Tag Archives: #HumanRights

Transformation in Mexico: a work in progress

Zapatista leaders: Marcos and Moises in La Realidad, Chiapas, November 1996. Photo: Jim Hodgson

by Jim Hodgson

On Jan. 1, 1994, the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) seized control of several cities in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s southern-most state.

Within a few days, it was clear that the group was Indigenous-led and that it had a charismatic spokesperson in Subcomandante Marcos. The movement also had expectations of social transformation that extended beyond the immediate goal of improving the lot of the Maya people of the Chiapas highlands.

From mountains of southeast Mexico, the Zapatistas put forward a vision of a world where there is respect for diverse ways of being human and of organizing political life, where there might be diverse expressions of truth in the face of supposedly universal truths like the one offered by business elites about the all-powerful “invisible hand” of the free market. They invited us to imagine a world with room for all – “un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos.”

Headlines on Jan. 1, 1994: “Uprising in Chiapas,” “EZLN takes 4 cities in Chiapas”

The Zapatistas pressed for new ways of thinking about power – that leaders should obey their communities – and rejected the hegemony of political parties. The vision had a big impact on those who created the World Social Forum series of encounters that in turn have helped to transform politics in Latin America over the past quarter-century.

Zapatista communities established autonomy from other levels of government, and set about ruling themselves. In the words of a chronicler of social movements in Latin America, Raúl Zibechi, these processes “modify” how people relate to each other as they manage health, education, production, justice, celebrations, sports and art: more mutual, less expert-client, relationships.

Competing posters: Bishop Samuel Ruiz was a man “wanted” for “treason;” EZLN says, “The world that we want is one with room for many worlds.”

“Disorganized crime” and “remilitarization”

Thirty years on, the communities say they have to re-organize themselves in the face of violence between rival drug cartels – “disorganized crime,” the EZLN called them in a recent statement – that now afflicts Indigenous territories near the border with Guatemala and indeed across most of Chiapas. 

Forced displacement, said the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Centre (known as Frayba), is among the most serious human rights violations in Chiapas today. In a new report launched in July, the San Cristóbal-based group said 16,755 people had been forced from their homes between 2010 and 2022. Frayba attributed the violence to actions by paramilitary groups that have afflicted the state for decades and to the newer criminal gangs, adding that the violence affects the Zapatista communities. At the same time, Frayba describes a “remilitarization” –more soldiers, more bases – in the area. 

Mexico’s Fourth Transformation

In 2018, Mexicans chose their new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on the same day as the people of Chiapas elected their new governor, Rutilio Escandón. Their party, the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), promotes a program of change they call the “Fourth Transformation” (4T), the previous three being the war of independence, the mid-19th-century liberal reforms of Benito Juárez, and the Mexican Revolution (1910 to 1917 – or through 1940, if you include the massive land reform led by Lázaro Cárdenas in the mid and late 1930s).  The 4T includes a security component: “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not shootings), the idea being to ensure that people have viable economic possibilities so that they do not turn to lives of crime.

More than five years into their respective administrations (and six months before the next elections), reviews are mixed. The old conservative parties loathe AMLO – “socialist!” “Chavista!” A more responsible critique comes from Indigenous people and sectors of the left that reject “neo-developmentalist” approaches that emphasize resource extraction and mega-projects for the sake of job creation – but again mostly benefit the traditional elites. Those criticisms were also levelled at all of the so-called “pink tide” governments that produced some changes over the past 25 years, but did not transform the systems of dependence on the export of natural resources. (This problem afflicts Canada too and in the face of climate change, requires urgent action.)

Despite promises, Mexico’s 4T government has not tried to implement the San Andrés Sakamch’en Agreement that was achieved in negotiations among Indigenous peoples and the government in 1996. Those talks, sparked by the EZLN-led rebellion and moderated by Bishop Samuel Ruiz, marked the first (and only) time that the government has negotiated face-to-face with Indigenous peoples. It was not a comprehensive peace deal, but rather the first step in a planned process to address Indigenous rights in Chiapas and beyond.

On June 2, 2024, voters will elect a new president and a new governor for Chiapas. These will be the sixth since the EZLN uprising. Over the years, the Zapatistas have used a variety of strategies to have an impact on Mexico’s political culture. They won’t be silent in the coming months.

Liberation theologians see relationships as key to overcoming Israel-Palestine conflict

A demonstration in Toronto during the July 2014 Gaza War.

by Jim Hodgson

For people like me whose faith found new grounding in the waves of liberation theology that have emerged over the past 55 years or so, a global conversation about solidarity with Palestine offered a chance to reflect with people who are living with the effects not just of the present war, but of generations of conflict that preceded it.

The zoom conversation – “Transnational Solidarity Amongst Liberation Theologies: Palestine & Beyond” – organized by the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre (a United Church of Canada global partner) in Jerusalem, was held Nov. 10 and drew together about 100 people from around the world.

Sabeel’s director, Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek (an Anglican priest) spoke of both the immediacy of the “crushed children of Gaza” and of the urgent need to “understand the other, respect the other, accept the other. Without those, there is not a healthy or productive exchange.”

“These are absolutely crucial when we think about rebuilding relationships (not just homes), and building solidarity for the future of all the people of Palestine and inside Israel,” he said, adding: “Have in mind the tragedy and the suffering; that is the departure point for us.”

Ateek encouraged those who would be in solidarity with Palestinians to be “pro-peace, pro-understanding, pro-liberation, and pro-reconciliation. We need to be looking for justice in accordance with international law.”

Sabeel is a space where community reflection continues to drives new action for justice and peace, and to build relationships far beyond Jerusalem. You can also follow Canadian Friends of Sabeel (CFOS) on Facebook.

Dr. Farid Esack of the University of Johannesburg (and a member of the United Church of Canada’s first partners council a decade ago) spoke of the reflection-action process in liberation theology that drives praxis beyond theorizing. “We must always reflect on our praxis, and make that affect our praxis,” he said. “Colonialism, imperialism and capitalism always view the Earth as territory to be captured.” For Palestinians, he added, the task is to elaborate a vision of what a “post-Zionist society would look like, and for the rest of us, to follow that.”

Esack, a Muslim scholar of liberation theology in South Africa, emphasized the need to “not demonize all Jews and to always fight anti-Semitism, but I will not fall into the white trap, not privilege that above other forms of racism.”

In response to a question about the role of inter-religious dialogue in seeking justice and peace, he warned against platitudes and “a butterfly dance of escapism and digression.”

“The occupation is not a result of Jews not understanding Muslims or Christians not understanding Jews. In liberation theology, the priority now is inter-religious solidarity against occupation, the armaments industry, the military, and not to remove attention from the occupation.”

This is to put it mildly, but global South views of current conflicts tend to be different from the positions taken by leaders in countries like Canada. A Brazilian Methodist feminist theologian, Rev. Dr. Nancy Cardoso, hoped to press that point as one of the speakers invited to be part of the Sabeel conference. Working now in Angola, she was unable to join the zoom call because of internet problems. I have known her for many years, and contacted her later because I was curious about what she would have said.

“Doing liberation theology implies a distrust of the tradition of bourgeois knowledge, a guerrilla war relationship with the church, university and their bunkers and dictators, a difficult relationship with publishers and their audiences, because it is always marked by class struggle,” says the text she shared with me. 

She drew attention to the actions of “Christian Zionists” – Christian fundamentalists who think Israel needed to be re-founded so as to bring about the return of Jesus Christ – whose “apocalyptic and hypocritical visions… dream with the past.”  

“Reconstruction of hope,” Cardoso insisted, “to be real and not illusion, should spring from the poor and excluded.”

The methods of liberation theology demand re-reading of religious texts including the Bible from the perspective of the poor, she said, and “returning the text methodologically to poor communities, not as a book of power and authority but as a possibility of dialogue with other narratives of faith present in cultures.”

In the days after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on an Israeli music festival and kibbutz, and then the overwhelming Israeli military response, images like these proliferated in social media – a sign of the hope, perhaps, that the rest of the world holds for peace between Palestinians and Israelis and among religions.
You can find some good content analysis of Canadian reporting on Palestine and Israel at The Breach.

Unwrapping populism: the Milei victory in Argentina

Images: Página/12

Jim Hodgson

There’s that word again: populism. This month, it’s used to describe Javier Milei, the right-wing politician who won the presidential election in Argentina. Saying that he’ll take a chainsaw to chop down government spending, Milei is compared to politicians of the right, including Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Marine Le Pen in France.

In other moments, the term populist is used to describe politicians of the left, like Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), or the Podemos movement in Spain or Syriza in Greece. 

At times I think populism is a term devoid of meaning. A Venezuelan colleague says that it’s used by élites and mainstream journalists when they don’t understand what is going on. Rather than using it, I look instead at the content of a political program. 

But sometimes, the meaning is clear. Populism as a “people” that must be protected from some external or internal “other”—has an obvious fascist stink, but that doesn’t hold back Trump or a crop of other leaders from using its methods to rally the people against refugees.

But none of that is what left leaders like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela (1999-2013) or Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico (1934-40) were about. If they talked about the “people,” it was to build solidarity across regions and identities (workers, farmers, Indigenous)—class  consciousness, if you will—so as to turn the attention of the state towards resolving their problems, but not at the cost of other disadvantaged or racialized people. 

When journalists and politicians use the term populism to denounce leaders of the left, beware: they are pretending that the ruling class is equivalent to some disadvantaged group—immigrants in the U.S. or European contexts—and promoting another big lie.

A mural in the Boca neighbourhood of Buenos Aires created 10 years after the December 2001 rebellion that ended a series of presidencies. New elections in 2003 were won by Néstor Kirchner, who was succeeded in 2007 by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. She is shown in the bottom panel driving the train forward. (Photos: Jim Hodgson, 2013)

What happened in Argentina?

“People chose change, without considering its cost,” wrote Washington Uranga in the Buenos Aires daily Página/12. “Change was put above any other value. Voters chose to launch themselves into the unknown so as to reject continuity of the critical situation in which they live now: inflation.”

Almost 25 years ago, on Dec. 6, 1998, another so-called populist, Hugo Chávez Frías, won the presidential election in Venezuela. “The people, weary of corruption and ever more sceptical of the traditional way of carrying out politics, bet on a new type of candidate,” wrote Marta Harnecker, a close co-worker and one of his biographers.

“Into the unknown.” “A new type of candidate.” But any similarity ends right there. The program of Chávez (like that of AMLO or Lula in Brazil) was to turn the capacity of the state and the wealth of the nation in favour of the majority of the people so as to ease or end their poverty. 

Milei faces enormous challenges. The state has no money, and there is a $44 billion debt that ballooned during the 2015-19 neo-liberal government of Mauricio Macri. Inflation is running at 150%. He wants to dollarize Argentina (as El Salvador and Ecuador have done), removing any capacity to shape the country’s economic future.

Milei will weaken the state through what he calls a program of “anarcho-capitalism.” Don’t be fooled: Milei is an extreme neo-liberal, holding more in common with the 1970s “Chicago School” of liberal economic theory and 1980s politicians like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He also calls himself a libertarian. He says he will remove legal protections for workers and eliminate the ministries of health and education. But he would also use the power of the state to restrict the rights of women. His vice-president, Victoria Villarruel, is a daughter of soldiers and already, lobbying has begun to free military people found guilty during the past two decades for crimes against humanity they committed during the military dictatorship.

A mural in Buenos Aires shows Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández with several of their “pink tide” colleagues. In the background are leaders who offer inspiration, including Emiliano Zapata, Evita Duarte, Salvador Allende, Che Guevara and José Martí. The mural is based on a photo of Kirchner and other leaders in 2007 when they formed the Banco del Sur as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund.

After the victories by Chávez in 1998 and Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva in Brazil in 2002, some of us starting talking about a “pink tide” sweeping across Latin America (forgetting perhaps that tides also recede). Since then, the tide has indeed ebbed and flowed, with electoral victories and defeats, along with coups or attempted coups in several countries and the phenomenon of “lawfare” – the “deployment of judicial power to persecute political opponents: candidates, parties, even entire organizations and social movements.” A current example is the Guatemalan attorney-general’s harassment of President-elect Bernardo Arévalo and of his Semilla (Seed) party.

In Argentina, after the collapse of a series of governments at the end of 2001 in the wake of a banking crises brought on by foreign debt acquired during the time of the military dictators, Néstor Kirchner and his spouse, Cristina Fernández, emerged from the left side of the Peronist party to lead the country from 2003 to 2015. Success they had in managing the debt, provoking economic growth and reducing poverty was undone by Macri, their successor, who resorted to new borrowing and a toxic relationship with the and the International Monetary Fund. 

Cristina Fernández returned in 2019, this time as running mate to Alberto Fernández (no relation), who won the election. But their government (weakened somewhat by disagreements between the two and among their followers) was unable to undo the damage done by Macri. After the Milei victory, Nora Cortiñas of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo human rights group said that the business sector had driven prices of food and medicine higher so as to weaken the Fernández government.