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Article from Socialist Review, December 1993. Subscription rate for one
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FOR LAND AND LIBERTY
The Mexican Revolution in the early years of this century changed the
country's whole history. Mike Gonzalez tells the story of its best known
leader, Emiliano Zapata, through the turbulent years of struggle.
Mexico in September 1910 was a society ready to explode. It had become
independent from Spanish rule 100 years earlier, yet those who had fought
the colonial armies saw little change in their conditions of life. The
capital, Mexico City, was a city of obvious wealth - and a new class had
grown rich under the protection of the president, Porfirio Diaz. But the
real beneficiaries of Mexico's economic growth were foreign capitalists -
the owners of the mines and factories that produced the wealth, or the
railways that transported it to the ports or the borders.
The biggest change was in agriculture. Under Diaz, the amount of land
devoted to export crops - tobacco, coffee and sugar - grew dramatically.
The plantations began to look like company towns as an increasingly
impoverished peasantry, thrown off their land, became labourers on
starvation wages. The American journalist John Kenneth Turner, writing in
1908, found conditions there little better than slavery.
In the province of Morelos, for example, one community after another had
lost its lands to the expanding commercial estates. When Emiliano Zapata
was elected mayor of the village of Anenecuilo, he began to mark off the
village lands, distribute them among the inhabitants and defend them -
arms in hand - against interlopers. Later, other communities sought his
help. It was the first act of a long struggle against the destructive
impact of an export agriculture which absorbed food producing land and
devoted it to cultivating crops. The only beneficiaries were those who
made the profits - the new landowner and their financial backers in the
city.
Diaz's government sent his vicious rural police against Zapata. But many
of the were already busy elsewhere crushing the strike breaking out in the
new factories of the country's centre or in the mines of the west, nearly
all of them owned by foreign capital. An increasing fierce repression
could not hold down the lid forever. The resistance of the peasantry, or
ex-peasants, was matched by rural banditry against the landowners. The
workers' struggles were encouraged by the anarcho-syndicalist ideas of the
Flores Magon brothers, and the small and medium business sectors felt
excluded from the corrupt elite that governed Mexico under Diaz.
When they demanded political reform, supporting the electoral campaign
of Francisco Madero, they unleashed a movement the could neither foresee
nor control.
In November 1910 Zapata launched his Ayala plan. It was a political
manifesto, a declaration that the peasant rebels would not lay down their
arms until they were guaranteed their land and the repressive apparatus
was dismantled - a call for `land and liberty'. Two months earlier Diaz
had announced his own victory in the presidential elections - again. It
was the last straw.
Zapata's manifesto was the first act of a seven year period of social
conflict known as the Mexican Revolution. When it ended officially in 1917
a million people had died and countless more were displaced. For while
almost every section of Mexican society baulked at the repressive
dictatorship of Diaz (who fled in February 1911) there was no agreement on
what should follow. The frustrated middle class wanted political reform -
a bourgeois democratic national state that could negotiate with foreign
capital for better terms, and economic growth which would benefit domestic
capital equally. They certainly did not want a social revolution that
would threaten the very basis of property itself.
With Diaz out of the country, the newly elected president called on
Zapata and the other rebels such as Pancho Villa in the north to lay down
their arms. Zapata refused until such time as a genuine agrarian reform
was carried out and the old landowning class was removed from power in the
state. Madero's response was to send soldiers, commanded by the old
military leaders, to disarm the peasant rebels. They failed but in the
process the old ruling class organised a counter-revolution and murdered
Madero.
Once again the revolutionary armies created an alliance of hostile
brothers - united only in their desire to defeat the counter-revolution.
In the event it was the peasant armies of the north and south who drove
out the new regime as they entered Mexico City in November 1913.
This was an extraordinary moment. It is recorded in a set of photographs
which show how dramatic the encounter was. In one, a group of peasants sit
in an elegant teahouse waiting to be served by young women in waitress
uniforms who look very startled. They had never seen the wide brimmed hats
and white trousers in such places before. In another, Zapata and Pancho
Villa occupy the national palace. Villa slouches in the presidential
throne, his uniform adorned with medals, a cigar in his hand and a broad
grin on his face. Next to him Zapata, in a straight backed chair, looks
grim and uncomfortable.
The photos show that the peasant revolutionaries were in a real sense in
control of the capital. Their bourgeois allies - led by Carranza - were
far from the city and divided among themselves. Yet neither Zapata nor
Villa had a political vision of a future society. Their strategies echoed
the aspirations of one section of the working classes, but not of the
class as a whole. They were not prepared to seize power in the state.
Instead they waited, hesitated, and finally withdrew. Their movement had
held power in its hands and then delivered it to their class enemies who
would wreak a terrible revenge.
It was not that Mexico had no organised workers - they had already
fought important battles in the years immediately prior to the revolution.
There were revolutionary organisations too, but the prevailing politics
within them were defined by a group of anarcho-syndicalists who were
contemptuous of politics and political organisation. Thus the
revolutionaries who made a revolution found themselves without a sense of
how to bind the exploited classes into a new kind of power. Their access
to the working class movement was cut off.
The vacuum of politics could not, and did not last. As soon as Zapata
and Villa withdrew to their own areas, Carranza assumed power in the state
(in January 1915). Not surprisingly, almost his first act was to organise
the military repression of Zapata and Villa. Whereas his military leaders
inflicted severe defeats on Villa in April and June of that year, Zapata
proved a much more difficult enemy.
This was not because Zapata was a better soldier, but because the
process of political change had continued in the area under his control.
While on 15 January Carranza had issued a decree guaranteeing private
property, Zapata's first agrarian reform decree was based on an idea of
the collective ownership of land in ejidos or communities. Thus Zapata's
resistance was a mass struggle, linked to political change - and that was
its strength.
Had news of the full impact of Zapata's Morelos Commune reached the
workers' organisations in the cities, Mexican history might have evolved
in a very different direction. As it was, Carranza co-opted the trade
union leadership, announced new laws on workers' rights and mobilised the
workers briefly against the Morelos revolution. A year later, when
Carranza turned his repressive apparatus against striking workers, the
stratagem would have become clear - but tragically it was too late by
then.
Within the walls of the Morelos Commune, by contrast, there was intense
political debate. The sugar mills were taken into public ownership, the
rights of small farmers guaranteed and the property of the `enemies of the
revolution' confiscated. A minister of arts and culture was appointed and
a system of credits set in place.
But the commune existed under siege and in conditions of increasing
economic scarcity. The vision enshrined in the decrees did represent an
attempt to marry an anti-capitalist rising with the needs of a class of
small farmers. As the besieged nucleus looked beyond its frontiers for
allies, Zapata clearly began to see that the key was to forge alliances
with workers' organisations elsewhere. But his envoys found no resonance -
for Carranza had used the intervening period to draw around him the new
leaders of the trade unions, the radical bourgeois democrats and the
nationalists. An isolated Zapata could do very little about it.
It was particularly poignant that from his external affairs office in
Havana, late in 1917, Zapata sent a message of support and a plea for
solidarity to the new Russian Revolution. The rumour is that he sent one
of his horsemen to carry the message to Lenin. Whether or not his message
arrived, the lessons of October would have reached the embattled and
isolated Zapata too late.
Zapata fought on. In 1917 a new constitution announced the formation of
a Mexican bourgeois state cemented by the ideology of nationalism. It
united against the demands of the revolutionary movement whose ideas and
practices reflected a desire for a more genuine and profound democracy
based on collective ownership. The new state pursued Zapata and finally
murdered him in 1919.
In 1964 a group of Mexican soldiers murdered a peasant leader called
Ruben Jaramillo together with his family. His organisation carried
Zapata's name and it was rumoured that he was the possessor of some of
Zapata's private documents. He had grown up in Morelos too and there were
always rumours that Zapata still rode in the hills.
Sadly, there is little doubt that he was murdered. Within a few years
those who had administered the state that killed him claimed to be his
inheritors. They spent $1 million on a filmed version of his life. But
they continue to repress and murder those who draw the most important
message from Zapata's life - that only struggle from below and a very
different society can answer the yearning for justice and for socialist
democracy.
