“Drug trafficking is just another capitalist corporation”.

Interview with Gilberto López y Rivas, anthropologist, essayist y Mexican politician

This Mexican researcher and politician reflects on the consequences of the war against drug trafficking, self defense and the Zapata legacy. Gilberto López y Rivas, anthropologist, essayist and Mexican politician is a full professor of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Morelos. He has been a federal congressman, advisor of the Nicaraguan government on ethnic issues and the Zapatista National Liberation Front (EZLN) during a dialogue in San Andrés.

He was also a member of the Intermediation Commission for the dialogue between the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) and the Mexican government. He collaborates with La Jornada since 1994.

Diagonal had the opportunity to talk with him during his visit to the World Social Forum that took place in Madrid between the28th and 30th of March.

During the talk he delivered in the Forum in 1994 he made a historical review of the Zapata movement and analyzed his health 20 years ago. This researcher also dealt in the process of re-colonization occurring in many countries of Latin America as is the case of Mexico.

In a country such as Mexico there is an integral action that not only affects the economic sphere but also the political, ideological, communication and constitutional and legislative framework through calls for structural reforms made to the Constitution. Within these strategies of integral occupation he lists drug trafficking as one of them. What is exactly the role of drug traffic on the re-colonization of Mexico?
U.S. strategies have called asymmetric wars to those that are not present in similar powers but through a diffuse enemy. The role played before against communism, is now occupied by two ghosts, on the one hand drug traffic and on the other terrorism. The occupation of countries requires planning a war, obviously with local actors. In the case of the Felipe Calderón government (2006-2012) that initially began as an alleged “war against drug trafficking” and in which the U.S

immediately comes to its aid. In this case drug traffic is not only a business, another capitalist corporation that has a political overtone of installing terror through violence that serves the pretext of militarizing the country, criminalizing all social struggles. It justifies the deployment of a repressive aparatus that serves to control the population, control workers and control territories for the penetration of capital.

When referring to reforms of the Constitution and laws, which have deeply affected Mexico?
The first of these reforms was article 27 of our Constitution that opened up communal lands and corporate bodies to the market.

But through this counter reform a new mining law was passed that left land in the hands of large mining companies, mostly Canadian for the extraction of precious metals. It also issued the law of water, increasingly privatized and controlled by corporations such as Coca Cola and recently, the “cherry on top”, that is the energy reform approved last December. For the United States government an open conflict in Venezuela that supplies between 8% and 12% of oil to the U.S. was a priority to force a break with the state monopoly, PEMEX. With this reform the entire oil reserve of oil and electricity was privatized making it an extension of the strategic oil reserve of the U.S.

Mexico has also suffered reforms in the educational sector that has led to convulsed periods of teacher’s strikes and all kinds of protests of the education sector.

Education was one of the spheres attacked first with a reform that pursues several purposes. In the first place it eliminates the primary and secondary schools of humanities, of history and all forms of civic duty, everything that implies thinking, questioning or remembering to become a species with historical amnesia. Also it is a reform to break with the rights acquired by a much politicized teaching staff. This will be checked permanently by a series of standardized tests done by private initiative. Professors are not evaluated by their peers but by an external evaluation based on parameters such as efficiency or quality derived from a capitalist world. And lastly, it limits the role of teachers in the social education of children and youths. It does not want critical people who at any given moment can take to the streets and rebel as the Zapatistas did.

In this context is the raid of public life; other movements that are strongly attacked are the processes of Native Autonomy – such as Communal Police Autonomy in Guerrero?
The Regional Coordinator of Communal Authorities (CRAC) and its communal police in the state of Guerrero is one of the most important processes of autonomy. The communities took over this autonomic practice to offer security that state and federal authorities do not offer. This police receives no pay and the only gratification is social recognition. Communal police have disrupted the interests established between the forces of security and drug trafficking and presupposes a brake for the business that represents public security; for those controlled and those who receive pay from the public treasury and who organize criminal gangs. For this reason the communal police have been virulently attacked by the federal and state governments and by the Army that has several soldiers currently in jail.

Also, it should be remembered that CRAC has opposed mining concessions that has earned it many enemies.

The outbreak of the Zapatista rebellion and the process of dialogue opened then with the advisory participation of the EZLN, what did that mean for the social movements and native processes in Mexico?
The process of discussion and debate opened in 94 was not new to the indigenous people but what was unusual to the rest of society was a form of university for many subjects that later were key issues for the Zapatista movement. One was Autonomy but not an autonomy that entailed administrative arrangements or distribution of posts but a process of awareness, a process of affirmation of ethnic identities, of anti capitalist resistance based on an old tradition of self government of the indigenous people, of their own justice and their own forms of collective organization…

The success of the Zapatista Little School in August had the participation of 1700 persons who came from all parts of the world.

What has this meant?
The Little school called “Freedom according to the Zapatistas” served to demonstrate several things. On the one hand, those who attended verified that 80% were voters; voting is the guardian, the heart of the people. We were accompanied night and day by youths. We learned that the Zapata movement has made a generational turnover; that it is an organization that is alive despite the voices who often announce its end in newspapers such as El Pais. And, on the other hand we learned that racist style opinions that claim the indigenous people are mere puppets, guinea pigs, as Vargas Llosa claims but are those who control their own processes. The Little School started as A Good Government Junta as an attempt to inform the world of the truth.

20 years after the outbreak of the rebellion what has the Zapatista Army (EZ) demonstrated?

The EZLN continues to be an intact force with an ethical coherence manifest, for example, in the system of the political military cadres from government institutions, the opposite of what any party organization does that pursues a road to bureaucratization and perpetuity of its leaders. The EZ is still a critical conscience, always present in the life of the country.

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