Dual Power - Dual Power and The Zapatista Movement

Dual Power and The Zapatista Movement

With the growth of the Zapatista movement, the system of local governance has been elaborated somewhat. Among the officials selected from each assembly, there are now commissioners for health and education, as well as a representative to a Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee (CCRI). The commissioners meet and coordinate with their peers on a regional basis, while there are four CCRIs, one for each language group in the area. The EZLN is subordinate to their decisions. This has fostered cooperation between community members and the EZLN, since "when a decision is made by the CCRI, it’s a decision based on consensus. It’s based on the agreement of dozens of families."

This local democracy has been extended by the creation of autonomous local governments, systems of alternative institutions that effectively replace local structures of power. On February 3, 1994, Manuel Camacho Solís, the conciliator between the government and the Zapatistas, announced the creation of two free zones in which the International Red Cross would operate and the militaries would not, unwittingly providing the Zapatista communities with a bit of national territory. On December 19, 1995, the EZLN broke the Mexican Federal Army’s encirclement and carried out the political and military seizure of dozens of towns, demonstrating that its influence went far beyond the small existing conflict zone. In this expanded area, Zapatista communities formed 38 autonomous municipalities covering more than a third of the state of Chiapas.

Autonomous municipalities are the Zapatistas’ implementation of the 16 February 1996 San Andrés Accords, which the government abandoned in December 1996, after refusing to carry them out. The Accords guarantee the right of indigenous peoples to form and govern traditionally their own municipalities. In forming the municipalities, residents derecognize the official authorities and elect their own. They refuse federal government involvement and control. They name their "local health promoters indigenous parliaments, and elaborate their own laws based on social, economic, political and gender equality among the inhabitants of diverse ethnic communities." Councils are constituted to plan the various areas of community action and are joined by councils of elders and, increasingly, of women. These communities are accomplishing long-ignored aspirations, like building bilingual (Spanish and the local indigenous language) education systems, and providing to all what once was only provided in accordance with political patronage. A report from the Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas finds: "At a local level municipal presidents imposed by the PRI are left governing only themselves, without being able to penetrate into the communities. Basically this means the slow destruction of…false democracy…and its replacement by communities and organizations that construct their own history first as autonomous municipalities and eventually as autonomous zones."

This eroding of the status quo has proceeded despite the attacks by the Mexican Federal Army and their paramilitary allies, providing a dramatic demonstration of the effectiveness of grassroots dual power. Whatever its accomplishments, the EZLN sees itself as a temporary formation: A "mirror image of the Mexican Army," it is "entirely unqualified to replace it" since it includes the hierarchy and violence that it would remove from society altogether. It will remain only "until the armed struggle becomes an absurdity and an obstacle for the revolutionary transformation of our country."