BY RUDY and LILA

At 11:40 on the morning of August 3rd a team of more than 260 state officials and civilians arrived to Ch’oles de Tumablá, where eleven zapatista families have made their homes for the past seven years, and forcibly evicted the community. The land, unannounced to the people living upon it, had been turned over by judicial order to three private owners: Gilberto Cruz Sánchez, Eduardo Maitre Collado and Rafael Vázquez Chávez. The Judge of Playa de Catazajá, one of the state officials present, told the women of the community and the few men who were present at this hour of the morning (the rest were at work in the fields), “You have five minutes to leave this land.”

The women and men of Ch’oles de Tumbalá pleaded for more time, at least a few hours to gather their things, but were given none.

With this, the twelve federal police cars that had arrived spread out in the road, a visible show of force. Twenty civilians, employees of the land’s new “owners,” began to destroy the houses of Ch’oles de Tumbalá. The houses were either soaked in gasoline and set on fire or destroyed with tractors and chainsaws. In some cases, the families were still inside as gasoline was poured over the homes and chainsaws ripped into the walls. In all cases, nearly every possession of the family’s was lost in the violent destruction of the houses. One mother, months later, said while washing her small pile of laundry, “This is all I have now. They burned everything else.”

In total, thirty-five houses were destroyed, along with the community’s church, the school and the Casa Ejidal (where collective goods, such as seeds, are stored). The possessions that were not burned were loaded into vans along with the families’ farm animals and stolen.

Three men had the courage to challenge the eviction. With pasamontanas (the inconic Zapatista ski mask used for security and symbolic reasons) pulled over their faces the men explained that Ch’oles de Tumbalá is Zapatista territory and that the police and civilian forces have no authority to displace the families from their homes. The police responded by demanding that the men remove their pasamontanas: when they refused the police grabbed them, forcibly removed the masks, and threw the men into one of the police trucks. For three hours the men were held against their will, the police demanding that they lie face down in the hot midday sun while they were insulted and threatened with violation and prison. One of the men was kicked in the abdomen.

At three the men were transported to the police offices in “La Joya” where they were interrogated for hours as to who their leaders were and whether or not they were authorities in their community. Finally, they were forced to sign documents assuring that they wouldn’t “denounce anyone for anything, that no one threw tear gases or hurt anyone…” The men were finally set free at 7p.m.

At the beginning of October the zapatistas peacefully reclaimed the lands from which they were barbarically evicted in August. A few of the original families returned along with dozens of members of EZLN Support Bases. The men and women erected makeshift homes, little more than poles sunk into the earth with black plastic stretched over top, as well as a "peace camp" where nationals and internationals have been invited to stay, and a kitchen area. Then, the men set to the work of replanting the crops and standing guard against further potential violence while the women began their work of hand pressing tortillas and cooking all day long. The children were left to linger in the kitchen and play soccer in the open field. In retaking the land the zapatistas, with dignity, reclaimed their work, their way of life and their culture.

In the reclaimed community of Ch’oles de Tumbalá the days pass with a veneer of calm that barely masks the tension with which eyes follow the shape of every car that passes by on the gravel road.

In the kitchen area the women and children congregate under the low tin roof, in the shade of a thin line of trees, swatting at the flies which also come to congregate here. All day the women press tortillas, grind corn, press more tortillas, and prepare the noon day meal. Men flow in and out of the kitchen, sipping at sweet cups of coffee and filling their stomachs with salty beans and hearty tortillas.

Some days there is the drone of a menacing helicopter passing overhead, scanning the land and monitoring the community.
There are still no homes built in Ch’oles de Tumbalá. The threat of displacement - of another violent invasion - looms too near to build houses that may only be torn down. Instead, there are the makeshift houses - posts that are propped together, sunk into the ground, and then covered in plastic or discarded bits of metal roofing. Here the men, women and children pile into sleep in the warm, star splattered evenings, hoping that it will not rain too hard, that the night insects will not nip at them too hungrily.

The crops have not yet sprouted their rich harvest-ready foods and two community wells are the only source of water in these stiflingly hot fields. One of the wells only has a shallow pool of water deep and low inside of its belly. The other remains full still.

For now, donations of beans, clean water, rice, and the occasional vegetable trickle into Ch’oles de Tumbalá. Aside from these donations there is very little to drink and the well water has to be purified before it is drunk by anyone.
Threats, and rumours of threats, of another state sponsored eviction continuously loom over the collective head of the community. Twice in the last month alarm bells have been sounded as the zapatistas get wind of a rumoured evacuation plan. Under this climate of fear, the community has very few steps that it can take to re-establish itself: it is still in a struggle for the very basic land upon which it lives.

On May 18, 1988, a grant to land for the creation of a new populated center was petitioned for before the Secretary of Agrarian Reform. This petition was published in the Federation’s Official Diary on November 12, 1990.

On January and June 15, 1992, without a perceivable reason, the authorities release their opinion against the concession of the lands for new population center near Tumbalá. However, in 1994 a state delegate from the Secretary of Agrarian Reform from the State of Chiapas, Layver Martinez Gonzalez, states the exact opposite, recommending that the land be conceded to the solicitants, finding legal basis “to create a new public land population center on the excess 449 hectares of land near Chuyipa and Cinco de Mayo, located within the Municipality of Palenque, Chiapas.” This opinion was sent to the Director of NCPE (New Centers for Public Land), who received it on August 31 and September, 1994. New measures taken by technicians revealed that there were actually 532 hectares of excess, unused land.

On January 23, 1995, without contestation the authorities resolve the petition taking into account the opinions released on June 15, 1992, and reach a definite agreement denying the people’s petition for the land. Lacking an authorized commission to ground and license the order to deny the concession of the land, the action thus deprives the people of their right to regulate the 532 hectares of land.

On September 9, 1999, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN, by its Spanish acronym) bases of support took the land of Ch’oles de Tumbalá claiming it as recovered land. Since then, the EZLN bases of support from different communities sat on the 532 hectares of land owned by Carlos Salinas. In an exemplary act of boldness and human integrity, de facto autonomy has allowed the bases of support to recover land that was ancestrally available to them in the northern region of Palenque, Chiapas. Facing the corruption and contradictions of the government, and unable to realize their urgent and basic agrarian rights to the land via the state’s interpretation of the law, the indigenous had no other option but to defend themselves within a system that has violated their social, cultural, collective and constitutional rights supposedly granted to them in 1917 under articles 14, 16 and 27. These have been the struggles of their ancestors.

Since the recovering the land, the EZLN bases of support have managed all documents regarding the land using the name of Ch’oles de Tumbalá – a name which takes into account the geographic region. However, the representative, Gregorio Albaro Cruz of Ch’oles de Tumbalá, was taken custody and locked in the state prison Playas de Catazaja. He has been accused of theft of cows, robbery, kidnapping, among others charges, when in reality his job was to manage the documents to the land, Ch’oles de Tumbalá.

This is land that has been possessed and taken under usufruct in a continuous, peaceful, public and rightful way. This is the nation’s property and was considered excess even by the owners. Currently, the government has represented the new “antiquated property owners”: Gilberto Cruz Sánchez, Eduardo Maitre Collado and Rafael Vázquez Chávez.

The Mexican state interprets and applies the law under a very specific political context – the implementation and administration of neoliberal reform. This system understands very specific definitions of rights, which in the neoliberal context favors individualism within a capitalist state. Government programs such as PROCEDE aim to privatize the land by issuing legal documents that individualize land holdings in communities where land was kept as ejido (common land). During a discussion a compañero wearing his ski-mask gives insight on how the community views such government ideas of land ownership, “The land will not be sold, it will be defended. If we, the poor, sell the land to the rich, our land will never again be our land… we will never be able to afford it again if we sell it.”

Legal institutions back the state neoliberal plan not the demands of the poor. The state frames its position by the strict “application of the law”, which in this case they interpret as protecting private property, even when “in excess”. As revealed by the compa, the privatization of land, and its subsequent integration into real estate markets, bars off access for most of the indigenous who cannot afford it. Thus, in following the application of the law the state legal institution protects those with the capital to invest in buying large plots of land. The indigenous are left to defend themselves from capitalist markets and government privatization programs that push them off the land.

Worth noting is the fact that under this system the poor are forced or persuaded to sell their land because of factors like competitiveness in the agricultural market. Additionally, communal ejido systems of land title are broken by individualizing and parceling the ownership of land. When the latter happens, land ownership decisions are no longer made by the community but by individual persons seeking personal benefits. Thus privately owned land allows the state to facilitate reform accomplishing various tasks: one, the imposition of neoliberal reforms continue apace as more individuals sell off land and the economic rights to the land are expropriated to capitalist interests; two, community decisions are replaced by individual decisions tearing apart traditional community decision-making processes; and three, relating to the latter reform acts as a counterinsurgency tactic of low-intensity warfare that disrupts how indigenous communities organize undermining the cultural, social, economic and political rights given to indigenous in the 1917 revolutionary Constitution, which zapatista and other autonomous movements are currently struggling to reclaim.

Neoliberalism is a system that was imposed from the top-down. Some were integrated into the system, others adapted and then others were simply pushed out. Being pushed out fundamentally meant that your culture, your society and your work was no longer economically and politically valuable. Many indigenous and peasant farmers have faced this reality responding by abandoning their communities, migrating in search of other forms of work.

However, in 1994, the zapatistas arose in arms chanting “Ya Basta!” They rejected the system that committed cultural genocide against the poor and they began the struggle for a reality that “fit many worlds.” They were, and still are, struggling for recognition as a people, as a culture and as a society.

Ch’oles de Tumbalá struggles within the same context struggling for land that was considered “in excess” by the land-owners. In a communiqué the zapatistas of Ch’oles de Tumbalá explained that recovering the 532 hectares of land was a reaction to neoliberal policy that modified Article 27 of the Constitution “condemning the indigenous to disappear from their original lands.” In 2001 the Mexican House of Representatives, the Senate and the Supreme Court refused to recognize the San Andres Accords giving the indigenous no other choice but to “exercise their autonomy and collective rights including their right to land and territory by realizing the following act: recuperation of the land that have historically been worked collectively and represent the present-day centers of Mayan culture.”

In trying to reclaim their autonomy and historical rights to the land, the community of Ch’oles is going up against the state and the legal systems’ definitions of who has rights and how those rights are obtained. The state’s legitimacy is upheld by the government’s interpretation and application of the law and the use of physical force to enforce the law, while the Zapatistas exude moral authority that also legitimizes their struggle against an oppressive and exclusive system.

State legitimacy in this case is not gained by good government or by improving the conditions of the poor, but rather through physical force. The ways that this force is applied is meant to discipline communities and individuals into conforming with the system that the state administers and maintains. For example, the various levels of violence committed by Secretary of Public Security-backed local Ranchers against the community of Ch’oles were intended to force conformity to the system through attempting to force the indigenous into respecting the state’s law. If the community were to conform to the neoliberal system the people would not have land, a livelihood nor a culture and community of their own.