Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aaron Bobrow-Strain is Assistant Professor of Politics at Whitman College.

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"Whether we knew it or not, "Intimate Enemies" is the book that we have been waiting for since at least 1994: the book about the other side of Chiapas's rural society, its "ladino" landowners. Gracefully written, evocative, and wise, it is just superb."--Jan Rus, coeditor of "Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Rebellion"

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Intimate Enemies

Duke University Press

Contents

List of Illustrations....................................................................................viiAcknowledgments..........................................................................................ixAbbreviations and Acronyms...............................................................................xiii1. Introduction..........................................................................................32. Honest Shadows: Ethnography and Ordinary Tyrants......................................................163. Landed Relations, Landowner Identities: Race, Space, Power, and Political Economy.....................324. Children of the Magic Fruit: The Making of a Landed Elite, 1850-1920..................................495. Killing Pedro Chuln: Landowners, Revolution, and Reform, 1920-1962...................................806. The Dead at Golonchn: Cattle, Crisis, and Conflict, 1962-1994........................................1057. The Invasions of 1994-1998: Estate Agriculture Unglued................................................1338. Import-Substitution Dreaming: Producing Landowners' Place in the Nation...............................1589. Geographies of Fear, Spaces of Quiescence.............................................................18410. The Agrarian Spiral..................................................................................208Notes....................................................................................................221Glossary.................................................................................................245Bibliography.............................................................................................247Index....................................................................................................265

Chapter One

This is a story of village tyrants come to grief; of men and women whose carefully defended world of racial privilege, political power, and landed monopoly has come unglued. It examines the experiences of relatively powerful landowners confronted with a dramatic reordering of space and social relations in north-central Chiapas, Mexico.

From about 1930 on, a handful of ladino landowners and thousands of indigenous peasants have fought a pitched multifront battle for political, economic, and cultural dominion over a large part of north-central Chiapas. The outcomes of this struggle remain unclear, but one thing can be said for certain. Ladino landowners, once the sole heirs to vast stretches of rich agricultural land and the nearly undisputed source of moral and political authority in the region, have suffered a phenomenal reversal of fortune. In the municipios of Chiln and Sital, where much of this story is set, the insurrectionary years at the end of the twentieth century augured the end of a way of life. The uprising of the Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional (EZLN, or Zapatistas) in 1994, followed by the invasion of more than 100,000 hectares of private property across the state and subsequent redistribution of nearly a half-million hectares of land, constituted a challenge that landowners in Chiln could not or would not defend themselves against. Acting between February 1994 and late 1998, the invaders stepped into a political opening left in the wake of the EZLN uprising, but their groups spanned the entire spectrum of Mexican politics and most were not directly affiliated with the Zapatistas.

As invasions mounted through the spring and summer of 1994, landowners screamed for justice. "We're giving the government until April 20. If there's no positive solution we'll adopt other means," one declared to a reporter (D. Scott 1994). The image of landowners "adopting other means" required no elaboration. The threat fit neatly into enduring representations of Chiapan landed elites as a violent and powerful class of modern latifundistas. Influential books by Lus M. Fernndez Ortiz and Mara Tarro Garca (1983) and Antonio Garca de Len (1998 [1985]) exemplified and helped reproduce this powerful set of representations. These portrayals, in turn, seemed to confirm Barrington Moore's (1966) classic depiction of the connection between landed elites, labor-repressive production regimes, and violence. In the end, however, most landowners in this southern Mexican state, fabled for its violent agrarian politics and powerful landed oligarchy, responded to these invasions with quiescence and resignation instead of thugs and guns.

As of 2000, only 28 percent of the almost 1,300 invasions had been evicted-as opposed to an 82 percent eviction rate in the ten years leading up to 1994. Instead, attempts by government mediators to resolve the disputes nonviolently culminated in March 1996 with the signing of the historic Agrarian Accords (Acuerdos Agrarios) that paved the way for unprecedented state-subsidized purchases and redistribution of land. From 1996 through 2000, peasant groups, landowners, and state officials negotiated the transfer of 244,000 hectares-13 percent of the state's private agricultural property-and the swift resolution of outstanding land reform petitions covering an additional 242,000 hectares of private and public lands in favor of the claimants. Coming only three years after President Carlos Salinas declared the definitive end of land reform and two years after he championed changes to the Mexican Constitution that allowed for the eventual privatization of land reform institutions, the invasions in Chiapas dramatically forced agrarian demands back to center stage, leveraging massive redistributions with unprecedented speed. Contrary to both the plans of neoliberal policy makers and the fears of critics on the left, land tenure in Chiapas underwent a rapid repeasantization and reindigenization rather than privatization and concentration. After decades of inchmeal change, 1994-2001 saw the rapid and, for many rural ladinos, intolerable triumph of indigenous political leaders, monumental steps toward the destruction of land concentration, and accelerated ladino out-migration.

What most observers gloss as "the Chiapas conflict" is in fact a constellation of temporally and spatially differentiated conflicts. This book focuses on one slice of that shifting "warscape" (Nordstrom 1997): struggles between landowners and peasants in the north-central Chiapan municipios of Chiln and Sital, which I refer to with the shorthand label "Chiln" (see Map 1). Thus, while most people know of Chiapas only in association with the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, this book tells a different story about different actors: it is the first English-language study of the state's 1994-1998 agrarian mobilizations and the only fine-grained ethnography of ladino landowners, critical but largely ignored actors in the Chiapan warscape.

In Chiln, land invasions commenced in the early-morning hours of February 14, 1994. Within two weeks, indigenous peasants from the ejidos of San Sebastin Bachajn and San Jernimo Bachajn, led by the Coordinadora Nacional de Pueblos Indgenas (CNPI, or National Coordinating Body of Indigenous Peoples), had seized more than 2,000 hectares of coffee and ranch land. By the spring and summer, a diverse collection of organizations, from the pro-government Municipal Solidarity Committee to the Centro de Derechos Indgenas, A.C. (CEDIAC, or Center for Indigenous...