What follows are some excerpts from the late David Fleming’s Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016). The excerpts have been chosen by the book’s editor, Shaun Chamberlin. Extensive references are given in the dictionary itself, but are omitted here.
Localisation. Localisation stands, at best, at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative.
Does that mean the end of travel? On the contrary, it means the end of mass dislocation – and the recovery of place. Almost wherever you go in the market economy, you find yourself in the same place – in the globalised market with its shared banality, its fullness; at the end of every lane is a busy road and a housing estate like the one at the beginning of it. You cannot get out of a globalised world, because there is no out. Localisation means the protection of distinctiveness: when you are out, you are somewhere else, in a different in.
Travel now finds its purpose, taking you to a place which is not in essentials identical to the one you have left, but to one that is interesting and finds you interesting, that wants to hear your song, that dances to a different tune.
See also: Delocalisation, Local Wisdom, Presence, Scale
Needs and Wants. A distinction between needs and wants has been made by many critics in the green movement and its predecessors, who have argued that consumption in response to our needs is justifiable and sustainable, but consumption in response to our wants is not.
Yet this notion that needs are good and wants bad does not survive inspection. For the anthropologists Douglas and Isherwood, it is a “curious moral split [that] appears under the surface of most economists’ thoughts on human needs”. Lean Logic argues that those economists have it somewhat back-to-front.
The heaviest burden of the modern economy, by far, is that imposed by its own elaborations. Any large-scale economy requires massive infrastructures and material flows just to support itself and keep existing. Such sprawling industrial economies have massively multiplied our needs, our ‘regrettable necessities’. Regardless of whether we want them, we need the sewage systems, heavy-goods transport, police-forces… Given the substantial scale of the task of feeding, raising and schooling a suburban family, and the increasing challenge of such routine needs as finding a post office, many of us undoubtedly need cars. The collapse of local self-reliance was both the cause and the effect of the massive elaboration of transport, and when that need can no longer be met, its life-sustaining function will be bitterly recognised.
It is, then, the elaboration of needs by large-scale industrial life that causes the trouble. Our wants are squeezed-out, much-missed and light by comparison, not least because they often involve labour-intensive crafts and services – pianists, craftsmen, dress-makers, waitresses, gardeners with minimum environmental impact. Some wants are also needs, of course, and they cannot be cleanly separated, but if we focus our efforts on finding a way, under the stresses of the climacteric, of achieving a substantial and rapid liquidation of our needs, we will be getting somewhere.
No Alternative, The Fallacy of. (1) The fallacy that there is no alternative (but you may not have looked hard enough). (2) The fallacy that, because there is no alternative to the particular strategy that is being discussed, that strategy must be feasible. Example: It is argued that the other big energy options are not going to provide solutions in the future, and that therefore the solution is a vast expansion of nuclear energy. But this is a non sequitur: the lack of feasibility of the other options tells us nothing about whether an expansion of nuclear power is feasible or not.
Peasant. A person practicing small-scale, mixed, energy-efficient, fertility-conserving farming designed chiefly for local subsistence. It is integrated into local culture. It is the defining practice of the community. This model of farming, however, became briefly obsolete in the market economy, with its abundant cheap energy, enabling a different one to develop which did not need to supply its own energy and sustain its own fertility.
Peasant farming is a skilled and efficient way of sustaining food production within the limits of the ecology. It is an eco-ethic, sustaining the measured synergy with nature that we find in Tao philosophy. It has the five properties of resilience.
But it has a flaw. It is highly productive, so it yields a surplus, and this is a tempting resource for the gradual evolution of an urban civic society, with its unstoppable implications of growth, hubris and trouble. Is there a way of learning from that dismal cycle, and sustaining, instead, a localised, community-based, decentralised society, without the seeds of its own destruction…?
Place. Space whose local narrative can still be heard, and could be heard again, given the chance. Place is the practical, located, tangible, bounded setting which protects us from abstractions, generalities and ideologies and opens the way to thinking as discovery. On this scale, there is elegance, and some relief from the need to be right, for if you are wrong, the small scale of place allows for revision and repair, supported by conversation.
Place is the endangered habitat of our species.
See also: County, Harmless Lunatic, Home, Identity, Localisation, Parish, Practice, Proximity Principle, Regrettable Necessities, Scale, Transition
Protection. The act of caring for something that you value, or for which you are responsible – it is a deep behaviour which, in some senses, is shared by all living things. It is widely supposed to be a good thing, except in the case of economies, which are required to dance to the single tune of perpetual competition. True, natural selection is a condition of all living things, too. But species with less intelligence than ours use both. It is time we caught up.
Lean Economics is about protecting the right of local economies to proceed on a different basis.
On such matters, market economics is far from neutral. It takes the view that the competitive market is the only sound basis for economy, politics and culture, and it advocates its case with evangelical conviction: if there is a society somewhere which is not based on the market, it needs to be saved.
In a taut, competitive, growing market, it is true that protectionism is not a good idea. …
But, of course, there are circumstances in which free, unprotected trade is not what an economy needs, and we are coming to a time when they can be discussed without inviting derision. Competitive free trade comes with a commitment to growth, i.e. to the rubbing out of diversity and local self-reliance, to resource-depletion, pollution, the loss of social capital and resilience – and eventual collapse. It is too late to consider protection against these things; the damage has already been done. But protection of what is left of indigenous food production and steps toward local self-reliance and reduced dependence on fossil fuels for every aspect of food production would be rational.
See also: Local Currency, Nation
System-Scale Rule. The key rule governing systems-design: large-scale problems do not require large-scale solutions; they require small-scale solutions within a large-scale framework.
Time, Fallacies of.
The Permanent Present. The fallacy which gives undue emphasis to the present when considering an option with long-term consequences. Examples include arguments that our present ability to import food justifies permanent burial of agricultural land under new housing, that joining the Eurozone is justified by today’s low interest rates there, that the state of the jobs market at the moment calls for migrant labour, that the current price of oil opens the way to a long-term expansion of air travel. This presumption of a constant present is a leading symptom of the dementia that afflicts the judgment of governments – dementia absens: the patient is so elevated, so far removed from ordinary life, so taken up with a global vision, so protected by experts, so busy, so short of sleep, and so absent, that he or she has no sense of time or place. (Abstraction, Presence).
And there is a risk that the values of the present may crowd out all other values. The question, “What is right?”, short-circuits to the answer, “Whatever is now”.
The Irrelevant Past. An argument that affirms that now is a special case in that the present has achieved standards of reason and ethics which have not been available before. The fallacy typically cites the fact that this is the twenty-first century as proof that the argument is correct:
“By the end of the 20th century, the independent sector had emerged pre-eminent in the British education system but the only vision the independent sector has today remains entrenched in the 20th century… We need new vision for the independent sector in the 21st century… It is no longer tenable in 2008 to retain 20th century apartheid thinking.” (Anthony Seldon (2008), “Enough of this Educational Apartheid”.)
The Irrelevant Past argument begs the question: if the proposal would change things around from how they were in the past, it is self-evidently a good thing.
Here is the scientist-philosopher Mary Warnock being sympathetic with the unfortunates who are so stuck in the past that they are opposed to genetically-modified crops:
“[For] many confused and vaguely frightened people, the new biotechnology seems to have opened up possibilities of changing the genes of plants and animals in a way which nature, or God as the Creator, never intended. … [And now] the argument has moved on [to] the myth of an unnatural creature being formed in the laboratory whose growth and behaviour could not be controlled. It was upon such fears that Mary Shelley played, as long ago as 1818, in her story of Frankenstein.”
Oh dear. Perhaps we should learn from the future?
See also: Feedback, Systems Thinking
Transformation, The Great. The Great Transformation has already happened. It was the revolution in politics, economics and society that came with the market economy, and which hit its stride in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Most of human history had been bred, fed and watered by another sort of economy, but the market has replaced, as far as possible, the social capital of reciprocal obligation, loyalties, authority structures, culture and traditions with exchange, price and the impersonal principles of economics.
Unfortunately, the critics of economics have had a tendency to discuss the whole structure as a tissue of misconceptions. It is a critique that fails. The strength of economics is its considerable, if far from complete, understanding of the flows and comparative advantages that underlie trade, jobs, capital and incomes, and the logic of optimising behaviour, all backed by glittering accomplishment in mathematics. That makes it a powerful analytical instrument, so that just a few misconceptions – such as a failure to understand the informal economy or resource depletion – can have leverage: like a baby monkey at the controls of a Ferrari, they can turn it into an instrument with extraordinarily destructive potential. If it were a tissue of errors, it would not be dangerous: it is its 90 percent brilliance which makes it so.
Economics has therefore been seductive. The market economy is effective for sustaining social order: the distribution of goods, services and other assets is facilitated by buying and selling, supporting a network of exchange to which everyone has access. It provides suppliers with the incentive to know their markets and respond to them; it uses ‘pull’ rather than top-down regulation, and it learns from experience, so it is effective and efficient. It supports a more egalitarian society than any other large-scale state has been capable of and it saves a great deal of trouble: it has appealed to minds glad of a cognitive technology which enabled them to make decisions according to mathematical models, and with little fear of contradiction.
“Douce commerce”, sweet commerce, wrote Jacques Savary, an early management consultant, in a textbook for businessmen (1685), “makes for all the gentleness of life.” The authorities themselves agreed: commerce is the most “innocent and legitimate way of acquiring wealth”, observed an edict of the French government in 1669; it is “the fertile source which brings abundance to the state and spreads it among its subjects”.
Indeed, the government’s main task in a mature market economy is to keep it free of obstacles that might stop it growing – like a bemused farmer would treat the enchanted goose: keep the foxes out so that it can go on magically laying its golden eggs.
Its achievements and answers sound authoritative and final, but what is truly most significant about them is how naïve they are – if the flow of income fails, the powerfully-bonding combination of money and self-interest will no longer be available on its present all-embracing scale, and perhaps not at all. And it must inevitably fail, as the market’s taut competitiveness demands ever-increasing productivity and thus relies on the impossibility of perpetual growth.
In the meantime, the reduction of a society and culture to dependence on mathematical abstraction has infantilised a grown-up civilisation and is well on the way to destroying it. Civilisations self-destruct anyway, but it is reasonable to ask whether they have done so before with such enthusiasm, in obedience to such an acutely absurd superstition, while claiming with such insistence that they were beyond being seduced by the irrational promises of religion. Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.
Yet, when this relatively short-lived market-society is gone, we will miss its essential simplicity, its price mechanism, its self-stabilising properties, its impersonal exchange, the comforts it delivers to many, and the freedoms it underwrites. Its failure will be destructive.
And the end is in sight; during the early decades of the century, the market will lose its magic. It is the aim of Lean Logic to suggest some principles for the design of a replacement.
I have traveled to Standing Rock twice now. The first time was on September 16 – 20. On the first trip I went with my mother. We camped at Rosebud and spent a great deal of time in the kitchen preparing food and talking with members of the camp, indigenous and non-indigenous allies. We could hear prayers and drumming in the Oceti Sakown Camp well into the night. The atmosphere was of constant prayer and felt celebratory. There were fireworks on the first night of our stay. I visited Sacred Stone and the “Overflow,” Oceti Sakowan, camps. Between Rosebud and Sacred Stone a women’s lodge was being constructed, with the permission of the elders.
The second trip was on October 29 – November 2. I went with acquaintances and we camped in the Oceti Sakowan. We fed ourselves, and provided our own shelter. The only time I ate outside of our camp was when I went to do dishes at Rosebud. Surveillance was present on the hill overlooking the camp: flood lights, drones, plane helicopter circling. I did not take pictures. The camp itself was much quieter. I attended non violent civil disobedience training, a requirement for all new arrivals. I filled out forms with legal and prepared for the possibility of NVCD action.
I also went to an orientation for the medics. Currently a Medic tent, herbal/alternative remedy, and a body work tent have been established with a mental health group and center in formation. Meetings for the camp are held every morning and in a truly respectful and democratic manner. All voices are heard. From 2-3 hours of work a day are expected to be given to the collective. I participated in water ceremony by invitation. I gave my drum when it was asked for, to be in sweat lodge. I visited Sacred Stone, and spoke with a keeper of the sacred fire who had just returned to camp, having closed down her life a half a continent away to be at Standing Rock.
Building for the winter was well underway. Between Sacred Stone and Rosebud on the Standing Rock Reservation side of the Cannonball, the women who were building the women’s lodge had returned and were well established; the lodge was complete. Rosebud looked the same physically, but many people who I remembered had left while some remained. I had a brief conversation with a Episcopalian Minister letting me know that 300 faith leaders were answering the call to come to Standing Rock. Over 500 arrived the day after our departure.
I was physically cold, in pain, and sleep-deprived during the stay. Monday was particularly difficult and windy. Recent tests indicate I most likely have a severe form of arthritis. Fortunately be were camped by some trees and able to create a bit of a wind break. If you are planning to go, be prepared for harsh conditions and be realistic about your limitations and how to deal with them.
I have attended multiple Wednesday evening updates at Four Winds in Denver. I have learned a great deal about the legal and on-the-ground struggles, not only at Standing Rock but historically, by attending updates. These meetings have also led to engagement with an organizing group of women who coordinated Four Directions March and Prayer in solidarity with Standing Rock and on Indigenous Peoples Day (transforming Columbus Day), prayer and ceremony for Murdered and Missing Sisters, and on election day will be holding a Million Mothers March in Denver. I have been able to engage in support work by request and have been able to offer air time through WomynAir and the AM News Magazine on our local community radio station KGNU to increase awareness and notify the public when it is appropriate for them to attend.
In Conclusion: Standing Rock is a functional, resilient community of resistance. Standing Rock is prayer and ceremony and community. If there is anything that I have gathered from having been at Standing Rock it is this. Prayer and ceremony unite the people to the land, air, and water; to each other, to our ancestors, to community, to action. It is my belief, after my experience of being at Standing Rock, that this foundation gives humans the strength and sanity to face ourselves, our communities, life, and to continue to take action in defense of life. Words fail. I will continue to listen.
From acclaimed documentary filmmaker Shannon Kring comes END OF THE LINE, the incredible story of a group of indigenous women willing to risk their lives to stop the Dakota Access oil pipeline construction that desecrated their ancient burial and prayer sites and threatens their land, water, and very existence.
But there was another prophecy: the women, as the guardians of the waters and protectors of all life, would rise.
They are the brave survivors. Among them, the descendant of the female warrior who fought the US Cavalry alongside Sitting Bull. The great-grandmother who was fired upon at Wounded Knee in 1973. The lifelong activist who became a part of the system in order to defeat it.
They are the daughters and granddaughters of brave survivors. People who escaped genocide, only to be robbed of their lands and herded onto reservations. Children who were taken from their families and placed in non-Native boarding schools and foster homes where they suffered further abuse. Today, these women tell their own tragic stories. Stories ranging from forced sterilization to substandard medical care.
Yet somehow the spirit of these women has not been broken. The women of Standing Rock vow to protect Mother Earth and all her inhabitants. It is their responsibility to the ancestors and to the seven generations to come. This is their last stand.
End of the Line is being crowdfunded on Indiegogo. Show your support here.
On October 13, the 500 delegates of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) reached complete consensus on the proposal presented by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) at the opening of the fifth Congress three days earlier: the CNI will collectively enter the 2018 Mexican presidential race with an indigenous woman candidate at its forefront.
The Fifth Congress is now in permanent assembly while the delegates return to their communities and hold consultations to decide to either approve or reject the proposal.
This decision represents a major shift in strategy of the Zapatista movement which in 2003, after nine years of betrayed negotiations with the Mexican government, cut off all communication with the political system. In the subsequent thirteen years they have not looked back, focusing instead on constructing autonomy in their own communities. The proposed presidential campaign will not, however, be a return to engagement with the political system, but rather a takeover and, if successful, dismantling of that system.
“We confirm that our fight is not for power, we do not seek it; rather we call all of the original peoples and civil society to organize to detain this destruction, to strengthen our resistances and rebellions, that is to say in the defense of the life of each person, family, collective, community, or neighborhood. To construct peace and justice, reconnecting ourselves from below,” stated the CNI and EZLN in a communiqué released at the closure of the assembly.
The Indigenous Council of Government will be made up of representatives from CNI communities from all states and regions of Mexico, with the individual candidate serving to “make their [collective] word material.”
THE FIGHT FOR RECOGNITION
The CNI was formed in 1996, nearly two years after the indigenous Zapatistas of Chiapas famously rose up in arms and declared war on the Mexican government. Earlier that same year, the EZLN and federal government signed the San Andrés Accords, which agreed to recognize indigenous autonomy in the constitution, increase indigenous political representation, and guarantee access to justice.
In October of that year, thousands of indigenous people from communities all over the country gathered in Mexico City for the first National Indigenous Congress, agreeing that their primary objective would be to defend the San Andrés Accords. It was at this first Congress that the late EZLN commander Ramona declared what soon became the slogan of the CNI: “NEVER AGAIN A MEXICO WITHOUT US.”
When the EZLN and government met to finalize the Accords one month later, a familiar pattern of denial began to re-emerge: The government refused to sign the Accords. Simultaneously, then president Ernesto Zedillo launched a bloody militarization campaign throughout Chiapas climaxing in the Acteal Massacre in which paramilitary troops massacred 45 members of Las Abejas, an indigenous Catholic pacifist organization.
The primary focus of both the EZLN and the CNI, then, became an effort to push the Mexican government to pass the Accords. In 2001, the third National Indigenous Congress was held in the Purépucha community of Nurío in Michoacán. Representatives from 40 of Mexico’s 57 Indigenous Peoples created a list of demands including constitutional recognition of indigenous rights and autonomy, and the recognition of indigenous systems of justice and ancestral territory.
That same year, Comandanta Esther addressed the Congress of the Union: “When indigenous rights and culture are constitutionally recognized in accord with the [San Andrés Accords], the law will begin joining its hour with the hour of the Indian peoples.”
The following month, Congress unanimously approved a constitutional reform concerning indigenous rights and culture that ignored all demands for autonomy and recognition, completely undermining the San Andrés Accords and cementing the betrayal of Indigenous Peoples by the entire Mexican political system.
It was after this ultimate betrayal that the Zapatistas and CNI decided to turn their backs on the Mexican political system which refused to include them. Instead, they decided to take matters in their own hands and implement the San Andrés Accords themselves in their communities and territories. What the government refused to give them, they would build.
For the next thirteen years, the Zapatista communities of Chiapas and indigenous communities throughout Mexico worked to construct their own autonomy from the ground up.
ACHIEVEMENTS AND LIMITATIONS OF AUTONOMY
In this Fifth National Indigenous Congress, which also celebrated the 20th anniversary of the CNI, delegates shared the immense achievements of autonomy in their communities:
They have rebuilt their traditional farming structures using organic fertilizers and native seeds.
They have reconstituted their traditional governments, replacing the corrupt government authorities with elder councils and community assemblies.
They have built their own community police and self defense forces, ousting organized crime and replacing the similarly corrupt official police who often work with narcotraffickers.
They have created community radio stations to broadcast the truth, drowning out the lies and silence of corporate media which, in Mexico, is monopolized by the media empire Televisa.
They have recuperated territory that was violently expropriated by the government and large landowners.
They have created their own bilingual indigenous schools where students learn about colonialism, capitalism, and the history of their people.
They have revived their traditional medicine and built clinics where before people had no healthcare, fighting dependence on western medicine.
However, they have also faced extreme repression, plunder of their territories, and human rights violations. There was not a single community that did not speak of their fight against what they call ‘death projects’— mining, fracking, hydroelectric dams, gas pipelines, airport construction, highway construction — operated by foreign corporations which do not consult their communities before destroying their land.
They are fighting against agroindustrial chemicals and pesticides contaminating their land and waters, the destruction of their forests, the invasion of genetically modified seeds, and the privatization and expropriation of their sacred water and collectively-held territory.
They are fighting supposedly ‘green’ development in the form of wind farms and conservation reserves that expropriate their territory and farmland, often for the production of monocrops like African Palm.
They are fighting against cultural death— the tourism industry that pillages their sacred sites and perverts their traditions as attractions for foreigners, and the disappearance of their languages and clothing.
And they are fighting against literal death—the murder, disappearance, kidnapping, rape, imprisonment, and psychological warfare that all indigenous communities in resistance face at the hands of the military, police, and organized crime.
The nation is also on the brink of total privatization of the public sector with the 11 structural adjustments passed by President Enrique Peña Nieto in 2013. Though the the CNI can prevent these reforms from entering their communities on a certain level, they can not, through autonomy alone, halt the devastating impacts of the privatization of public healthcare, education, communication, energy, and housing, among others.
In this Fifth Congress, the delegates recognized that walking the path of autonomy, though remarkably successful on a local level, has not allowed the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico to truly unite. Building coalitions on statewide and even regional or municipal levels has proved exceedingly difficult with most communities remaining relatively isolated. Though they all face the same repression by corporations and the government, each community fights the same enemy from its different corner of Mexico, thus allowing what the Zapatistas call ‘the capitalist hydra’ to divide and conquer. As one delegate from Jalisco said, “they’re continuing to screw us.”
THE PROPOSAL
The proposal of the EZLN for the CNI to run a collective presidential campaign is an effort to halt the hydra. At first, nearly all of the delegates were doubtful. They expressed their concerns about sacrificing their autonomy to embark on the electoral route. All, however, also expressed their deep trust in the EZLN as their guide in the struggle and their willingness to be convinced. Throughout the three-day assembly this is exactly what happened.
One of the fundamental principles of both the CNI and the EZLN is that they do not aspire to take state power, which they view as inherently corrupt and oppressive. The delegates spoke of their commitment to this principle and their concern of sacrificing it. Through their discussions, however, they clarified that they would not aim to take power, but rather dismantle this power from below and to the left, from the poor and marginalized indigenous communities fighting for their dignity, freedom, and autonomy.
Another fundamental principle is their opposition to all political parties, which they view as the same elite oppressor class dressed in different colors. They clarified that they would not create a new political party, but rather an Indigenous Council of Government which, Subcommander Galeano (formerly Marcos), urged us not to confuse with an Indigenous Government Council, meaning that they are not trying to indigenize the current government, but rather build a new indigenous government that governs according to the principles of the EZLN and CNI:
Serve, don’t self-serve
Represent, don’t supplant
Construct, don’t destroy
Propose, don’t impose
Convince, don’t defeat
Go below, not above
Govern by obeying
The EZLN is demanding that we disrupt our basic notions of what a government is and what a government can do. In indigenous communities throughout the country as well as in Zapatista territory, the CNI has expelled government officials and revived their traditional systems of self-governance. The EZLN is asking us to envision this happening on a national level: a Mexico that is governed by a council of hundreds of indigenous people from all nations and tribes guided by the wisdom of their ancestors.
Central to the proposal is that the candidate who will represent the Indigenous Council of Government be an indigenous woman. Galeano, in his explanation, continually emphasized this point. He said that both mestizos (non-indigenous) and men have proved incapable of governance, and that this point was not up for debate. He also reminded us that this will not be a government run by any and all indigenous people, because there are of course indigenous landowners, paramilitary, and police, as well as indigenous communities that have been bought out by the government. It will be a CNI government, running not with a political platform, but rather a program of struggle that is explicitly anti-capitalist.
Galeano also emphasized that it must be the CNI that approves and constructs the campaign, not the EZLN. In 2006 the EZLN ran ‘the Other Campaign’ parallel to the presidential race to spread the word of autonomy and urge the people of Mexico to organize their communities outside of the electoral sphere. In his speech at the Fifth Congress, Galeano explained that in the Other Campaign, the EZLN led and the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico followed, and that it needed to be the other way around, with the Indigenous Peoples in resistance leading the nation.
The aim of the presidential campaign will be not only to win, but to fortify and unite the CNI and, as one delegate from Michoacán said, to “force the people of Mexico to turn and look at us”. In his opening speech, Subcommander Moisés repeated the urgency of uniting the people of the country and the city:
“Now is the time to remind the Ruler and his managers and overseers who it was who gave birth to this nation, who works the machines, who creates food from the earth, who constructs buildings, who paves the roads, who defends and reclaims the sciences and the arts, who imagines and struggles for a world so big that there is always a place to find food, shelter and hope.”
ANOTHER GOVERNMENT IS POSSIBLE
Some may question the possibility or efficiency of a collectively run indigenous government. The assembly itself refuted these doubts. Over 500 people from all different cultures and contexts discussed the proposal for three twelve-hour days without a single moment of disrespect. Instead of arguing based on ideology or political views, they truly listened to and, in the face of doubt, convinced one another. Most importantly, no delegate spoke from personal interest, but rather the collective interest of their community.
The consensus, then, that the proposal be brought back to their communities for consultation, was based on a true and complete agreement that the presidential campaign would benefit them all. Compared to the disrespect, corruption, corporate control, and political deadlock that we are used to in our current federal governments, the CNI was an example of the power of traditional governance.
This campaign will be unlike any other in the history of the world. In this moment of global political despair, particularly in the midst of the US presidential elections, the EZLN is once again challenging us to imagine outside of the defined realm of possibilities. After being denied a space in Mexico for over 500 years, they are deciding to construct a new Mexico and eventually, Galeano said, a new world.
In the words of the General Command of the EZLN:
Now is the hour of the National Indigenous Congress.
With its step, let the earth tremble at its core.
With its dreams, let cynicism and apathy be vanquished.
In its words, let those without voice be lifted up.
With its gaze, let darkness be illuminated.
In its ear, let the pain of those who think they are alone find a home.
In its heart, let desperation find comfort and hope.
Ever since the incursion of rampant neoliberalism in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s, the Mapuche territory or Wallmapu, located south of the Bio Bio River, has been subjected to immeasurable domination and constant exploitation at the hands of a diverse range of foreign and national economic interests. Megaprojects like hydroelectric dams, mining operations, oil extraction and forestry plantations embody some of the main threats to Mapuche self-determination and autonomy.
In Chile, thanks to the enactment of Law 701 in 1974, three forestry giants stand at the forefront of the exploitation of Mapuche territory Forestal Bosques Arauco, CMPC and Forestal Mininco. Overall, pine and eucalyptus plantations in Chile today amount to more than 2.8 million hectares. For their part, the forefathers of today’s latifundistas were European-born families, who were invited to settle in Mapuche territory during Pinochet’s dictatorship.
Underpinning the vast array of threats in Wallmapu there sits a broader historical, socio-politico and economic reality that was recently defined by historians Fernando Pairican and Rolando Alvarez-Vallejo as the “New Arauco War”.
On the frontlines of this war, the Chilean State works vigorously to criminalize, demoralize, incarcerate and discredit Mapuche leaders using any manner or method at their convenience.
A prime and recent example of this harsh campaign can be found in the arbitrary detention of Mapuche Peñis, Ernesto Lincoyam Llaitul Pezoa and Ismael Queipul Martínez, by Chilean security forces last May, in Los Angeles (Bio Bio Region).
Peñi Llaitul was arrested due to the alleged illegal possession of firearms — although no concrete evidence for this accusation has since then been provided by Chile’s equivalent to the FBI, the Investigations Police of Chile (PDI). His arbitrary detention can be best explained as part of the regular series of intelligence operations against the Mapuche — constant monitoring and surveillance of Mapuche autonomist communities by undercover police, paramilitaries and co-opted local members has indeed become an entrenched strategy of the Chilean corporate state.
Most importantly, the violent arrest of Llaitul and Queipul came at a crucial juncture in Chilean-Mapuche politics. In the leading up to the first ever Mesa de Diálogo, a top-down embraced initiative to reconcile Mapuche and non-Mapuche interests in the region, the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Committee (CAM for its Spanish acronym) publicly announced its refusal to participate. The announcement sparked anger and frustration among the politically liberal associations and NGOs that sought a peace process. The rationale behind CAM’s decision was that the Mesa de Dialogo was largely devoid of political power since it was pushed by local and national actors which had themselves a vexed interest in the negotiations, such as conservative intellectuals, university chancellors, forestry and mining labor union leaders, among others. Unsurprisingly, the corporate giants absented themselves from the table. In this sense, the Mesa de Dialogo was an attempt to paradoxically reconcile Mapuche and non-Mapuche interests by leaving capital untouched.
Mapuche activist Ernesto Llaitul was arrested by Chilean police on weapons charges in 2016. Photo by Periódico Azkintuwe.
This refusal to partake in the Mesa de Dialogo and any other similar de-politicized, de-economized processes came along with the release of a first of its kind mainstream special television report on CAM and its clandestine strategy of liberation. This report showed for the first time to the average Chilean citizen an unapologetic CAM, which openly defended violence (arson and other attacks against capital) as the sole means of emancipation–leaving the variegated cells of CAM exposed to a wave of brutal quelling, which included arbitrary arrests, violent raids to communities and the expulsion of Mapuche from recovered lands. It was precisely in this critical environment where Llaitul and Queipul were arrested.
For his part, Ernesto Llaitul has been a long-time active member of CAM. His father, Weychafe Héctor Llaitul has been at the forefront of Mapuche resistance since the late 1990s. Therefore, his arrest comes as no surprise to the Mapuche communities of Arauco-Malleco. He is another de facto political prisoner jailed in Wallmapu. In the midst of his imprisonment, Ernesto Llaitul proclaimed “neither imprisonment nor bullets will halt our struggle”.
On Wednesday 21 of September, the Los Angeles tribunal ruled Ernesto Llaitul’s detention arbitrary and illegal. Preventive detention was revoked and he has since been granted partial parole. The tribunal states that insufficient evidence was provided by the prosecutors to proof Llaitul and Queipul’s illegal possession of weapons. This development, however, should not be construed as the triumph of justice in the highly-corrupted Chilean bureaucratic-legal system. On the contrary, it sheds light on the variegated and complex techniques of oppression and surveillance used by the Chilean state. It is through arbitrary arrests, like this one, that the Chilean state exudes the extent of its power. It is through granting parole that it aims to wash off international condemnation of its judicial processes. The release of Llaitul can only be seen as a statist tool to “pacify” and co-opt CAM.
A similar narrative of criminalization can found in nearby Argentina.
Most recently, on August 30 2016 a large contingent of police and military personnel took to the streets of city of Esquel in Patagonia, Argentina where Mapuche leaders and social movement gathered outside the courthouse to support Lonko (traditional leader) Facundo Huala Jones.
Mapuche activists outside protested outside a courthouse on August 30 2016 in the city of Esquel in Patagonia, Argentina to support Facundo Huala Jones. Photo by Red de Apoyo Comunidades en Conflicto MAP
In preventative detention since May 27, 2016, Huala was accused of usurping land belonging to the multi-national Benetton in Chubut, Argentina and also faced extradition to Chile where he is wanted on counts of arson and possession of illegal weapons in a case dating back to 2013 in Pisue Pisue, Rio Bueno.
Huala Jones had no doubts about his situation: “I am a political prisoner, persecuted by the Government of two countries – Argentina and Chile,” he said. “This is political persecution that goes beyond this judicial process.’
This could not have been clearer when the Judge Martin Zacchino refused a request from Huala’s defence lawyer to allow him to go under house arrest on health grounds: “You incite people to fight, that verges on crime. 30 more days in prison,” he said.
The case of Peñis, Huala Jones and Llaitul both need to be contextualized within the broader warfare campaign targeting Mapuche leaders —from Machis (spiritual healers) to Werkens (messengers) and Weychafes (warriors) — all of them, struggling for the inherent right to autonomy of the Mapuche nation.
Unlike many other indigenous nations in South America, the Mapuche nation continued to be autonomous fiercely and successfully resisting any incursions on their territory up until the late nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the foundation of the colonial nations of Argentina and Chile, that the Wallmapu was divided in two and differing forms of oppression ensued.
In Chile, the Mapuche nation was forcibly annexed in the aftermath of the violent and brutal Operation “Pacificación de la Araucania”.
In Argentina, a campaign of genocide called the ‘’Conquest of the Desert’’ rampaged from 1778-1885, killing and enslaving the Mapuche, funded partly by the British who supplied Remington Rifles in return for 1 million hectares of land. Up until the mid 1920s, money was awarded to anyone who presented the ear of a slain Mapuche — a process which enabled many European settlers buy up land.
Despite this, the Mapuche never lost their vision of an autonomous Wallmapu and have maintained their historic fierce resistance to the colonial states. Today, the Arauco Malleco Coordinating Committee and the emerging Movimiento Autónomo del Puelmapu (MAP) in Argentina are arguably the most important indigenous autonomist organization in the whole of Latin America engaging in a project not only for the recovery of scattered Mapuche lands but actively seeking to liberate the Mapuche nation from the grip of statist colonial power and its corporate allies.
The heavy police presence on the streets of Esquel during the trial of Facundo Huala. Photo by Red de Apoyo Comunidades en Conflicto MAP.
“We have a legitimate right to rise up and rebel in the face of tyrannical regimes, created through processes of military occupation by the Chilean and Argentinean government from the mid-1800s onwards which created poverty, violence, racism, denial of basic human rights and a policy of genocide which exists even today,” says Huala, “And even more so when there is no serious attempt at dialogue. The response to our political proposals is always the same: prison and bullets.”
The imprisonment of Mapuche leaders raises serious concerns of due process in a country which has long been regarded as the epitome of Latin America’s liberal democracy.
Take, for instance, the highly controversial imprisonment of Machi Francisca Linconao and Machi Celestino Cordova, who were charged with terrorism due to their supposed involvement in the arson attacks against the estate of the Luchsinger family in 2013. Their trial was marred with inconsistencies, lack of transparency and heavily relied on protected “faceless” witnesses, all of this validated and substantiated by Chile’s 1984 Anti-Terror Law—a controversial piece of legislation that dates back to Pinochet’s time. While the original law was first and foremost directed at targeting and quelling the more “direct” actions of leftist urban guerrillas in the 1980s , the amendments to this law passed by the Chilean Congress after the restoration of democracy post-1990s aimed to legalize the systematic surveillance of Mapuche communities, the militarization of Wallmapu and the inclusion of arson attacks as a terrorist act.
In Argentina the process of judicial harassment of Mapuche leaders has been less extreme than in neighboring Chile. One reason given by the MAP is the history of extreme violence against the Mapuche: “ Here we have dead bodies, not prisoners, ” they say.
And this violence could clearly be seen during the arrest of Huala Jones on 27 May 2016 in a police raid in Cushaman, a community which is in the process of land recuperation from the multi-national Benetton. 120 heavily armed police used bullets, tear gas and destroyed the homes of a group of 20 people living on 500 hectares of recovered land. Six others were arrested but subsequently released, with the existing extradition request from Chile used to justify preventive detention for Huala.
The request dates back to 2013 when Haula had been visiting Machi Millaray Huichalaf — an emblematic figure in the struggle against a hydroelectric dam on the Pilmaiken River — when her house was raided by police and she was arrested along with Facundo and four other colleagues all accused of involvement in an arson case on the agricultural estate Pisue Pisue. During a year long process of judicial persecution involving preventative detention, home arrest while the Chilean Government sought ways to apply the anti-terrorist law to this case, Huala managed to escape back into Argentina. While the intellectual authors of the arson were never found, Machi Millaray was sentenced to two months in prison, the other four were absolved and Huala was declared a fugitive of justice.
As aforementioned, Ernesto Llaitul’s father, Weychafe Hector Llaitul, has been a central actor in the Mapuche resistance movement since the late 1990s. Therefore, he has been subjected to the same controversial legislation and undue process. Weychafe Llaitul, current leader and spokesperson of CAM, was charged for the attacks against prosecutor Mario Elgueta back in 2008.
While Weychafe Llaitul is now on parole, his struggle for the revindication of Mapuche territory and the liberation of the Mapuche Nation continues unscathed. Intimidation, infiltration and violent attacks by corporate-funded paramilitaries — such as the Comando Hernán Trizano — continues, limiting the processes of territorial recuperation set into motion by CAM.
Llaitul’s imprisonment then evinces the perpetuation of arbitrary and undemocratic Chilean legal processes that continue to criminalize Mapuche mobilization and persecute prominent Mapuche leaders and activists.
A surprise move unsettles the status quo on the other side of the colonial border. On August 31, 2016, Argentinean authorities chose not to grant Chile its extradition request of Huala. The testimony of one of the witnesses brought forward by the prosecution was called into question after he claimed that he had been forced to sign a statement of accusation against Huala.
The revelation was key in the Judge’s final decision that was met with an explosion of excitement and the Mapuche battle cry Mariciweu!
“Historically, the Government has always ruled against Indigenous people,” said Qom leader Felix Diaz who attended the trial. “Today a precedent has been set which gives us hope of a new future for Indigenous people.”
For now, Huala while will enjoy time with his family and loved ones and the struggle will continue: “In prison or out, I will always fight. When things are wrong we have to change them. When you see oppression and do nothing to change the situation, then you become complicit with the oppressor.”
Ernesto Llaitul and Ismael Queipul, meanwhile, continue to face persecution along with so many other Mapuche men and women who seek only to preserve the lands and rights of their ancestors.
Until both states choose to embody the democratic values they espouse and, most importantly, halt the unrestricted incursion of capital agents in the region that process will continue to play out as it always has, shedding more and more light on the extent of the political repression and economic subordination in both Chile and Argentina.
Featured image: The Wixárika community of San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán or Wuaut+a is preparing to send 1,000 members to the remote Nayarit community of Huajimic to take back from the ranchers lands that the courts have ruled belong to the Wixárika. Photo from Facebook/San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán.
A contingent of at least 1,000 indigenous Wixárika (Huichol) people in the Western Sierra Madre are gearing up to take back their lands after a legal decision in a decade-long land dispute with neighboring ranchers who have held the land for more than a century.
Ranchers who have been in possession of the 10,000 hectares in question for generations say the seizure is unlawful and that they will not hand over the land — setting the scene for a showdown that observers fear may end in violence.
Leaders of the Wixárika community of San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán have announced their plans to accompany the authorities of the federal agricultural tribunal to carry out an enforcement action on the first parcel, a 184-hectare ranch in the state of Nayarit, on Sept. 22, and called on state and federal law enforcement officials to send police forces to prevent a conflict. Until the time of publication, neither the Nayarit nor the federal authorities had agreed to send police to maintain order, so both parties are hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.
The Nayarit community of Huajimic in the municipality of La Yesca has a long tradition of ranching. Ranchers of Huajimic have titles to their land that date to 1906, but the courts have ruled that the Wixarika land claims go back to the Spanish land grant of 1717. Photo from Facebook/Huajmic, Nayarit.
“We’re hoping they’ll accept the decision which is now law: that they lost the trial. They had the opportunity to legally prove that they really had the documentation and they didn’t have it,” said Miguel Vázquez Torres, president of the communal lands commission of San Sebastian. He is aware of the potential for violence, he said, “but the community is not going to sit with its hands crossed. We are prepared.”
Ranchers have titles to the land that go back to the early 1900s — but San Sebastian has the original grant from the Spanish crown that dates to 1717, and is backed by a 1953 presidential resolution. In all, 10,000 hectares is at stake, for a total of 47 different claims. The agrarian court has ruled in favor of San Sebastian in 13 of those cases; the remainder are still in process.
Rosa Carmen Dominguez Macarty, an attorney representing some of the ranchers of Huajimic, disputes the version presented by Wixarika attorneys, saying that only two of the sentences are definitive, and that all the rest are still under appeal. The ranchers are appealing the 1953 presidential resolution, saying it is based on a document that is invalid.
“It’s a social injustice,” she said. “These are very simple people; they are fathers, they are mothers who work the land themselves, and that’s how they support their families. It would be really sad if through the government’s disregard, something unpleasant were to happen.”
Vázquez said that two families who have no land have already been granted permission by the community assembly to establish homesteads on the parcel and that the assembly plans to send a rotating contingent of community residents to stand guard for several months — “as long as it’s necessary so that the families can feel safe and comfortable.” The long-term plan, he said, is to establish another settlement in the area, as San Sebastian’s existing towns are becoming overcrowded.
Dominguez argued that the local inhabitants have worked the land for generations and turned it into a highly productive area. Local residents suspect the Huicholes have another ulterior motive for taking back the land, which they have never worked: to exploit the mineral deposits that supposedly lie beneath.
Members of the Wixarika community of San Sebastian Teponahuaxtlán protesting for land reform in Guadalajara in 2014. Photo from the Facebook/San Sebastian(Wuaut+a).
Complicating matters is that San Sebastian lies in the state of Jalisco, while the contested land lies in Nayarit, where the ranchers have been outspoken in their opposition to the court decision and have been organizing in resistance to the return of the land to the Wixárika.
“Jalisco vs. Nayarit: Blood will run,” screamed one headline in a Nayarit newspaper. Meanwhile, Nayarit Gov. Roberto Sandoval reportedly has sent messages of support to ranchers.
“The governor promised us that while he is in office, we would not have to turn over a single meter of land to the Huichols,” one of the landowners told local reporter Agustín Del Castillo of Milenio newspaper.
Indeed, it’s no accident that the conflict crosses state lines, according to anthropologist Paul Liffman, author of the book Huichol Territory and the Mexican Nation.
“In fact that’s the deep history of Jalisco and Nayarit,” Liffman said in a recent interview. “Nayarit was part of Jalisco, and it separated in 1917, in part for the ranchers who wanted more political autonomy and also wanted to kick out the Indians.”
During the early years of the 20th century, the government encouraged settlers to make land claims on apparently abandoned land. It was during that period that major encroachment began to occur on Wixárika land, and the courts granted titles based on the erroneous assumption (or pretext, as Liffman says) that the land was unoccupied.
Tensions have flared periodically since the land was taken but the Wixárika had no legal recourse until the government created an agrarian court system in the 1990s, said Ruben Avila Tena, the attorney representing the community of San Sebastian. Soon afterwards that community began a legal process of reclaiming its land.
Jalisco law enforcement has agreed to be present, but only up to the state line; thus far the Wixárika leadership has received no such assurances from the Nayarit authorities, nor from the federal government.
“I’m not sure what the Jalisco police can do, besides cheering them on from the other side of the border,” commented Avila Tena. “It’s actually a very worrisome situation.”
Avila said sources in the Agrarian Tribunal have told them that the Nayarit police have no intention of supporting the Wixárika on Sept. 22. Agrarian Magistrate Aldo Saul Muñoz López spoke to this reporter by telephone but said he could not grant an interview by telephone, only in person in the Tribunal regional offices in Tepic, Nayarit.
“We did what corresponds to us as a federal tribunal, we notified all of the relevant authorities of Nayarit. If they don’t respond, it’s something that escapes my authority,” said Muñoz López, but would not give further information by phone.
Liffman likened the current conflict in San Sebastian with one that arose in the 1950s under the Huichol leader Pedro de Haro. Haro built a movement that ultimately procured the 1953 presidential resolution confirming that San Sebastian was the legal owner of the land. But as in the present case, the government didn’t provide any enforcement mechanism, and the local residents refused to give up the land. A band of armed Huichols took the matter into their own hands and marched to the Canyon of Camotlán, where they reportedly burned down a farm, drove out local residents and reclaimed the land.
Photo from the Facebook pages of the community of San Sebastian (Wuaut+a).
Santos de la Cruz Carrillo, a Wixárika leader and also an attorney on San Sebastian’s legal team, said the community has been urging the federal authorities to attend to this case for five years under a program that would offer financial compensation to the current landholders.
“It’s been five years since the community of San Sebastian asked the federal government to attend to this situation, to support the landholders with compensation”, said de la Cruz. “But the ranchers showed no interest in the compensation; they always said they want the land, so the community chose to take possession.”
Finally, in a meeting in March of this year, an official with that program told San Sebastian authorities that there was no money to pay restitution to the ranchers. That’s when they made the decision to move ahead with the process of retaking the lands, said Avila.
The Wixárika authorities have done everything in their power to seek compensation for the ranchers in the hope that a conflict could be avoided, said Avila. “This case was decided in their favor more than two years ago,” he stressed. “The community didn’t want it to be enforced like this, they were trying to get the federal government to indemnify the landholders. When they couldn’t do that anymore, they said, it can’t be helped, we will have to ask the tribunal to enforce the law.”
Liffman warned that the situation was not to be taken lightly; the area has changed radically since the times of Pedro de Haro, he said, with a significant amount of drug production now occurring throughout the territory.
“The region has become much more heavily armed,” he said. “San Sebastian has been the most violently disputed area in the sierra over the past several years…. it’s big-scale transnational narcos now, it’s not just some ranchers with pistols on their belts. So if it does come to that, it could be a bloodbath.”
