Listening to the old stones of Oaxaca

by Peter Costantini

On the mountaintop temples of Monte Albán, the early sunlight gilds the walls of weathered stone and the swallows' winged hieroglyphics. From these millennial Zapotec ruins, too, the morning illuminates the clash of dissonant Mexicos.

Through the haze to the east, you can almost see the new Mercedes-Benz dealership and the world-bestriding yellow arches of McDonald's below on the outskirts of the city of Oaxaca (pronounced wa-HA-ka), capital of the state of the same name.

To the north, clinging to the green escarpments of the Sierra Madre, the bell towers of an Indian village drift into focus.

On the heights, México profundo (deep Mexico), as it was dubbed by anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla; in the valleys, "Yo quiero Taco Bell," in the words of the little dog in the TV commercial. Or as writer Carlos Fuentes termed it, Quetzalcóatl (the plumed serpent god ) versus Pepsicóatl (presumably the god that refreshes). In practice, the schism transgresses neat geographical divisions, suspending communities and families between First and Third Worlds, tangling them in threads of indigenous, national and global cultures.

To the southeast in the state of Chiapas, this disjunction burst into open warfare on January 1, 1994, as the guerrillas of the Zapatista National Liberation Army materialized in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Five years later, the Mexican government has reneged on agreements that it signed in 1996, opting instead for a military strategy of low-intensity conflict to deal with fundamentally economic and social problems.

Maya supporters of the Zapatistas have declared "autonomous municipalities," which they say are authorized by the 1996 accords. The government has responded bloodily, sending in troops to destroy these communities and expelling human-rights observers. The conflict threatens to metastasize: indigenous groups in nearby states have declared autonomous communities, and other guerrilla forces have surfaced.

These uprisings, however, are just one ash plume from a volcanic buildup of citizen discontent. The current and previous Mexican administrations, in an effort to drag Mexico rapidly into the First World, have left huge swaths of the country mired even more deeply in Third-World indigence. Disparities between the relatively industrialized north and the rural south have sharpened.

While the government of Ernesto Zedillo has allowed a democratic opening in electoral politics, its fiscal policies have undermined the economic foundations of democracy: families' ability to move beyond survival mode and participate meaningfully in public life.

The current lords of Tenochtitlán continue to sacrifice millions of Mexicans to the hummingbird-god of global finance. Where its Aztec forbear Huitzilopochtli had an insatiable appetite for beating human hearts, the modern incarnation darts from market to market sucking the marrow out of economies, snatching the common wealth away from public control, and tossing "redundant" humans into the dumpster.

It's depredations have aroused resistance ranging from middle-class movements of debtors ruined by impossible interest rates, to new independent labor unions, to the rural uprisings.

These rebellions of the excluded follow a long and tenacious tradition. Before Cortéz, smaller groups like Oaxaca's Zapotecs resisted the expansion of the Aztec empire. Since the Spanish replaced the Aztecs, México profundo has continued to rear up in periodic Indian uprisings and the 20th-Century peasant rebellions of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa.

Their demands and those of Zapata's modern admirers have mostly been profoundly conservative: land for those who work it, local democracy for their villages, shelter against the vast anonymous forces that threaten to destroy their way of life.

From Monte Albán, you can imagine some elements of a just response emerging from those mountains, where a parallel indigenous world has survived 500 years of efforts to bury it.

In Oaxaca—despite government repression, land disputes and severe poverty in some areas—these traditions have flourished perhaps more than in any other state. Weaving and woodcarving have made some villages famous and Indian languages, widely spoken, were recently approved for use in legal matters. Indigenous political traditions have been recognized by the state's 1995 electoral reform, which allows the great majority of Oaxacan towns to hold non-partisan elections and govern themselves autonomously according to their customs.

At Monte Albán, the ancient Zapotec city organized itself around téquio (community labor, pronounced TAY-kee-oh) and communal land. Today, many villages still rely on téquio for their public works, with residents turning out on weekends to repair roads and clear irrigation ditches. Even emigrants to the States respond to the common obligation, sending back dollars to maintain the town. Significant areas of land, too, are still held in common.

Village government relies on a system called cargo, which obligates citizens to serve in a rotating range of offices from police officer up to mayor. Although public office is an honor, it is also a burden, as it is unpaid and takes time away from farming.

These old ways of mobilizing human and social capital have worked for centuries and still work in much of Oaxaca, making life better for the community as a whole. The autonomous municipalities demanded by Maya villagers in Chiapas are similarly seeking to govern themselves according to their traditions, but so far plantation-like power structures have denied them their rights.

As critical as local democratic autonomy is to resolving Mexico's conflicts, though, it is not sufficient to tackle the structural economic problems plaguing the region. Municipalities, for example, can't provide farmers with credit, roads and markets. To survive, local democracy needs higher levels of government that are equally responsive.

Under presidents Salinas and Zedillo, however, Mexico has been a star pupil of the "Washington Consensus," which mandates unrestricted markets and investment while decimating public services. Mexicans have suffered terribly from its economic and human inefficiency. Now, with the Asian and Russian crashes threatening Latin America, the tyranny of orthodox austerity is increasingly being challenged.

As French commentator Ignacio Ramonet observed, "The logic of competitiveness has been elevated to the rank of a natural imperative of society. This logic leads us to lose the sense of 'living together,' the sense of the 'common good.'"

Defending unprofitable social goals against currency traders and the International Monetary Fund will require deepening the reach of democracy. In politics, deep democracy means involving citizens at all levels between elections and diluting the power of concentrated wealth. Economically, it means increasing investment in human and social capital and insuring a decent standard of living for all.

Hemispheric economic integration and flighty investment will worsen poverty and inequality in Latin America—and drag down U.S. standards of living—unless we can broaden our social contracts to include the "disposable" people who have been left behind.

"America can find its most youthful energies in its most ancient sources," wrote Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano. "The 'primitive cultures' are still dangerous because they have yet to lose their common sense. Common sense that is by natural extension, communal sense." While not offering a universal formula, Oaxaca's old ways of living together provide a precious reserve of experience and point to a path out of the Chiapas conflict.

The stones of México profundo have a history of eloquence. In 1868 in Chiapas, they spoke to a young girl with God's voice and ignited a Maya protest movement. Today, the Hemisphere's leaders and anyone who cares about democracy would do well to listen attentively to the old stones of Monte Albán.

* * *

Peter Costantini writes about Latin America for MSNBC News and Inter Press Service. He volunteered with grassroots organizations in Seattle for eighteen years.

Return to Sincronia