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Intimate Enemies
Landowners, Power, and Violence in Chiapas
By AARON BOBROW-STRAIN Duke University Press
Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3987-8
Chapter One
Introduction
This is a story of village tyrants come to grief; of men and women whose carefully defended world of racial privilege, political power, and landed monopoly has come unglued. It examines the experiences of relatively powerful landowners confronted with a dramatic reordering of space and social relations in north-central Chiapas, Mexico.
From about 1930 on, a handful of ladino landowners and thousands of indigenous peasants have fought a pitched multifront battle for political, economic, and cultural dominion over a large part of north-central Chiapas. The outcomes of this struggle remain unclear, but one thing can be said for certain. Ladino landowners, once the sole heirs to vast stretches of rich agricultural land and the nearly undisputed source of moral and political authority in the region, have suffered a phenomenal reversal of fortune. In the municipios of Chilón and Sitalá, where much of this story is set, the insurrectionary years at the end of the twentieth century augured the end of a way of life. The uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN, or Zapatistas) in 1994, followed by the invasion of more than 100,000 hectares of private property across the state and subsequent redistribution of nearly a half-million hectares of land, constituted a challenge that landowners in Chilón could not or would not defend themselves against. Acting between February 1994 and late 1998, the invaders stepped into a political opening left in the wake of the EZLN uprising, but their groups spanned the entire spectrum of Mexican politics and most were not directly affiliated with the Zapatistas.
As invasions mounted through the spring and summer of 1994, landowners screamed for justice. "We're giving the government until April 20. If there's no positive solution we'll adopt other means," one declared to a reporter (D. Scott 1994). The image of landowners "adopting other means" required no elaboration. The threat fit neatly into enduring representations of Chiapan landed elites as a violent and powerful class of modern latifundistas. Influential books by Luís M. Fernández Ortiz and María Tarrío García (1983) and Antonio García de León (1998 [1985]) exemplified and helped reproduce this powerful set of representations. These portrayals, in turn, seemed to confirm Barrington Moore's (1966) classic depiction of the connection between landed elites, labor-repressive production regimes, and violence. In the end, however, most landowners in this southern Mexican state, fabled for its violent agrarian politics and powerful landed oligarchy, responded to these invasions with quiescence and resignation instead of thugs and guns.
As of 2000, only 28 percent of the almost 1,300 invasions had been evicted-as opposed to an 82 percent eviction rate in the ten years leading up to 1994. Instead, attempts by government mediators to resolve the disputes nonviolently culminated in March 1996 with the signing of the historic Agrarian Accords (Acuerdos Agrarios) that paved the way for unprecedented state-subsidized purchases and redistribution of land. From 1996 through 2000, peasant groups, landowners, and state officials negotiated the transfer of 244,000 hectares-13 percent of the state's private agricultural property-and the swift resolution of outstanding land reform petitions covering an additional 242,000 hectares of private and public lands in favor of the claimants. Coming only three years after President Carlos Salinas declared the definitive end of land reform and two years after he championed changes to the Mexican Constitution that allowed for the eventual privatization of land reform institutions, the invasions in Chiapas dramatically forced agrarian demands back to center stage, leveraging massive redistributions with unprecedented speed. Contrary to both the plans of neoliberal policy makers and the fears of critics on the left, land tenure in Chiapas underwent a rapid repeasantization and reindigenization rather than privatization and concentration. After decades of inchmeal change, 1994-2001 saw the rapid and, for many rural ladinos, intolerable triumph of indigenous political leaders, monumental steps toward the destruction of land concentration, and accelerated ladino out-migration.
What most observers gloss as "the Chiapas conflict" is in fact a constellation of temporally and spatially differentiated conflicts. This book focuses on one slice of that shifting "warscape" (Nordstrom 1997): struggles between landowners and peasants in the north-central Chiapan municipios of Chilón and Sitalá, which I refer to with the shorthand label "Chilón" (see Map 1). Thus, while most people know of Chiapas only in association with the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, this book tells a different story about different actors: it is the first English-language study of the state's 1994-1998 agrarian mobilizations and the only fine-grained ethnography of ladino landowners, critical but largely ignored actors in the Chiapan warscape.
In Chilón, land invasions commenced in the early-morning hours of February 14, 1994. Within two weeks, indigenous peasants from the ejidos of San Sebastián Bachajón and San Jerónimo Bachajón, led by the Coordinadora Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas (CNPI, or National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples), had seized more than 2,000 hectares of coffee and ranch land. By the spring and summer, a diverse collection of organizations, from the pro-government Municipal Solidarity Committee to the Centro de Derechos Indígenas, A.C. (CEDIAC, or Center for Indigenous Rights), an opposition group grounded in Catholic liberation theology, followed CNPI into the fray.
Chilón's landscape mirrored these upheavals, as young corn shoots appeared in hastily burned pastures and makeshift settlements grew up in what were once the region's most productive fields. Shocked ranchers watched the invasions from a distance, intervened to save livestock, and organized emergency meetings of the Asociación Ganadera Local (AGL), the Local Cattlemen's Association. That March, the ladino municipal government under Roberto Trujillo resigned under duress and was replaced by one headed by Manuel Jiménez Navarro, an indigenous land invasion leader.
Chilón's AGL pressed for evictions and threatened violence into the summer of 1994, but its demands went largely unheeded, as state and federal officials distanced themselves from landowners. By Christmas the AGL had relaxed its demands, calling for only eleven evictions and volunteering to sell thirty-six properties to land invaders. With rare exceptions, Chilón's landowners eventually cooperated with a statewide program designed to purchase and redistribute land for peasant claimants. Ultimately, according to government records, only one property was evicted in Chilón and Sitalá, and by 1999 state officials had brokered the purchase and transfer of more than 7,000 hectares to land claimants.
Why would coffee planters and cattle ranchers with a long and storied history of violent responses to agrarian conflict react to these recent invasions with quiescence and resignation instead of thugs and guns? In addressing this puzzle, I rethink conceptual frameworks that have long guided the study of landowners and landed production. This analysis remains firmly rooted in agrarian political economy, highlighting the importance of what David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and generations of political economists have understood as the rentier logic of landed production. Yet I reject economic determinism, posing landed production as a social and spatial relation; not a thing, but rather a set of relational practices operating on multiple material and discursive levels that order space in particular ways. Thus, building on the work of Marxist agrarian studies, poststructural understandings of power, and critical human geography, I trace the dialectical connections between estate agriculture, cultural politics, and the ordering of space and territory.
In broad strokes, I argue that the nature and character of landed production in Chilón has always been shaped by struggles over the territoriality of estate agriculture-diverse constellations of social-spatial practices that produce the bounded spaces of estate production. These struggles constantly reshaped landed production in Chilón, generating a succession of new unstable forms over time. Each of these forms in turn conditioned subsequent struggles and shaped the channels, constraints, and opportunities for landowners' defense of territory. Thus, understanding landowners' responses to the invasions of 1994-1998 requires understanding landed production both historically and in the immediate conjuncture surrounding contemporary conflicts.
Contrary to the prevailing tendency to treat Chiapan landowners as a "divine caste" (García de León 1978:31) exercising a "perfectly coordinated" (Fernández Ortiz and Tarrío García 1983:152) and "incontestable hegemony" (García de León 1998:103) over the Chiapan countryside that remains "constant through time" (Tejera Gaona 1997:46), my perspective emphasizes the incongruities and contradictions of landowners' hegemony. Thus, while the invasions of 1994 achieved an epochal reordering of social and spatial relations in Chilón, they also formed part of an ongoing process of struggle through which landed production was continually contested and remade through time. Although the acclaimed Mexican political analyst Enrique Krauze (1997:780) declared that Chiapas "was a place that ... Agrarian Reform had ignored," the opposite is true. Agrarian reform has, in fact, effected major transformations of the state, reshaping both the material landscapes of landed production and the social relations of landowner domination. Understanding landowners' responses to the radical upending of their world in 1994 requires us to understand this broader historical geography of land conflict in Chilón.
Tacking between past and present, I conclude that Chiloneros' responses to land invasions after 1994 must be seen as the result of both broad historical shifts in the configuration of regional hegemony and conjunctural formations of landowners' identities and interests. In the years leading up to 1994, I argue, landowners already found themselves squeezed between indígenas' increasingly organized struggles for territory and declining political and economic support from the neoliberal Mexican state. Caught between these two flames, land-owners found their ability to define and defend the spaces of landed production eroded in important ways. Critically, as part of these historical changes, shifting patterns of political mediation displaced landowners from their positions as the sole nexus between countryside and nation, indigenous peasants and the state-positions that had long been central to the construction and maintenance of landowners' territorial claims.
In this historical context, two conjunctural formations of identity and interests profoundly shaped landowners' calculations of the costs and benefits of violent territorial defense after 1994. First, the changing way landowners were positioned and positioned themselves in the larger nation-a complex process worked out through struggles over the meaning of nature, race, and neoliberal development-produced a strong sense of limits and constraints on their use of violence. Second, landowners' displacement from their historical role as paternal mediators between peasants and the larger polity radically upended their sense of physical security. Over many years, but explosively after 1994, indigenous people, once "known" to landowners through myriad intimate relations, have become increasingly unintelligible and unpredictable to landowners. Experienced by landowners as the unraveling of the respeto (respect) indígenas once accorded them, shifting hegemony kindled a geographic imaginary of fear-a palpable and territorialized terror of indigenous "savagery"-that pushed landowners toward quiescence after 1994.
This historically and geographically specific rethinking of the Chiapas case has broad implications for understanding transformations of landed production around the world. From Chiapas to Brazil, South Africa to El Salvador, traditional landed elites-often depicted as superannuated artifacts of a distant past-survive and even thrive in new political and economic contexts. The upheavals of globalization, economic restructuring, and peasant mobilizations test these actors in different ways-sometimes threatening their very existence, sometimes creating unexpected new opportunities. But, as recent developments in each of these countries suggest, landed elites continue to play critical roles shaping the trajectories of political reform-even in such highly urban nations as Mexico and Brazil. Nowhere is this more clear than in landowners' responses to a wave of new land reform movements and initiatives that emerged around the world in the early 1990s.
After two decades of declining international support for land reform, landowners today increasingly find themselves sandwiched between, on one hand, powerful new peasant movements calling for land redistribution and, on the other, states and multilateral institutions that have rediscovered land reform as a central policy tool. In this context, the transformation of landed production has taken a variety of forms and trajectories, from the União Democrática Rural's successful "uncivil movement" against redistribution in Brazil to more ambiguous outcomes in Colombia, Zimbabwe, and the Philippines. Nevertheless, studies specifically focused on contemporary landed elites are few and far between, with most appraisals of recent land struggles centered on public policy and peasant movements.
While studies of contemporary landed elites are rare, research that attempts to interpret the everyday lived experiences of landowners-of actors typically constructed as the bad guys-is even rarer. Despite the ongoing transformations and metamorphoses of landed production, the basic theoretical tool kit used to understand this category of political economy has not changed much since the late nineteenth century. With this book I seek to breathe new life into the study of landed elites by treating "landed production" and "landed elite" as categories without fixed meanings, categories that are everywhere constructed through contingent processes of social struggle. Centrally, I argue that landowners (as complex subjects) and landed production (as particular configurations of space and social relations) are constituted through processes of struggle over hegemony.
A Note on Fieldwork and Method
Research on agrarian conflict in Chiapas requires filtering through the attics of memory, gutted archives, rat-eaten memos, incomplete and contradictory reports issued by competing government agencies, the fragmented minutes of sham court proceedings, reports of "on-site inspections" conducted by men who never left their offices, outright lies by actors at all levels of society, and a menagerie of land titles issued by more than a half-dozen bodies over the past two hundred years. The history of agrarian conflict in Chiapas is the story of an overdetermined convergence of monumental bureaucratic incompetence, high-stakes class conflict, intimate race relations, and struggles over the meaning of gender, class, and nation. It is the story of secret meetings, under-the-table favors, deliberate misinterpretation of legal rulings, lost papers, burned archives, and late-night ambushes on lonely roads. It was the kind of process in which 1,200-acre estates could be, and were, lost by bureaucrats in the Secretariat of Agrarian Reform.
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Excerpted from Intimate Enemies by AARON BOBROW-STRAIN Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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