greenwashing and managing focos rojos in rural mexico
TRANSCRIPT
Greenwashing and managing focos rojosin rural Mexico
Ricardo F. Macip
Published online: 27 February 2014
� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Twenty years ago, while preparing and applying for graduate school abroad, I
worked for the Mexican (federal) Social Development Ministry (SEDESOL). A
rather new super-ministry—established by the Salinas Administration—it concen-
trated the duties and mandates of former agencies, but no one came second to the
president’s pet project: the National Program of Solidarity. Imagined to be a direct
link between him (as person and persona) and the poorer sectors of society, it was a
thrust of initiatives at simultaneously breaking through any political-bureaucratic
obstacle while depoliticizing itself in the process. A lot has been written about
‘‘Solidarity,’’ Salinas and neoliberalism, but I want to underline one particular
feature: The program’s directorate and higher cadres were staffed mostly with what
I would later learn to identify in the USA as ‘‘progressives1.’’ Demographically, it
was the consolidation in power for a lot of 68ers (sesentayocheros)2 including those
who were part of THE student movement, and its aftermath as unionists, guerrillas
and activists. Unlike other federal agencies, this one did not recruit hardcore
technocrats. Like many of my schooled contemporaries familiar with the 68
generation’s legacy, I was still surprised that the lingo we used when dealing with
bosses and liaisons stationed in Mexico City was Guevarista adapted for
development: ‘‘focos rojos,’’3 ‘‘base-communities’’ and ‘‘rural proletariat.’’ As I
was part of the infantry on the front, those occasions were rare and at random but I
R. F. Macip (&)
Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, Puebla, Puebla, Mexico
e-mail: [email protected]
1 ‘‘…those who propagate the semblance of liberation which only covers up the reality of capitalist
perversion…’’ (Zizek 2012: 18). Even though this is Zizek’s definition of ‘‘scroundels,’’ I find it more
than apt for ‘‘progressives.’’2 Mostly but not restricted to those who were students (high school, professional and university) and
active politically in 1968 in Mexico.3 Literally, red iridescent points—meaning to locate and focus a specific plan for its expansion over space
and time—also referred as ‘‘foquismo’’ in other parts of Latin America.
123
Dialect Anthropol (2014) 38:95–104
DOI 10.1007/s10624-014-9332-7
had to prepare some of the less groomed troops to speak properly. Eventually, the
Zapatista Uprising and its negotiated contention would confine this dialect to its
shadows given the enlightened force of multiculturalism and indigenous rights.
Two books deal directly with the unintended effects of specific attempts to
manage rural poverty and its contradictions. Stealing Shining Rivers by Molly
Doane (The University of Arizona Press 2012) confronts the making of a newly
perceived region to fight over in the border between the states of Oaxaca and
Chiapas while Multitud y distopıa by Luıs Vazquez Leon (Universidad Nacional
Autonoma de Mexico 2010) takes issue with the rise of an intelligentsia in the state
of Michoacan and the alleged struggle to represent its indigenous populations.
Reading them together, we learn about twisted and complicated political processes
that attract a lot of participants and considerable energies in multilayered fields of
power. We also learn that it is untenable to take a correct side in those histories, as
there are no clear or permanent lines to guide us other than the superficial and fictive
narratives of the media and participants. Back in those days while working with a
special team made up with young professionals from different states across the
southeast, there was an apocryphal rumor that a couple of colleagues were raped in
the area where the states of Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas converge. We could not
determine whether it happened in the Uxpanapa or the Chimalapas, much less grasp
what those names meant by themselves or to the people who live in the region, but it
was clear that el campo4 was not what it used to be. ‘‘Whomever has an anus knows
fear’’5 but we could not know the extent of that until the years to come. Now, thanks
to Doane, we learn about the making and unmaking of a microregion to intervene in
under a green flag on the one hand, and to Vazquez Leon, we can appreciate how
politically profitable those focos rojos have become.
Stealing Shinning Rivers
Molly Doane’s ethography on the Chimalapas is a very straightforward exercise in
political ecology on a highly contested and debated marginal microregion located
on the border between two of the poorest states in Mexico. Even though the naming
of this microregion is rather new, its marginal integration to Mexico is not and what
has changed overtime are the specific forms of intervention by different projects of
empire and state formation. The author traces out the region through different
archives from the colonial period with their encomiendas and repartimientos, when
Indian Republics assumed their distinctive contours and features rooted to the land,
to the different land grabbing schemas of the liberal period and to the failures of the
revolutionary Agrarian Law for simply setting definitive boundaries among agrarian
communities and between them and newcomers. This lack of effective forms of
4 The countryside: not as a descriptive or analytical category but as a political representation in which
simpler folk lived in agrarian communities abiding the Agrarian Law and based their interactions on
peasant codes of reciprocity and solidarity.5 Quoted from Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro’s Kenote address ‘‘Immanence and Fear, Or, The
Enemy First’’ to the CASCA Anual Meeting in Toronto, 2007.
96 R. F. Macip
123
mediation and negotiation between comuneros6 and different settlers shapes her
ethnographic present as yet another set of neoliberal contradictions: those to be
found in conservation.
The critical approach to the production of space and landscapes is a thread to
discuss theory, different state projects and the new contradictions added to an
already conflictive disagreement on how two former Indian Republics—turned into
Oaxacan municipalities of its Isthmus region—confront the constant invasion to its
borders by ranchers, loggers and, nowadays, environmentalists. Today, most people
who work in the Chimalapas disassociate a long history of agrarian conflicts from
the imperative for conservation. Accounted for by Doane is how this has come to be
and to what extent the later is effectively erasing the former from conventional and
electronic media (and scholarly work as well). Ethnographic potential for a
politicized production of knowledge has in this book a prime example on how to
approach contradiction, conflict and defeat. Beyond the glossy propaganda about
jaguars, orchids, butterflies and wilderness on which international donor founda-
tions, imperial agencies and federal and state Mexican ministries have agreed on,
there is a history of exploitation and immiseration worth reading and debating.
The Mexican turn toward neoliberalism is agreed to have happened during the
year 1982 after a major debt crisis, but it is until the period in between 1989 and
1992 when it passes from emergent to dominant. There is no doubt, then, that it was
during the Salinas administration or sexenio,7 as Mexicans prefer to call it, when it
let its full force be felt throughout a series of structural reforms and profound
changes. The promise of social justice through ‘‘revolutionary nationalism’’ ended
there. What would come next depended on how and under which banners different
organized groups fought.
Within the Chimalapas and the state of Oaxaca, different subjects were mobilized
in order to shape state politics. The organic link between state and civil society is
clear not only by the reiterated appearance of the very same social actors in different
roles according to regions and projects, but also through the same invention of
‘‘civil society’’ as the privileged arena where to solve contradictions. Maderas del
Pueblo is the main subject we get to know in the ethnography, not only through their
labors but also by their protracted conflict against almost every other organization
and initiative. Facing the profound structural changes that the Salinas agrarian
counter-reform and the new administrative structure offered, this organization tried
to seize the opportunity to redraw the landscape and its legibility as a Campesino
Ecological Reserve.
The launching and development of a Campesno Ecological reserve demanded
negotiations with municipalities, state government agencies, federal ministries and
international donor foundations, as well as extension work and organization of the
grassroots in the boondocks. Its ethnographic reconstruction allows us to appreciate
the endurance of agrarian conflicts and the imposition of green-coated languages
and agendas. Inexorably Maderas del Pueblo lost the fight against much stronger
6 Those entitled to and derived rights in an agrarian community of communal land tenure.7 The 6-year period that the president and governors hold office and for which there is no consecutive
re-election.
Greenwashing and managing focos rojos in rural Mexico 97
123
and better-armed foes associated within the state government, which used the
‘‘progressive’’ law of usos y costumbres8 (see Recondo 2007 for this form of
indirect colonial rule) for indigenous municipalities and politically motivated
assassinations—among others—to undermine their efforts, scare out federal and
international agencies and appropriate their resources. Today, there must be several
‘‘independent’’ and newer NGO-led initiatives for conservation within the contours
previously agreed on by big business and states within NAFTA. Each of them ought
to be more ‘‘professional’’ and more specific than Maderas del Pueblo in their
purview and expertise, each of them weaker and more accommodating to the donor
community and governments. This specific history of defeat by attrition, fragmen-
tation and terror is important and worth knowing precisely because based on it
Doane makes a case for ‘‘accumulation by conservation.’’
Accumulation by conservation is more that the crafty use of words on the now
well-established debate about accumulation by dispossession. It actually pushes the
debate on neoliberal conservation to more specific and finer grained ethnography by
placing it within worldwide developmental schemes and by embedding it within the
political process of decentralized authoritarianism in Mexico. The Chimalapas not
only went from being a couple of colonial Indian Republics (of people recognized as
Zoques), which survived as municipalities to the ethnographic present, to become a
perceived region of a specific wilderness within the always already conflictive
Tehuantepec Isthmus. The jaguar became a ‘‘flag’’ or ‘‘umbrella’’ eco-fetish under
which almost everyone is persuaded of the need for ‘‘ecological corridors’’ while
people who spoke around a dozen different languages come to identify, militantly,
as Chimas, turning an old derogatory nickname into an endearing term of strategic
essentialism among cadres working for a common goal. Outsiders to the zone come
to identify it not so much as a microregion within the Isthmus or as part of the
Juchitan district (which together with Matıas Romero has a well-known reputation
for filth in the broadest sense of the word), but as a specific landscape with endemic
inhabitants: There jaguar is king of the forest, making the Chimalapas an island of
wilderness among an almost wretched Central American scenario. Beyond the
contradiction between agrarian struggle and environmental conservation, we learn
that the organizing principle is accumulation by conservation in tandem with
decentralized authoritarianism.
Among the unintended consequences of Salinas’ neoliberal reforms, the agrarian
counter-reform meant losing the patron-client grip over peasants and rural dwellers.
Rural folk allegiances could not be taken for granted and Oaxacan public
intellectuals with technocrats and professional politicians responded to the danger of
free elections among clients cut lose with an indigenous political law of ‘‘usos y
costumbres.’’ This empty signifier was filled with all sorts of coercive practices
within a continuous transference of obligations from the federal government to state
and municipal levels in tandem with the subcontracting of services from the state to
8 ‘‘Common law’’ for municipalities, written by cosmopolitan intellectuals and local politicians but
justified as the collective will of ‘‘millennial’’ consuetudinary practices of allegedly pre-colonial
indigenous origin. Even though most of the ‘‘indigenous’’ features correspond to the colonial period and
most of the municipal territorial division dates back to the revolutionary period, the relevance of an
‘‘indigenous actor’’ is a neoliberal byproduct of electoral struggles in recent sexenios.
98 R. F. Macip
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‘‘civil society’’ through NGOs. This effectively reorganized a once idealized
pyramidal state-party structure into a network of decentralized chiefdoms to be
ruthlessly ruled. The Chimalapas is paramount among them, and this would not
have happened without marrying environmentalism and development. Nor would
we be able to debate it without Stealing Shining Rivers.
Accumulation by conservation is pork and barrel business for the USAID, WWF
and its Mexican clients in governments and NGOs, with the surplus value of
‘‘greening backwardness’’ (121). The backwardness in this case refers less to the
Chimas themselves and more clearly to the political forms of dominance that have
come to prevail within the democratic transition. The homicidal violence upon
which conservation work unfolds in a decentralized way to the point that nobody is
clear about what corresponds to whom but power remains tied to the ability,
literally, to bleed out the opposition. Some of the public intellectuals advocate both
the indigenized law of usos y costumbres and the imposition of conservation areas
as yet another expression of non-Western indigenous autonomy. This authoritarian
cover-up is what passes as progressivism in Mexico and elsewhere: the narcissistic
feel-good of the ruling alliance of hegemonic classes, whose lead in conservation is
canonized in spectacles such as the rainforest displayed in the Academy of Sciences
Museum in San Francisco, where Doane starts and ends her critical account.
Multitud y distopıa
Focos rojos has proven to be quite an enduring political term in Mexico. Originated
in Guerrilla warfare (Guevara 1961) and appropriated by development planners and
analyst alike, it refers both to the identification of problematic issues and to the
tailor-made answers that governments provide to some of those affected by each of
them. More often than not they tend to appear within indigenous regions. During the
last 20 years regardless of the root causes, they are subsumed to a romantic
narrative: the struggle for autonomy. Luıs Vazquez Leon has been studying
Michoacan for a long time and has written ethnographies on the Tarascan Plateau
and Cheran, the most recent foco rojo for revolutionary tourists in which a de facto
law of usos y costumbres, cloned from the Oaxacan model has been imposed.
Multitud y distopıa is a collection of his polemical essays debating technocratic
bureaucracies and an emergent indigenous intelligentsia over their agreement on
how to administer and profit from ethnically marketed focos rojos.
Formed within the vicissitudes of Indigenism, the founding debate of anthro-
pology and social thought in Mexico, the author traces the changes that it underwent
during the twentieth century in order to concentrate on the latest transmutation:
from a critical engagement with and against the state, to the market management
and sanctioning of cultural differences given the relative abundance of funds and
projects to profit from. Two debates keep the articles bound: How many indigenous
people are in Mexico, according to the most sophisticated demographic and
anthropological debates in different census on the one hand, and what is the best
form to refer to the indigenous population in Michoacan, according to the situated
knowledge that their leadership claims to hold, on the other hand.
Greenwashing and managing focos rojos in rural Mexico 99
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To give an account of how many persons are indigenous in Mexico is eminently a
political assertion that would unequivocally be rejected, on the grounds that it is too
little for some and too much for others. Either on absolute or relative numbers, the
reaction is bound to be the same. However, national censuses and other samples
ought to provide approximates for the public policies that are allegedly designed for
them, the allocation of different funds for specific projects and, more fundamentally,
in order to keep the collective misrepresentation alive: Mexico was not a settler
colony, and therefore, its plural composition as a nation is grafted on the trunk of
indigenous ethnic groups that endured colonialism and further assimilation policies.
Without a sizable and strong indigenous population, the fatherland is at risk, as then
it would not be different from other predatory and soulless societies North, South
and overseas. Surprisingly enough, in the preparation for the National Census that is
undertaken every 10 years, demographers, economists, sociologists and anthropol-
ogists among other scientists, scholars and political forces debate how to formulate
questions and which political filters to use in order to be as accurate as possible to
the theoretical state of the art on ethnic difference and recognition. This is relevant
because race, genetic markers and phenotype are universally rejected within
Mexican official positions (while pretty much alive on the streets and in common
sense) to determine indigenous belonging. In the past, first language or mother
tongue took its place as the only irrefutable cultural artifact and marker on which to
prove its precolonial origin, resilience and endurance throughout colonial and
independent history as well as current vitality. Linguistic complications are well
known, and it lost its unquestionable character bringing a new series of criteria. The
results in 2000 were not those that anybody expected because some speakers of
indigenous languages decided to identify as non-indigenous, whereas a considerable
portion who has lost or had no chance to learn it at home asserted themselves as
such. The nightmarish scenario for technocrats, too avid to cut funds to the bones
given the resulting numbers, versus advocates for indigenous autonomy crying foul
play provides a very animated comedy of errors.
Eventually, different governmental agencies made up their own estimates and
fought for their share of the public budget and client groups with them. Something
was new, though, and that ‘‘thing’’ is the focus for the author and his provocative
challenges.
Based on extensive ethnographic research not only on the Tarascan Plateau but
also in the barracks inhabited by daily laborers on some of the most prosperous
agribusiness districts, as well as the corridors of higher education institutions, the
author presses a latent contradiction in Michoacan. Whereas it is undeniable that
education policies, extension developmental work and the boom of civil society
have shaped a strident community of alleged indigenous intellectuals, who demand
to be called Purepechas (or similar variations based on the P’urhepecha language)
rather than Tarascos, and to be recognized as representatives of an imagined
P’urhepecha nation and people by governments and society in Michoacan, Mexico
and the world—for they claim to be their true leaders—there is an overwhelming
process of immiseration and indigenization on an ethnically segmented agricultural
labor market. Even though we can expect all sorts of schism, factionalism and petty
politics common throughout the left in social movements among the P’urhepecha
100 R. F. Macip
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Nation leadership, their recognition by different governments and foundations is
ongoing, on one end. They are the effective name lenders for any new venture that
has to pander to the empty signifiers of the ‘‘indigenous,’’ ‘‘feminine’’ and
‘‘environment’’ to be filled with specific capitalist projects. On the other end, much
larger, unorganized and discontinuous contingents of indigenous workers are over
exploited by agribusiness, segregated within towns and discriminated by almost
everybody fortunate enough to avoid those jobs. The author describes and analyzes
in detail the dire living conditions in barracks, the many instances of abuse at work
in the fields, governmental neglect as well as the vibrant and changing use of
P’urehpecha linguistic variations in relation to different attachments to ethnic
identities.
The differences among such disparate subjects are clearly class based: some go to
school full time, up to college and graduate school, and from among them, an
imaginary P’urhepecha leadership is recruited; others march everyday to the fields
alternating home and barracks in agribusiness districts, having their citizen’s right
violated every day and cannot be recognized as anything but ‘‘targets’’ of social
development intervention. A more powerful political dispositive orders their
differences in ‘‘ethnic levels of identification’’ and tries to manage them
accordingly. As we can expect, the Mexican federal government devotes programs
and funds for each. While not covering the totality of the population, it claims to
attend to the needs of daily laborers (using still the old structures of PRONASOL)
while subsidizing agribusiness instead in one case. For the other case, it promotes
bilingual education and the savaging of indigenous languages through atomized
programs providing more or less monies according to political moments. The state
government of Michoacan has had more focos rojos than it is able to handle, so
every alliance it makes with one group will be decried by others. International donor
foundations are rather skittish to act in the state but will be able to go only through
the indigenous leadership, regardless of the divorce between masses and vanguard.
Of all the documented indictments that one can find in the book, this is the most
damaging: What has replaced the always-problematic indigenist action is a model
for corrupt business management. Phony leaderships are too avid to be brought in
and bought by governments for the enactment of ethnic differences in civil society
while making good businesses.
Milking money by representing indigenous causes while being able to force a
public recognition of indigenous groups may not be so bad given the historical
oblivion of assimilation and mestizaje as a national project. After all that is what
‘‘multicultural neoliberalism’’ (Hale 2002) is all about. Things are less simple,
though. Not very different from the Chimalapas case, the Agrarian Law in
Michoacan was consistently unable to establish certitude on communal lands of
neighboring agrarian communities. The overlapping of this dominion with the other
two (ejido9 and private) legally valid property regimes in Mexico under the
revolutionary period produced a multitude of conflicts between municipalities and
9 Land grants issued by the revolutionary state to be worked collectively. They differ from communal
lands because, among other things, the origin of these later has to be found in royal grants by the Crown
during the colony.
Greenwashing and managing focos rojos in rural Mexico 101
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within them. The 1992 agrarian counter-reform and following governmental
program to regularize land tenure and possession10 have been a failure in
Michoacan. More often than not, there is a de facto invasion by agribusiness,
ranches and also by small groups of loggers and settlers. The ferocity of the
confrontations gives foco rojo its true meaning, and the uses of ‘‘pueblo originario’’
(original people), and associated rhetorical arsenal, by the indigenous intelligentsia
are used less against expanding agribusiness and more toward weaker and also
likely indigenous populations. Vazquez Leon discusses in detail why the state of
affairs in Michoacan is properly a multitude of peoples and conflicts redrawing their
ethnic and territorial boundaries with blood, contributing to the inscription of a
dystopia in the ongoing Mexican war onto itself.
Huis clos
I started this review backtracking to the Salinas sexenio as a way to reflect on the
effects that the neoliberal structural reforms have had, which does not mean that
subsequent presidential administrations, nor state level gubernatorial policies, are
irrelevant. Just the opposite: the presidential sexenios of Zedillo, Fox and Calderon
and those of governors Ramırez, Carrasco, Murat and Ruız in Oaxaca like those of
Chavez, Tinoco, Cardenas and Godoy in Michoacan for the approximated
corresponding periods, struggled to deepen, ameliorate or simply to adjust to the
reforms and their consequences. They did it necessarily within a political process in
which party coalitions come to share power and redefine what it meant to be ‘‘left,’’
‘‘center’’ and ‘‘right’’ in politics. The much-celebrated Mexican transition toward
democracy in 2000 meant to practice at the national level what was allowed in the
states since the early 1990s, namely that different parties and party coalitions can
alternate in power. This ‘‘functional democracy’’ has been lazily pandered at home
and abroad as the late but unavoidable complement to the radical reforms of Salinas:
There cannot be democracy without free market, nor Perestroika without Glasnost.
With Zedillo’s sexenio as a hiatus, the Mexican case is yet another happy story of
the globalized family of nations.
Of course things have been different. The structural reforms affected all the
country, which reacted differently according to regional fields of power, within
which democracy came to mean very different things. The two books under review
help us to critically engage the last 20–25 years (a whole generation) in Mexico by
looking at the renewed forms of decentralized authoritarianism and the homicidal
force negotiating the Mexican version of Perestroika–Glasnot. Oaxaca and
Michoacan are almost daily on the national news and maybe every other week in
the international pages of the North Atlantic. They seldom achieve this for other
reasons than killings, armed violence and criminal activities. I won’t attempt to
summarize here what is happening in each state because nobody really knows for
10 PROCEDE (Programa de Certificacion de Derechos Ejidales y Titulacion de Solares Urbanos), a
certification program of land grant rights for the countryside and the issuing of urban lots.
102 R. F. Macip
123
sure. I have recently lived by periods up to a year in a rural district in each,
experiencing that acute fear and uncertainty are Real and part of daily life.
Over the failure of the revolutionary Agrarian Law, which was not able to set
clear and agreed boundaries in the countryside and, more often than not, exploited
the promise to do so as political bargain, the neoliberal counter-reform made things
worse by shutting down the possibility of expanding land grants and the cancellation
of most state subsidies. This led to an all too imperfect market to act, based on force,
as an ungloved hand. The violence that has engulfed Mexico, which is myopically
credited exclusively to drug production and transport, has been inflicted among
neighboring agrarian communities with gusto. The encroaching of lands and
opportunities by capitalist ventures unfolded with different political support at state
and federal levels, but the most gruesome acts tend to be visited among neighbors.
Vigilante violence and permanent patrolling—redrawing territorial boundaries
given from ‘‘immemorial’’ times or ‘‘millennia’’ to conflicting agrarian communi-
ties—and settlers are the vehicle to even scores on death counts. Each of those
killings is politically grounded on local grievances and more often than not backed
by political parties in a wider field. Among the most commonly invoked legitimacy
is precisely the defense of communal forests. Each paramilitary force—under
indigenous symbols—sanctions its authoritarian interpretation of the usos y
costumbres law and is authorized to kill, maim and intimidate anyone who is in
their way.
There is no incontestable evidence on the number of killings after president
Calderon started his war on Mexico, nor can we be assured that the numbers are
decreasing, much less assume that all started and ended with his obsession to play
the role of a warlord. Reading Doane and Vazquez Leon, however, we learn about
that ‘‘capillarity’’ of power that post-structuralists like to invoke, and the changing
structures that it contributes to shape, in this case, the emergence of a new political
field from revolutionary Agrarian Law to neoliberal usos y costumbres. The core of
the ethnographic present in both books corresponds to the sexenios of Fox and
Calderon. In the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas as well as in Guerrero, which is
located in between them, political schism and armed vigilantism rose preeminently
to the point of breaking down any claim to a legitimate monopoly of violence by the
state forces. I suspect that when the authors sent their manuscripts to the presses,
neither of them wanted to augur what was coming, but they somehow do that. For
most people living in rural Mexico, like their informants and associates, there is
nowhere else to go and no easy way out of the current war.
References
Doane, Molly. 2012. Stealing shining rivers. Agrarian conflict, market logic and conservation in a
Mexican forest. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Guevara, Ernesto Che. 1961. 1997 Guerra de guerrillas. Hondarribia: Hiru.
Hale, Charles. 2002. Does multiculturalism menace? Governance, cultural rights and the politics of
identity in Guatemala. Journal of Latin American Studies 34: 485–524.
Greenwashing and managing focos rojos in rural Mexico 103
123
Recondo, David. 2007. La polıtica del gatopardo. Multiculturalismo y democracia en Oaxaca. DF:
CIESAS.
Leon, V.L. 2010. Multitud y distopıa, Ensayos sobre la nueva condicion etnica en Michoacan. Mexico:
UNAM.
Zizek, Slavoj. 2012. Less than nothing: Hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. NY: Verso.
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