1982. This is more the revolution brought some of the ideals of the revolution were oT The model Indeed, there was a mini-devaluation of the peso earlier in 1994, as well as a rapid decline in the Bank of Mexico's hard currency reserves, which fell from US$ 24 billion in December 1993 to US$ 14 billion in December 1994. The authorities decided to allow the peso to find its own level, at which point the whole system imploded. The US Dollar shot up from 3.44 pesos on 1 December to a high of 6.0, settling at a new rate of 5.5 pesos. In only one month, the peso had fallen to its level in December 1987, the date when a currency reform stripped six zeros from the old peso and fixed the exchange rate against the dollar. For a few years, this enabled the government to suppress inflation. But the cost was a revaluation of the peso, which increased 60% against the dollar. Twelve years ago, a financial crisis forced the Mexican government to devalue the peso and adopt neo-liberal economic policies. This meant redefining the class alliance between the PRI bureaucracy and the various fragments of the bourgeoisie, and modifying the political regime which had been in force since the end of the Mexican revolution. The logic of these twelve years of neoliberalism is stark: unhealthy and unbalanced fast economic growth, coupled with terrible social regression. 'NAFTA to the North, the Zapatistas to the South'! The neo-liberal experiment has failed. There is no solution for the Mexican bourgeoisie. They will be obliged to implement a massive austerity policy, to compensate for the flight of capital which has only just started, and which none of their neo-liberal recipes can stop. Bleeding Mexican society dry will provoke massive shocks to the social and political system. It is high time for the Mexican left to propose a popular programme based on refusing to pay the debt of a crazy policy which only ever benefited the privileged layers of society, who are now hurrying their capital to safety in U.S. bank accounts. by Maxime Durand This article was first published in the French weekly Rouge
International Viewpoint #263 February 1995 11 than a setback for the neo-liberal model of third world economic reform. The failure is based in the essence of the model. International Viewpoint has always pointed to the monstrous social regression such policies have meant wherever they were applied. But as Maxime Durand argues, the Mexican crisis demonstrates that, even in terms of capitalist economic logic, the model simply doesn't work. Mexico is a dependent country which has increasingly opened its economy to the world. The formation of the NAFTA common market with the U.S.A. and Canada on 1 January 1994 was the concretization of a policy begun in 1986, when Mexico adhered to the GATT free trade agreements. Current policies have been followed for long enough for everyone to see what the results are. True, Mexico has increased its capacity to export towards the United States dramatically. But its capacity to import from the North has increased much quicker. With oil revenues already committed to paying back foreign debts, this trade imbalance has led to a US$ 24 billion trade deficit in 1994 - representing 7% of GDP. The neo-liberal gamble to plug this gap was to attract massive amounts of foreign capital, by making available a cheap, relatively skilled work force, removing all controls on investment, guaranteeing high interest rates on deposits, and fixing the exchange rate. The events of December show that two thirds of the capital attracted was volatile and speculative, attracted by the promise of privatisation, and by the security of guaranteed interest rates. Attracting investment in productive capacity was much more complicated. The upturn in the U.S. economy did not generate sufficient new orders for Mexican exporters, and the NAFTA agreement did not produce enough relocation of North American production south of the Rio Grande. Europeans should bear all this in mind when they read that it is the low-wage countries of Southern Europe which cause high unemployment. The fragile balance of the Mexican economy could have been overturned any time over the last couple of years, particularly since 1994 saw not only the Zapatista uprising, but violen tensions inside the ruling PRI party.
reflected in its ideas and plans. Later it became the Institutional Revolutionary Party. '4 This party is still in power today. The Indians have always been the most marginalised section of the population, ever since the colonisation of what is now Mexico in 1521. Yet they are not mentioned once in the whole history of the revolution in the text-books produced for elementary school.
These books do not describe the situation of the Indians, before, during or after the revolution. It has already been forgotten that several Indian languages were spoken in the Zapatist army and that as a half-caste Zapata spoke Nahuati as well as Spanish.
Finally, the official version forgets that the most brutal massacres during the revolution took place in Indian villages.
The collective recollection of these events can only exist through the memories of those who lived through it. In contrast, no-one can remember an official history. Any official history is a kind of artificial memory. Its creation will always be a form of commemoration.
To take an example, the Mexican government long ago created a museum at Anenecuilco. Every 8 August the regional and national public servants gather in the little museum to pay their respects to Zapata on his birthday 'but they usually leave by the end of the afternoon before it starts raining and the village remains melancholy and silent under the beating sun '5
IV 'MANY PEOPLE REFUSE to believe that Zapata is dead. Strange stories began to spread... that the body that they had been were shown was not really Zapata's. It was a kind of consolation to believe that he was not dead... In the final analysis ... it was a way of staying faithful to the leader after he had gone?
John Womack 6 Tahn Wamool 6 In the myth of the revolution, Zapata began to be associated with the hope of peasants. He became the image around which they rallied. Some suprising processes took place, such as the association of Zapata's image with that of the Archangel St Michel (the patron saint of Indians). He became the symbol of their hopes as well as their waiting. 'I thus came to know a people waiting for a caudillo [leader] to come. They called it Quetzalcoatl, the Archangel, Zapata. A real caudillo, with obsidian teeth, invincible rifle and dazzling sword. They were waiting for it.
Some legends said that Zapata was not killed, that he was living in hiding, waiting for the precise moment for another uprising. Even though after the biological age of Emiliano Zapata made his reappearance impossible, the population continued to wait.
Emiliano Zapata constituted the greatest source of hope for a generation who was living in desolation, he constituted the axe around which all transcendant experience was expressed. This is valid for the generations who were still very young at the time, those who learnt through experience, perhaps still very naive, but certainly direct and fundamental. It is also valid for the generations who experienced it through their grandparents' accounts. The transmission of experience through the generations conserves a large part of the emotional charge of the original experience.
Unlike the official history, the collective memory has not forgotten Zapata's assassin. A popular song from the south of Mexico still says:
'Chinameca is dead the peasant of the south by the vile treason of the partisan Carranza, Guajardo' 8
The song emphasises that the method in which Zapata was killed transgresses a code of honour. Retelling the account of this treason is a central element in perpetuating the emotional charge of the memories.
Another element of the song is interesting in the light of new events:
'Zapata said to Pancho Madero when he was already president if you don't give them land you will see the Indians fight again'9
The collective image remembers that, despite his half-caste origin, Zapata 'loved the Indians and wanted to help them'. The Nahuatl accounts have not forgotten that the leader spoke their language.
'Like the land, he was patience and fertility, silence and hope, death and resurrection.
Octavio Paz!!
As we have seen, since 1910 the image of Zapata has run along two different paths. On the one hand, there has been the development of a concept of Zapatism giving legitimacy to the post-revolutionary government. On the other hand, collective memories, incorporated into popular tradition, have kept their emotional charge, their power as the recepter of collective hopes.
The image created by life experience is a dynamic element, capable of crossing geographic frontiers, it is an element transmittable through time, which does not lose its emotional charge and which is capable of adapting to different situations as it incorporates contradictions. The Mexican government today finds itself face to face with the same image which frightened Carranza's government at the end of the revolution. But this time the image also contains the acumulated hopes of almost a century of injustice and poverty. * Notes
1.- SEP, Ciencias Sociales (4th year) p. 131
2. - SEP, Ciencias Sociales (4th year), p.134
3. - SEP, Ciencias Sociales (4th year), p.134
4. - SEP, Ciencias Sociales (4th year), p. 135
5. WOMACK, op cit, p.381
6. Voices of Mexico, April/June, 1994 p.95
7.FLORES CANELO, Raul. Presentation a La Espera.
8. 'Corrido del General Zapata'. Cancionero Popular
Mexicano p.397
9. La muerte de Emiliano Zapata'. Cancionero Popular
Mexicano p.414