Keeping in mind now the theme of sustainable development, I continue with another episode from my life. Setting: the colonial city of San Cristobal, situated in the highlands of the heart of the state of Chiapas, country of Mexico.
It was a brisk rainy night, as most have been since I arrived here in late May. I walked the four blocks down the cobblestone streets to Kinoki, a local café and independent movie theater house. On occasion, in one of their three small movie salons, they have nights of ‘Cine Debate’- debate film. On these occasions, it usually passes that a local or national NGO (from Mexico) will show a recently produced documentary, or the beginnings of one anyway, that highlights some event or series of happenings in Mexico that pertains to themes of human rights, development, or human security. More often than not (at least since I have been attending), the films document some struggle that various indigenous groups, located all throughout Mexico, have had trying to retain rights to ancestral land, protest a mega-development project, or continue existing in some traditional, sustainable form. After the films, the floor is opened up to the 10-30 people crammed inside a small room or rooftop tent who wish to speak their mind and heart about that matter. From what I have experienced, the people present at these debate films almost always side with the indigenous and their struggle for rights to their culture and land, and denounce the capitalist globalistic system that the government of Mexico and its constituent actors mandate that these cultures assimilate to.
Tonight’s film was about the ‘Ciudad Rural Sustentable’ (CRS), or Rural Sustainable City, of Nuevo Juan del Grijalva, whose construction was completed in 2009 in the northern municipality of Ostuacan, near the state of Tabasco. The CRS was initiated by the governor of Chiapas, Juan Sabinas, and backed by Mexican president Felipe Calderon and the federal government of Chiapas as a response to a devastating landslide caused by heavy rains in 2007 in the states of Yucatan and Chiapas in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. On November 5, 2007, the heavy rains caused a landslide that fell into the Rio Grijalva, causing a mini-tsunami that completey destroyed the village of Juan Grijalva, destroying at least 100 houses and burying at least 30 people underneath the sediment. The remaining villagers and surrounding communities rushed to higher lands to wait out the effects of this natural disaster. The government saw the rural sustainable city, the first of its kind in the world, as a way to help the communities whose residents’ lives were disrupted by this natural disaster and also as a way to fulfill the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which aim to cure the world of all its ailments, essentially.
The film was actually a series of three short films. The first was a promotional video produced by the government in 2009 soon after the 49 families from the 11 displaced communities had been relocated to this new town. The film showed spectacular footage of beautiful cookie-cut houses, paved streets, grand factories, and courtyards filled with kids playing basketball and soccer. The interviews it broadcast showed kids happy to be in school, parents happy to have a hospital with medicine within walking distance, adults and youth alike happy to have jobs, paved roads, and basketball courts. The promotional film boasted these things about the CRS: equality for women (as now they were offered jobs, whereas before they stayed in the home), reforestation projects in the areas surrounding the city, drains connected to a sewer in every house, a potable water processing station, one teacher per subject, a hospital with medicine, etc. The list of the glories of this El Dorado continued on for some time and the people that appeared in the interviews would really have made you believe that it was everything it boasted.
The next clip was from 2011. It was a news story about eight farmers from Grijalva who had manifested themselves in a protest, demanding compensation and commitments that the government had promised the people after the disaster in 2007. These men had been arrested and imprisoned by state authorities for interfering with the project that was taking place on their old land. The clip showed the families of the detained men protesting in the streets of their new city, demanding their husbands, fathers and sons be released from jail for trying to claim what they had been promised. The news clip ended with a state authority trying to pacify the emotional crowd, giving some excuse as to why these men could not be immediately released. Finally, after three months imprisoned for their protest, the eight farmers were released on June 22, 2011. The clip provided a brief glimpse into the criminalization of the indigenous populations that is occurring in Mexico and all throughout Central and South America, all for the desire to protect and retain authority of what was once theirs.
The next clip, again from 2011, provided video footage of Nuevo Juan del Grijalva, this time from a hill outside of the gates of the city. This time, the footage showed empty streets, empty factories, and empty sport courts. Over the course of several audio interviews while the video spanned what appeared to be this deserted city, the audience heard the accounts of residents from the city, two years after its founding. It turns out the residents aren’t so happy about their new sustainable city. Sure there are factories, but what do these coffee and cacao farmers know about fixing bicycles and growing roses in a greenhouse? The jobs provided are not really providing jobs. Point one: the planners of this new Eden did not consult the recipients of the project. The government put in factories and jobs that (a) the residents did not know how to do, (b) the residents did not want to do, and (c) was completely immersed in an economic system that these rural indigenous folk were not a part of and definitely do not want to be a part of. The residents were now living in houses with bathrooms inside the same walls where they slept, in places where they needed to pay for water and electricity, and there was no land to have their ‘milpa’ where they could grow their corn and beans - instead they had to buy food from the supermarket. The lack of flow of money, due to the lack or work, has made it so that people cannot pay for their electricity and cannot buy their essentials. Point two: this development project attempted to give these peasants a good life and cure them of their poverty by giving them a hefty push into a foreign culture that relies on consumption to drive an economic system that is really not whatsoever sustainable. And who knows what will become of their old land – mined for minerals? Damned for electricity or water?
Context: Chiapas is one of the poorest states in Mexico. In Chiapas alone there are over 14,000 communities with less than 100 people. For a government trying to rid poverty (or trying to exploit the country’s most natural-resource rich state), what are your options? For the 400,000,000 pesos (40 million U.S. buckaroos) that it cost to build this rural sustainable city, one wonders how many clinics could have been built centralized around those 14,000 communities, how many secondary schools or high schools could have built (if that’s really what the people want), how many nurses’ or doctors’ salaries could have been paid, or how many potable water systems could have been constructed. But no, instead we end up with a Rural Sustainable City.
The comments from the audience afterward focused on several debates. Debate one: bad planning on the part of the government. The government should have provided more capacity building so that the people would know what to do with a greenhouse of roses and bicycle workshop. That way, they could actually work and get the money they need to buy their essentials. Argument: None of the people in the town have bicycles or want roses. The town is so isolated that they have no market to sell these to anyone else. What was it really bad planning on the part of the government? Or was it actually a well-planned attempt to capitalize on a natural disaster and rapidly attempt to assimilate 11 indigenous communities into a capitalistic economic system based on consumption?
Debate two: What is really sustainable about a system based on consumption anyway? The way the consumptive world runs now, the United States alone needs 5 Earths to satisfy its appetite for all things shiny and new. The environment, that little system that economists refuse to believe that the economy lies within, simply cannot support this consumptive society. Un-renewable resources, such as oil, minerals, water, and air, are being depleted to the point we don’t have more to use or contaminated to the point that consuming them is detrimental to our health. Renewable resources, such as forests, animals, humans and all the rich biodiversity that lies atop the earth’s crust and under the oceans and rivers are being mistreated and unsustainably harvested to the point that forests are disappearing and species are going extinct. In short, the audience was very credulous as to whether or not putting these indigenous people into this economic system was really a ‘sustainable’ solution.
I left the showing room a bit early, my mind already full with thought. On the walk back home I stopped by the plaza in front of the main cathedral, where the night before I had played guitar with several indigenous youth which happened to be in the plaza as well. That night I learned briefly that Santiago, one of the youth, was camping out in the plaza indefinitely because he, his family, and four other families were displaced. Thus I returned to the plaza the next night, after the cine debate, to the little encampment in front of the central cathedral in San Cristobal’s main square, filled with tourists and locals alike, to find out more about this group of indigenous.
After finding one man who could speak Spanish, I soon learned the story of these five families, totaling 33 people, including 23 children, who had been displaced for the third time since the year 2000. This last displacement occurred before dawn on the morning of July 4th, just 16 days ago in the community of Las Conchitas, in the municipality of Salto de Agua, bordering the municipality of Palenque, famous for its millenia-old Mayan ruins. From their description, ten local paramilitaries armed with rifles entered their little village and began beating and torturing the residents. With nothing to fight back with and nowhere to go, all five families fled for their lives. With the help of the Frente Nacional de la Lucha por el Socialismo (National Front for the FIght for Socialism), of which these families are members, they made their way to San Cristobal and set up camp atop a stage that the municipal authorities were erecting for some other event.
Although they have been harassed by the local police to vacate the area, I do not believe the state government wants to overtly throw another wrench in their lives. According to the people of Las Conchitas, the paramilitaries that forced them to flee their village were given arms and fully supported by the state government. So there they camp, in the central plaza, encouraging the thousands of passersby to help demand justice and land from the government. The argue that there is plenty of land in Chiapas, and it is the government's responsibility to provide them with what it can. They hand out flyers describing the incident that forced them to flee their houses, and asking people for support of any kind, whether it be a tent or some food.
I finally returned home after promising to bring them some soup the next night, my mind that much fuller and my heart that much heavier. The two events of the night, the debate film and my talk with the displaced indigenous, seemed very much connected. In the former case, I see a failed development project initiated by the government that essentially tried to passively push 11 indigenous communities into a western economic system by masking it in disaster relief and alleviation of poverty. In the latter case, I see a forceful displacement of 1 community covertly supported by the government trying to criminalize the indigenous fight a human right to land.
The plight of the people whose interviews I saw in the film and whose voices and faces I heard in the plaza stayed with me all night. It was a sleepless night, and all the images and thoughts of development and economy and conflict and poverty mulled over and over in my head. I tried to count sheep jumping over a fence, but the pasture they jumped to was either flooded and destroyed or their owners were beaten and displaced. I thought often of the people sleeping in the plaza underneath a tarp, trying to find cover from the cold and rain of these summer months in the highlands of Chiapas. I finally fell asleep as I saw the fist light of dawn creep underneath my curtain, which falls two inches too short to cover the entire window…
I open the floor to discussion. I would love to hear new perspectives, different points of view, a way to move forward… How do you solve ‘poverty’ in Chiapas in 14,000 communities of less than 100 people? How does a country incorporate an indigenous way of life, a different way of life, into its borders? Does indicating ‘poverty’ by measurements of salary per head automatically place these indigenous in a losing battle for their existence? Who has the right to own the land of the Earth? Is it the responsibility of those who have to share with those who have not? If not, what responsibility has a government to provide for its country's inhabitants?
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