humiliated, kidnapped, dispossessed, robbed and murdered for so long.”

A few days later, the EZLN delivered the prisoner to the state commissioner for peace, Manuel Camacho, in the community of Guadalupe Tepeyac. “I have come to hand over a prisoner of war,” announced Zapatista major Moisés. “General Absalón Castellanos Domínguez, a distinguished member of the Army, for having governed Chiapas for six years.” The prisoner was healthy and unharmed.

The trial and punishment of General Castellanos Domínguez was the first public demonstration of Zapatista justice in action. The novel manner of the execution of justice and the spectacular nature of the ceremonial handover had a great impact on the indigenous world.

The Baktún

With the arrival of Enrique Peña Nieto to power in December 2012, the Mexican elites began to feel as indomitable as they had during the reign of Carlos Salinas de Gortari twenty years before. The Salinas presidency (1988–94) oversaw a project to reform Mexico in an authoritarian manner at whatever cost, beginning with the electoral fraud against Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1988. Salinas projected the image of a crusading president tackling Mexico’s historical burdens. His public approval ratings skyrocketed and it seemed that he was laying the foundations of power for beyond his six-year term.

Salinas pushed through the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution—privatizing collectively held ejido lands and opening the way for the concentration of rural land—with relative ease. Equally, the amendment of Article 130 granting political rights to the clergy passed without a problem. With the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Salinas and the political elite were convinced they were on the precipice of an era of abundance, progress, and prosperity.

The reign of Carlos Salinas and his political policies—known as Salinismo—was seen to be all-powerful and permanent. Never before had there being such sweeping reforms to the Mexican state. The opposition were powerless to stem the neoliberal tide. The Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, PRD) was crushed in the 1991 midterm elections and more than three hundred of its party militants assassinated. The president’s arrogance was such that he tried to modify the name of the country. Instead of Republic of Mexico, Salinas signed the NAFTA agreement simply Mexico, insisting that international financial organizations identified the country as such.

The emergence of the EZLN in January 1994 changed everything. The uprising derailed Salinas’s long-term project, and blew apart his authoritarian rule. The Zapatista impact was enormous: it placed the indigenous question at the center of the public agenda, unmasked the government program to combat poverty as a farce, opened space for a wide variety of previously blocked political and citizen forces to expand, and forced the Federal Electoral...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Renaissance in the Zapatista Mayan World
• 2. Nota Roja Country
• 3. The Emergency Brake
• 4. Bitter Guerrero
• 5. The Community Police
• 6. The End of the Dream
• 7. The Wild West
• 8. The Indigenous Dawn
• 9. The Uprising
• 10. Uncertain Times
• 11. Some Other Pieces of the Puzzle
• 12. The Rewriting of Frankenstein
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index