Draft

American Sociological Association.

Panel 72: The Internet and Social Change: Uses of the Internet

2:30 pm Friday, 16 August 1996, New York

THE INTERNET INSURRECTION: CHIAPAS AND THE LAPTOP

Paul Rich, Hoover Institution, Stanford, and University of the Americas-Puebla, Mexico

rich@udlapvms.pue.udlap.mx

Guillermo De Los Reyes, University of Pennsylvania and University of the Americas-Puebla, Mexico

williamr@udlapvms.pue.udlap.mx

To understand the use of the internet by the guerrillas in the Mexican state of Chiapas it is necessary to understand something of Mexican political hisotry. The phenomenon of the Chiaps rebellion and its leader, Subcomandte Marco, has to be seen in light of how Mexico is governed by the oldest incumbent political party or oligarchy in the world, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional or PRI.

The PRI is not a party in the American sense, but more of a family firm and social insurance scheme which has co-opted hundreds of thousands if not millions of supporters by handouts. Decaying, it presides over a country where recollecitons of President Ernesto Zedillo's 1994 election promises to provide for the "well-being for your family", and his advertisements of himself as a leader who "knows how to do it" produce hollow laughter. For Mexicans, in the last two years, little has gone right (no pun intended).

They are paying the price for the long PRI rule, which has had an effect on the country's personality as well as its pocketbook. The great political cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed a festy Mexican in the pages of Harper's Weekly in the 1880s, armed with a cutlass in one hand and a pistol in the other. He and other cartoonists of the era conceded with their drawings that Mexicans were a kinetic if not always lovable neighbor. But with the consolidation of one-party control in the late 1920s after the Mexican Revolution, the portrait of the Mexican changes to one unusual in political representation. With the rise of PRI came the sombreroed dozer, the cartoon Mexican slumped on the ground in a perpetual siesta, a big sombrero shutting him out from the world.

The claim is made thatsuch sombolescence is the Mexican and Latin American heritage, that it is part of "...a core set of values common throughout the 'Hispanic' sector of Latin America. These values - with their resulting worldview and social structure - are, for the most part, a direct legacy of the Spanish conquest." Individual responsibility and political participation are not according to this view high on the apprciated values scale.

There is unquestionably in Mexicoa legacy of personalismo, a situation where, "To get things done, who you know is much more important than what you know." Personalismo will be put ahead of "laws, schedules, and contracts" and from personalismo there comes caudallismo, authoritarianism. In rural states such as Chiapas, it is at its most virulent. This caudallismo depends on t bribery and patronage : "Those who are properly connected with the reigning party circumvent this bureaucratic legal nightmare [of obeying the law] through personal connections and a never-ending system of mutual favors and obligations...[which] curtails the genius and entrepreneurship of its citizens, [and] makes it next to impossible for Latin American nations to compete effectively in the international market - even with those items for which they have a natural competitive advantage." A critic adds, "The root cause of Latin America's underdevelopment lies in the nature of Latin American society and culture: highly stratified, elitist, authoritarian, personalistic, mercantilistic, and protectionists, it rewards some groups at the expense of others."

The notoriety which the guerilla uprising in Chiapas has achieved perhaps reflects a trend towards finally acknowledging a cultural pluralism which heretofore has been largely ignored. Many groups are now emerging in Mexico from a sort of media limbo.The fault is not only that of newspapers and television but of academia. Admittedly what are now stylishly called subaltern studies have in the last two decades become more and more popular, but new kids on the block are still not likely to be the favorite pursuit of university establishments, especially in Mexico. "The main attraction of these records lies in the extremely rich quality of the depositions and testimonies given by poor women and men, including Indians and castas." until the advent of the internet, those who wrote no leather-bound memoirs and commissioned no oil portraits have been remembered through court dossiers.

By any reasonable standards, the situaiton in Chiapas over the decades has been outrageous. There is little doubt that justice there, and in many other parts of rural Mexico, has been highly selective. Self-confident élites sought to be protected against the squalor of bakeries, the stench of expired horses, and the underclass. However, much of what is now happening politically in Latin America is no longer the activity solely of an élite. As she writes, in the present attempted redemocratization of Latin America, "...the debate about democracy becomes an arena for struggles over the rules of the game and over who will be recognized as legitimate participants in the political process. The more the various participants in the debate accept the legitimacy of a multiplicity of definitions of what is possible and create institutions (or use existing institutions) to mediate the inevitable conflicts that result, the more likely is a democratic outcome." (p.23)

Justice in Chiapas does not mean condemning Mexico to class warfare.

Not everyone is an optimist aobut democratization: "Sociocultural conditions are so strongly weighed against democracy in Latin America that there is serious question whether any democratizing agent can actually do the job." (p.viii) In general the contributors to his collection are m ore optimistic than he is.

Bryan T. Frohle in "Religious competition, Community Building, and Democracy in Latin America: Grassroots Religious Organizations in Venezuela" is very much of the Robert Putnam and Bowling Alone school. "A strong, independent institutional and associational life is an essential moblilizer and mediator of support for democratic politics. Civil society, institutions and associations ultimately are themselves sustained by community 'spirit' and sociability. This is the grat irony of democratic politics: 'democracy' enables individual freedoms, but those freedoms are provided through collective identity and bonds of solidarity in mutually intelligible discourse and everyday interactions. In a sense, 'communities' are the forces that organize, mediate, and maintain democratic politics." (p.27) With that said, unsurprisingly Professor Frohle contends that the religious competition introduced into Latin America by Protestant religious sects is a healthy influence. In other words, the creation and vitality of minorities per se promotes tolerance and other democratic virtues. (See p.41)

In some cases, racial minorities are becoming religious minorities as well by converting to one or another Protestant denominations. "The congregational authority of the local church, Kanagy notes, "along with the integration of community and church interests, has further solidified the autonomy and cohesiveness of the local community." (p.140)

A number of the writers in Donna Lee Van Cott's INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA address the relationship between the indigenous and religion. Carlos Frederico Marés de Souza jr. In "On Brazil and Its Indians" comments that "in spite of receiving fie centuries of preaching of a sole religion and a sole God, each indigenous people continues with it own beliefs and spirituality." (p.229) In Guatemala, nots Richard N. Adams in "A Report on the Political Status of the Guatemalan Maya", Over the past 20 years there has been a significant increase in the numbers of Protestants, fundamentalists, Pentecostals, and others, for reasons that lie beyond the scope of this book. In some ways, this has been extremely divisive, since Protestant sects and congregations are very independent and necessarily lose integrative relations that tied practicing Catholics to a larger social order. However, many Protestant Indian leaders not only insist that their religion in no way dilutes their Mayan identity, but even that it conforms to the Mayan cosmovision." (p.176)

Redemocratization of Latin America entails the empowerment of minorities that have long embraced antistatism in the face of decades of authoritarian domination. That they are now being reincorporated into the political fabric is a momentous development. Generalizations made about Latin American culture have done little justice to its potential pluralism, its ethnocultural mixing.(Stern: pp.ix, 37) However, the present discussion should avoid a renewal of the arguments of the 1920s and 1930s that the treatment of minority history as a digression from the "great issues", is not accidental but part of an agenda. (Stern, 9.) .

A warning is in order though that as the indigenous movements acquire a hihger profile, . a completely positive picture may not appear. Notion that general harmony and balance prevailed among Indians, as contrasted with the power-seeking and violence of mestizos,have alrady begun to look like a stereotype. (Stern: 9) .

REFERENCES

GARCIA, CHRIST (ED.) (1988) Latinos and the Political System. University of Notre Dame Press.

STERN, STEVE J. (1995) The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press.