FROM THE FIELD
Vol. 4, No. 4: Winter, 2005
Development Struggles in Oaxaca
by
George D.Colman
(This article reports on “self-government” dynamics in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca and is based in large measure on the observations of the anthropologist Melissa Poe.)
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In June, 2005 the Imparcial newspaper of Oaxaca reported that villages in the mountains north of the capital city had suddenly and dramatically thrown up twelve roadblocks to keep “strangers” out. The undesirables whose entrance would not be permitted were not, however, tourists from the United States or travelers from Mexico City come to the “provinces” for brief contact with their indigenous roots. The strangers whose entry to the mountain vastness of Oaxaca was denied were among the most important institutions of the Mexican state: the National Forestry Service (Conafor), the Environmental and Natural Resources Agency (Semarnat), and the National Federation of Campesinos (CNC).
Spokesmen for the road-blockers explained to reporters that a Presidential decree of September 19, 1961 had given the mountain villages permanent, inviolable rights to the use of their 75,000 acres of woodland. But, they said, the Forestry Service had taken advantage of a worm infestation in part of the forest to move its heavy machinery into the area without village permission. Conafor, it was claimed, was disregarding the pueblos’ traditional rights and increasing the already high levels of tension precipitated by the intention of at least one of the pueblos to secede from the united villages.
The protesters speaking to the press wanted the public to understand that they would do whatever was necessary to protect their legally recognized rights and if blood was shed in the process, the intruders, the outsiders, the strangers would be entirely responsible.
How best to understand these events? And how, if at all, do these roadblocks in the mountains of Oaxaca throw light on three critical and interrelated dynamics: economic development, the conservation of natural resources, and the struggle for democracy?
Melissa Poe is a valuable resource on these issues. An environmental anthropologist, Poe initiated research in these mountain pueblos during 2002, continued her research in 2004, and will conclude a final year of work in 2006. When villages blocked the roads entering their region in June, 2005 to protest the actions of the National Forestry Service, she was there. Her research, which includes a focus on the management of forest resources by indigenous people, will be the basis for a doctoral dissertation at the University of Washington in Seattle and the subject of a book to be shared with the Oaxacan communities involved in her study.
Poe explained that although the issue is legally and historically complicated, there are basically three forms of land tenure in Mexico: 1)private property, 2)public property (national parks, federal hospitals, ports etc), and 3)communal property. The last is of two kinds: a)indigenous communal property established prior to Mexican independence and b)ejido land, a form developed after the Mexican revolution.
The protesters blocking roads in the Sierra Norte were from villages with rights to “communal property”, a form of land rights that is common, legally recognized and honored in Oaxaca but is not common in the majority of Mexican states. Within such a communal area, a member may sell a house or small parcel to another community member but there can be no sale of communal property to those outside the community.
In contrast, ejido communal land rights were modified by the federal government in 1992 with legislation establishing a process by which an ejido can have its status changed so that it may grant members of the ejido individual titles and rights to the land. The individuals granted such property titles may in turn rent, sell or mortgage their property to anyone in or outside the ejido.
The continuous attempts by private corporations to extract forest resources on communal lands as well as the government’s efforts to expand its administrative control over them have caused the Zapotecs to watch carefully for any sign of unwanted intrusion in their territory. So when the Forestry Service rolled heavy machinery into the forest without previous consultation with the villages, it was considered an unacceptable threat that must be challenged. The villagers therefore blocked the roads leading into their territory and forced serious negotiations with the agencies involved. As a result, they won a reaffirmation of certain rights but they also suffered serious economic losses.
These forest communities meet their basic needs by growing corn, beans, potatoes, a few other vegetables and by selling products such as flowers and tree fruit to regional, national and international markets. Recently, the villages have also begun harvesting wild mushrooms in the annual twelve week rainy season of July through September. Mushrooms are part of a suite of natural resources known as “non-timber forest products” (NTFP) which are of social and economic importance. Other valuable NTFPs in the communal forest include resins, herbal plants, soil, charcoal, fuel-wood, and epiphytic bromeliads.
It is estimated that members of the villages who harvest and sell wild mushrooms earn an average of 2500 pesos or $250 dollars a season, a figure representing approximately 15% of annual reported income. Another 15% of the average annual income comes from the production and sale of charcoal.
It was therefore a very serious economic blow to the community when the forestry service, soon after removing its heavy machinery from communal property, denied harvesting permits to the villages for “non-timber forest products” such as mushrooms, charcoal, plants and herbs, an action that threatened to reduce by an estimated 30% the annual income of those involved in such sales. The determination of the community to assert its rights had been countered by a federal agency’s intention to assert its own.
The history of Zapotec struggle to govern their own territory includes a major confrontation with a timber company which was harvesting wood in communal forests. The pueblos had welcomed the company because of the employment provided to the men of the villages but they soon observed that the company was abusing the forest and sharing few of the profits. Appeals to reason, bargaining, and discussions produced no real change so in the late 1970s and early 1980s workers from the villages organized, refused to work, shut all forest operations and expelled the timber company from the region. In the process, they forced a change in federal laws governing timber harvesting and since 1987 the communities have been afforded a greater amount of control in the management of their woodlands.
Given their experience with commercial timber companies, the community decided to construct its own mills for producing lumber and to use environmentally sensitive methods when harvesting trees. As a result, the community now produces “Smart Wood”, a label certifying “community rights-based conservation and sustainable logging”. Somewhat similar to the “organic” label for edible vegetables, this “Smart Wood” is labeled and sold in USA lumber supply stores for slightly higher prices.
Similar disputes about land rights and the use of natural resources are common in Oaxaca and often violent. As a result, villages are acutely aware of the trouble that outsiders can bring to them. I therefore asked Poe if she had any difficulty obtaining permission to conduct her research there.
She pointed out that these villages have centuries of experience dealing with outsiders and are well prepared to judge which strangers might cause harm and which might be able to help in some way. In her case, it was necessary to approach a number of village authorities, explain her research in detail, and answer all questions. At the conclusion of this process she was welcomed, invited to enter, come, go or stay in the villages, talk to anyone who wanted to talk with her, enter their homes when invited, take part in fiestas, participate in daily work and, given her interest in forest resource management, accompany collectors when they harvest the wild mushrooms that are an economically valuable resource to the community.
The villages, she explained, are increasingly and consciously relating to international social and economic systems. As a result, many pueblos described as isolated in the long centuries before automobiles and electricity can no longer be considered remote. The mountain villages she studies are just two hours by car from the capital city and have an almost startling range of interactions with national and international groups. They’ve been dealing with government officials at local and national levels for years. Out-migration began in the 1940s so family connections have spread throughout Mexico and the United States. The Mexican government has provided money for tourist-huts, the World Bank funds forestry projects, NGOs such as the World Wide Fund for Nature and other local community development organizations arrive with knowledge the villages have learned to value. Japanese merchants come through every few days in the rainy season to buy mushrooms, eco-tourism travel agencies promote visits, anthropologists with tape recorders are familiar sights, and increasing numbers of tourists arrive to hike, look for birds, escape the car-choked city and give their lungs exciting moments in the mountain air.
But with all the changes and all the new interactions, these Zapotec villages in the mountains of Oaxaca remain committed to their fundamental values: the self-government of their own lives and land, the sustainable harvesting of forest resources, and resistance to those outsiders whose actions threaten their traditional, communal way of life.
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A MEETING OF MINDS
By
Michele Gibbs
Feeling depressed? downhearted? demoralized? terrorized? isolated?
Take one copy of THE QUOTABLE REBEL (Common Courage Press )
And call me in the morning.
This new anthology of “political quotations for dangerous times” contains wisdom as old as the hills and as current as a sign declaring :ARMS ARE FOR HUGGING. It’s editor, Teishan Latner, a 28-year-old Philadelphia-based activist, takes his responsibility seriously and infuses his choices with all the global awareness and urgent energy of his generation located in the ‘belly of the beast’ in a time of war. A radical egalitarian, he mines this tradition, emphasizing the voices of first world peoples and the living. In this process, on subjects ranging from Technology to Food, Animal Rights to Empire, Work, Life, Death, Law, Revolution, and , as we used to say in SNCC, “the condition of our condition,” spirited exchanges arise.
Imagine a Diner where the morning regulars are W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Arundati Roy, Rigoberta Menchu, M.C. NAS, Helen Keller, Adrienne Rich, Subcomandante Marcos, Emma Goldman, Will Rogers and Aime Cesaire. As you open the door, they are speaking of war.:
WEBD: “We are peddling freedom to the world and daring them to oppose it and bribing them kindly to accept it and dropping death on those who refuse it.”
ARoy: “Among the myriad freedoms claimed by the US government are the freedom to murder, annihilate and dominate other people. The freedom to sponsor despots and dictators across the world. The freedom to train, arm, and shelter terrorists. The freedom to topple democratically elected governments…..and most terrible of all, the freedom to commit these crimes against humanity in the name of “justice,” “righteousness”, and ‘freedom.’
MLK: “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
AC: “ A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.”
WR: “You can’t say civilization isn’t advancing: in every war they kill you in a new way.”
NAS: “Political thugs in shark suits persuade us to pull triggers in army boots…”
Subc.M: The entire world is in dispute between two projects of globalization. Globalization from above which globalizes conformity, cynicism, stupidity, war, destruction, death and forgetting; and globalization from below which globalizes rebellion, hope, creativity, intelligence, imagination, life, memory, and the construction of a world with room for many worlds.”
ARich: “If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live with dignity and hope, you must begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You must build from the ground up.”
MX: “If you’re not ready to die for it, put the word ‘freedom’ out of your vocabulary.”
When the subject shifts to “The Color of Justice,” they are joined by James Baldwin, Michele Gibbs, and Paul Robeson:
JB: “The Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live.”
MG: “in how many back alleys, open fields, dark parks
Did our bodies crumple, separate, flake
From the tar, feathers, knife, rifle, rope, and flame
While they portrayed us as the beasts
Oblivious to pain…”
PR: The leaders of this country can call out the army and navy to stop the railroad workers and stop the maritime workers; why can’t they stop the lynchers?”
Sonia Sanchez and Cherrie Moraga, Black Hawk, and Chiefs Crazy Horse and Seattle among others all come in then on this common theme:
“They tell us they want to civilize us. They lie. They want to kill us.”
Then Sojourner Truth walks in with two new recruits. She says: “America owes to my people some of the dividends. She can afford to pay, and she must pay. I shall make them understand that there is a debt to the Negro people which they can never repay. At least, then, they must make amends.”
…and Twiya Autry and Walidah Imarisha chime in with: “Because I have the power to resurrect the past, train it like a pit bull and sic it on your ass!”
…at which point Zora Neale Hurston emerges from the kitchen to “grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear.” Seeing some ‘homies’ at another table, they join Mother Jones, Pearl Cleage, Barbara Smith, Sheila Robotham. Mary Brave Bird, Audre Lorde, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Miriam Makeba, Cecilia Rodriguez and Gloria Anzaldua all riffin’ on “Ain’t I A Woman.”
From a booth in the corner, Vietnamese Buddhist educator Thich Nhat Hanh observes:
“By taking a look at your anger it can be transformed into the kind of energy you need/
…a flower, though beautiful, will become compost someday, but if you know how to transform the compost back into the flower, then you don’t have to worry.”
By lunchtime, Rita Mae Brown, Sarah Jones, Dick Gregory, and Not4Prophet come in, working on a new routine. Anyway, this café is open 24/7 with people you need to meet holding forth on every topic under heaven. The musical contributions are cool, too, from Woodie Guthrie to Horace Tapscott, Bob Dylan to Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder to Sun Ra, Ani DiFranco to The COUP. Just choose your favorite groove.
And check out the walls. They are peppered with an array of graphics: cartoons, mural details, paintings, photos and collages which add their own commentary.
You won’t always agree with these people; they don’t always agree with each other. But their differences are tactical, accumulated experience pointing unswervingly toward popular power, communitarian values, and the mutual accountability that implies. It is a group in which I am honored to be counted a member by my actions over time. If you know people who should also be here, the editor invites you to include them. The more, the better.
As Teishan Latner says, this book was created to fill a gap and be of use. It does more. It galvanizes those of us committed to social transformation to enter the breach, once again. It testifies to our common courage over the ‘long haul.’ It makes the Movement “irresistible.” It reveals clearly, in the words of Mumia Abdul Jamal, that
“the fact that I write at all reveals the utter failure of their intimidation tactics, --as does the fact that you read.” And finally, in the closing quotation, for Teishan Latner’s generation and mine, too, it reminds us:
“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” John Lennon
At the beginning of this review I suggested you take one copy of this book and call me in the morning. Better still, get two, pass one on, and call me next year after you’ve absorbed one of its 365 pages every day and begun to act on the truths contained here.
La lucha sigue.
ALL ROYALTIES FROM THIS BOOK ARE DONATED TO SUPPORT OF SOCIAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES.
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GRAPHICS from
THE QUOTABLE REBEL
