Week 7: Introductions to the EZLN and change in Chiapas

By Jordan Beall

The focus of Week 7 here at CEMAL centered on the EZLN and the role of indigenous women and indigenous Liberation Theology as a compliment and pillar of that movement.

We began our week with a guest lecture by Myrian Fracchia, a woman who currently works for Servicio Paz y Justicia (SERPAJ) in Mexico. Her work includes non-violent solidarity work and studies on rural sociology. Through these areas of focus, she has spent a large amount of time studying and work with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation or Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) movement in the state of Chiapas.

Ms. Fracchia gave us an in depth background on the motives behind the EZLN uprising, their goals, and the structure of their governance. The crucial motive behind the revolution was the distribution of land, and how the indigenous of Chiapas had been so severely marginalized and ignored. One of the points I found particularly interesting was that when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, land redistribution was effectively cancelled, thus leaving most of the indigenous of Chiapas without any chance of reclaiming their ancestral lands. The EZLN uprising was a response to not only this policy change but to the continued marginalization that they face. Currently their goals are to re-claim and expand their territory of ancestral lands and to maintain their autonomy as a government separate of the Mexican government. The Zapatista government also has established itself as an autonomous entity that governs itself in a true democratic fashion.

Our second guest lecture of the week was by Dr. Rosalva Aída Hernández Castillo, a scholar of critical Mexican anthropology who has worked extensively in Chiapas concerning the refugees, Liberation Theology, and Protestantism. Her perspective was particularly interesting because she was very knowledgeable about the role of Protestantism in Chiapas, which was unusual because we have concentrated mainly on Catholicism. She spoke about how the outside perspective of Protestantism is that it is an imperialistic construction from the United States, yet she shared how amazing it was that the indigenous practitioners had assumed Protestantism and had adapted it to their needs and granted them a sense of dignity. In that spirit, Dr. Castillo also discussed how the indigenous women were struggling similarly to reject the traditions within their communities that oppress them while embracing those that they find empowering. These two movements parallel each other and thus compliment each other, as the Zapatista movement has worked to create equality amongst its people.

One of the most fascinating ideas that I picked up from both lectures is that of the empowerment of women within the EZLN and Protestant Liberation Theology. From the outside, many would view the indigenous women of Chiapas as marginalized within their own communities because one does not often hear an indigenous women speak to foreigners, but one of the things we don’t often understand is how strong their roles are as community leaders, family providers, and as a force of military might. It is this empowerment that not only the women have created, but the EZLN’s struggle and success with establishing autonomy has created a similar liberation.



By Kathryn Sweet

Week 7 was Chiapas week – after studying guerilla movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the preceding weeks, our focus turned to Mexico’s southernmost state and the controversial guerrilla group, the EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de la Liberacion Nacional, or Zapatista National Liberation Army). The subject matter this week was of particular interest to me because, almost two years ago, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend a week in Chiapas and learn about the EZLN in ways that were inaccessible to the average tourist – for example, meeting with Zapatistas. This was not, however, a boring week of things I already knew; there is always more to learn.

Since my visit to the Zapatista caracol (the name for their five autonomous government centers in Chiapas; literally “conch shell”) of Oventic, I have been interested in women’s status in the EZLN, and the role of women’s liberation within the movement. The Zapatistas have a very unique code written into their laws, a set of ten demands known as the Revolutionary Women’s Law. While the EZLN is clearly not a feminist movement in itself, women’s rights have been on the Zapatista agenda – or, at least, in their rhetoric – since the first day of their uprising in 1994. We read an article by Dr. Rosalva Aida Hernandez Castillo (who later gave us a guest lecture) which discussed a major contradiction that Zapatista women have tried to reconcile: the tension between the struggle for indigenous autonomy and the struggle for women’s rights.

In the early 1990s, an article of the Mexican constitution was amended to give indigenous groups the right to maintain their traditions – known as usos y costumbres, or “uses and customs.” One thing that this led to, however, was an abuse of cultural relativism, justifying detrimental practices like domestic violence and forcible marriage as “part of the tradition.” To demand better treatment was to be an assimilationist, under the influence of North American feminists. While this wasn’t true, their fear was somewhat justified. (This is something we’ve grappled with all semester – the boundaries of our North American forms of a social movement, and where it becomes more oppressive than liberating.) With the presence of the Zapatista rebellion, however, women have had a space to fight for their rights both as women and as indigenous people, insisting that the two movements don’t have to be contradictory.