aquí, ahora:here and now

I am reading a book by Andres Oppenheimer called ‘México en la Frontera del Caos’ (Mexico at the Frontier of Chaos), and in it he discusses political parties’ ‘donations’ to newspapers. He writes that all of the papers in the country accept $ in exchange for pro-party articles, even my favourite La Jornada. The italicised headlines he notes are used to identify these articles (not that many readers would know that) are all through the copy I bought today. Wow. I *love* La Jornada. Just the other day I bonded with an old guy over how lovely it was for Mexico to have such a progressive, independent paper.

I arrived in freezing cold San Cristobal de las Casas last week, and it was just too cold for me. Even after wrapping myself in a metre of polarfleece bought from a haberdashery shop the chill was making me miserable, so less than 24 hours later I was on a bus to Palenque, a small town in the Chiapan jungle. This is Zapatista territory, and the military checkpoints were the first of many reminders that the tensions here between the indigenous paramilitary group and other factions — government supporters, capitalists, and Protestants, for example — have not dissolved as years pass. 

I’ve never seen more beautiful, fertile country. Verdant hills roll on and on and on, filled with bananas, coffee, and palms for ethanol production. It is obvious that although a scandalous number of people here are living in abject poverty, this part of the country is rich. As well as a great proportion of national agriculture, the state of Chiapas produces almost half of the hydroelectric power in Mexico, and the majority of the country’s oil. Travelling with a Minnesotan farmer who lives half the year in Oaxaca assisting a coffee growers’ collective was great; I had private economy, history and agriculture lessons on tap! 

We were not received there with anywhere near the kind of welcome I’ve come to expect in Mexico. There was a distinct anti-tourist vibe, and I felt very out of place. I’m not sure how much of this is due to the type of traveller that goes to that particular area — there were swarms of doped up hippies floating around the place — and how much is due to long-passed and more recent history and Zapatista ideology, which placed indigeneity squarely at the centre of, well, everything. It’s very complicated, Zapatista-ism, and I doubt that many of the aforementioned hippies who profess to stand in solidarity with the indigenas of Chiapas and idolise Subcomandante Marcos have much of an idea of just how complex the movement and its goals are. Yesterday Jason and I jumped on the back of a ute and headed out to see a cave about half an hour out of San Cristobal (the ruins and jungly scenery were gorgeous, but two nights in Palenquewere enough), and on the way we had a chat with a local guy, a campesino (peasant farmer) who raises rabbits. He told us that although he is of 100% indigenous ancestry, his small farm was taken by the Zapatistas in 1994… raised in the city of San Cristobal, he never learned any of the local dialects, and wasn’t considered “indigenous enough” to keep hold of his land. He’s also a Protestant, and I’m sure that that had a lot to do with his expulsion during the first wave of the uprising. Evangenlism has been making great inroads here in Southern Mexico, but converts are often shunned by their communities and occasionally cast out. There are new non-Catholic villages springing up in hitherto untended lands where these exiles take refuge. One of the villages least tolerant of conversion is San Juan de Chamula, home of the most beautiful and eerie church I’ve ever been to.

Aleta and I arrived around midday and huddled together as we fought the wind and rain to get to the large white, blue, pink and green facade. Inside, the floor was covered in pine needles. Statues of various saints in glass boxes lined the walls above thousants of devotional candles on long tables, and on the far wall, where the altar would usually be, stood a huge display of Christmas lights and decorations that almost obscure Saint John the Baptist’s image.

San Juan is held in higher regard than Mary or Jesus here. The church has no pews, and the town’s residents sit in small groups on the floor, setting up rows of candles in various configurations, chanting, and drinking Coca Cola. Apparently before the conquest a religious rite involved imbibing herbs that caused vomiting, and now Coke is seen as a bit holy because of the burtping it produces! We thought that we might see a chicken sacrifice — there were quite a few of them tied up here and there — but (un?)fortunately we seemed to have arrived a bit too early for that. No photos were allowed, and I was surprised that we are let in there at all. I suppose the $2 entry fee must be of use to someone…

Querétaro, Guanajuato, and Mexico City were lovely, but Oaxaca’s been fantastic. Yesterday I took a cooking class with a woman a former Rotary scholar put me in touch with (thanks, Graciela!) that turned into a brief history lesson on the recent troubles here. My mum leaves tomorrow, and I’m flying down to Chiapas the next day to meet with members of some local peacebuilding projects there. I am most interested in learning about the social, political and economic situation in that part of the country, I think it’ll be a highlight of this trip.

A few weeks ago I took a class on the Mexican Revolution, and the idea of ejido captured my attention. I just wrote the longest paper I’ve even done in Spanish on this subject (1000 words is so little in English!), and here’s a very brief rundown.Please excuse my English, I am losing my ability to write properly. In Spanish you can write 50 word sentences, and it’s ok!

The Mexican Revolution was, to simplify a lot, a struggle over land rights. Indigenous Mexicans were working their traditional lands in pretty much the same way as our Indigenous peoples (ie in terrible conditions, for nothing more than food and accommodation) and racking up huge debts to the owners of the big haciendas (farms). The revolutionaries won the war and in the 1920s Zapata turned down the presidency and started to redistribute land to indigenous peasants (campesinos). His motto was ‘the land belongs to he who works it with his own hands’ (or some such, that’s my translation!). About half of all arable land was redistributed to around 3 million people.

Large areas were given to cooperatives, who then divided it up into ejidos — plots of land that are tended by one family. You couldn’t sell your ejido, but you could pass it on to your children, and it could be taken away from you if you weren’t using it — basically, instead of owning it outright, you have stewardship of it as long as it’s productive. Ejidos were set up more to make people self sufficient, and they are still a feature of Mexico’s land tenure system. They are different to the communal lands here, which are worked in cooperatives administered by indigenous elders and generally produce together (ie ten plots will all grow the same type of lentils, and they’ll all pool their resources to sell it together).

So here’s the problem: ejidos are really, really unproductive. I’m sure they worked well enough in the years when no-one had farm machinery and everyone had 15 kids to cultivate their plots, but nowadays it’s just not happening. Also, when the idea of ejidos was thought up, moving up in the class system, getting an education or a job outside of manual farm labour, was unthinkable for the proletariat. Now, although this place is, really, screwed up in terms of education and opportunity, you don’t HAVE to be a campesino if your dad was, but because of how Mexican people generally handle their money (all of it goes into houses and *things*, as there’s not a strong culture of investment and after multiple crises they are rightly distrustful of banks and cash money) all of an ejidatario family’s resources are tied up in their ejido. They can’t sell up and leave for better work or educational possibilities, so they’re stuck in rural areas, tending unproductive plots and eking out a very difficult existence. So they’re selling. ‘Under the water’ (not table… an interesting mental picture, I think).

In 1992 the law was apparently changed to allow ejidatarios to privatise and sell, but no-one (not even lawyers) knows exactly what the situation is. I’ve found this to be the case with respect to a lot of legal stuff here. Because people are scared to buy it without the usual legal protections and proper land titles, they only get very low prices, and guess who’s buying? Big rich landowners, who are consolidating multiple ejidos into big farms. I have no idea how this situation could be improved, but I think it’s an interesting example of how changes within a society and in the local and international economic situation complicate policies that were, at the beginning, very well thought out and fair. If world economies had not become so intertwined and Mexico had remained undeveloped, with little opportunidad for movement between social classes, I can see how the ejidal system would have greatly improved the lot of campesinos. But that’s not the case, and the challenge now is to find a balance between instability and rigid systems that don’t permit changes with the passage of time.

It’s hard to get quality reporting here, but it seems that the flooding in Tabasco was exacerbated by mismanagement of a hydroelectric dam. The area is prone to flooding, but it used to come up bit by bit, giving people time to get to higher ground. The dam held the water back until it had build up to an unmanageable level, then released it in a gush so as to prevent damage to itself.

These things are always sadder when they were preventable.

What I want to know now is why the US government had pledged only $300k in aid, when Mexico donated $1m to the Katrina fund?