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TITLE: Watered Down Indigenous Rights Law |
AUTHOR: Tim Wise |
DATE: May 1, 2001 |
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Friends and colleagues, I've been reading quite a bit in the Mexican press about the conflict over the recently passed law on indigenous rights and culture, and I thought it might be worth sharing some of that information and analysis with you. You may remember that the passage of such a law - called the San Andres Accords and negotiated in the early stages of peace talks between the Zedillo government and the Zapatistas - was the key precondition of the Zapatistas for resuming peace talks. Having been shelved by Zedillo, it was reintroduced by new president Vicente Fox. The Zapatistas lobbied heavily for its passage, marching to Mexico City in a widely supported peaceful caravan, and speaking to Congress, alongside members of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), the country's new alliance of its many indigenous groups. Last week, Mexican Congress passed a very watered down indigenous rights law, a constitutional amendment that now goes to the states for ratification by a majority of legislatures. Fox has lent his support to the measure, while noting that it has many limitations. The Zapatistas, the CNI, the coalition government in Chiapas, and the opposition center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, on the other hand, have rejected it as a betrayal of the original letter and spirit of the San Andres Accords. As these issues are unlikely to be reported in any detail in any paper you're likely to read, here is a quick summary of the objections to the changes in the law. (Note that many of these are recognized publicly by Fox, but with no clear proposal for how to amend or rectify such constitutional changes, which were passed at the very end of a legislative session.) 1. The changed law fails to grant the limited rights to autonomy and self-determination in the original law. It leaves to the states the power to grant such status, and it makes any local forms of indigenous law and governance subject to the requirements of federal law. This not only eviscerates the concept of autonomy, it even puts in peril many of the current ways in which indigenous forms of self-governance are already recognized and practiced. In that sense, it is a step backward. 2. It changes the original law's recognition of indigenous peoples in Mexico as a legal entity to a very murky "object of public interest," a change denounced as paternalistic by the CNI. 3. It fails to grant any meaningful control over natural resources to indigenous communities in areas that could be demarcated as autonomous areas. 4. It fails to establish a process for the demarcation of such areas, making it impossible to achieve the practical exercise of these new rights. 5. It fails to grant rights to education and media controlled by communities and in native languages. These were the principal objectives of the original San Andres Accords, and the original law contained provisions to achieve them. What now? The Zapatistas have broken off relations with the government. They fully expect a massive PR campaign to denounce them for being intransigent, to justify the law as the best that could be achieved. And they expect a renewal of military and paramilitary operations in Chiapas. So should we. This is not a case of radical intransigence in the face of compromise agreements for reform. This is a case of gutted reform, and another sad case of missed historic opportunity. Tim Wise, Deputy Director Global Development And Environment Institute (G-DAE) Fletcher School, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155 tel: 617-627-3509 fax: 617-627-2409 END |