msc thesis rural development sociology
TRANSCRIPT
MSc Thesis Rural Development Sociology
AUTONOMY BUILDING IN MODERN
INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES.
THE CASE OF THE AUTONOMOUS MUNICIPALITY IN SAN JUAN
COPALA, MEXICO.
August, 2008
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MSc programme
Management of Agroecological Knowledge and Social Change
Specialisation
Rural Development Sociology
Name of student
Víctor Manuel Mendoza García
Name of Supervisor(s)
Dr. Alberto Arce
Thesis code:
E0430
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Contents
Presentation ................................................................................................................. 7
Introduction .................................................................................................................. 9
Chapter I
UNDERSTANDING THE COMMUNITY ......................................................................... 13
Geography and Population ..................................................................................... 13
A Bit of History ........................................................................................................ 20
Chapter II
METHODOLOGY .......................................................................................................... 22
The Case Study ........................................................................................................ 22
Unity of Analysis ..................................................................................................... 22
Importance of the Case Study ................................................................................ 22
Research Questions ................................................................................................ 23
Sampling ................................................................................................................. 23
Data Collection........................................................................................................ 24
Analysis of Data ...................................................................................................... 25
Chapter III
FROM VIOLENCE TO AUTONOMY; the Drama of the Triqui Society .......................... 27
Triquis: a violent race? ............................................................................................ 27
Chapter IV
LIFE CYCLE ................................................................................................................... 37
POLITICAL ORGANISATION ......................................................................................... 46
Chapter V
THE TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY OF SAN JUAN COPALA ...................................... 52
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Origin of the Diaspora ............................................................................................. 52
The Path to the North ............................................................................................. 54
Encounters of the Triqui Nation .............................................................................. 61
Chapter VI
THE EXTERNAL SITUATION .......................................................................................... 66
Social movements ................................................................................................... 69
Arenas for Autonomy .............................................................................................. 73
CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................. 78
Glossary of abbreviations ............................................................................................ 82
Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 83
Appendix I .................................................................................................................... 86
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Presentation
The present is a case study of a very interesting indigenous community in Oaxaca
Mexico. I have been working on indigenous communities for almost ten years since I
graduated from college in Mexico City. The diversity of the indigenous cultures, their
struggles, resistances and symbolic beliefs are embedded in their everyday life. It is
wondering how many forms they found out to survive and make a living in this
changing world. Development policies changes and adjust to the new theories and
political establishment; so far the voice of the subjects of development has been
ignored or repressed. However the indigenous communities has learnt to deal with
the policies and incorporated official discourses in their cumulus of experiences and
knowledge, which has been an important element in the evolution of their
traditions.
After the demise of the cold war, ‘the end of the history’ and the idea of the
world as a ‘global village’, drew a landscape of a non-differentiated society regulated
for the ups and downs of the free market. The modern state-nations embody that
idea in themselves since the binomial character of nation and state tends to
legitimise the construction of bounded systems of homogenous situations which
may be manipulated, shaped and re-designed according to a teleological ‘ideal’
about how the society ought be rather that understand how it is. Paradoxically, the
modern communication, the wider access to technology and information produce
the rough material to create contest proposal in multiple and unpredictable ways.
In Mexico, since the upraising of the rebellion of indigenous peoples in the
southern state of Chiapas on January 1 of 1994 (the same day the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect), the indigenous peoples have been
present in the political national agenda.. The upcoming years, indigenous peoples
experienced intensification of the poverty on one hand and escalation of the
repression of the state on the other. In their aim to resist, indigenous peoples and
their political organisation has been seeking a way of self-determination and voice
since the democratic system of political parties does not regard alternative ways of
organisation apart of the established modes.
Oaxaca State in Mexico is one of the poorest of the country and plenty of
conflicts. At the same time Oaxaca is considered a multicultural state since the
number of the indigenous peoples that inhabit in the state many centuries before
the Spaniards arrived. Every indigenous community has a big sense of identity which
they continue until now. Isolated in their communities, indigenous peoples has been
able to preserve most of their ancient traditions, beliefs, form of organisations and
way of live. Most of them use their traditional methods to choose their local
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authorities which govern under the principles of ‘usos y costumbres’ which is the
system of rules and regulations based in the tradition which is passed down from
generation to generation.
Nowadays, the global policies concerning rural development go more into
diversification of the economic activities in the rural areas such as rural tourism, and
commoditisation of the rural life ‘packed’ in folklore which denies the importance of
the food security in rural villages. Nevertheless, under uneven circumstances of the
global market, communities have left behind the agriculture production and they
have to survive by diverse ways.
The Triqui peoples are one more amongst the diverse indigenous groups in
Oaxaca, but its history is a chronicle of marginalisation, discrimination and violence.
Triquis lost the best part of their land and then they refuge in the mountains
surrounded by other indigenous and non-indigenous communities who exploited
and discriminated them for ages. Violence and political control has created a
symbiosis that transformed the communitarian life in a sort of ‘lumpenindigenous’
groups without an own ideology and coercively controlled by their leaders.
The triqui region holds an official ranking of ‘high marginalisation’; as a
consequence, Triqui communities are considered target groups for governmental
social programs. Every year, new programs and projects are applied in the region
without any improvement in quality of life of the Triquis; indeed they left the
agriculture production many years ago. Hence, development policies seem not to
have sense for Triquis who survive from the scarce remittances of migrants and from
the even scarcer benefits that their leaders get from the government. Thus triqui
leaders have become experts in the use of discourse and manipulation in order to
effectively negotiate with the government.
This thesis pretends to identify the causes that led the violence and how it
shapes the social life of Triquis taking in account that the Triqui peoples are a
community that extends out of the Triqui homeland. Nevertheless, The Triqui
peoples are not a passive entity; they experience social changes, assimilate and/or
contest them. The recent proposal of the Triquis in order to create an autonomous
municipality caught my attention as an interesting counter-tendency which in
certain way draws an alternative way to do politics by claiming the right of self-
determination as the base for development.
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Introduction
“The first day of 2007, Oaxaca woke up with a new municipality: San Juan Copala. It
is not another municipality amongst the 570 of this state; it is an autonomous one,
like those that indigenous peoples are building in several parts of the country as a
way to defend their rights and to construct their future”(F. López, 2007a).
The region of Copala in the state of Oaxaca Mexico is the homeland of the
Triqui ethnic group. For non-Triquis, Copala represents a mysterious region where
law and human rights do not exist. The popular stories about Triquis describe them
as violent and a ‘semi-wild tribe’. People from outside the area are afraid to go into
it: “it is dangerous, they kill” people say. It is not strange that people have created
this illusion, because this is the way that Triquis show themselves off. Like Krohn-
Hansen says, violence can be 'horribly sensual and visible'(Krohn-Hansen, 1994).
Indeed, Copala has a long history of internal violence. During the last decade it has
mainly been between two antagonistic groups: the Movement of Unity and Triqui
Struggles (MULT) and the Unity of Social Welfare of the Triqui Region (UBISORT);
each group control one part of the region. Violence has been embedded in the
people and transformed their habits, livelihoods and everyday life insofar as the
region has turned from an agricultural based system into one whose economy is
based upon both remittances from a number of migrants and governmental social
programs reached through political organisation.
There is not a convincing explanation about the origin of the violence but as
a matter of fact, it has been present over the course of the history of the Triquis.
According to Malkki assumptions, there is interplay between history and violence; in
other words, the spiral of violence is based on the production of ideas about past
events and experienced and remembered violence; it means that violence has a
revolving character(Krohn-Hansen, 1997). In actuality, in Copala the old affronts
remain in the memory of the families and pass down from generation to generation;
as a result, Triquis trigger a chain of vendettas which are not easy to stop. Nowadays
violence is embedded with political struggles which make it visible as a spectacle of
the mass media. Rupesinghe points out that modernity exacerbate violence and
with all its paraphernalia excite the myths.
Riches, cited by Krohn Hansen (Krohn-Hansen, 1994), considers that violence
can be suitable for practical and symbolic purposes, in other words violence “can be
effective, both as means of change and of dramatizing the importance of central
cultural ideas. These sentences regard the instrumental application of violence in
order to legitimize the social action. Riches suggest that the study of violence must
cover the revision of the ‘dynamic triangle of violence’ comprised by perpetrator,
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victim and witnesses in order to find out “the potency of violence as action and
image”. In Copala the instrumental use of violence legitimises the power of the
organisations in the territory; no wonder that political organisation has its origins in
the defence of the historical territory of the Triquis; the local history illustrates the
territorial conformation of the political organisations; communities and political
organisations are overlapped in spatial patterns. It means that the influence of
political organisations cover whole communities in a given territory. Like other
examples described by López y Rivas, violence in Copala has been a form of
relationship by having institutionalised as a mode of interlocution between the
government and society (Gabriel & López y Rivas, 2005).
Violence has caused many people to leave the region on behalf of their own
safety; and Triquis in exile have begun to question the political organisation and the
violence. It is evident that the new generation of Triquis are looking forward a way
to pacify the region and put an end to the vendettas among families. At the same
time, in the region, a democratic faction from MULT separated and created the
Independent Movement of Unity and Triqui Struggles (MULT-I). MULT-I embraced a
progressive discourse and gained popularity amongst the indigenous and leftist
organisations in Oaxaca. In 2006 MULT-I became member of an umbrella
organisation called APPO (Popular Assembly of Peoples from Oaxaca); APPO is a
large, popular social movement throughout Oaxaca; their main demand was the
resignation of the repressor governor but on the other hand, APPO also proposed
models of popular self-government. Under these circumstances, people from MULT-
I and some from UBISORT, declared the inauguration of the Autonomous
Municipality of San Juan Copala (MASJC). Hence, the use of the discourse of
autonomy has been leading changes in the social organisation of Copala and
transforming the relationship with the state, the community in diaspora and the civil
society in Mexico.
The present paper is organised in order to approach a wider perspective of
the complexity of the violence in Copala as well as the formation of the autonomous
municipality as the voice of Triqui peoples who claim their legitimate right of self-
determination and peace. First of all, I start with a brief ethnography on Triqui
peoples; next I want to present a re-construction of the violent social dramas that
have happened repeatedly over the course of the time. The following chapters
attempt to analyse the “triangle of violence”. In order to achieve that, I dissect the
interpretation of the protagonist of the violence; however, this attempt is not easy;
Violence in Copala is multifarious, MULT and UBISORT trigger oscillatory patterns of
violence, at the same time they contest aggression with the same intensity and the
same strategies; hence, they have to be treated as both perpetrators and victims.
Nevertheless, in a wider context I discovered that while violence is the cause of the
migration it disappears in the new settlements that Triqui peoples have built outside
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their homeland; therefore Triqui violence is territorially bounded. In that sense my
approach locates the vicious circle of the perpetration of violence in the social life of
Copala and the victimized society in exile. Finally, I describe the external situation or
“witnesses” (state and civil society) that have played a role in the violence or peace
processes in Copala.
My point of analysis is the declaration of the MASJC which attempts to
create a bottom-up way of political organisation; autonomy is a common issue in the
language of the indigenous movement in Mexico, and comes together with the aim
of self-development of the communities which are looking for spaces of participative
democracy where their opinions and ways of organisation are taken into account.
However, autonomy is seen as a process and a goal in itself. It can be said that
indigenous peoples are building their autonomy in different ways and different
rhythms, Triquis included. Nevertheless the population of San Juan Copala decided
to put the autonomy in a statement. The Declaration of the Autonomous
Municipality of San Juan Copala is a document comprised of three parts, the first
part is a summary of the exploitation and subjection that the Triqui people have
suffered over the course of history; next, the document stresses the responsibility of
the state, represented by the government and related political organisations, for the
presence of violence, hunger, illness and illiteracy in the region. Symbolically the
declaration of autonomy substantiates the inefficacy of the state to solve the needs
of the population; it delegitimizes the state violence and legitimises traditional
collective action to promote self-development and defend the principle of self-
determination of the indigenous people.
In a broader sense Autonomy (Greek: Auto-Nomos - Nomos meaning "law")
means one who gives oneself his/her own law (contributors). López y Rivas quote
Rene Kuper: “Autonomy is the political and legal arrangements that allow a public
entity into a State, the right to behave independent from the direct influence of
politic power, national or central” (Gabriel & López y Rivas, 2005). However, the
concept of autonomy is interpreted and theorized in several ways and its scope has
spread all over the world. The Mexican theorist about autonomy Gilberto López y
Rivas described autonomy in 2004 as ‘a minor entity inside a major entity unique
and sovereign’ (López y Rivas, 2004a). On the other hand, autonomy building also
implies a strategy of resistance where the state is no longer accepted as the
hegemonic power, such is the case of Zapatista caracoles where “good government”
juntas1 is the rebel contestation to the “bad government” from the state.
1 Councils of representatives of the communities which govern under the maxim of “command where
obeying”.
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The amount of experiences about autonomy building in Latin America has
been so diverse that we must talk about autonomies rather than a single autonomy.
Autonomies then, are processes of resistance by which peoples and ethnicities
resume and strength their identities through claiming their culture, collective rights
and self-governance. The range of interpretations about autonomies is a continuum
that goes from the pacific exercise of regarded rights to attempts to radical and
deep transformation of the state and society. López y Rivas affirms that autonomies
do not exist per se rather they make sense during the modernity when the nation-
states consolidates (Gabriel & López y Rivas, 2005). Hence, autonomies are modern
processes that contest the attempting to create homogenous societies inside the
modern states.
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Chapter I
UNDERSTANDING THE COMMUNITY
Geography and Population
San Juan Copala
San Juan Copala (SJC) is a small village in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico which is
located in the southeast part of Mexico and is one of the 32 states of the Mexican
Republic. Oaxaca has an array of traditions and customs based on its varied
indigenous population. Sixteen indigenous groups inhabit the territory of Oaxaca
and they represent 47.9 % of the whole population. Indigenous peoples keep many
of their ancient traditions, including the forms of organisation, election of
authorities and system of justice.
The Triqui people inhabit the western part of the state, and are surrounded
by the second most important ethnic group in the state: Mixteco. The Triqui region
is mainly divided into Highland and Lowland Triqui; both are well defined and have
particularities that differentiate one from another. Each region has a ceremonial
centre or Chuma a, which is also the economic centre of exchange because
traditional markets takes place there. The Chuma a of the Highland Triqui Region is
San Andrés Chicahuaxtla and San Juan Copala is the Lowland Triqui region’s Chuma
a. These regions have local linguistic variants; however they can understand each
other when they are talking.
Figure 1 Region of Copala (red dot) in the west of Oaxaca State (Google, 2008)
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In the 2000 census, the National Institute of Statistics, Geography and
Informatics (INEGI), registered 20,712 speakers of Triqui in all the country and
15,203 in the State of Oaxaca (INI & PNUD, 2002). However these figures do not take
in account the varieties of the language. It is difficult to estimate the exact
population of the Triquis from Copala, due to the mobility of the population and that
the migration flows and destinations vary throughout the year, as a consequence a
picture of the Triqui population in a given period is not accurate. Other reports
focused on the population of Copala calculate 30,000 to 40,000 Triquis in Mexico
and taking into account an estimation of 600 to 1,000 Triquis living in the United
States. (Unknown, 2008)
Officially, the Triqui Region belongs to different municipalities; whereas San
Martín Itunyoso is a municipality in itself, Chicahuaxtla belongs to the municipality of
Putla de Guerrero and Copala2 is divided amongst three municipalities, Santiago
Juxtlahuaca, Constancia del Rosario and Mesones Hidalgo. San Juan Copala is on the
edge of Santiago Juxtlahuaca which is the largest nearby city; people from Copala
exchange goods in its local market and also most of the offices of representatives of
the federal and local government are established there.
Copala occupied about 377.3 square km which are full of mountains with
altitudes from 600 to 3000 metres. Temperature fluctuates from 20 to 25 degrees
centigrade and it is classified as a semitropical zone. Mountains are covered by
forest which makes it difficult to practice agriculture; however Triquis have
domesticated and grown local varieties of corn for ages in hillsides and lower lands
where some irrigation is possible.
Copala is comprised of 32 barrios. Barrio is the unity of agency and
organisation that comes after family. Barrios are sparse over the Triqui territory and
they are geared to maintain the area occupied and under control. Almost all barrios
are connected by rough roads. Barrios are regular settlements from around 10 to
100 families and they share common elements such as: a well defined territory,
communal lands, local authority, traditional organisation for public work and fiesta,
and one predominant local leader.
Lewin (Lewin & Sandoval, 2007) explains that the conformation of barrios as
well as the system of access to the land are determined by marriage systems; Triqui
men choose their partner from a different parental group or lineage which are
2 It is important to mention that Copala is the name for the whole Lowland Triqui region, and
San Juan Copala (SJC) is the name of the Chuma a, the most important village in the region. In this
paper I will use the term Transnational Copala Community (TCC) to refer to the dispersed community
that Triqui people from Copala have forged along the national Mexican territory and outside its
borders.
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conformed by patrilineal ancestry; that means that the residence of nuclear families
establishes in the side of the father’s land. Women do not just change his residence
but also their political affiliation. The structure of lineages forms clans of territorial
organisation; in that sense, marriages occur between different lineages but usually
in the same clan. Therefore the communal endogamy is subordinated to the linage
exogamy. It is important to highlight that this organisation corresponds to the land
distribution in the agricultural unities, which is different to the spatial organisation
in the urban areas; for instance, in Copala the conflicts altered the lineage structure;
hence, the old clan organisation does not exist anymore. The Triquis does not have a
term in their language to refer at this structure spatial-parental; however they
identified themselves for the geographical name of each one. The parental links
between them make sense to the social unity; thus, the word in Triqui language tuvi´
refers to the relative, brother and neighbour.
Origin
Many theories exist about the origin of Triquis: Swadesh, Gay, Martínez, Ruíz and
Olivares (S. E. Díaz, 2007); the most accepted identify them as a branch of the
Triqui
family
Triqui Barrio organized on clan
structure based on patrilineal
lineage linkages
Triqui community settled down into a territory which
entails shared history and values around the belonging
to the land and the defense of the communal territory
over the course of the time
Figure 2 Pyramid of spatial-parental organisation of the Triqui territory
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otomanguean group which comprises Mixtecos, Cuicatecos and Amuzgos; they all
share common linguistic traits. Although the origin and the time of settlement is
unknown, many authors make references to a migration which took place before
the Spaniards conquerors arrived in Mexico, there are dates about whether they are
descended from Aztecs or Mixtecos because the route they followed to establish
themselves in the actual Triqui region is not clear.
Triqui people call themselves Zi Shan what means “the original ones”. The
word Triqui has a foggy origin; some authors refer a derogative use of the word
“trique”, which means an object of low value. On the other hand, some authors
argue that the word Triqui has an etymological composition of Mixteco roots and
even from the Triqui language; in both case the meaning refers to particularities of
the landscape of the inhabitants of the region (Díaz, 2007).
Beliefs
The Triquis use legends to explain the origin of the things around such as animals,
tools, utensils, clothes, and so on. Legends are tales charged of symbols and events
that happened ‘long time ago’. The characters of legends are humanised
representations of the sun and the moon which are brother and sister respectively
and it is common that appear wise elders who orientates and corrects the
misbehaviour of the sun and the moon. Triquis are very superstitious and the
interpretation of dreams, in order to try to predict their future and luck, is an
important issue into their daily life. Dreams interpretation has to do with the events
of the family life and the success or fail in the community interactions. A highlight
point is the relation that exists about dreaming weapons, murders, and other people
bleeding with the personal achievements. According to Díaz, dreaming about knives
means a healthy life for your offspring; dreaming guns means success for yourself
and dreaming about kill someone means you will be lucky to hunt a deer (S. E. Díaz,
2007).
The religion in Copala is a
mixture of ancient beliefs and
Roman Catholic practices; rather
than an acceptation of Catholic
dogmas, there is a deification of
the images that represent the
saints. They believe that health,
wealth, success and luck depend
on the mood of the saints; thus
they need to offer gifts, prayers
and rituals to keep them
contents. The traditional fiestas Figure 3 Catholic temple in San Juan Copala
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are holding on special dates when they worship a particular image; they are related
to the agricultural calendar; for instance on 25 April they celebrates San Marcos day
who is directly linked with the cult to the ancient god of thunder and rain; hence,
celebration and rituals are geared towards having a good raining season. All the
communities have a Catholic temple; it is in the centre of the barrios and is a
material symbol of the united work and wealth of the community; however they
also carried out ceremonies in caves and sacred places. Churches are public spaces
where all members of the community have plenty freedom to practice their beliefs;
the temple is dedicated to the Patron Saint of the barrio which is the most
important deity amongst the local pantheon regardless the dogmatic Catholic
hierarchy. The Triquis also regard the existence of evil spirits which inhabit the
sacred places.
As in others indigenous communities the concept of health for the Triquis
comprises the welfare of the body and the soul and their cure implies both the use
of medicinal plants together with rituals. They attend shamanistic practices to
recover their health; these involve rituals of divination and Catholic prayers. In
recent years, regardless the enlarging of acceptation of modern medicine, they still
consult their traditional healers for those illnesses that they attribute to
supernatural origin or evilness.
Livelihood
The economic system of indigenous peoples is based on production for subsistence,
they kept an equilibrated balance between production and consumption; they
produce what they need to survive and barter the surplus in the markets for
products that they are not able to produce. The equilibrium in this system of
production and consumption was broken when the exchange with the external
world brought new products and created necessities that they did not have before.
Incompatibility of the economics systems triggered deeper poverty in the region; on
one hand, the products that mestizos3 introduced in the region proceeded from
factories (clothes, shoes, furniture, electric devices, etc.) which are made by
capitalistic systems of production focused on profits and accumulation; on the other
hand, the products that indigenous offered (crops and handcrafts) were made by
subsistence systems of production. These uneven competitions increased the
poverty and brought a sense of frustration that scaled up alcoholism, migration and
lack of values. Therefore, this situation originated abuses from mestizos who
bartering crops from the Triqui people for industrially elaborated products of much
lower value.
3Non indigenous
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The rugged territory of Copala has scarcity of optimum lands for the
agriculture. However, they plant bananas and coffee in the warmer zones, and
maize and beans in the lower and most temperate zones. Bananas and coffee
became the most important crop and it was one of the reasons for why they were
widely exploited by mestizos middle men who bought partially processed coffee at
low prices.
The Triquis use to raise some animals, mainly chickens, turkeys and pigs at a
domestic scale. Some of them have a few goats, sheep, and cattle and sell them
rather than consuming them. Since the establishment of an office of the federal
government to attend the indigenous peoples in the sixties, officials have tried to
implement technical programs to improve their production such as introduction of
agrochemicals, improved seeds or credits for agricultural machinery but with no
success.
Today, people do prefer
to avoid practicing open air
activities such as agriculture and
livestock because they have a
fear of violence. Because of the
number of migrants, people who
remain in the community –
children, women and the elderly-
live by remittances and access to
social programs. Women in
Copala attend the local market in
Juxtlahuaca; they sell bananas,
wild crops, fruits and vegetables
that they grow or gather in the hillside.
Like all the indigenous peoples from Mesoamerica; the staple diet of Triquis
is composed mainly by maize: tortillas and tamales (steamed maize dough with chilli
sauce), beans, chilli and wild leaves. For special occasions and fiestas, they cook
chilate which is a very hot beef broth; chicken broth is also common; although they
raise pig, do not use them to eat but they rather sell them in the public market.
Recently the consumption of instant ramen noodles (sopa Maruchan™) has
increased due probably to the cheap cost, the easiness of preparation, and the lack
of agricultural production, together with the rise in the use of cash from remittances
and Oportunidades4 program. Ramen noodles have become a source of income for
4 In 1997 the government launched the social program named Oportunidades (Opportunities). It is
supposed to encourage individual development by achieving improvements in health, education and
Figure 4 Landscape of San Juan Copala
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Triqui women who sell them in
fiestas together with
traditional meals. It is
noticeable how the Triqui
women have transformed their
old vaporeras5 into water
boilers; some of them no
longer prepare tamales but
noodles.
One of the most
profitable economic activities
for men in Copala is to drive a
taxicab since there is no
regular service of buses or other vehicles to go into town. It is very rare that foreign
people go to Copala because of the fear of violence; even public taxis from the
nearest cities do not used to enter into the region, some braver charge a lot of
money for ‘special trips’ into Copala; the most leave the passenger at forks in the
road to Copala, then the passenger has to switch into a taxi from MULT or UBISORT
depend on the community of destiny; Triquis introduced fleets of taxis which
transport people and commodities among the barrios and cities which created an
effective way of income for males.
The Triqui women are well known within the handcraft markets because of
their skills in weaving on “backstram looms”; the sale of handcrafts is an important
income for women inside the community and everywhere they join the migrant
males. This activity is not only to make an income; women weave their own
traditional red huipiles whose design identifies them from each to another since
each piece is unique. Women spent several months working daily to finish one
huipil.
An important issue in the communities is the construction and maintenance
of public infrastructure. The traditional organisation manages it by collective work –
food (Conditional Cash Transfer). Beneficiaries receive an amount of money which has to be spent on
those issues, but beneficiaries have to prove to have managed certain official indicators (children’s
grades, weight and size, and so on).
5 Big steam cookers used to made tamales, large cylindrical recipes of 20 litters have a grill pan inside
where tamales are set to be cooked, under the grill pan they put water and then tamales are boiled
with steam. Vaporeras have some holes at the level of the grill to drop the water in case it exceeds
the level when boiling. Triqui women cover those holes to fill the vaporeras with water and boil it.
Figure 5 Taxi
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tequio- and cargo systems6. The use
and maintenance of the public
buildings (school, church, town hall,
gardens and so on) are administered
by committees of citizens. The
communities also possess public
goods such as musical instruments,
vehicles, and etc which are also
entrusted to committees who are
accountable for them.
A Bit of History
As it is mentioned before, the Triqui
territory is formed by parental
linkages that go further than the productive association of the land; the territory
implies deep senses of belonging; no wonder the history of Triquis is a sequence of
events that show their eager will to maintain and recover their territory. Although
the origin of their settlement is unknown, there are reports about the struggles they
had in order to preserve their lands. Villoro coined the term "refugee zones" (Villoro,
1996) to refer to the regions that indigenous occupied after the conquerors took the
best lands for themselves. Within these regions, indigenous people could reproduce
their culture and way of life, however since those are the worst regions they hardly
could improve their agriculture and production practices and eventually these
deficiencies exacerbated the poverty. Díaz groups three periods in defence of Triqui
territory; the first was a dispute held among Spaniards caciques in 1735, the next are
Triqui rebellions in 1832 and 1843 and the last in the seventies which is called
“territorial reconstitution” (S. E. Díaz, 2007).
The available information shows that Triquis took part in the war for
Independence in 1810 as members of the libertarian army; however after the end of
the war, and declaration of Independence, Triquis did not see their aspirations of
freedom achieved at all. To the contrary, parts of their lands were occupied by
criollo7 former combatants and these new lords became new oppressors for the
Triqui people. Some historians call this period the second conquest (F. López, 2007b)
6 Cargos system is a ladder throughout indigenous communities train people to obtain experience in
the public service for the community. Young people start with the lower level and simple tasks, once
they managed it; move upward to the next cargo and so on until he is skilful enough to become
authority. This systems is criticized arguing uneven gender relations and does not take in account the
learnt skills and knowledge outside the community in formal education.
7 Criollo is the adjective used to name people form Spaniards parents but born in America
Figure 6 Triqui girls wearing the traditional huipil
21
because the new elite in power continued and even worsened the relations of
discrimination and exploitation toward the indigenous people. In the Triqui region
took place the first rebellion against the independent government and it was led for
a former triqui combatant of the war of Independence named Hilario Medina, best
known as Hilarión; He gathered support from Triquis from Copala and Mixtecos and
was persecuted by the government until 1836 then he was apprehended and
condemned to die. The episode of Hilarión becomes a myth in the local history of
Copala who is seen as a local hero, insofar as the legend of Hilarión remains until
now; he embodied the high values of the Triqui peoples: braver, rebel, combative
indomitable and defender of the triqui rights. Another rebellion arose in 1842 led by
Dionisio Arriaga and Domingo Santiago; Mixtecos soon joined the rebellion and it
spread in all the west part of Oaxaca (F. López, 2007b). Finally in 1975 2,000 armed
Triquis and their local authorities carried out a delimitation of their territory
following the directions of the presidential resolution of 1973 this delimitation is
respected and defended until now (S. E. Díaz, 2007).
An important date that remains in the collective memory of Triqui peoples is
the year of 1948; at the time the municipality of San Juan Copala was abolished and
the region of Copala spread amongst three municipalities governed by mestizos. The
Declaration of the MASJC refers that the municipality existed for 120 years since
1826 when it was regarded by the independent government as a reward of the
active participation of the Triquis in the war for independence from 1810 to 1821
(Unknown, 2007).
22
Chapter II
METHODOLOGY
The Case Study
Due to its complexity, the present is an
intrinsic case study and the objective is
not to make generalisations; according
to Punch, special cases can be studied in
order to understand the complexities of
the case in it as well in its context
(Punch, 2005).
Unity of Analysis
Copala is a community that has not
defined boundaries or at least these do
not correspond to those established by
the state. Although the Triquis identified
their region and their own boundaries; in the practice the community is divided
amongst three municipalities. This problem makes it impossible to find a systematic
framework to categorise the population; for the case of Copala available data such
as census and statistics identify the municipality as the unit of analysis and this data
do not take into account the diversity of the population living in these
municipalities. On the other hand, the mobility of the population is another element
that complicates the construction of a frame of reference.
Therefore, in this particular case study, the unity of analysis is the social and
spatial construction where the Triquis inhabit. First of all, it is the region of Copala in
the state of Oaxaca which the Triquis recognize as their own territory, with
boundaries established by tradition, experience and historical defence. In other
words it is the physical space where Triquis experience their daily life. Secondly, the
Triqui community involve the spatial transportation of people and customs to
different parts outside the region of Copala where they re-group and reproduce
their way of life and collective organisation and wherein they identify themselves as
members of the Triqui collectively.
Importance of the Case Study
The case of the Triqui autonomy building represents the making of a bottom-up
solution to deal with an extreme situation of violence. It is also a result of the
incapacity of the state to put an end to the conflicts in the community. However, the
Figure 7. National Encounter of Autonomous Municipalities. San Juan Copala, Mexico. February 2008
23
origin of a discourse cannot be explained as something isolated, it is a consequence
of a long process of learning and the sum of individual and collective experiences of
the community, together with the influences from the outside.
Research Questions
General Research Question
Is there any relation between the autonomy discourse and the escalation
or de-escalation of violence in Copala?
Specific questions
• What are the dynamics of the Violence amongst the Triquis?
• Is the diaspora of the Triquis a result of Violence?
• What has been the role of the state in the perpetration, escalation or
de-escalation of violence?
• How the autonomy is affecting the life of the Triquis in Copala and
the Triquis in diaspora?
Sampling
The followed method was a purposeful stratified sampling.
Since my object of study is the Triqui community as a whole and because of
time constrains to do my field research I decided to do an intensity sampling as it is
described by Patton which allowed me to obtain the most information in the least
time possible (Patton, 2002).
The first step of sampling was at the transnational community level.
Wherever they group, the Triquis organise in political organisation with more or less
the same structure. The first sample was among those groups that use or have some
knowledge about autonomy discourse. Since autonomy is an important component
of the language of the indigenous movement, I decided to search among the
adherents to “La otra campaña”, led by the National Liberation Zapatista Army
(EZLN)8. I choose three organisations: MULT, MASJC9 and FULT10.
The second stage in the stratified sampling was in order to go deeply into a
more intense sample. I decided to spend most of the time in the MASJC to carry out
8 For more details about EZLN and La otra campaña see Chapter V
9 The MASJC is not properly an organisation; however it encompasses barrios from MULT-I and
UBISORT so it is more interesting to treat the Municipality as a political organisation.
10 Front of Unity and Triqui Struggle, the political organisation of Triquis from Hermosillo Sonora,
Mexico.
24
a deep research effort on the staggering events that happened there. The reason
obeyed to the present situation of violence and peace, and the process of building
autonomy which allowed me to observe many events in a single place and in a
relatively short time.
Data Collection
Qualitative research is based on the quality of the given information; however, the
information from the people is expressed in different forms which vary from the
position and knowledge of them. For this particular case study I decided to work on
two types of information which shaped both the sources and the methods to obtain
it: discourse and language.
Discourse:
Foucault describes discourse as 'the general domain of all statements' and points
out some of its features. Discourse refers to the unwritten rules and structures that
make particular utterances and statements intelligible. Foucault mention that there
is no simple relation between discourse and reality, and discourse has a double
realm because is the mean of oppression and the mean of resistance and it is
important to point out that discourse does not simply translate reality into words of
language, rather discourse become the system which structures the way we
perceive reality and interact within it (Mills, 2003). To obtain this information I used
several sources and methods
Unstructured Interviews; I selected a number of actors involved into the
process:
Ø Local Leaders
Ø Formal Authorities
Ø Civil servants working in the area of study
Ø Others (NGO’s representatives, academics, volunteers)
Review of
Ø Local and national newspapers
Ø Manifest and pamphlets of the organisations
Ø Interviews on radio and television
Ø Virtual forums of discussion: Blogs and posts
Direct observation and listening of:
Ø Public speeches
Language
Language refers to the daily speaking of the people, the values and understandings
that they give to the words, and is a more accurate source to know the reality,
language reflects the common sense of the people and is part of the collective
knowledge and representation of the reality through the cumulus of vivid and learnt
25
experiences (Alberto Arce, 2000). Language evidences different realities and the way
how different actors perceive the interactions and interface in a context. To obtain
this information I applied:
Informal interviews; informal chats with common people: taxi drivers,
traders, owners of local shops, food sellers, visitors, pilgrims, peasants, and
so on.
Direct Observation of:
§ Meetings of authorities
§ Assembly
§ Public events: official ceremonies, fiesta, masses, religious rituals,
etcetera.
Participative Observation: I volunteered and took part in some events into
and outside the community
§ The Encounter of Indigenous Peoples of America
§ The 1st anniversary of the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan
Copala
§ The traditional Fiesta of “Tata Chuz” in San Juan Copala held on
February, 2008.
The hardest part was to acquire direct information from formal interviews;
due to the atmosphere of violence, the people who live in San Juan Copala do not
usually talk to strangers; moreover they are afraid to say revealing things or even to
express their own opinion. Those who speak freely –authorities and leaders- often
repeat elaborated discourses rather than tell real information. Besides the
observation (direct and participative), I found out that in the relaxed atmosphere of
fiestas, people like to talk much more, starting with an informal chat, and regardless
of the trivial topics, people eventually come to politics and do not hesitant to
express their opinion.
An important deficiency in my information was the lack of a gender
perspective of the conflict in Copala; women just do not talk to strangers; many of
them are not fluent in Spanish but mainly because of the strong social control of
males. When a woman talks to a strange it is seen as a lack of respect for her
husband. The point of view of women was missing in my field research and I was
very careful to not make assumptions in that sense.
Analysis of Data
Apparently the link between the leaders and their constituencies make a solid
structure in the organisation; however there are intrinsic conflicts within the
organisation that, over the course of time, challenge the old structures and trigger
new ones. The political conflict must be understood as an interface where different
26
actor converges with different standpoints, perceptions of reality and social
learning. I needed an analytical approach that takes into account those relationships
and also the internalization and appropriation of external factors in the strength and
evolving of the social action and even the realization of excluded minorities that can
represent potential challenges and new social changes.
The approach I chose for the analysis of data is the actor-oriented approach
(N. Long, 1989), (N. Long, 2001).
27
Chapter III
FROM VIOLENCE TO AUTONOMY; the Drama of the Triqui
Society
Triquis: a violent race?
“They call us a violent race, but we are not. Interest of caciques and factious
groups, strangers to our community, are putting us to fight and to kill among
ourselves...”
Juan Albino. Vícam Sonora, Mexico. 2007.
Krohn-Hansen (Krohn-Hansen, 1994) debates the idea of studies that stand violence
immerse in the genetic configuration of human beings, which is described as
aggression. Nagengast (C. Nagengast, 1994) criticize the reification of violence as a
category present or absent within a society. The study of violence by examination of
its social roles uncovers possibilities to find it out within the discourses, practices
and ideologies of daily life as well as to examine its importance in power bolstering
and as a mean of the state to legitimise power. Elwert et al disapprove the
psychologisation and culturalisation of violence (Elwert, Feuchtwang, & Neubert,
1999), they explain that violence is not a regression to atavistic instincts but a
‘narrowing of the available forms of actions and a strategic choice”; violence is
always channelled, so it can be analysed by analysing its social channels. This
chapter will analyse the social construction of the violence through the
dramatisation of symbols and actors. In the chapter VI, I will go deep into the role of
the state and official discourse to legitimise itself through the use and manipulation
of violent atmospheres.
Corbin, quoted by Krohn-Hansen, suggests that a good basis to understand
violence is through the symbolical theories of Turner (Krohn-Hansen, 1994). Since
these theories regard a dialectic relation between mental maps and the physical
world, Corbin argues that violence needs a symbolical interpretation to understand
it as a mental and physical phenomenon. In other words, physical violence harms
and destroys the real world whereas mental violence threats mental maps and
violates ideals and identities. In Copala, violence has destroyed severely the social
fabric of the community but at the same time has opened a big gap in the non-
material relations of the people and has created the idea that one group is right
whereas the opposite one must be wrong.
28
In Oaxaca Triquis
are deemed as an
aggressive and gullible
race at the same time, this
imaginary construction
obeys to the fact that long
and old feuds exist
between opposite groups;
origin and continuity of
violence is due to a series
of intricate circumstances
uneasy to identify. Written
history make references to
the violence from the
seventies on, however oral
stories say that violence start many years ago, when guns were unknown by Triquis.
The conflicts among powerful families and consequent murders were carried out
with machetes, very bloody stories remains in the collective memory of Copala.
It is important to mention the particularities of the violence in Copala.
Several sources refer different numbers of deaths between 1976 and 2000, more
than 500 (F. López, 2007a), 300 from the side of MULT (B. F. López, 2008), and a
number of women raped (Jarquín, 2007). Vendettas are carried out by ambush of
selected targets; in ambushes the incidental companions also dead. In times of high
crisis armed confrontation takes part in San Juan Copala; the opposite sides shot
their guns from strategic positions in the hillsides that surround the urban area of
San Juan Copala. According to Nagengast, violence exists from the standpoint of the
victim whereas the perpetrator will claim the legitimacy of his act as a tactical pre-
emption of the acts from the others which assume are illegitimacy (C. Nagengast,
1994). Triquis use this instrumental view to justify their vendettas as an act of
justice. One of my informants told me the answer of a well known gunman when he
tried to inquire whether the gunman had a sense of repentance at his elder age; the
gunman said: “those people I killed got a punishment of god, because they wanted to
kill me”.
The oscillating violence, described by Elwert, is possible as it is embedded in
historical context (Elwert et al., 1999). To have a clear understanding about process
of temporal events, communication and miscommunication within and among
actors, Turner points out the inevitability of the study of symbols, signs, signals, and
token both verbal and non verbal that people use to achieve individual and
collective goals. He calls ‘Social dramas’ to the units of harmonic and disharmonic
Figure 8 Violence and weapons are part of the Triqui daily life, in the picture Triqui children with toy guns
29
processes, arising in social conflicts (V. Turner, 1974). Turner identifies four phases
of public action which lead the progress of Social Drama.
Social drama starts with a breach of the normal situation. By symbols of
dissidence, actors confront particular interests that no longer are shared by the
whole group. Turner calls this a “symbolic trigger of confrontation of encounter”.
Opposite Interfaces encounter release a crisis stage, and people involved clearly
speak out about the conflict which cannot be ignored; there is an “escalation” of
crisis. In this phase Turner places the liminal characteristics where the uncertainties
and expectation of the conflict reveal a true state of affairs similar to a ritual of
passage. The third phase is the redressive action which pretends to rearrange the
normality of the social relations; redressive mechanisms or agreements lead to the
last phase which can be either reintegration of disturbed social fabric or the social
recognition and legitimisation of the division of the community. This approach can
help to understand the complex conflict in Copala, since the conflicts are full of
symbols and situations between conflictive and cyclical schisms along the history of
Copala.
The recent history of conflicts and violence between Triquis of Copala can be
grouped in four moments, which also illustrate four generations of actors whose
interests and context change over the course of time. Each moment is an episode of
a longer social drama which is situated in a defined “political field”. In this chapter I
focus on the intrinsic events of the power relations inside the community of Copala;
breaches and re-composition of the local actors and collective action. In the chapter
VI I will analyse the external factors that lead to the perpetration of violence and the
creation of the MASJC.
-
No one knows exactly how vendettas started; the origin could be related
with the power of old Sí11 who attempted to achieve more power and the control of
the Chuma a. As it is mentioned before, San Juan Copala was the ceremonial and
trade centre of the low Triqui region; in the past, only mayordomos and authorities
were allowed to live there and they hold privileges to trade in the local market.
Eventually the Sí found out that living in Copala was the most effective way to gain
economic and social benefits. On this way, powerful families disputed the control
over the Chuma a and as a consequence rivalries arose insofar as they defended the
possession of the territory even with their own life. At this stage the oral stories
11
Sí is the noun in the Triqui language to describe redoubtable persons who have enormous power
and influence in the community. I will describe wider the importance of Sí in the next chapter.
30
make reference to old vendettas among powerful families which control the
decision making in Copala, in Spanish they identify those people are caciques.
The oral stories about the escalation of violence are not clear in this point,
the old Sí-caciques faded away but it is possible that once corrupted and sick of
power the caciques do business with mestizos from Juxtlahuaca and Putla. Paulino
Martínez Delia was a triqui teacher murdered in 1990 and one of the founders of
MULT; he related in an interview carried out in 1986 that caciques were invaders of
the lands belonging to Triqui people, but he does not discard treason from
compañeros Triquis that sold natural resources and followed personal interests.
“Caciques are not Triquis but they drive Triquis to create internal conflicts” (Besserer,
2007). The discontinuity between oral stories and written history is interesting,
especially the image of caciques. Mixtecos peoples have stories of ancient caciques
compared to kings or señores12 the tradition represents them as braves and
progressives; people remember their military achievements fighting against Aztecs
invaders and even Spaniards. There are also stories about tyrannical señores
defeated by new leaders who demonstrate his bravery and legitimise their rights to
create a new order. The legend of the origin of the Mixteco kingdom tells the victory
of the indigenous warrior Dzahuindanda. He called the landlord of a huge valley to
challenge him; since he did not found any person there but the sun; he shot his
arrows to the sun until defeat; at the sunset, he realized that the sun looked red and
bled in the horizon; Dzahuindanda declared himself victorious and with legitimate
rights to occupy the region since he defeated the señor of the valley. Dzahuindanda
could be seen as a local myth of the new brave knight who challenge and defeat the
old system and establish a new one in a legitimate way.
The history narrated by the MULT leaders stresses the point that the
organisation rebelled against the power of caciques and from that date the
connotation of caciques is always negative and widely used in the political discourse
of the MULT, the UBISORT and the MULTI to refer to those cruel and tyrannical
leaders who drive the will of the people to attain individual benefits; in other words
caciques are discursively present in the opposite group and are those who have to
be defeated.
The historical analysis of López Bárcenas states that after the Mexican
Revolution -from 1910 to 1920-, wealth people and politicians in the region
encouraged the factions. On one hand, wealth people bought coffee and bananas at
low prices and sold weapons to the Triquis dispute the internal power; thus,
exploiters took the production of the Triquis and created dependence on safety. On
the other hand governmental institutions dislocated the structure of indigenous
12
Landlords
31
government and imposed their own (B. F. López, 2008). The teacher Paulino
(Besserer, 2007) mentioned that over the spam of 1948 to 1956 “hubo un chingo de
pleitos” (there were a lot of fights) produced by the relation with a lieutenant who
sold weapons to Triquis (he does not explain why Triquis bought those weapons)
and then charged them for the permission to have them. Triquis could not take it
anymore so they ambushed the lieutenant; this event led to the fact that in 1956 the
army bombarded the community of Cruz Chiquita as a punishment. The teacher
Paulino continues: from 1964 to 1975 there was calm in the region and people
started to organise and work together. This is the period of prosperity of the state
when the National Indigenist Institute (INI) was the benefactor face of the state in
the region (see chapter VI). This is also the period of blossoming of gestores13 in
number and importance.
The next stage in the chain of violence occurred in the seventies; at the time
the organisations and gestores competed the resources from governmental
programs, on one side those who were closer to the government institutions and
the official party (PRI) an on the other hand those who were aware of the necessity
of deep changes in the region. The most notable leader from that period was Luis
Flores; he promoted the necessity of an organisation which represents the interest
of the community and unifies the barrios according to the traditional government.
His murder in 1976 was the milestone to configure the group schism in Copala.
The first attempt to self organisation was called El Club whose objectives
promoted unification of the barrios, defence of the historical territory, and creation
of cooperatives for trading coffee and bananas. Lately many of their leaders were
murdered and other migrated to preserve their life. Meanwhile, the PRI bolstered
factions by using resources of social programs in the region to attract sympathizers.
The objective of PRI attempted to dismantle independent organisation; in 1978 PRI’s
supporters promoted the establishment of an army squad in the region. In the
middle time, those migrants who abandoned Copala fleeing from repression thought
about the need to create an organisation of resistance; in November 8th of 1981 the
MULT was born.
In the eighties, the MULT achieved support from many barrios; the MULT
resumed the principles of El Club plus the cessation of repression and harassment
against their members, and freedom for political prisoner. MULT became the most
influential and powerful organisation in the region and widely recognized among the
leftist movements in Oaxaca and Mexico City. Besides their own mobilisations, the
13
Gestores are those persons (usually teachers) that because of their fluency in Spanish obtain
information about social programs and gather the requirements from the governmental offices,
progressively a gestor can became a leader.
32
Triquis contingents from MULT have
had a tradition to attend
demonstrations and show solidarity
with trade unionists, farmers,
students, and so on. To counteract
the power of MULT in Copala, in
1994 the PRI created the Unity of
Social Welfare for the Triqui Region
(UBISORT) (S. E. Díaz, 2007).
In a second stage of the
activism of MULT, they focused on
achieving infrastructure for
development and productive
projects. Under this situation the
MULT learnt to bargain with the
government; mobilisation was an
important tool, but also the fact
that the communities in Copala
exercise a ‘collective vote’; that
means that because of the influence
of the organisations, the entire constituency vote for the same party in elections.
This has become the main asset that leaders use to negotiate with the government.
The same strategy is used by UBISORT. During the last 10 years more or less, San
Juan Copala was occupied for both groups the MULT and the UBISORT in relative
calm; the strong division set two visions of development.
Both organisations received incomes from the government which led the
blossoming of two satellite communities aside of San Juan Copala and where the
organisations concentrated their political power: El Rastrojo is the community
empowered by the MULT; it has a high school and a road that connects with the city
of Putla de Guerrero. La Sabana is the community controlled by the UBISORT; it has a
secondary school with dormitory and a road that connects to the city of Santiago
Juxtlahuaca. Both roads come to San Juan Copala but in practice they are private
roads by use only of the organisation to which they belong. Free transit of strangers
occurs at their own risk. Same happens with the children who cannot go to a
contrary village to attend school.
Soon, leaders learnt that by having control over the population, they could
also have control over the management of economic resources; hence, violence and
development combined in a macabre equilibrium. When someone was killed, the
group immediately blamed the others as the responsible and clamed justice. Justice
Figure 9 San Juan Copala has been the ceremonial and political centre for Triquis
33
never came; instead, it gives an opportunity to the organisation to demand social
programs as ‘compensation’. Later on they deliver ‘justice’ through vendettas;
automatically, they provide arguments to the other organisation to get similar
benefits. Like Krohn-Hansen properly assumes violent actions bridge communication
gaps and set basis for understandings and negotiation in this case; mutilation and
destruction are horribly sensual and visible (Krohn-Hansen, 1994) no wonder that
Triquis have exhibited corpses of murder militants to catch the attention of
authorities and media (Velez, 2007), and even to carry out the wake of a leader from
the UBISORT on the middle of the road as a form of protest (Álvarez, 2008).
The third stage of the Triqui drama took place when the new leaders of the
MULT changed the strategy and decided to take part in the local politics by
constituting a political party. On November 10, 2003, the Popular Unity Party (PUP)
gained its official register and took part in the elections of 2004 and used for the first
time ever their collective vote to themselves. The results of the election made that
PUP achieved a place in the local congress. The most visible young leader of MULT
became deputy. The social base of the MULT disagreed on the fact that just leaders
had benefits whereas communities could not see any benefit from the party. In
practice, the leaders of MULT legitimised the role of the state as the maxim figure of
power; they abandoned its ideology of grassroots self-governance and became part
of the structural system of “democratic” government legitimised by universal
suffrage.
The fourth stage is even more complex because of the variety of actors who
took place, and the external and internal circumstances that shaped the conflict (In
the next paragraphs I attempt to continue the narration of the social drama from
the realm of the local events, and the profile of the actors involved; in the next
chapters I will treat the same events from different perspectives).
The creation of PUP causes a backlash against the local leaders; some barrios
pointed out that the benefits and power concentrated in a small group of corrupt
leaders; meanwhile, bases of the MULT interpreted the creation of PUP as a treason
of the leaders to the historical struggles of the MULT and their deceased;
paraphrasing to López y Rivas, the struggle of indigenous is not in order to find
someone to represent them, they seek a way to represent themselves (Gabriel &
López y Rivas, 2005). Internal conflicts arose and the leaders repressed dissatisfied
people to keep control of the situation. ‘T’, leader of an important barrio challenged
the power of the Sí and the MULT leaders from El Rastrojo; he blamed them for the
murder of his son; MULT leaders did not answer the demands of ‘T’ who asked a
compensation and ‘justice’ for his deceased son. ‘T’ threatens to withdraw the
support of his barrio. This event was the forerunner for the split of MULT. ‘T’ looked
for support among other barrios and finally they decided to separate from the
34
MULT. In 2006 the new actor appeared in the region the Independent Movement of
Unification and Triqui Struggle (MULT-I).
The upraising of a third actor challenges the typical unfold of the social
drama; the MULT-I originated from a breach of the regular system of MULT which
remained in the stage of crisis with the UBISORT. The MULT-I used the myth of
Dzahuindanda against the MULT but at the same time, ‘T’ and other leaders
searched support from historical rival barrios in the side of the UBISORT which
seemed to forget the old rivalry on behalf of peace. As a result, some barrios joined
the idea of MULT-I; however, they did not accept to be part of the organisation; the
solution was the creation of a new political field where alliance was possible. MULT-I
and some barrios created the MASJC; the first point of the Declaration of MASJC
sentenced that it is integrated by communities and barrios which has broken or will
break the subordination to the organisations of the government or those linked to
them.
The Declaration of the MASJC recognise the original right of the Triqui
peoples to be a Municipality and to have their own government which was granted
since 1826 “due to their active participation in the war of Independence, under the
command of José María Morelos y Pavón14
”. The ceremony of inauguration of the
MASJC in January of 2007 called the attention of the press and social organisations
in Mexico; the promoters exalted the values and traditions of the Triqui peoples.
During the event they regard the position of the Council of Elderly as the maxim
authority of the community; the public speech legitimised the self-determination
right in the form of autonomy as a continuity of the example of the mythical
Hilarión. The establishment of peace was the main task given by the Council of
Elderly to the new authorities:
“You should govern according to the Triqui principles and listen to the peoples
to keep holding the cargo; you will not be corrupt and you should seek the peace for
all the Triqui Nation”
The Declaration of autonomy was an impending forerunner of more violence
although some barrios left the UBISORT and bolstered the MASJC. The autonomous
authorities managed to achieve peace at least in San Juan Copala. Like in the past,
political control of the Chuma a was crucial to legitimize the social action of MASJC;
after intense armed confrontation, the MULT-I and its allies expelled the members
of the MULT who lived in San Juan Copala; they migrated to El Rastrojo and some
went far away. The MASJC accomplished the control of the Chuma a and gained
14
Called “The Servant of the Nation”, priest Morelos ranked Generalissimo led the war of
Independence from 1811 until his execution in 1815.
35
legitimisation as well, at the same time reinforce the image of pacifiers and ‘good
guys’ among the public opinion, triqui population in Copala and Triquis in exile.
From this moment on, it was relatively peaceful in SJC; however the
redressive action mentioned by Turner remains to be there until now, MULT and
UBISORT continue their violent path to political success as usual evolving into
something that seems a perennial stage of escalate of crisis. Arce identified the
coexistence of life-worlds visible in fields of interface where the possibilities of
solution are multiple: coexistence, clash, separation, mix or retreat into themselves
(A Arce, 2000). The conclusion of the last stage of the drama confirms the
multiplicity of possibilities of reconfiguration of the society during and after the
interface.
On the other hand, the interventionism of the state played a crucial role in
the perpetration of violence in a vicious circle. Interface with state and collective
action produces a relationship of client-server or what Handelman calls bureaucratic
affiliation (Handelman, 1979), where the material outputs of violence set the
political field to bargain, and collective votes are the cash to pay the services from
the state. The attempts of the state for social changes threaten and destroy the local
structures and produced violent confrontations. Active participation of people in the
decision making such as the consensus of the indigenous communities, create social
forms that disembedding and re-embedding political factors in process of counter-
development (A Arce, 2000); this process configures and reconfigures over the
course of time; in this case the evolving process from El Club, the MULT, the MULT-I,
to the MASJ are counter-tendencies that challenged and challenge the established
domains.
López Bárcenas stands the contradictions between traditional indigenous
organisation and the political organisation of indigenous (F. López, 2007b). It means
that whereas the traditional structures of decision making are the basis for the
collective action; on the other hand, political arenas and conflicts move away the
objectives of those that originated the social organisation. In the Triqui society this
phenomenon is observable by double construction of identity since the perspective
of origin but also from the organisation where the household is incrusted. Next
chapter deals with the configuration of the triqui individual as a family member but
also as an individual actor of the constraining society of Copala.
The majority of scholars would accept that economics, culture, ecology and
state-formation are the main factors influencing violence. However, a high grade of
contextualisation limits the understanding to ‘structural violence’ and misses
alternative paths of actions. Nevertheless, like Elster point out (Krohn-Hansen,
1994): regarding of structures and institutions should lead to talk about actors and
36
interactions. For example, it is common that journalist write about number of
deceased from the MULT or from the UBISORT as a result of violent interfaces
between antagonist groups; but in actuality, there are actors, lead by emotions,
ideals, and feelings, who perpetrate the violence although their behaviour is shaped
by a complexity of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ realities that in certain way make
possible that an specific actor in a given moment pulls the trigger. Next chapter
attempts to present a frame of these social actors and its relationship as a member
of the community and a political organisation.
1975
El Club
1994
UBISORT
2006
MULT-I
2007
MASJC
1981
MULT
2003
PUP
Figure 10 Genealogy of MASJ
37
Chapter IV
LIFE CYCLE
Floriberto Díaz, indigenous anthropologist, sentenced that “indigenous cannot be
understood in isolation, but as members of a community. The community establish a
series of relations between people and space and in second term between persons
among themselves”. Díaz identified common elements of Indigenous communities:
• Territorial space demarcated and defined by possession
• Oral common history passed down from generation to generation
• Own variation of the language, from which is founded the identity upon
common language
• Organisation that defines political, cultural, social, civil, economic and
religious realms.
• Communitarian system of deliver and administration of justice
Díaz stood that those elements lead us to the dynamic dimension of the
community, which contains a subjacent and acting energy between human beings
and the elements of nature. Díaz uses the term 'communality' to define the
immanence of the community; in other words “it refers not just to the physical space
and material existence of human beings but to the spiritual existence, ideological
and ethic code and political, cultural, social, economic and civil behaviour”.
Communality is defined by these elements:
• Land, as mother and territory
• Consensus in assembly for decision making
• Gratis service, as exercise of authority
• Collective work as a recreation act
• Rites and ceremonies as expression of communal gift (Robles & Cardoso,
2007).
Znaniecki defined community as the social bound constructed by the
consciousness and willingness of people whose existence is due to regulated social
relations and organised social groups which develop their own cultural ideals and
practice apart from organised group actions. This is what Turner calls ‘communitas’
or social anti-structure, the bonds of communities are anti-structural in the sense
that they are neither shaped by norms nor by institutions nor abstract events and
they occur outside of structural relationships (V. Turner, 1974).
From his standpoint, Norman Long acknowledge that community is a social
actor and explain his assumption through three connotations that lead social
practice; a) coalition for the actions: actor that under certain circumstances share
38
values, interest, perceptions and pursue together courses of social action; b)
‘heterogeneous actor-network’: mixture of human, technical, material and textual
elements; c) unitary acting whole full of images, representation and categorisations
of things, people and institutions (Norman Long, 2000).
In that sense we can talk about a ‘social life’ which is experienced within the
communities. Hence, social life is multidimensional and comprises interpersonal and
networks relationships. Whether indigenous life should be understood regarding its
communitarian embedded character it is an issue of discussion to understand the
relationship between the external structures and interfaces encounter provides
elements that impact inside the community with different intensity and therefore
have to be taken in account to understand the complexities of the social change. In
that sense indigenous community should be understood as a sum of individual
actors that through the exercise of consensus experience social action.
-
Since triqui children born, they are part of the community; identity is formed
not just by the kinship but also for the birth place and the political organisation.
Household is the first contact with the society; Hollenbach wrote: Children are
desired, and families tend to be large; babies are breast-fed until the mother learns
she is pregnant again, at which point the baby is abruptly weaned to a diet
consisting largely of corn (Hollenbach, 1992). Because of the precarious health
facilities, families used to have as much kids as possible based on a probabilistic logic
that not all of them will survive longer than 5 years, till now communities with
scarce health services follow the same rule; however the situation has been
changed. Health services and family planning programs arrived at the communities
not at the same rate and intensity; as a result, grown population is uneven; whereas
some communities welcomed planning programs, some reject them and just accept
the therapeutic services.
Hollenback continues: Babies and young children are indulged considerably
because it is considered bad to let them cry. Once they reach school age, however,
they are expected to obey and to help in household tasks. Ridicule is an important
technique used to enforce compliance with societal norms... children accompany the
parent of the same sex and learn skills by observation and imitation. Education of
Triqui children comes from family and school. Triquis consider necessary and
positive the formal education in the school; boys and girls attend the school without
restrictions from the parents, moreover they consider an obligation to send children
to school. Parents are deep involved in the scholar issues through parental
committees which took care of the necessities of the school and also watch the
behaviour of teachers. Parental committees are part of the system of cargos;
39
committee members has a high accountability to the community so they don’t
hesitant to accuse misbehaviour of teacher (usually alcoholism and lateness in high
degree, above what they consider normal and tolerable), and even ask removal of
those ‘bad’ teachers; the situation is more relaxed when teachers are Triquis, in this
case, they bear misconduct of teachers regarding their social duties with the
community as causing of their misconduct which is tolerated; nevertheless because
of their lack of skills parents don’t pay attention to the contents of the education.
The Triqui region is not attractive for teachers at all; those who remain in the
community for a long time are rare since they look forward to being moved
somewhere else. As a consequence, Triqui teachers do not have problems to work in
their hometowns. Teachers are very influential persons in the community since they
are fluently in Spanish they eventually become gestores and/or local leaders.
Teachers always gain respect from the community; however as members of the
group they have to observe the rules and accomplish their tasks such as be
authorities and held cargos.
Almost all barrios in Copala have a preschool and elementary school, some of
them under the mode of educación inicial indígena (initial indigenous education)
which is non-schooling education for children under 4 years old, and it is imparted
by community fellows who accomplished their secondary school and by this way
obtain a grant to continue their studies in high school. Bigger barrios have tele-
secondary school wherein students take broadcasted lessons with support of an
advisor teacher; only the biggest barrios have secondary school like San Juan Copala.
Only El Rastrojo in the side of MULT has a high school campus.
Most of teenager Triquis leave formal education behind after they graduate
from secondary school then is time to think about marriage. For males it is time to
migrate and save some money to afford the expenses of a new household; women
have to learn at home about domestic issues and she has to be able to weave her
own huipil. A few youngsters who continue studying have to leave the community to
Oaxaca or Mexico City, depending on where their relatives are. Although there is a
high school in El Rastrojo, parents complain about its low quality insofar as the
leaders of MULT force parents to send their children, otherwise they fine them with
excessive amount of money. Despite of all difficulties, in the last decade a few
numbers from a new generation of Triquis have been graduated from University.
Triqui children grew up within an unpleasant atmosphere where the violence
is present everywhere at every time. Social life is embedded with the political
conflict insofar as Triqui children grew up as member of a group and regarding the
existence of an opposite otherness which is ‘the wrong’. Rivalries are observed also
in school where boys reproduce adult’s conflicts; in SJC teacher report a number of
40
street fights among kids belonged to one and another group. Future of youngsters
are not so optimist; migration bring them an attractive image through the stories of
those who come back; they link the adventure in the North with success which mean
dollars, trucks, electric devices, good clothes and ostentatious use of gold
accessories. However young Triquis start to question the community system and
challenge the values and traditions. During an informal interview with a smart
young triqui, he relates the difficulties that implies be a young triqui:
“Violence won’t finish, vendettas are very deep in the families and no
one wants to forgive the past injuries’. He drank his beer and breathed deeply:
‘you know, what is missing here is love; if I marry a woman from the other
group I’ll be forced to respect her family, I won’t be able to kill her relatives,
but how? I can’t even talk to them (to the girls), is forbidden”. He laughed and
drank again: “Moreover I haven’t gone to the North (the US), I couldn’t pass, I
tried but the migra15
trapped me and they kick me off, how can I get a woman?
I’m not able to afford the cost. I write poems”. He laughed again: “that’s why
I’m not coming to the dance tonight; women won’t dance with me, they don’t
care about poems; they would love me if I got dollars, but I don’t want to leave
my town again’. I think our traditions are wrong; they suck; we must learn to
do things in a different way, if I marry a woman and we love each other, I
won’t be thinking about kill people...”
Triquis have strong endogamy practices. Courtship is long and expensive and
it is mainly a matter for parents to arrange. In the old days, the parents of the groom
offered aguardiente16
and tobacco to the bride’s family and usually it took several
meetings until the family finally approved the marriage. At the last meeting all the
relatives together decide the form and the expenses for the wedding.
Nowadays the system of a series of visits remains but the negotiation has
changed drastically because of migration. Male teenagers who go to work in the USA
and decide that is time to get married come back to their hometowns. There is a
popular belief that people who come back from the US have succeeded and
accumulated a good amount of dollars. As a consequence, brides’ families ask
(charge?) a high amount of money to make a deal. Rates varies according to age and
status of the woman; to give an idea it is popularly commented about those who
have paid about 70,000 pesos (€4,700) for a young virgin female whereas a mature
single mother has been ranked at 5,000 pesos (about €300). This situation creates a
competition between males to demonstrate who is able to afford such expenses.
15
Popular name that migrants use to refer to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service police.
16 Strong alcoholic beverage made by distilling sugar cane
41
This has become an issue among outsiders, human rights watchers and feminists,
who argue that it is a form of trade with women; however male Triquis defend their
practice as a part of their own culture like Hollenback wrote: ‘The bride price
contributes to the stability of marriage, but divorces and separations are not
infrequent. Some couples elope, but such marriages tend to be unstable because
they lack the backing of the extended family’(Hollenbach, 1992).
Family is the basic institution of Triqui society, and the householder is the
representative of the domestic unity. As a formal member of the community, the
householder takes part in collective issues but he involves the whole family to carry
them out properly. Collective action start within the family that seek from attend a
political demonstration to manage a fiesta, householder allocate a role to each
member of the family. Social action is building in a ‘harmonic’ process which Turner
calls ‘social enterprises’ (V. Turner, 1974)
The process to achieve social goals is visible in the collective work called
Tequio; Díaz describes tequio not just as a collective work but as a transforming
energy where the individual combine personal and familiar interest with those of
the community without a expecting a wage for his or her contribution. The success
of tequio depends on the importance of the goal for the community and also on the
ability of authorities to call people to attend it. Governmental programs have
capitalized the work of the community in form of tequio where it is considered to
have an input of the community in the building of social infrastructure; combination
of tequio plus government financial resources has made possible most of the public
buildings, infrastructure and roads in indigenous communities.
The tequio is also a form of accountability in upward level; when people join
the collective work they get information about the using of the economic resources
in detail. The tequio represents the human capital of the community and it also hints
the capability of the organisations; under the atmosphere of violence the tequio is
not a safe practice insofar as in San Juan Copala there is not a concentric
urbanisation like in other barrios. For instance, in the past decade, the MULT built an
auditorium in its side whereas UBISORT built a market building in its own side.
Nowadays the council of the MASJC are building a wall in the perimeter of the town-
hall.
42
Apart of material achievements, it is important for indigenous peoples to
keep in order the spirituality of the community. Fiestas are the way how social
enterprises balance the material with the non-material identities, and reinforce the
community harmony by doing the
process properly. Current fiestas
are a combination between
catholic practices and ancient
believes and traditions; catholic
church has adopted a tolerant
attitude and the role of priest are
limited only to the catholic
services, the rest of the events
during fiesta are taking in
combined way for the mayordomos
and the authorities, the first
concern about religious issues and
the latest for civil and social
activities.
The Triquis celebrate
several fiestas throughout the year;
all barrios have their own fiesta on
a certain date, but the most
important ones take place in San
Juan Copala:
The third Friday of Lent,
they celebrate Rne cuanun in
honour of an image of Jesus Christ that they call Tata Chu17
. Triquis from all barrios
and even Mixtecos, Amuzgos, Tacuates and mestizos join this fiesta. Besides the
Catholic celebration, the fiesta is surrounded by many elements of Triquis’ beliefs18.
In addition to visiting the Catholic temple of Tata Chu, pilgrims visit the sacred cave
17
Tata Chu is a deformation of the Spanish name of “Padre Jesús”. Tata Chu is recognized not
just in Copala but in many communities of Mixtecos, Amuzgos and Tacuates as a very miraculous
image.
18 Together with mass and celebrations, Catholic services, inside the church shamans and
traditional healers have plenty of freedom to practice their rituals and therapies, soul cleansings and
reading of cards, maize and hands. Conservative Catholics are shocking for this mixture of elements,
but on the other hand dozens of pilgrims travel long distances to find health for their bodies and soul
in the fiesta of Tata Chu.
Figure 11 Images of fiesta in San Juan Copala, (February, 2008)
43
and rock; there they make offerings and petitions to “el dueño del lugar”19
. They
represent graphically their desires drawing them -cars, houses, money, cattle, and
etcetera- on the wall with chalk or building small houses with rocks and branches on
the floor. Despite of the conflicts the number of pilgrimages do not decrease, faith is
bigger than fear, a Tacuate woman told to me: -we came with faith to see Tata Chu,
they say that is dangerous to come here, but we believe that if you come in peace
and with faith, Tata Chu will not let you to suffer anything bad-. Lent is a special time
for Triquis; probably it is due to the relation of this period with the season of
planting, insofar as every Friday of Lent there is fiesta in other barrios.
On September 29, Triquis worship the Archangel San Miguel, this celebration
coincides with the season of harvesting. This fiesta is carried out in the entire region
but the most important takes place in San Miguel Copala.
The Day of Dead November 1 and 2 is an important date in the indigenous
calendar, this Catholic celebration coincides with the ancient date of cult to the dead
ancestors. They believe that on this date deceased relatives come to visit them;
Triquis do not visit the cemeteries in these days, but rather set an offering in their
houses adorned with marigolds or cempaxóchitl flowers (Tagetes erecta), special
food, fruits and beverages; at the end of the fiesta, they share the meals.
Another important date is New Year's Day. During the New Year’s Eve, the
Triquis carry out the exchange of authorities; the ceremony represents the end of a
period and the start of a new one, by which the cycle of death and live, day and
night is complete. The Triqui believe that at the end of every year their past
mistakes or crimes are forgotten. As a result, the last few days in December are
considered the best time to kill your enemy.
19
El dueño del lugar is the indigenous representation of the one who owns the earth and from
whom they ask permission and blessing.
Figure 12 Image of the sacred cave and the draws on the wall
44
Fiestas have changed over time and adjusted to the current circumstances.
Whereas they preserve the symbols on the other hand, violence and political
conflicts has been influenced changes in the form of organisation of fiestas.
Nowadays mayordomos do not have any influence in the decision making of the
authorities. Even some practices were abandoned; in the past after the fiesta of Tata
Chuz, mayordomos used to take the figure of Jesus Christ to the sacred rock, there
they washed the image with water from the sacred cave; due to violence now they
no longer practice this ritual. Since the sacred rock is on the territory of MULT, those
mayordomos who are members of UBISORT do not feel safe to go there. Last
decade, UBISORT and MULT shared the space of the church, and during fiestas there
was a peace de facto, mayordomos could be nominated from one or another group;
however people don’t feel free to go from one side to another to join the fiesta. In
periods of crisis only a few amount of traders attempted to come to SJC, also
happen with the social events, it became difficult to find musicians and basketball
teams brave enough to play in SJC.
This year accomplish one since the authorities of the MASJC pacified the town. They
sized his success through the number of visitors in the fiesta; the main street is so
crowded than even the procession of Tata Chu toughened to find a way into the
number of stalls: clothes, agriculture tools, illegal copies of music CDs and DVD films,
etcetera, on the other side of the street women sold food, fruits, handcrafts,
bananas and tobacco leaves.. People are losing fear to come to Copala: the
autonomous president told. Another strategy for catch people to fiesta is the
basketball tournament, this year the prizes were from 15,000 pesos (€965) for the
first prize to 2,000 pesos (€130) for the 5th placed; after many years there was
women tournament as well. Fiesta occurred in peace, next days, people commented
proudly: ‘there wasn’t little dead (muertito) in our fiesta this year’. Next week a
couple of members of UBISORT died in an ambush.
Who dies go to a new and better life, Triquis say. When somebody dies they
are dressed with his or her best clothes, and provided with food, utensils to drink
water, money and jewellery. There neither silence nor prayers during the wake;
Triquis play music, talk loudly and drink beer and aguardiente. According to Díaz,
when someone is killed; the family curses the murderers and ask the corpse take
them away (Díaz). Nine days after the burial, they hold a ceremony called raising
the cross which must be carried out to assist in the passage of the soul to heaven.
There is, however, a belief that murder victims cannot go to heaven.
Triquis are involved in the social and political organisation of their family and
community during their life cycle. People are not only identified by their birth place
but also for the social organisation they belong, Turner mentions that loyal and
45
obligation is a heavy duty that goes even against their own personal preferences (V.
Turner, 1974).
Too Young to Know; Too Young to Die (The Youth in Copala)
On April 7, 2008 two young women died in an ambush, they held a cargo in the
MASJC; their job was the operation of the communitarian radio: Radio Copala. ‘The
voice that breaks the silence’ is its slogan. Days before they broadcasted a new spot:
‘they say that we are too young to know; we say that we are too young to die’. It
makes a clear allusion to the critics from the old leaders who argue that people
involved in the MASJC is too young, inexperienced and stupid because they do not
know how hard has been the historical defence of the territory and the relation with
the government.
The process of learning inside the tradition of Triquis seems that never ends;
however, formal education, scientific knowledge and myriad of experiences of
migrants from outside the community provided of new skills to the youth that
challenge the wisdom of elderly. Mead quoted by Arce, noticed the counterpoint that
the children’s world forms against the adults’ world (A Arce, 2000). In actuality,
young people firmly supported the declaration of autonomy. As they say, this
inclusive process could be a chance to experience voice and participate actively in the
achievement of peace in Copala.
Old organisation grew up in close relationship with the government; it could
be in good or bad terms but government has been the only interlocutor that they had
to negotiate and to get benefits. Nowadays social policies have been changed and
the state is no longer able to accomplish the demands of the population. Young
people do not recognise the state as a benefactor; they grew up in an atmosphere
where the government causes more problems than solutions. Moreover, young
people have more access to the massive media and personal experiences of
migration outside the community; in other words their interpretation of reality is
different.
For young people violence is everywhere in Copala and they learnt to live
immersed in its; however the origin is so far and foggy insofar as violence is a non-
sense for the youth. Nevertheless, they creatively have opened subtle ways of
communication even amongst opposite groups. The experience of the community
radio is an example; operators of Radio Copala are not older than 25 years. They
broadcast popular music combined with greetings and short messages; something
that seems an innocent activity caught the attention of the old leaders. A common
message could be like this: “This song is a token for Rosa from Copala, from the part
46
of his secret love who lives in El Rastrojo20”; outside the house of Radio Copala,
youngsters run freely bringing pieces of papers with such ‘subversives’ messages of
secret loves. Since the land and the roads are unsafe and despite of the censure of
the older, young Triquis use technology to appropriate the air and transmit feelings
and opinions.
POLITICAL ORGANISATION
Community life cannot be understood without taking into account political
participation. Through hard lessons of their own history, the Triquis have learnt that
being together is the only way to hold control of their territory. Political organization
is a very dynamic and interesting process; it is a series of constant changes in power
relations, however agency within the community varies between individual actors
and collective action.
Perhaps one of the hardest question to be answered is about who rules in
Copala, and it is also an issue that has been modified over time. First ethnographies
about Triquis (Cordero, 1977), (Huerta, 1981), described the old traditional way of
organisation and pointed out several actors and their positions in the decision
making process of the communities, those mentioned positions are:
Principales: They are persons that because of their age, experience or skills
have achieved the respect into their communities; they have a very active
role in the decision making and functioning of the community. At the top of
their career they usually become formal authorities. Older principales are
always consulted by younger authorities and eventually become members of
the Elderly Council.
Formal authorities: They are persons who hold the legal representation of
the community during a period of time such as municipal presidents and
municipal agents. In indigenous communities, only those who have served in
all cargos21
in a gradual scale can become an authority. Election of
authorities is held in popular assemblies.
20
El Rastrojo is a community under control of MULT, after the inauguration of the MASJC people
from MULT left San Juan Copala and moves to El Rastrojo. They cannot come back because is too
risky.
21The Cargos system is a ladder through which indigenous communities train people to obtain
experience in the public service for the community. Young people start with the lower level and
simple tasks, once they managed it, move upward to the next cargo and so on until he is skillful
enough to become authority. This systems is criticized arguing uneven gender relations and that it
does not take into account the learnt skills and knowledge acquired outside the community in formal
education.
47
Mayordomos: They are chosen to hold the religious fiestas, to take care of
the religious issues, maintaining of the church and sacred places and spend
money on the celebration of fiestas (meals, drinks, music, flowers and
fireworks). The cargo for Mayordomo lasts one year, but in practice they are
three22; they had an important voice in the community issues and in the past
their families and those of the authorities were the only ones who were
allowed to live in the Chuma a and also had privileges to trade in the local
market in order to be able to afford the expenses of communal fiestas.
Council of Elders: It is composed of wise men that have succeeded in all their
cargos. The Council takes part in important issues for the whole community
usually related to conflicts with other towns and those attributed to
supernatural origins such as epidemics or droughts.
This political system has changed. Caciques have been deemed as powerful
and cruel persons who kept a strict control over Triqui lands and persons. Caciques
are also confused with leaders or principales or these conceptual terms have been
used interchangeably which is not always right. Díaz makes a brilliant description
about Sí:
Sí are persons who looks like both caciques and principales, to be a Sí it is
not important to be elder, everyone who has the ability to solve conflicts,
mediate between them and deliver justice can become Sí. Sí and caciques are
alike because of the wealth they can achieve from their hierarchical position;
Sí can use violence to defend their families and barrios and make alliances to
defend the integrity of Triqui territory or if their lives are in risk.
Among the Sí exists a hierarchical distinction achieved by relevant actions;
usually they start being Sí of their own barrios by doing actions of defence.
The higher aspiration of Sí is to rule as many barrios as possible and this
desire is linked to the wish to concentrate wider political power. (Díaz)
Sí is seen as synonym of leader, though it is not always true. Sí use to be in a
safe place without leave his territory; he does not show him in public; his decision
making is at home where them, other Sí and leaders hold sort of conclaves to decide
the future of the communities. Leaders are public persons who bargain with the
government at the same time that are accountable to the grassroots level; a leader
can be a Sí, cacique or both at the same time, otherwise leaders obey the will of Sí
and publicly exercise his voice; leaders move relatively autonomously but always
22
Three mayordomos are responsible to carry out the fiestas, they call them incoming,
current and retiring, although there is only one who held the title each year, in fact three of them
have to spent almost the same amount of money and the responsibilities are shared.
48
defend the interest of Sí at least until something changes the balance of power
relationship. In brief, because of their public activities leaders are the sine qua non
that makes collective action possible and they vie each other to become Sí or to
defeat another Sí.
Everyone in Copala knows that the “mero mero lider” (the real leader) of the
MULT lives in El Rastrojo at few kilometres from San Juan Copala; people said, in a
frightened tone, that Don “O” and his brothers held secret meetings in their house
in El Rastrojo to plan the strategies of the MULT; then they communicate the
decision to Sr. ‘P’ in Oaxaca City and ‘R’. True or not, Don ‘O’ holds the respect and
regards of his community; he is what Díaz S. calls a Sí; he hasn’t left the community
but never appears in public. In contrast, Sr. ‘P’ and ‘R’ are true leaders they lead the
demonstrations, appears in public, and tell speeches to the press; in other words,
they are very active politically, and public persons. Sr. ‘P’ is not Triqui so he is hardly
deemed manipulator, murderer, and liar by Triquis. ‘R’ is triqui but he does not live
in his town since many years ago; probably he does not feel safe there. These men
are powerful and have strong influence in the decision making of the communities
of the MULT; but they cannot achieve the position of a Sí; it is a ranking that has to
do also with the family and tradition.
-
The ephemeral life of leader is determined by accountability; this refers to
the process of holding actors responsible for their actions. According to Fox,
accountability is multidirectional: vertical refers to the relations between civil
society and state that might be in both senses upward and downward whereas
horizontal accountability refers to a process along a surface of institutions within the
state, At this flat level there is also collective internal accountability that is about the
relations among members of the same group which support each other and share
responsibilities as a whole, Fox suggests the term ‘lateral’ to refer at this particular
kind of accountability (J. Fox, 1996).
Elwert et al sentenced that: ‘the social incorporation of violence is one of
‘accountability’ which has to replace violence itself as the currency of negotiation; it
build bridges between fight leaders and talk leaders, in which collective suffering can
be recognised’ (Elwert et al., 1999)The structure of power relationships inside the
Triqui collective agency reveals that a system of accountability coexistences in
fragile equilibrium which is easily broken. This makes a cycle that goes forward and
adjusts itself over time and using violence to start a new cycle. Díaz argued that an
indigenous community cannot be seen as individuals separated from territory and
the idea of indigenous people without land is simply impossible (Robles & Cardoso,
2007). In practice the community can be seen as a sum of individual actors
49
exercising strong lateral accountability because of the crucial importance to protect
the territory and others shared interests.
In a recent study Fox properly assumes that some communities just do not
work out with conventional authorities and government relationships -such is the
case of Copala- and they created their own “autonomous scaled-up counterweights”
and local accountable institutions (J. A. Fox, 2007). The first level of upward
accountability lies in the local leader. In a typical case when a leader starts his career
his community trusts him, and he is highly accountable to them; however a leader
sometimes needs the support of a local or regional Sí which make him automatically
accountable from above; the leader then has to be able to keep a balance of
accountability in both downwards and upwards directions.
As a second stage, when conflict arises leader is at a crossroads, they have to
decide between to be loyal to Sí or to community. It is a tough decision taking into
account that what is at risk is the life of leader. The decision is shaped by the
strength of the accountability relations; at least two scenarios are possible: a) the
leader becomes more accountable to Sí and less to community; in this case the
lateral accountability becomes less strong and a new leader can emerge; b) the
leader becomes more accountable to community and less accountable to Sí; in this
case lateral accountability relaxes and collective loyalty increase to protect the
Figure 13 Diagram of conflict; social arrangement of leader, Sí and communityThe dashed line represent the position of the leader and the triangles the lateral accountability among the community; in A) the balance between the position of leader, SÍ and the community is in equilibrium and the leader is sustained by the community's loyalty; In B) the leader tends to be closer to the Sï, he loses the loyalty of the community and the lateral accountability becomes stronger and wider; emergence of a new leader is feasible; In C) the leader is close to the community and becomes part of the lateral accountability and is protected by the community.
Loyalty to Sí,
A) C) B)
Lateral accountability, loyalty to community
Vertical accountability
50
leader’s life.
A third stage is possible in a leader's career and it is observed when a leader
reaches a public position that sets him in the position to bargain with the state.
Government strives to bewitch leaders; this situation always creates a relation of
inverse proportionality between the accountability to government and community.
This is the highest position of risk for leaders, because of incompatibilities –Triquis
say: “no se puede servir a Dios y al Diablo”23-. Leaders who choose to be loyal to the
people can be murdered by instruction of government; on the other hand co-opted
leaders are killed by disappointed colleagues or new emerging leaders who want to
take his place. Leaders in this stage are very careful insofar as they move outside the
community to safer places like Oaxaca City. Nevertheless those leaders who have
lost support and loyalty from the people have no other resource than using violence
to preserve their power, no matter how much it costs in money and lives; this
violent behaviour is the same for those Sí that tends to be more like the caciques.
‘R’ and ‘T’ started his political career as members of MULT, ‘R’ studied
outside the community so he became fluent in Spanish; his skills helped him to be
closer to the Sí of El Rastrojo. ‘T’ forged his career through cargo systems and being
a gestor. As a natural leader he achieved respect and trust from his barrio; ‘T’ kept a
good relation with the Sí of El Rastrojo and provided support of his barrio to him. ‘R’
holds a strategic position as the spokesman of the MULT and he became an
influential element for the Sí and the old leaders in Oaxaca City, he was loyal to Sí
and also to Sr. ‘P’ in Oaxaca City insofar as it is said that both planed the creation of
the PUP. Sr. ‘P’ rewards him being congressman for the PUP. Meanwhile, after ‘T’
lost his son in an ambush, the relationship with the Sí in El Rastrojo was impossible.
The support of his community and the loyalty he put on them made possible that
‘T’s barrio followed him in the creation of a new political organisation: MULT-I.
Neither ‘R’ nor ‘T’ hold an easy position; on one hand, ‘R’ does not live in his
community anymore, and has widely supported by the official system; on the other
hand ‘T’ continues living in his barrio; probably he did not expect that the separation
from MULT led the situation to a declaration of political autonomy in the MASJC. At
the moment he is an important person in the MASJC’s political structure; however
he must be loyal to the community regardless that the democratic process impairs
his power; otherwise he would not have safety anymore.
In briefly, Triqui life is completely embedded in political affairs. Triquis
exercise political voice individually but the collective consensus determines the
nature of the collective action which they follow even against their individual
interest and believes. During escalation of violence, the Triquis must decide
23
‘ You cannot serve God and the Devil’
51
between to be loyal to the family or to the community because it is their own life
which is in risk. Decision to migrate is an individual one insofar as at times of crisis
people leave the town behind at night and secret. Exit is the resource against
violence and extreme situations, when the life inside the community cannot be safe
and secure anymore.
52
Chapter V
THE TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITY OF SAN JUAN COPALA
It is important to take in account the high mobility of the Triqui people to get a
complete picture of them. Copala ranks among the highest migration flows regions
according to official statistics. This phenomenon produces an extended community
that cannot be understood without acknowledge all the parts that comprises the
territories occupied by Triquis and their dynamics. Copala should be seen as a
transnational community. This chapter refers to the composition of the
transnational community and its peculiarities, and try to explain how migration
trigger complex processes of reinforcement of the identity and differentiation,
however this parallel process leads to unexpected constructions and transformation
of local realities that directly or indirectly affect the Triqui life.
Origin of the Diaspora
The Triqui community has a strong migratory outflow and they make reference the
violence and poverty as the main reasons of the diaspora; however, Triquis of
Copala remain closely knit. Far from home, they learnt to be united to face new local
challenges. The migration in the Mixteca region is classified in two different types:
permanent and temporal. There is also a relation between environmental factors
such as rate of erosion and type of migration; whereas people from highly eroded
zones tends to migrate in permanent way to the big cities in Mexico and the United
States and search for urban employees, people from low eroded zones (like Copala)
used to cultivate crops and then migrate in temporal way to large farms in the states
of the north of Mexico such as Sonora and Baja California. However, this assumption
does not fit for the permanent migration of Triquis. In Copala migration is a
concomitant output of violence.
Migration is commonly seen as an act of abandonment and translated as lack
of loyalty to the community. Fox point out that migration is also an individual choice
of loyalty to family or self-preservation (Fox, 2007). To support these assumptions
he describes the relations between migrant civil society as a political user of voice
and exit and the role of the sentiment of loyalty as mediator between the self-safety
and sense of cultural belonging: one first step acknowledge that some migrant are
engaged with collective action and secondly most migrations implies a collective
action in the usage of extended networks of social capital empowered by loyalty and
trust. Finally migrants express loyalty when send remittances back home.
In this picture presented by Fox, Triqui migration is an atypical case.
Migration of Triquis from Copala is linked directly or indirectly with violence: losing a
53
householder, fleeing from revenges or the justice, and the inability to work due to
injuries or simply fear are some of the causes of migration. Nevertheless migration is
a well organised system. Political voice is a common practice among Triquis; that is a
part of their making of collective agency. Although public voice is expressed by
leaders, his success and support from the community depend on the degree that
people feel well represented by him. Otherwise, the leader no longer will live among
the community or he will be eliminated; however loyalty is part of an individualistic
agency that is shaped by kinship and individual conveniences. Firstly, belonging to a
group depends on the geographical situation of the community because safety and
strategic cooperation for defending of territory are important factors to maintain
life; however the community as a collective actor can turn its favour to another
organisation or leader.
The migration of Triquis is most of the times in one way. It is common that
the people who leave lose their land and rights in the community, this factor
together with lack of family links make unattractive the idea to come back but
strength the eager to build a new community somewhere else. The Triquis exercise
political voice in a participative way to rebuild the social fabric of their community in
diaspora. New home will forge new community that eventually will replace the
community in Copala and from these communities Triquis start new patterns of
migration. During my field work in La Nueva San Juan Copala in Sonora, I witnessed
a case of a person who was deep in debts -after he managed the organisation of the
local fiesta- and how his situations was handle during a popular assembly in the
presence of the traditional authorities and staff of the National Commission for
Development of Indigenous Peoples (CDI). This man was mayordomo and also the
treasurer of a formal committee which obtained resources from CDI to run the
expenses of the fiesta; at the time (2 months after the fiesta took place) he had not
present all the proofs of the expenses. The local leader told me that that the man's
wife was very sick so people mumbled that he took the money to afford the cost of
medicines and to pay the bill of physicians; this situation was never mentioned in
the assembly; at the end the participants set a deadline to the man presents the bills
or the money which was missing. The decision to set a deadline was not a trivial
issue; after a large discussion, the attendants of the assembly took into account the
dates when the man could find a job in the US, and how long it will take to gather
the money; surprisingly the decision contained the solution in itself: the man has to
go to the US to gather money and come back to pay his debt with the community. I
was wondering if the man decides to stay in the US and forget his debts; the leader
gave me the answer: He cannot do such a thing, his family and house are here, he
won’t go anywhere, for sure he will come back. As the same way it happens in
54
Copala, people who are deep in debts, because they have to afford a compromiso24
,
they go to the US as the only possible way to gather money in relative short time.
Apart from paying debts, Triquis from La Nueva San Juan Copala migrate to build
their houses in la colonia or gather money to buy a car. In this way, La Nueva San
Juan Copala is also replacing to San Juan Copala Oaxaca as the destiny of
remittances.
The Path to the North
There are two types of migration that the Triquis follow; one of them is the one that
they do to afford compromisos which is a temporal migration. Usually only men go
to work in the US for one or two years and most of then come back although for
only short periods; they send remittances home to pay debts or to save them and
afford high expenses in the future. Because of the difficulties to cross the border
illegally, it is difficult that the Triquis travel with their wives and children, though
there are exceptions. The routes they follow vary according to the family network;
sometimes they pass to the communities in Sonora and Baja California to work for a
season while they gather enough money to cross the border. Phoenix Ca. is the
point of distribution, from there the Triquis move to the different destinies in the US
where they can find a job (París, 2003). Since 1997 and because of the escalation of
the security in the border, the crossing preferences moved to the east from Nuevo
Laredo Tamauipas (Mexico) to Laredo Texas (US); once there, they move to the east
coast of the US. One the other hand there is the permanent migration; in this case
complete families leave the village behind to establish in the new settlements in the
cities -Oaxaca, Mexico City- or in the agricultural fields of Sinaloa, Sonora and Baja
California; once they settle down, they hardly will come back.
Parallel to political organisation Triqui people keep strong family networks
which constitute the backbone of the migration system. The Triquis move along
localities relying on a network of family links. Using family networks, the Triquis
move collectively along well defined routes through Mexico and the US (París,
2003); this network also connect the migrant with the labour market and the
political organisation. Family networking is very active and available whenever they
need it25.
24
When they hold an important assignment in the community such as to be mayordomo, manage a
religious celebration or something that implies an important expense of money.
25 During my field research I experienced the rapid organisation of Triqui network. When I
travelled from Hermosillo to Tijuana, and because my informants knew that it was my first staying in
Tijuana, they provide me with phone numbers and addresses of their contacts there. They asked me
my mobile number so the Triquis in Tijuana called me almost immediately I arrive to the city.
55
Triqui migrant regroup outside Copala; hence, the physical domain of barrios
are rebuilt in different spaces where they remain closely knit but they incorporate
new elements to their language of territoriality and belonging: El predio26
in Mexico
City (Díaz, 2007), La colonia27 in the agriculture fields of the north states of Mexico
(Camargo, 2006), and the apartment in Greenfield California (Johnston, 2004). These
are all new forms of settlements which are becoming the new domains where
Triquis and their organisations join their abilities and capacities to make a
difference.
Although the decision to migrate is an individual choice, the destination of
migrants is determined by the family network that the migrant knows beforehand.
Evidently, Triquis are constantly engaged in individual and collective action28;
however since loyalty is a collective matters and exit is an individual act of agency,
individual loyalty toward the collective actor is not common. On the other hand,
once Triqui migrants are in the community of destination they are automatically
incorporated into the local organisation and eventually become loyal to a new
community. ‘Ci’ is a labourer in the agricultural fields of Sonora; he lives there with
his brother and his own family; he came in the nineties when ‘J’ a leader of the
MULT commissioned him in the north in to do propaganda in favour of the MULT.
The Triquis in Sonora did not accept him and rejected everything that has to do with
the MULT ‘Ci’ suffer an attack and like he says: “I had to defend”. ‘Ci’ was
condemned and sentenced to prison. Then he asked the support of MULT to get his
freedom but they denied it. ‘Ci’ narrates that he got support and assistance from an
organisation of Sonora and he got free six months later. This experience broke all
kind of relationship with MULT and he advocated empowering the new organisation
in Sonora, the FULT.
26
Predio is a ground in the urban area where Triqui group built sheds where the families live
in overcrowded rooms.
27 La colonia is an urban neighbourhood with regular public services, in the past they were
agricultural fields which were taken by the labourers throughout social struggles or by negotiations
between leaders, landlords and government.
28 There are cases of exiled Triquis who took part actively in the local organisations and after
migration could organize their paisanos in the new settlements and create new organisations.
56
Triqui people who have born in these new settlements speak Triqui
language, reproduce Triqui traditions and behave as Triqui despite the fact that
some of them have never been in Copala. In this way Triquis built and re-built their
identities and become a transnational community. However there are some crucial
differences with typical transnational communities and one of the reasons is the fact
that they leave their community by fear rather than poverty. One of the main points
of difference is the fact that the Triquis regard their new community as their “new
homes”.
The Mixteco’s region is highly eroded thus Mixtecos migrate in order to make
a living since their homeland is very poor. Mixtec identity is re-defined in the North
where the Mixtecos faced discrimination and exploitation (Carole Nagengast &
Kearney, 1990). Mixtecos in the North organise clubs and social networks that
strength the relationship with their hometown by sending remittances and voice
back home. They regard their local authorities and are active part in the decision
making of the community of origin. The impact of the remittances can be observed in
the large houses that Mixtecos migrants build in their hometowns although they are
empty most of the time. The ideal of Mixtecos is to gather a good amount of money
Figure 14 Migration routes and networking from Oaxaca to the North of Mexico and the United States.
San Quintín
Greenfield
57
to have a pleasant retirement time at home; when someone dies, Mixtecos use to
expend loads of money to send the body back home to be buried there. In contrast,
Triquis tend to create new communities in the destiny communities rather than
improve the community of origin.
Overcrowding is a common issue in the new settlements; the Triquis have
access to facilities for attention of their health since they are living into urban areas
or near to them; however the health institutions does not have specific programs for
the attention of Triquis according to their habits; which do happen in Copala where
there are programs of health education and family planning services focus on
indigenous communities. As a result big families appears in predios and colonias; the
leader of La Nueva San Juan Copala (I will call him 'C') has twelve children; he
follows the idea from Copala where they use to have as many children as possible.
He explained: “My mother in Copala had ten chamacos29
but we only survive four,
here in La colonia, all of them
are healthy. My brother (he
lives in la colonia as well) has
six children too; the problem
is that we have to work very
hard to raise them...”
At the same way that
in Copala, It is a priority that
children in la colonia attend
the school; In La Nueva, ‘C’
proudly showed me the
elementary school “Nueva
Creación Comunidad Triquis”;
it is one of their main achievements as gestor. “Now, we are searching bilingual
teachers like in Oaxaca”, he said; “we want they teach our children in Triqui”. The
school is another field where Triquis reproduce their organisation; they have a
parental committee as well; the school and the social practices around tie even
more the permanence in the community, like ‘C’ said: “even if I want to go back to
Copala I cannot go, my children are in the school here, I cannot move my family...;
alone? No, I cannot; who is going to cook for me?”
Kearney regard ethnicity as a social construction formed from the interface
of material conditions, history, the structure of the political economy, and social
practice (Carole Nagengast & Kearney, 1990), it implies the construction of a dual
ethnicity by double definition; the one that Triquis get from themselves and the one
29
children
Figure 15Family of C in La Nueva San Juan Copala Sonora
58
that they get from the outsiders. During my visit to Sonora people from the
surroundings have a foggy idea about who are Triquis, they identified them for the
red huipiles that women wear and their barefoot children; on the other hand, a civil
servant from the National Commission for Development of Indigenous Pueblos (CDI)
defined Triquis as: hard workers, well organised, cooperatives and with a strong
sense of community and collective life; I asked: violent?, to which he rapidly
answered: “no. I have heard those stories from Oaxaca which seems to me like an
exaggeration; here these people are very friendly.” The Triquis redesign their
identities on the basis of the defined ethnicity as Triquis in first instance and the
reflected image that they receive from the external word. Kearney argues that
ethnicity is not ontological given but a social construction on the interface of
material conditions (Carole Nagengast & Kearney, 1990). Like the Mixtecos
described by Nagengast; Triquis in the diaspora ‘defined their own reality in a highly
contested struggle over the meaning of ethnicity’. This ethnicity and the
reproduction of their forms of political organisation help them to resist the new
challenges of their new settlements.
The local struggles that the Triquis face in the new localities have been
crucial to thick their identity. In the beginning of the diaspora, in the eighties and
nineties, when the first families of Triquis came to the agriculture fields in Sonora
and Baja California they lived in camps surrounded by the agriculture fields, the
conditions were very poor with neither electricity nor water suppliers nor health
facilities; their life there was very hard. However, through social organisation and
strong leadership, they achieve improvements in their quality of life over the course
of time. First, they obtained the ground to built their houses, later they sought
government support for construction inputs; then they started claims for electricity,
water facilities and drainage. Nowadays the main demand is paving the streets.
Camargo (Camargo, 2006) describes how these struggles encouraged the
participation and organisation of Triquis; this process strengths the original identity
but also incorporate new elements that identify themselves as Triquis but acquires
the particularities from the places where they settle down and reorganise
themselves; they are Triquis from Sonora, Baja California, etcetera. However, the
first sense of belonging is always to be Triquis30 no matter if they live within more
complex societies. Trough their actions they defined the boundaries of their private
spaces and where they allow themselves to be and feel part of the Triqui group.
30
Talking to the leader of “La Nueva San Juan Copala” in Miguel Alemán, Sonora, I asked him about where their kids were born. He answered to me proudly; -they were born all here in “La colonia”. –so they’re “Sonorenses”, I assumed. He turned serious and thought for a moment, finally laughing out loudly he said: -Oh yes they are, they are Sonorenses, right? He agreed.
59
Against all the odds, in the new communities the Triquis live in peace; even
though rival family re- encounter in the North, they cooperate and forget the past,
Camargo describes the act of families that beg pardon and apologize for aggressions
and mistakes from the past. When the Triquis are questioned about the
discontinuity of violence they use to say: We do have enough problems here, why
should we bring back those from Oaxaca? The new communities regard the chance
to build something new with optimism, based on their own knowledge and values,
but taking into account the particularities of the new context. Triqui migrants are
well known for their ability to organise and lead struggles of indigenous labourers in
the North. Whereas other ethnic groups organise to send back remittances and
support in the community of origin, Triquis worry about the new local conditions,
the ‘here and now’. The possibility to return is far from being real and the only
opportunity to build a home is in their new localities.
Nowadays,
Triquis in the North
not only need
electricity and water,
they are building their
spaces according to
their experiential
learning; for instance
the “Colonia La Nueva
San Juan Copala” in
Sonora has in the
middle a small town
hall and in front they
are building a church,
between them there is a basketball court. This distribution of the public space is the
same that in the Triqui barrios in Oaxaca; colonias are somehow the transnational
reproduction of the use of space based on their living experience in Oaxaca.
According to the leader, the next step for the colonia is to have their own cemetery
and this firmly marks a clear difference with other migrant groups to whom it is
crucial to be buried in the birth place (Brandes, 2001).
In contrast with the definition of hyperspace (Kearney, 1996), what Triquis
do is an act of regrouping of the social action; they transport this item to new
spaces. These new spaces are domains where the relations of power are re-
structured separately from the original community. The element of territoriality is
crucial for the integration of the indigenous community and appears again in the
diaspora in the form of predio, colonia, and apartment. Upon the new territories the
Triquis re-design their identities and experience the process of organisation in both
Figure 16 Facade of the town hall of the Colonia La Nueva San Juan Copala
60
traditional and political
way; they combine
individual learned
experiences with the social
action; an example is the
experience of 'JS' who was a
founder member of the
MULT. He had a quarrel
with other leader so he left
Copala for self safety; once
he was in San Quintín Valley
in Baja California, he form
the Independent Movement Unity and Indigenous Struggles (MIULI), because of his
social activism, ‘JS’ was in jail in Oaxaca and also in Baja California31.
People create new social environments through combination of elements of
modernity and tradition. Strathern, cited by Arce, mentioned that diverse
modernities are linked by ‘partial connections’ (A Arce & Long, 2000); it means that
these social constructed spaces are interconnected but never fully integrated. This
explains that the Triquis in diaspora construct modern spaces in different places but
at the same time, subtle partial connections interlink them as a whole community.
For example, the Triqui women are well identified by his traditional red huipil;
wherever they are they weave their huipiles in the same way; however the
circumstances around the making of huipiles change in every place: Triquis in
Mexico City go by metro to the thread shop and come back to his post in the streets
of the centre where she weave until the evening when a group of men come to help
women to retire the post and come back to the predio. Women in “La Nueva”
organise to buy threads; men go to Hermosillo and come back home to spread the
threads; women weave at home during low work season in the agricultural fields.
In Mexico City the unit of collective action is el predio it is comprised by
several families that live together; the main source of income is by selling handcrafts.
The largest predios are of members of MULT and there are some predios that claim
to be independents. Each predio has a leader and gestor; through the social
mobilisation they have achieved some benefits, like the legal property of their
predios, licenses and best places to sell their handcrafts.
Miguel Alemán is a town that is part of the municipality of Hermosillo, the
capital city of the border State of Sonora. The Colonia “La Nueva San Juan Copala”32
31
Personal interview with ‘J’, Vícam Sonora, 2007.
32 New San Juan Copala
Figure 17 Triqui women selling handcrafts in Mexico City
61
is settled there. The colonia was founded in the nineties and until now is in process of
urbanisation. The source of income is almost totally from the wages in the
agricultural fields of the valley of Sonora. In the morning the labourers are
transported in vans from the colonia to the field and return in the evening. The
property of the land is administered by a traditional authority which held an official
representation given by the governor of Sonora. The election of the authorities is
held in popular assembly and based on the cargo system as the same way as in
Copala. Each household has a land where they built their houses, however they don’t
held property rights, when someone leaves the community, The Traditional Authority
decides over the land.
In the new spatial constructions Triquis has learned the best way to be
effective in order to achieve the benefits for the population; they have been the
promoters of their own development. Evidently what keeps them connected is the
starting point; even though most of them have built a new life, the point of
reference will be always the place where they all belong, the region of Copala in
Oaxaca. Wherever, they are not hesitant to express their opinion about the current
situation according to their own understanding of the reality. For instance, one
young Triqui who lives in Tijuana said -after the army took control of Tijuana City
over the drug dealers, the city became quieter and safety-. He suggested that the
army restore the peace in Copala33. Evidently this opinion is far from being a feasible
solution to the conflict; however it responds to a different understanding of the
reality of a member of the same community.
Encounters of the Triqui Nation
One of the paradoxes of globalisation is that which at the same time that
mobilisation of peoples and commodities are bigger and faster, information and
counter-tendencies move as well at the same rate. As a result there is an escalation
of networks and ‘social causes’ that resist and contest the dominant system. An
example is the EZLN which created a ‘virtual community’ in the Internet. The
strategy of Zapatistas of using the cyberspace, gathers support, informs and
mobilises people on his favour. Coming back to the idea of Strathern (A Arce & Long,
2000), despite of the distance ‘partial connections’ still exist and appears in quite
spontaneous situations where identity re-encounter and open channels to
communication and language.
33
Personal communication from Laura Velasco, researcher of El Colegio de la Frontera Norte in
Tijuana.
62
Alonso wrote an example about how an encounter of indigenous, black and
popular movements in Managua on October, 1992, generated a broader contestant
movement (Alonso, 1994). On October, 2007, in Sonora Mexico, the EZLN and the
National Indigenous Council (CNI) called to the “Encounter of the Indigenous
Peoples of America”. The event was held in the Indigenous community of Vícam
(one of the towns of the Yaqui tribe). The encounter brought together more than
1,500 people, 570 delegates from 67 indigenous peoples from 12 countries
(Bellinghausen, 2007). Triqui delegates also attended the encounter: delegates of
MULT from Copala and Mexico City, members of the Autonomous Council of San
Juan Copala, ‘C’ leader of La Nueva San Juan Copala in Sonora and ‘JS’ leader of the
MIULI in Baja California. All of them shared the sense of belonging to the Triqui
peoples, being members of CNI, and adherents to “la otra campaña”. They never
planned to get together in Vícam; however their particular realities still connected in
certain edges. Those men have been forged in multiple realities, they and their
communities have generated language and discourse; in different spaces they re-
created a territory for their peoples which all of them acknowledge.
Regardless their differences and conflicts, the organisers of the encounter
did not make any distinction; every ethnic group had the floor to speech for certain
time. The logistic of the event managed to call to the stage at the delegates
regarding their ethnic group, nation or tribe:
- “Tlapaneco, Triqui, Tzeltal and Tzotzil peoples be ready to take the floor”
Suddenly one of the most memorable episodes of the Encounter in Vícam
took place: the encounter of the Triquis. They join together in the stage:
-“The Triqui peoples has the floor...”
Figure 18 The Encounter of Indigenous Peoples of America
63
Starting from the oldest man, ‘JS’ opened his speech sharing his happiness to
be there beside his brothers Triquis. They all talked about their own places, their
conflicts and struggles, the difficulties of being Triqui inside and outside Copala; at
the end the representative of MULT summarized the arguments: ‘It is the
government who make us fight and kill one against another’.
In the backstage, these leaders and powerful men discussed about Copala,
the autonomy and the violence. They talked in Triqui language, with respect, in
peace. ‘JS’ migrant in Baja California declared about the Triqui conclave: “We need
to sit and talk; even animals get together; why should not we? The problem is that
we listen more to the government and it creates many problems. It is like a disease,
like a plague; but we must seek a way to finish it but for doing this we need to talk all
of us. The Autonomous Municipality is a serious process that deserves all our support
and we will do that” (F. López, 2007c).
The encounter in Vícam brings together different discourses and languages.
At least 67 languages were spoken in Vícam; every language brings content, an idea
of reality, a strategy and something else to share.
-
Despite of its long feuds, it is evident that Triqui peoples have many things in
common, common history, shared traditions, and similar symbolic language but
above all, they regard themselves as members of a larger community that extends
further than Copala. López y Rivas points out that belonging sense and will are the
elements of nation (Gabriel & López y Rivas, 2005). Bakhtin quoted by Alonso,
describes the elements of epic nationalism: national epic past, national tradition and
epic distance separating the epic world from contemporary reality (Alonso, 1994).
Nagengast sentenced that Nations is subjective constructed and members
materialize the nation trough sense of commonality and collective will (C.
Nagengast, 1994). In the case of indigenous peoples, nationalism is embedded in
daily life, rites and myths.
In contrast, modern nation-states ‘built’ the sense of nationalism towards
coercion and manipulation ‘sometimes taking pre-existing cultures and turning them
into nations, sometimes inventing them, and often obliterating pre-existent
cultures’ (C. Nagengast, 1994). Mexican state glorifies its indigenous past and
produces the image of the epic origin of the mexicanity. Mexican nationalism is
spread everywhere in the movies, religion, folklore, and so on. In aim to produce a
homogenous nation, state relegates the traces of the past to museums. This idea is
incompatible with the multiculturalism of the indigenous peoples. The Triquis have
resisted the assimilation of the national culture at the same time that encourages
and transport the Triqui nation to modernity.
64
As a matter of fact, the encounter in Vícam was a collective show of
resistance movements all over the American Continent. As Nagengast argues, there
is an increasing appropriation and incorporation of montages of diverse cultural
forms into local resistance movements (C. Nagengast, 1994) at the same time that
these movements increasingly mobilise people in terms of self-determination as it is
considered an universal right in the Article One of the covenant of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR):
All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right, they
freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic,
social and cultural development.
Díaz (Robles & Cardoso, 2007) pointed out that right to self-determination
implies the right to be Nations and nationalities and the way to materialise that right
is in form of autonomy. López y Rivas says that autonomy builds relations in a given
territory which are differentiated from the other social groups, but into the frame of
a National-State (Gabriel & López y Rivas, 2005). The Declaration of the MASJC
contents the aim of the building the Triqui Nation inside the Mexican State. The
basic elements are the regarding of the historical Triqui territory bounded by the
collective memory, tradition and historical defence; no more, no less. Next, they
pointed out the necessity of self-determination without intervention of the state
and its institutions (political parties) in order to achieve pace and development. Last
but not least is the fact that they do not violent the administrative structure of the
state since they adjust their traditional organisation to fit in the figure of
Municipality which is the base of the Mexican state and the first level of governance.
To be a municipality means to hold the same rights that the National Constitution
grants for them.
In practice, language of Triquis does not limit the idea of Nation to the
territory of Copala, the strong symbolic ties that they have with their brothers in
diaspora necessarily bring a supra-spatial perspective of the idea of Nation and it is
not exclusive of the promoters of Autonomy. On one hand the MULT contested the
creation of the MASJC with series of mobilisation of its bases in order to proof that
they held legitimate voice as representatives of the Triqui Nation. They created a
collective instance of decision making named ‘Supreme Political Communitarian
Council” and in its manifest they acknowledge that in the MULT participates a
general population of 20,000 inhabitants distributed in 20 communities and Mexico
City, San Quintín Valley and other parts in Mexico. On the other hand, in the public
speech in the first anniversary of the MASJC, the Mayor of San Juan Copala, declares
that the Triqui Nation is all over the national territory: “We, brother and sister
Triquis are in many parts, but we feel happy when we meet each other and talk in
our language, but we feel sad also because of the wounds of our land. We know that
65
as the same way we organise here to resist against the government; our brothers do
the same in Hermosillo, Maneadero, San Luis Potosí, Mexico City and more. Who
knows? Someday we can have not only one, but many Triqui Municipalities over the
National Territory and be strong, and support each other as brothers that we
are...”34
These examples illustrate that the nationalism of Triquis does not limit the
homeland territory in Copala; rather they acknowledge that the expansion of their
community combined the appropriation of the territories that they occupy where
the symbolic reconstruction of the nationalism remains and blossom. Alonso argues
that nationalism attempts to reconcile the perspective of place with the perspective
of ‘relative space’ proposed by the globalisation (Alonso, 1994) and quotes Harvey
who mentions that globalisation and resurgence of ‘aetheticized nationalism’
empower social movements in place but they are disempowered when organising
over space. However, Alonso cites Kearney who concludes that ´transnational
communities...escape the power of the nation state to inform their sense of collective
identity’. Hence, the transnational community of Copala expand its nationalism
throughout the bounded nation-state -and even further- challenging the spatial
matrix of the unique culture. Moreover, while they built their territories based on
identity, they show themselves and their organisations in the new spaces; by doing
this they contradict the idea of the homogeneous society in each place they settle
down. Furthermore, there is not a Triqui social movement but social movements
with particularities and different realities which preserve identical features and
points of coincidence that in combination with activity in social networking produce
unpredictable encounters just as it happened in Vícam.
In summary, the processes of unbounded nations and nationalisms challenge
the idea of the homogenous modern state-nation and it comes together with the
mobility of the people. If nowadays mobility of people has been escalated by the
global markets and flows of labour, we should not forget that the ‘first nations’ of
North America experienced seasonal migrations regulated by natural phenomena;
the deepest believe behind this is that territory (mother land for Triquis) is the mean
to achieve self-determination but never the end.
34
Words of the Mayor of the MASJC; February
66
Chapter VI
THE EXTERNAL SITUATION
As it is mentioned before, Krohn-Hansen regards the term violence as ‘context-
dependent’ and especially the statements about violence are statements about
legitimacy (Krohn-Hansen, 1994). To understand the role of the state in the
perpetration of violence, it is important to acknowledge the idea of state like a
‘message of domination’ (Alonso, 1994); Abrams cited by Alonso pointed out the
dominant and unified character of the modern state as a constructor of an
homogenous society; hence state entails an historical process of assimilation,
legitimisation and moral regulation constructed and contested over the course of
time. These assumptions provide an analytical framework that allows understanding
the nature of the state as a powerful regulator of the society.
For Kearney, indigenous peoples have been treated as objects for
development projects rather than subjects that have played an active role in their
own past and have a voice in their present and future. A population whose problems
require to be solved by the institutions of the wider society without realizing that
they face problems as a result of structural and historical process (Carole Nagengast
& Kearney, 1990). On the other hand, indigenous peoples have their own history,
experiences and understandings about development. Contrasting and sometimes
conflicting social worlds produced separated bodies of knowledge whose
incompatibilities exacerbate the differences, leading to a misunderstanding of social
worlds and legitimisation of each body of knowledge (Alberto Arce & Long, 1992). In
this chapter I analyze the interface and the construction of those social worlds and
the influences that they have had on the Triqui community and on the configuration
and upraising of the MASJ.
Nagengast points out that the main goal of the state-nation is the creation of
an illusion of a united and homogenous society within a narrow ethnic and political
range (C. Nagengast, 1994). The construction of this social agreement creates
consensus about what is and what is not legitimate; however when consensus fails
and the power of state is challenged, state evidences its repressive face, Nagengast
quoted Claestres who sentenced: ‘The refusal of multiplicity, the dread of difference
–ethnocidal violence- is the very essence of the state’.
Since the establishment of the Mexican republic, the government has applied
a number of policies regarding indigenous peoples. Evolution of policies can be
grouped in three periods that overlap along Post-revolutionary Mexican history: 1)
Land reform, 2) Indigenism and 3) Neoliberalism. Parallel, in the communities
67
discourse making has transited in a gradual way and at different speed from
individualistic approaches of basic demands -health, land, education, and etc- to
more elaborated collective demands -territory, self-determination, and autonomy-.
In other words, the struggles of the indigenous have evolved from the defence of
individual human right to collective rights of peoples.
Land Reform refers to the distribution of “latifundia” that belonged to
‘hacendados’ after the success of Mexican revolution. As an agrarian revolution,
Mexican revolution had more impacts in areas where haciendas were established
like in the central valleys and the north of Mexico. Since indigenous lived in refugee
zones with low production, they didn't join the revolution in massive ways like the
campesinos –peasants- in the North and in the southwest. Land reform attempted
to treat all population in rural areas as campesinos with very few distinction among
indigenous and peasants; however land reform regarded the right of collective
property for indigenous peoples in the form of communal lands. Nevertheless,
policies for development focused on socialization of agricultural production together
with subsidies, mechanization of agriculture and infrastructure. In the refugee zones
indigenous people obtained fertilizers and crops from the government. This practice
soon crated nets of corruption and looked at the indigenous as a big constituency
easy to influence and a sure provider of votes in an incipient democracy.
The aim in the beginnings of Indigenism was to incorporate indigenous
communities into the Mexican nation-states, transforming them into Mexican
citizens. Indigenism, according to López y Rivas, try to delete the cultural diversities
out of the national societies and incorporate the indigenous to the employing
sectors as well in the cities as in the countryside (Gabriel & López y Rivas, 2005).
These policies were empowered by the Indigenistas theories from official
anthropologists that created Indigenism as the scientific approach to convert Indians
into Mexicans; and as a result the National Indigenist Institute (INI) was created. This
official institution was a benefactor agency whose realm was to provide material
benefits to Indigenous peoples focused in infrastructure –constructing schools,
hospitals, roads and urban facilities-35. Indigenous cultures were seen as something
undesirable, something to be diminished in order to obtain the goal of development.
In order to derive benefits from the government indigenous learnt how to follow the
rules and manuals of the state’s policies. These situations encouraged the
emergence and importance of local “gestores” -people who were able to read and
understand Spanish, to apply for resources, to fill forms, and gestionar36 in the cities.
35
Personal communication
36 To visit government offices in order to obtain information about social programs and eventually
apply for them.
68
Eventually, teachers in the Triqui communities became gestores and gradually many
of them become influential persons in the communities and transformed into
leaders.
After the ratification of 169 Convention of International Labour Organisation
(ILO) in 1989, Mexican government established new policies in the aim of a “new
relationship between the state and indigenous peoples”. The social programs of INI
were redesigned and transferred to the indigenous communities to encourage
active participation and allow them to create their own rules; on the other hand
macroeconomic policies such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)
between Mexico, Canada and the US stress the contradiction and incompatibilities
between capitalist and traditional ways of production. In the economic sector, the
most important program has been “Fondos Regionales de Solidaridad” (FRS) –
Regional Solidarity Founds- which attempts to create regional micro financial
organisms operated by the indigenous by imitating the structure of traditional
organisation; FRS are governed by an assembly of partners who nominates a
manager council; microcredit is then assigned to local organisations approved by the
assembly that accomplish the internal rules. Far from being a model of integrationist
development, most of the productive projects failed. Instead of development it has
produced debts, corruption, divisionism and migration. Productive projects failed
because of lack of skills and knowledge, natural and ecological limits of productivity,
and desertion for emigration but above all for the unfeasibly economic design of
projects where under NAFTA conditions, small farmers with higher costs of
production compete directly with those larger farmers from the US. It was starting
the era of the transformations suggested by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and World Bank in developing countries to put the global market as ‘the epitome of
natural regulation and transparency’ (Alberto Arce, 2003).
The ratification of the 169 Convention of ILO produced changes in the federal
law; National Constitution of the Mexican United States regards in the 2nd Article the
existence of Indigenous peoples and recognises the multicultural character of the
Mexican Nation which based on their indigenous people. In 1990, the Constitution
of the State of Oaxaca, regards the right of self-determination of the indigenous
peoples expressed as autonomy for self-government and use of territory and natural
resources.
In 2002, due to a series of neo-liberal reforms in the structure of the public
administration, INI became National Commission for Development of Indigenous
Peoples (CDI). Its function now focuses on the coordination of federal and local
ministries for attention of indigenous affairs; the general feeling within the
communities is that CDI no longer solves the necessities of communities. In other
words CDI took over the role of local gestores, the voice of indigenous peoples
69
decreased in the operation of governmental programs and with very few economical
resources, the services of the CDI are not attractive for the communities any more.
In Copala, the INI started to operate in 1973, with a staff of 70 to 80 persons
including administrative and technical workers. The INI had its own budget and
worked with relative autonomy from another ministries; its room for manoeuvre
was wide, so the INI built schools, roads and clinics and at the same time it provided
inputs and technical assistance for productive projects and the procedure for
financiation was at simple as to bring a letter signed by the local authorities; these
situation encouraged the number and importance of local gestores who found a
fertile soil to increase their achievements. Gradually, policies changed; the budget of
the INI became lower and lower insofar as in 2002 the staff was only 12 persons and
the operation of the programs much more complicated. Triquis learned that the best
way to obtain resources was the social pressure, so the political organisation
became the fundamental piece to set an interface with the government. In the
nineties the strongest gestores turned into leaders and the social action was the key
to open the government vaults.
Long (2001) explain that the global era brought a problem of
governmentality. The conditional policies from the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund applied in developing countries challenged and redefined the
sovereignty and the monopoly of power. The concept of sovereignty is gradually
eroded, the unitary state as a powerful centralised agency is being challenged by
sub-national forms (Rupesinghe, 1994). Under this situation, a new global political
economy generated a whole range of conditions and socio-political responses even
at local levels. This process led to the apparition of new struggles for space and
power in local and/or global scenarios. In the second part of this chapter I contrast
the action of the governmental policies with the counter-tendencies that emerged.
Social movements
From the standpoint of the contestant movements, the local understandings and
knowledge ‘filter the effect of externally generated policies’ as soon as they appear
in the re-organisation of social life (Alberto Arce, 2003). As it is mentioned above the
indigenous discourses have been transiting from individual to collective demands,
and it is usually reflecting of policies from either above or beside through intra-
community (transnational communities) or inter-community (networking of political
and civil organisations). It is important to mention that this process is not
progressive neither unidirectional but it is shaped by the conjunctures and power
relationship within a given scenario in space and time.
Under paternalistic policies, indigenous people created discourses to fit this
system. Indigenous peoples demanded basic facilities and government provided
70
them; power relationships were build vertically and the success depended upon the
social force from grassroots level and the ability of leaders to gather support from
below.
This idea of the benefactor state sticks deeply in the communities which
makes it difficult for the new policies to be embraced by the communities. In the
case of the FRS, people hardly understood the level of responsibility and
accountability that the program transferred to the local organisation and many
organisations were formed in order to fit the program or in order to achieve the
official goals in the program37. Organisations and manager councils could not bear
the responsibilities and became dependents of the INI staff or in some cases the
professional staffs of FRS led the organisation.
After the end of the cold war and the notion of a hegemonic system ruling
the world, alter-globalisation movements and its various and heterogenic
tendencies jumped upon the global arena challenging the established order. Among
several and diverse discourses, autonomy building arises with great eagerness and
sympathies around the world. Since the end of the seventies, it has been a world-
wide movement of indigenous struggles for cultural and social autonomy, political
recognition and territorial and collective rights (T. Turner, 2006). Indigenous peoples
started to coin their own discourses from below, perhaps Oaxaca has been
developing a more elaborated discourse and has held a deep debate about
implications of autonomous governance (Gabriel & López y Rivas, 2005). Even
before the arising of Zapatista movement in Chiapas, intellectual indigenous people
from Oaxaca set apart the indigenous struggles from those of labour workers and
peasant (campesinos) organisations, some examples are the Assembly of Mixe
Authorities (ASAM) created by Floriberto Díaz (Mixe anthropologist), the Indigenous
and Popular Council of Oaxaca (CIPO) leaded by the Mixteco teacher Raúl Gatica; the
MULT itself in the period under the leading of the Triqui teacher Paulino Martínez
Delia and the work of the Zapoteco biologist Aldo González in the Union of
Organisations from the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO). Also relevant in this
respect is the theoretical work of the Mixteco lawyer Francisco López Bárcenas.
These approaches pointed out the necessity of new discourses from below and
disagreed with the language of development of the non-indigenous intellectuals.
37
In 1998, the new operational regulations of FRS sentenced that at least 30% of microcredit
had to be assigned to women organisations. Because of lack of organized women, due to serious
unevenness in gender relations, staffs of INI “created” groups by making lists of applicants and in
most of the cases women barely understood the regulations in Spanish. Money was widely
‘administered’ by men and the result was a number of debtor women (Personal observation).
71
In January 1st of 1994 upraised an armed indigenous movement led by the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas,
Mexico. EZLN is comprised mainly of indigenous. Neo-zapatismo is seen as an anti-
systemic movement and its demands refer to the right of indigenous people to self
determination, territory, practicing of their own culture and autonomy. Ideas of neo-
zapatismo rapidly spread among the indigenous communities and were deeply
embraced. The maxim mandar obedeciendo (to command while obeying) regards
the way of governance of indigenous wherein assemblies decide how authorities
have to act and deliver justice.
In February 16 of 1996, after a dialogue between the Mexican Government
representatives, Commanders of EZLN and representatives of diverse sectors of civil
society, EZLN and Mexican Government signed the Acuerdos de San Andrés
Larrainzar (San Andres Accords) which granted autonomy, recognition and rights to
the culture of indigenous peoples. The Federal government however ignored the
Accords and it was until 2001 that the congress approved a series of reforms on
indigenous rights. New law recognizes the right of indigenous people to exercise
autonomy, self-government practices and preferential use of their Natural
Resources. In practice, there is an antinomy among federal laws and secondary laws;
whereas the federal law grants rights, secondary laws deny the right or make it non
executable since the indigenous community as a legal subject does not exist. For
example, federal law establishes the right of indigenous people to have their own
media and broadcast in their natives tongues but once the community attempt to
use this right they have to deal with the Law of Telecommunication which does not
recognize “indigenous community” as a subject who can own a license to broadcast,
in that sense, the community is not able to exercise this right as such.
In actuality, government and reactionary sectors of the society see autonomy
as an attempt to break the national unity. What they claim to be national ‘harmony’
is in fact a state of repression that stifles the freedom of self-organisation and the
right of self-determination. The words of the minister of Governance to justify the
repression of a group of indigenous that declared the autonomy of their community
in 2004, was clear in that sense: "the federal government will not allow the
establishment of new forms of governance by an individual or group that disagree
with the constitutional authority and pretend to put it aside " (López y Rivas, 2004b).
Meanwhile, in 2006 the EZLN launched La otra campaña, based in the Sixth
Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle (EZLN, 2005). This is the political proposal led by
the EZLN which attempts to transform deeply the capitalist state in a pacific way and
with a participative democracy where all voices are taken in account; construction of
local autonomies and alliances between indigenous and all minorities and exploited
sectors of the society are the backbone of the proposal together with “the Sixth”,
72
EZLN called to join the campaign and become adherents by registration in their
website, MULT and MULT-I are adherents to “La otra”.
Oaxaca is governed by an old oligarchy of members of the PRI that are
sustained by corruption practices where all political parties take part. However, the
governor of Oaxaca holds the support of the federal government since the political
alliance between PRI and the President’s party –PAN (National Action Party) - is
crucial for keeping the questioned legitimacy of the President38. In the current
administration, repression and violation of human rights has been the way of the
government to calm the scaling up of social movements throughout the state;
students, indigenous popular organisations and teachers movements have revolted
with more strength in the last years.
The morning of June 14, 2006 the governor of Oaxaca ordered a violent
repression of the sit-in that the state teacher’s union staged as part of their claims
for improvements on the salaries and quality of the infrastructure for education.
This episode changed the nature of the movement, unifying large numbers of
Oaxacans citizens who all disagree with the governor policies. The teacher’s union
attempted to draw all this support together, creating the Popular Assembly of the
Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). Rapidly many grassroots organisations, socialist groups
and citizen collectives (MULT-I inclusive) joined the APPO (Esteva, 2007). Since its
creation until the massive repression of November 25 and 26, APPO took control
over Oaxaca City, creating an atmosphere of struggle and resistance that made it
impossible for the government to work normally. APPO attempted to create a
popular government with the direct participation of the citizens; without a formal
leadership or homogeneous ideologies, APPO in the practice established spaces of
discussion and decision making in the very bottom level. APPO in essence is a
popular assembly; delegations from diverse collectives and organisations that take
part into APPO attend the assembly and they together make the consensus that will
be carried out. The horizontal democracy in APPO is similar to the system of decision
making used by indigenous peoples in their communities.
The recently created MULT-I found in the APPO structure a perfect
opportunity for blossoming, tie links with indigenous and leftist organisations and
gain sympathy from other sectors. MULT-I scaled up its popularity due to APPO
support and its active participation within the movement. Some sources told that
UBISORT participated with APPO, later the leaders denied the note. The relation
between MULT-I and APPO was evident insofar as members of APPO organised the
38
The national election of 2006 has been questioned by the series of irregularities and the possibility
of fraud. People doubt of the real triumph of the official candidate. See: Aparicio (Aparicio, 2006),
Klesner (Klesner, 2007) and Webmane (Webmane, 2007).
73
installation ceremony of the MASJ. The event was seen as a triumph of APPO
(Osorno, 2007) and this conjuncture caught the attention of local and international
press; San Juan Copala became more visible than ever before.
The document of declaration of the MASJC comprises three parts:
justification, framework and declaration of autonomy. It is interesting that they used
the legal framework in order to validate their declaration of autonomy, in
progressive top-down order they make reference to the rights granted in: the
International Human Rights, the Political Constitution of the Mexican United States
and the Political Constitution of the Free and Sovereign State of Oaxaca. Whereas
Zapatistas in Chiapas started their process of autonomy through a declaration of war
against the Mexican State, the Triquis regard the juridical framework of the Mexican
State and reaffirm their intention to be included in them being recognized as
members of a collective action with a common history. They stress the point that in
order to cope with their historical problems, it is necessary to be constituted as a
political subject with juridical personality and capacity to self-representation and
freedom in their decision making.
Paradoxically the Declaration of MASJC is a document that states an
interface encounter where both social worlds: indigenous and government
converges. By legitimising the juridical structure of the state they legitimise
themselves and their movement regardless the official recognition of MASJC. In
spite of the wider debate about what and how autonomy looks like and which is the
best path to achieve it, the document is powerful in itself. The content was the
touchstone and gimmick actant that leads the encounter of diverse arenas which are
actually shaping the true autonomy in San Juan Copala.
Arenas for Autonomy
Long (N. Long, 2001) points out that globalisation triggers conditions for socio-
political contest at different levels; at the same time people join movements what
they perceive against pressing problems. The Triquis have known how to use their
discourse in order to forge alliances with those sectors of the civil society who
favour the causes of the Triquis in a given moment and sometimes just moved by
impulse without a deeper analysis of the situation and the consequences of their
intervention. Triquis know well how to manipulate the public image around them, to
attract the support of outsiders, and create a negative opinion of their enemies.
On July, 2007 two girls from El Rastrojo (daughters of a leader) were
kidnapped; promptly the MULT declared that ‘T’ and the president of the MASJC
was responsible for the crime. The MULT started a big campaign stating that the
MASJC and his allies took the women as hostages; hence, they created an image of
the MASJC as enemy and violator of women’s rights. Suddenly this discourse caught
74
the attention of feminists who did not doubt to favour the MULT (no matters that in
the communities of the MULT women’s rights are continuously violated on behalf of
the “the culture”, and the male leaders do nothing to change it). Feminists soon
joined the demonstrations of the MULT and wrote their opinion in newspapers;
moreover, they were not hesitant to naively paraphrase the discourse of the leaders
claiming the apprehension of ‘T’ and the president of the MASJC. A Triqui woman
was the main public actor who pursued the campaign for the liberation of the
kidnapped girls. I thought that she was a sort of she-leader that finally provides a
voice to the Triqui women and I attempted to interview her; however, even though
she accepted the interview, she rejected to answer my questions and advised me to
talk to her uncle –an old leader of the MULT-: “you must talk to my uncle; he knows
much better about that”. I understood that the MULT tried to transport the problem
from a political to a gender arena; and so they did it. Talking to a feminist, I asked
her if she was aware of the political implications of taking a part in the Triqui
conflict; she answered that it was a male conflict and what they (feminists) were
doing is to give a voice to the women.
On April, 2008 two girls of the MASJC were murdered; the spokesman
declared that it had been a crime of state perpetrated by the MULT since the work
of the journalists threatened the power of the local ‘caciques’ and the government.
It is not my purpose to debate whether the girls were journalists or not, but the use
of the adjective in the declarations of the MASJC attracted the attention of the
journalist’s guild and soon media was flooded with notes about the murdered
journalists; notes were from propagandistic notes against the paramilitary gunmen
from the MULT (mentioning names and witnesses) to more serious declarations like
the one of Köichiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO: “Killing journalists is a
heinous crime which harms the whole of society as it undermines the democratic
right of citizens to hold informed debate and make informed political choices”
(UNESCO, 2008). The murdered girls won the posthumous National Prize of
Journalism 2007. In the awards ceremony held in the Finest Arts Palace in Mexico
City, the spokesman of the MASJC claimed justice and the intervention of the
Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) to find the murderers. These events cause in
practice an unintentional division of opinion in the civil society like those feminists
that openly supported the movement of MULT could not make strong declaration
(as they use to do) about the murdered journalist; probably it was not due to lack of
interest but because their close relation with the MULT put them in a knife-edge
that compromise their voice and set a link of loyalty that they could not predict
before. Epifanio Díaz (Triqui), warns about the risk of an ephemeral interventionism
in the political arena in Copala; he judged that ‘civil society’ escalate violence in the
region, since they unconditionally support some of the groups without to seek for
dialogue and mediation between the parts (E. Díaz, 2008).
75
-
As a matter of fact, the MASJC, through its discourse of autonomy, caught
the sympathy of ‘autonomy builders’ and set an ‘ideal arena’ where their opinions
are very welcome in the process of Triqui autonomy building. There is no doubt that
the active participation of the MULT-I within APPO was a springboard that the
autonomists used to capitalise the external bolstering and achieve their objectives.
The MASJC attempts to get support outside the government’s institutions; one year
after the declaration of the MASJC, the president informed: "Three months after the
constitution of the Autonomous Municipality, we went to manage support with non-
governmental institutions. We signed an agreement with the University of Mexico
City...With the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM-X) we agreed to start in
February a specialisation course for our teachers about education and autonomy; in
August the classes of the intercultural high school will start, also with the support of
the UAM-X”.
On one hand the MASJC attempts a ‘relative autonomy’ (Gasparello, 2008).
The president of the MASJC –peasant and former member of the UBISORT and PRI-
says that they do not want to break the relationship with the government, moreover
they claim the federal resources that the government delivers to each municipality
according to law. However I found out that there is no consensus about this issue.
On the other hand, the municipal secretary – teacher, former member of MULT and
activist of APPO- told me that they pursue to create a new way to do politics without
the intervention of the government, since it has not solved their demands; “we want
to manage our own natural resources according to our tradition and culture, we
want to carry out projects that the communities demand, not the ones that the
government wants for us”.
Indeed, the former communities from the UBISORT did not totally agree to
name the municipality ‘autonomous’; in their opinion ‘Municipality of San Juan
Copala’ was enough, and according to my informants, this debate still continues.
However, it was the adjective ‘autonomous’ which attracted the attention of the
sectors that actually joined the process of the MASJC, and incorporated the actors of
the MASJC in multiples arenas that otherwise could not be possible. I asked to one
of the researches I interviewed if he would be interested anyway if the Triquis
declared just a ‘Municipality’, without ‘Autonomous’; he said that probably, in that
case, he would not even know about them.
In actuality, not just Copala but most of the indigenous communities from
Oaxaca are on the path to build their autonomy in several ways without having the
wide attention of support that the Triquis have. For instance, a group of Zapoteco
communities named ‘pueblos mancomunados’ joined together to exploit their
76
natural resources through the establishment of communitarian enterprises
managed according to their traditional organisation. They implemented the
sustainable use of their forest, posses a sawmill, and a plant of bottled natural
water. One of its assessors told me: “we created some employees there; now we are
working on an education system according to the indigenous customs, we are also
training the traditional healers to develop a system of preventive health; once we
cover three aspects: incomes, education and health, then we are going to be able to
end our relationship with the government and be autonomous”. On the other hand,
by interviewing other social organisations that participate inside APPO, such as the
Indigenous Popular Council of Oaxaca – Ricardo Flores Magón (CIPO-RFM), I found
out that their idea about autonomy has to do with the right to preserve their ancient
ways of living, social organisation, fiestas, customs, election systems, etc. They say
that what they want is not to take the political power but to create a new collective
way of governance different and apart from the state.
As a matter of fact, the word autonomy does not have an equivalent in Triqui
language and as far as I was informed during interviews with other indigenous
persons, there is no translation in their native languages (Mixteco, Zapoteco, and
Mixe). However everyone has a way to explain to the people what autonomy
means. As a result autonomy is understood in several ways and shapes according to
the diversity of languages and ideas. Arce (A Arce, 2000) describes that certain
processes are never fully controllable, and their internal rearrangements take
precedence over externalities. These events give sense to the study of multiple
modernities. He calls these processes as mutants and this recognises the intensity,
rapidity and self-organising properties of much contemporary social change. In that
sense, the particular and suddenly apparition of the autonomy discourse in the
struggles of Triquis responds to a complex mixture of interpretations of the reality
and the combination of tradition and modernity. The autonomy in Copala fits the
concept of mutant well since the political discourse of the Triquis has been
nourished by the accumulative experiences of generations of Triquis in the region
and those experiences from the diverse realities of the communities in the diaspora.
According to Floriberto Diaz, autonomy of indigenous peoples is not contrary
to the conception of nation, but it re-shape the idea of nationality, in a perspective
of heterogeneous composition (Robles & Cardoso, 2007). He also pointed out that
the discussion about autonomy should not come from theoretical dissertations since
the academic proposals have not come to reality in the concrete daily life of the
communities; hence autonomy should be constructed in a social and political
process. These assumptions are now taken in account for the studies about
autonomy, this year there was a seminar about indigenous autonomy in the UAM;
the indigenous autonomy builders join together with the expertise theoretical
academic autonomist. The earliest talked about their experiences and how they
77
contest their particular realities in various ways and different one to another. The
latest concluded that there is not a single rule or theory to understand the
autonomy so in actuality what we have are autonomies.
Figure 19 Gilberto López y Rivas and the Secretary of the MASJC in the seminar about autonomy in the UAM-I
78
CONCLUSIONS
The study of the case of the Triquis from Copala evinces the complexity of violence,
its multifarious origin and the role of involved actors. In the realm of discourse, the
violence of the Triquis is seen as power struggles among two political groups whose
ideals are opposing, incompatible and irreconcilable. These assumptions created a
political field to legitimize the violence; hence, people -inside and outside the
region- do believe that one of the groups is right whereas as a consequence the
other has to be wrong. In practice violence has multiple forms and challenges the
idea of the collective actor; in one hand the violence seems perpetrated by social
constructed apparatuses which act in consensus and homogeneity of thoughts
(called MULT and UBISORT) and in perpetual antagonism; however the agency of
individual actors creates an array of possibilities inside the conflict: excisions,
alliances, negotiation, and exit; as a result the escalation or de-escalation of the
conflicts have multiple paths and depends on individual agencies that later become
collective as long as the lateral accountability allow that.
An extreme of the violence as an instrument of legitimacy is the socially
constructed image that deems Triquis as a ‘violent race’ which is impossible to
control. An example is the answer of the ministry of Justice in Oaxaca to women
who required a deep investigation about the disappearance of two women in the
region; the ministry told them that since there is no safety in the region he could not
risk a command of polices going into the region; thus, the state denies its
responsibility and blames the Triquis for the absence of justice in the region. The
idea of a ‘violent region’ makes sense if it is seen as a political arena commanded by
the state (By state I mean the ethnocidal structure comprised by government,
institutions and policies) where Triquis resist, contest or become part of the
violence. Over the course of time Triquis reacted in several ways: they adopted,
embodied, embraced, rejected and contested official policies at the same time that
they diversify the relations and the interface with the state.
The leader of MULT in Mexico City declared “it is the government who makes
us fight”; however it is not the structure of the state who perpetrates the violence in
an overt way; the state bolsters the political field; hence violence is possible.
Nevertheless materialization or escape from violence can be a very individual action.
Triquis in exile have broken the myth of the ‘violent race’; it does not mean that the
state as a perpetrating structure of violence vanished but the forms change and the
way how Triquis contest too.
In the case of Triquis from Copala migration is concomitant of violence; the
particular migration of Triquis does not fit into the metaphor of flows or waves of
79
migrants that spill to the north as an effect of a given cause; rather Triqui migration
is an issue of loyalty which mediate the choice between safety and collective
accountability. In exile, Triquis embrace the idea of a new home and the opportunity
to create something new, occupy new territories and reaffirm their own identity. In
the new communities Triquis regroup and reshape their identity on the base of their
own ethnicity. However, the transnational community of Copala reshapes the idea
of territory in diverse and decentralized spaces that do not follow the hierarchical
structure with the original community; their new structures respond to the new
necessities and adapt to the local circumstances.
The dispersion of the Triqui community along transnational spaces
challenged the traditional organisation at the same time that encourages the
collective creativity to face the new problems that the new realities brought. Triquis
faced the modernity constructing multiple realities in different spaces where they
combined the learning process with tradition and practical experience; the result is a
diverse re-constructed ethnicity that stresses the importance of the symbolic
elements as the ‘partial connections’ that support the continuity of the extended
identity through the space and time.
The Triqui political organisation is a contesting one and it is shaped by the
political context in a given space; whereas in Oaxaca they deal with the oligarchy of
the repressor state, in the agricultural fields in Sonora, as farm labourers, they face
the symbolical violence of capitalism where the state and government are led by the
free market regulations.
The attempts of the state to create a homogeneous society have failed;
either it is because of the lack of capability of the bureaucratic system or due to the
resistance (conscious or unconscious) of the indigenous peoples (or both).
Nowadays, indigenous peoples hold the example of the diversity within the Mexican
nation-state. Over the course of time, they have been influenced by established
policies but also they have created counter-tendencies to provide them an effective
voice in the political arena. Autonomy is one of them. Through the discourse of
autonomy; Indigenous peoples try to legitimise the right of self-determination and
to be able to exist in the wider Mexican society without losing their indigenous
identity. Nevertheless, having the monopoly of democracy, the Mexican state sets
the only frame under which democracy is possible: the political parties. On one hand
MULT joined the political system of parties through the creation of their own party;
eventually it appeared to be the millstone that brought their loss of legitimacy and
their breakage. On the other hand the proposal of Autonomy tries to open a political
space where alternative participatory democracy can be possible since the system of
parliamentary representation has not taken in account the main demands of the
indigenous populations.
80
The Zapatistas coined the slogan “never more Mexico without us”. The
intention behind this is to acknowledge the diversity of realities contented in the
Mexican state, this multiplicity of realities is inevitable, since there is no
homogeneous paradigm leading the nationalistic approach. Floriberto Díaz said that
the lag of the indigenous communities is relative since “all together are entering to
the new century at the same time”(Robles & Cardoso, 2007).
The Declaration of the MASJC acknowledges the possibility of the Triqui
Nation to coexist together and into the Mexican Nation and observing the
conditions of the national laws. A highlighted point is that the idea of an extended
Triqui nation escape from the notion of bounded nations and involves the entire
Mexican territory in an attempt to consider not just the community inhabiting the
historical territory of Copala but also the community in exile. Paradoxically the idea
of an extended Triqui Nation appears in the political discourse of the promoters of
the autonomous Municipality and in that of its detractors although the concept and
the form of the nation vary among them.
On one hand, the MULT considers a hierarchical vertical constitution of a
centralized Triqui Nation commanded since the Chumá a of San Juan Copala; its
assumption reflects its own idea of a structured nation-state which is consequent
with its strategy to be part of the system running elections through his own political
party. The discourse of MULT evidences the cumulated experience through the long
relationship with the paternalistic and coercive state. On the other hand the idea of
a Nation in the MASJC is inclusive, regards the importance of the community in
diaspora, and respects the self-determination of the community in the different
spaces.
Autonomy is a long process that indigenous communities have carried out
for decades even without a clear definition of what it means. They interpret
autonomy as their rights to exists and to keep being what they have been since
centuries ago. Nowadays the complexity of the modernity brings together new
elements that combine with tradition. In the case of Triqui peoples they merge they
own experiences acquired from multiple realities and local knowledge to create
something what they call autonomy; but at the same time they are re-shaping the
understanding of academics about how autonomy looks like. I came to use the term
of mutant autonomy to describe the modern process that is leading the social
changes into the Triqui peoples.
The major challenge for the promoters of the autonomy is the eradication of
violence from the Triqui region; however, as they properly say, peacemaking implies
the compromise of all the stakeholders and it will not appear automatically by
signing an agreement; it is a process that entails the breakage of the vicious circle
81
state-depending which is the biggest task. On one hand, the MULT and its PUP are
already enclosed into the state structures of ‘democracy’ which automatically turn
them into controllable subjects from the state. On the other hand, the promoters of
the MASJC and his discourse of peace moves with relatively freedom from the state;
but it is interesting to point out that the use of discourse of pacification make them
accountable to the social network around them that is bolstering the process of
autonomy.
Nevertheless, the pacification process is more than an issue of political
accountability to state or to civil society. In actuality the violent process is deep
inside the culture and daily life of Triqui peoples; many times vendettas has nothing
to do with political affairs –although they later transforms it in symbolic capital to
negotiate with the government- but with individual revenges. As a matter of fact,
violence is perpetrated by individual actors who respond to external and very
individual inputs. Hence, pacification implies deeper changes in the national state;
but at the same time, it lays in the will and capability of Triquis to forgive; at the
same way that their brothers in the north do that. The question that remains is
whether the bounded oscillating violence in Copala depends on the relation with the
state or is embedded in the symbolical process of legitimisation of the Triqui
leaderships. As long as the authorities of the MASJC keep themselves out of the
influence of the government, its organisations, and institutions, it will be possible to
glimpse an answer.
Overall, indigenous peoples have faced the oppression of the state, the
attempting of integration to a society that negates their existence and the pressures
of the market; however, they have resisted and contested in multiple ways.
Autonomy is one more of their strategies and each community gives a different
meaning at the process. Autonomy cannot be seen as the solution itself but it
contains the basic elements for the construction of the self-development according
to the own cultures, values and principles of the communities. At the same time this
process aware the possibility of a real multicultural state.
82
Glossary of abbreviations
APPO Popular Assembly of Oaxacan
Peoples
Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de
Oaxaca
CDI National Commission for
Development of Indigenous
Peoples
Comisión Nacional para el
Desarrollo de los Pueblos Indígenas
EZLN Zapatista Army of National
Liberation
Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional
FULT United Front of Triqui Struggle Frente Unido de Lucha Triqui
IMF International Monetary Fund
INI National Indigenist Institute Instituto Nacional Indigenista
MASJC Autonomous Municipality of San
Juan Copala
Municipio Autónomo de San Juan
Copala
MULT Movement of Unity and Triqui
Struggles
Movimiento de Unificación y Lucha
Triqui
MULT-I Independent Movement of Unity
and Triqui Struggles
Movimiento de Unificación y Lucha
Triqui Independiente
PAN National Action Party Partido Acción Nacional
PRI Revolutionary Institutional Party Partido Revolucionario Institucional
PUP Popular Unity Party Partido Unidad Popular
SJC San Juan Copala San Juan Copala
UAM-I Autonomous Metropolitan
University campus Iztapalapa
Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana campus Iztapalapa
UAM-X Autonomous Metropolitan
University campus Xochimilco
Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana campus Xochimilco
UBISORT Unity of Social Welfare of The
Triqui Region
Unidad de Bienestar Social de la
Región Triqui
83
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Appendix I
The Declaration of the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala
Declaración
del municipio autónomo
de San Juan Copala
Considerando
1. Que el pueblo triqui ha sido sometido históricamente: primero por los
conquistadores europeos y después por la clase política que asumió el poder cuando
México se convirtió en un país independiente.
2. Que este sometimiento continúa en la actualidad y se manifiesta de muchas
maneras:
a. En el despojo de más de la mitad de nuestro territorio, que hoy se encuentra como
propiedad privada en manos de mestizos adinerados, muchos de ellos descendientes
de los conquistadores españoles.
b. La destrucción del gobierno triqui, consumado por la desaparición del municipio
constitucional de San Juan Copala, por decreto de la Cuarenta Legislatura del estado
en diciembre de 1948, con lo cual se arrebató a nuestro pueblo su propio gobierno,
que se había ganado desde el año de 1826, con su activa participación en las guerras
de independencia, bajo las órdenes de José María Morelos y Pavón.
c. La división del pueblo triqui y el reparto de sus comunidades entre los municipios
mestizos de Santiago Juxtlahuaca, Putla de Guerrero y Constancia del Rosario, en
donde sus habitantes hemos sido discriminados, excluidos y explotados.
3. Que en la actualidad la subordinación del pueblo triqui se ha acentuado, impulsada
desde el gobierno o por organizaciones afines a él, lo cual da como resultado que en
la región predomine:
a. La violencia, generada por la impunidad con que actúan las bandas delictivas y la
falta de justicia porque entre los Ministerios Públicos y Jueces predomina la
corrupción.
87
b. El hambre, por la ausencia de un programa alimentario que asegure la alimentación
de los habitantes de las comunidades.
c. Proliferación de enfermedades, por carecer de programas que las prevengan o las
atiendan.
d. Analfabetismo, por carecer de un sistema de educación que responda a las
necesidades del pueblo y valore la cultura triqui.
4. Que para superar el sometimiento político, económico, cultural y social al que han
condenado al pueblo triqui el Estado y sus políticos, es necesario que éste se
constituya como sujeto político, con personalidad y capacidad para autorepresentarse
y tomar libremente las decisiones sobre su futuro.
5. Que el derecho internacional reconoce el derecho de los pueblos indígenas a la
libre determinación en un régimen de autonomía, mismo que les da derecho a:
* Establecer libremente su condición política y proveer a su desarrollo económico,
social y cultural.
* Gozar plenamente de los derechos humanos y libertades fundamentales, sin
obstáculos ni discriminación.
* Salvaguardar las personas, las instituciones, los bienes, el trabajo, las culturas y el
medio ambiente.
* Proteger sus valores y prácticas sociales, culturales, religiosas y espirituales.
* Respetar la integridad de los valores, prácticas e instituciones.
* Decidir sus prioridades para su desarrollo.
6. Que la Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos reconoce y
garantiza el derecho de los pueblos y las comunidades indígenas a la libre
determinación y, en consecuencia:
* Decidir sus formas internas de convivencia y organización social, económica,
política y cultural.
* Aplicar sus propios sistemas normativos en la regulación y solución de sus
conflictos internos.
* Elegir de acuerdo con sus normas, procedimientos y prácticas tradicionales, a las
autoridades o representantes para el ejercicio de sus formas propias de gobierno
88
interno, garantizando la participación de las mujeres en condiciones de equidad frente
a los varones.
* Preservar y enriquecer sus lenguas, conocimientos y todos los elementos que
constituyan su cultura e identidad.
* Conservar y mejorar el hábitat y preservar la integridad de sus tierras.
* Acceder al uso y disfrute preferente de los recursos naturales de los lugares que
habitan y ocupan las comunidades, salvo aquéllos que corresponden a las áreas
estratégicas, en términos de esta Constitución.
7. Que la Constitución Política del Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca establece
El derecho a la libre determinación de los pueblos y comunidades indígenas se
expresa como autonomía, en tanto partes integrantes del estado de Oaxaca, en el
marco jurídico vigente; por tanto dichos pueblos y comunidades tienen personalidad
jurídica de derecho público y gozan de derechos sociales.
Por todo lo anterior, las comunidades y barrios de la región triqui baja dan a conocer
a la sociedad mexicana e internacional, la siguiente
Declaración
Primero. A partir del día primero de enero del año 2007 ha quedado
constituido el municipio autónomo de San Juan Copala, integrado por todas
las comunidades y barrios que han roto o en el futuro rompan la
subordinación a las organizaciones del gobierno o ligadas a él.
Segundo. Las autoridades del municipio autónomo de San Juan Copala son
aquéllas que las comunidades y barrios que integran el municipio autónomo
han elegido libremente, a las cuales ha dado posesión el Consejo de
Ancianos. Estas autoridades podrán ser destituidas en cualquier momento si
atentan contra la voluntad del pueblo o se subordinan a las políticas del
gobierno.
Tercero. Como consecuencia de lo anterior, se desconoce el Consejo
Municipal electo por el gobierno del estado desde el año de 1993, así como
cualquier otra autoridad que no sea electa de manera legítima por las
comunidades y barrios.
89
Cuarto. Las autoridades del municipio autónomo de San Juan Copala
sujetarán sus actos a los usos y costumbres del pueblo triqui y, en lo que
éstos no prevean forma de conducirse, a las leyes del Estado mexicano.
Quinto. Las autoridades del municipio autónomo de San Juan Copala
representarán a las comunidades y barrios hacia el exterior del municipio,
respetando siempre la voluntad de sus ciudadanos y el respeto de la cultura
triqui.
San Juan Copala, el día 20 de enero del 2007