In October 2016, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez was nominated as the candidate of the National Indigenous Council (abbreviated CNI in Spanish) and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) for the upcoming 2018 presidential election in Mexico, marking the first time that the CNI has entered the political arena.
The EZLN was founded on November 17, 1983, as a guerilla rebel group formed by peasants and indigenous people. In 1994, it received worldwide media coverage when indigenous peasants occupied four towns in the state of Chiapas in an uprising named after Emiliano Zapata, a leading figure of the Mexican Revolution. This 1994 uprising sought better education, wages, infrastructure, land reform, and cultural recognition of indigenous people, and it coincided with the inauguration of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In the wake of the uprising, then-president Carlos Salinas—and subsequently Ernesto Zedillo in 1995—entered into peace negotiations with the rebels.
The San Andrés Accords were signed in February 1996, which were a series of agreements between the EZLN and the Mexican government that would have initiated a program of land reform, indigenous autonomy, and cultural rights for the approximately 25 million indigenous people living in Mexico (21.5 percent of the total population). The accords, however, were disregarded by the Mexican government under President Ernesto Zedillo; in 1997, paramilitary groups proceeded to attack Zapatista communities in an attempt to weaken their position. The EZLN decided to walk away from the Mexican political process and moved away from militant action toward autonomous administration of their various municipalities.
In October 1996, the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) was formed, as a collective space for all indigenous peoples in Mexico.
‘Marichuy,’ as Patricio is commonly known, is a Nahua healer from southern Jalisco and advocates for indigenous representation. She is the first indigenous woman to seek candidacy in a Mexican presidential election. However, Patricio, the CNI, and the EZLN all claim that they are not interested in winning the 2018 election, or even in receiving votes. Instead, they seek to undermine Mexico’s dominant economic, political, and social orders via a campaign built from indigenous governance and communalism. The EZLN and CNI’s pillars of governance are designed to implement a new form of grassroots organizing to unite indigenous and impoverished peoples behind a movement against exploitation of people and resource extraction. Mexico, facing a reality of stark inequalities, should address the outcry of its indigenous people with comprehensive reform as a key part of the process of achieving and sustaining socioeconomic prosperity.
Patricio’s nomination marks the organization’s next step in its incursion into the Mexican political scene. The EZLN and CNI’s decision to nominate her comes 20 years after the signing of the San Andrés Accords. Following years of conflict over indigenous representation and cultural rights, the accords were disregarded by the government and did little to address the needs of the 78.4 percent of indigenous people who live in poverty with difficulty accessing formal education, employment, or better workplace standards. Poverty among indigenous people persists with a wealth gap between native and non-native peoples at 20–25 percent; indigenous people have less access to basic services such as housing, water, sanitation, and healthcare; and 50 percent of indigenous people live under the lowest socioeconomic conditions.
During the decades that they have operated in opposition to the Mexican political process, the EZLN and CNI have developed connections with civil society that may allow them to use the 2018 presidential campaign as an opportunity to “govern themselves.” Faced with continued subjugation to the larger political, economic, and social forces in the country, these indigenous organizations reject Mexican democracy as rule by the “mestizo elite” and seek to redefine political candidacy with the endorsement of Patricio, rather than pursue electoral victory. In a communiqué, Subcomandante Galeano (previously known as Subcomandante Marcos, the former leader of the 1994 Zapatista uprising) states, “If the mere possibility of an indigenous woman existing as a citizen (causes) the earth to tremble to its core, what will happen if… her word traveled through all of Mexico?” The CNI’s openly anticapitalist platform rejects permits to foreign companies, cracks down on illegal logging or mining, and champions indigenous self-determination in an attempt to deconstruct modern Mexican politics.
The EZLN seeks a new form of participatory democracy that “governs by obeying” the will of the community and wishes to present the political system that they have cultivated for twenty years in their autonomous regions in Chiapas secluded from the rest of Mexico. Regardless of the results of the upcoming election, the outcry for indigenous representation is certain to resonate with voters who wish to move away from Mexico’s institutionalized politics. In order to reconcile Mexican politics with inequalities throughout Mexican society, public policy must address the pressures placed upon economically disadvantaged groups such as indigenous communities.
The central point of Patricio’s nomination is that indigenous causes in Mexico are very much alive and continue to challenge the status quo. The supporters of these causes are now beginning to use an increasingly open electoral process in order to guide the discourse in a direction they believe is more favorable to their goals.
Jolen Martinez (’20) is an intern at the Baker Institute Mexico Center and a sophomore at Rice University majoring in political science, anthropology and history.