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Chiapas Delegation Finds Economic Project Threatening Indigenous Culture 

A Chiapas mural depicts an entire village wearing the symbolic facemask of Zapatista resistance.

"Every kind of globalizing monster that you can think of is on its way to Chiapas."

I traveled to Chiapas recently with the Chiapas Support Committee's annual March delegation. We received briefings on the current situation in Chiapas from nonprofit organizations in San Cristóbal de las Casas. We also visited several indigenous communities that we work with or support financially - ones that are exemplary of what's currently going on in Chiapas.

What's currently going on in Chiapas? Well, a clash of cultures, one that's played out in terms of both economics and human rights. At stake is nothing less than the future of an indigenous way of life, a culture that has endured for hundreds of years.

On the one hand, indigenous people are struggling to develop autonomous counties with their own self-determined structures of government, economics, education, and health. The Zapatista movement has lately been focusing more on this effort, too. They're especially putting an emphasis on their primary schools and health clinics.

On the other hand, in the name of free trade and development, international corporations and the Mexican government are increasingly targeting Chiapas and other areas where people live close to the land for mega-development projects. These threaten to remove indigenous people from their ancestral lands, which will assure the continuation of extreme poverty, remove local control from economic and cultural life, and inflict environmental damage.

The major thing that all the nonprofits asked us to report on when we came back was the negative impact of Plan Puebla-Panama, a Mexican government development scheme aimed at the entire Central American isthmus, from Puebla state to Panama. It's purpose is to develop the infrastructure necessary for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

We're talking about eight-lane highways going through the middle of the rainforest, huge dams that will flood traditional indigenous communal property, and maquiladoras built out in the middle of nowhere with dormitories to house the indigenous people they exploit.

Some of the communities we work with are in the Lacandón Jungle. They fear expulsion because they are located on top of huge oil deposits and on the banks of important rivers. Some oil drilling is already taking place, but when they get that eight-lane highway going into the jungle, it is expected to increase dramatically. New highways will also facilitate the heavy equipment necessary to build hydroelectric dams which will flood their lands. The situation in these villages is really tense.

What also upsets the indigenous people tremendously is the patenting of medicinal plants by corporations. Their belief is that those exist for the benefit of everyone, to be used collectively as needed rather than for the profit of a few.

The need for aid and involvement among North Americans is urgent. Every kind of globalizing monster that you can think of is on its way to Chiapas, and a number of communities are in immediate danger of being evicted from the land that they live on either by paramilitary forces who have alleged "land disputes," or by legal tricks.

The Chiapas Support Committee delivered over $7,000 from private donations in the Bay Area. This will go towards a variety of causes, such as primary schools, seed money for local cooperatives, medicine for clinics, refugee relief (food), and support for nonprofits organizing resistance to hydroelectric dams and water privatization so they can share information on how best to resist huge development projects.

For more information on helping the people of Chiapas, call Mary Ann Tenuto-Sanchez at (510) 654-9587 or email enapoyo1994@yahoo.com.