NEWS & REPORTS

Educator-activist Gustavo Esteva and Bishop-emeritus Samuel Ruiz to speak in San Miguel

by Peggy and Mike Rivage-Seul

So who really won the presidential elections? Was it Calderón or López Obrador? No matter what you think, you're probably wrong. There is no winner. That, at least, is the likely answer of two leading Mexican intellectuals who will be speaking in San Miguel next week. Some may think that the real winner was subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas' "Other Campaign." He timely warned against the political classes and their media circus. It you look for democracy, you need to stop seeing to the "powers that be", increasingly powerless. Democracy cannot be but where the people are. And there, at the grassroots, they have been creating a real alternative. Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia, "Don Samuel," of Querétaro, and Gustavo Esteva, the "de-professionalized intellectual" of Oaxaca,  will bring that message to the Third Annual Conference of  San Miguel's Center for Global Justice.

This year's theme is "Another World is Necessary." Esteva will give the keynote address at the Recreo at 5:00 p.m. on July 22nd.  His topic will be "The Other Campaign and the Left: Reclaiming an Alternative." The "Other Campaign" was launched by the Zapatistas as an alternative to the campaigns for the presidential election currently disputed in Mexico.  His remarks will address the theoretical and practical challenges raised by what he describes as a complex, but viable alternative to globalization. In doing so, he will challenge most of the dominant paradigms of both right and left, explaining his alternative within the context of recent political trends in Latin America. Esteva will also examine the current political juncture in Oaxaca and Mexico, particularly the popular mobilization to throw out the governor of Oaxaca and to challenge the idea that election procedures in Mexico have been or will be "cleaned up."

Bishop Ruiz will speak at 5:30 on Sunday, July 23, also at the Recreo. His topic will be "The Contribution of the Indigenous to Peacemaking."  All conference presentations will be simultaneously translated by professional interpreters from the international organization BABEL, who are donating their services to the conference.

                Both Ruiz and Esteva must be taken very seriously. Gustavo Esteva is the author of more than 500 essays and three dozen books, including, Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Culture, with Mahdhu Prakash. He founded two vibrant educational programs, The Center for Intercultural Dialogues and Exchanges (CEDI), and Universidad de la Tierra (Uniterra) in Oaxaca, where he continues to work, along with indigenous groups and NGO's, including several organizations linked to the Zapatistas.  Esteva has served as an advisor of the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. He exercised major influence in the drafting of the San Andreas Accords, which established an uneasy "peace" between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government.

                Don Samuel Ruiz Garcia, at the age of 85, continues to provide spiritual and social leadership to millions of oppressed people throughout Latin America.  He served as Bishop of the Diocese of  San Cristobal de las Casas for four decades, from the period of the Guatemalan civil war, which forced many refugees to flee the violence of death squads into Chiapas. Afterwards, Ruiz served as mediator between the Zapatista rebels and the Mexican government.  His tireless work on behalf of the indigenous people of Chiapas angered both the Mexican government and the Roman Curia. In 1993, a year before the Zapatista uprising, the Vatican asked Bishop Ruiz to resign. It withdrew the request however when thousands of indigenous took to the streets in protest. Bishop Ruiz's bravery and tenacity in fighting for the rights of the indigenous poor led to his nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, 1995, and 1996. In addition, he has received the Martin Ennals Award, the Niawano Peace Prize, and the Simon Bolivar Prize from UNESCO.  Since his mandatory retirement at the age of 79, Don Samuel has traveled the world in defense of indigenous populations.

Gustavo Esteva's work clarifies key points shared by the two speakers. Like Marcos, Esteva has given up on conventional politics and on "formal democracies" such as the one here in Mexico. The planet's "grassroots" have given up too, he says - especially after their votes have been nullified in case after case, not only in Mexico, where fraudulent elections are an art form, but even in places like Costa Rica - and (twice recently) in the United  States. Such developments have led the earth's new "social subjects" to conclude that they must ignore politicians and look to themselves and their immediate communities for solutions to the problems politicians falsely promise to fix.

                According to Esteva, to believe otherwise is to succumb to the "development drug." Face it, he says, "development" is a dope.  The idea that the world's "social majorities" can attain levels of consumption anywhere approaching those of the United States and Europe is nothing more than an opium den illusion.  It is contradicted by the results of four development decades when the "Two-Thirds World" has fallen further and further behind the "developed world" in terms of income and purchasing power.  And all the while they've been promised a bigger share of the pie. It's just never going to happen.

                Besides that, the very concept of development is contradicted by the example of the so-called First World.  Crime, addictions of all types, environmental and cultural destruction reveal a deep despair even in the most "advanced" countries.  "What is called happiness there," Esteva says , " is merely episodic at best.  It's like the momentary highs of drug addicts.  So any alleged right to development is like claiming a right to daily doses of heroin or cocaine.  Our drug addiction is destroying us all."

                To counter the illusions of development, Esteva advocates what he calls "grassroots post-modernism." It refers to the rejection of the modern world and its two-hundred year old superstitions about development. It is "grassroots" to distinguish it from the academic post-modernism of the well-to-do "social minorities."  Academic post-modernism has questioned the scientific worldview along with its certainty and belief in technology, objectivity, rationality and domination by a single culture of "progress." Meanwhile, however, the academics in question have accepted the globalism behind the ideologies of scarcity, market self-regulation, liberal democracy, rugged individualism, the universality of human rights and the need to "think globally."

                Esteva likes to illustrate all of this with examples drawn from his own experiences in Mexico. During the presidency of Luis Echeverria Alvarez (1970-76), Esteva worked at the top of the Mexican government to organize development programs for peasants.  These programs helped distribute basic subsidized staples through 18,000 shops run by people in the villages. "They were beautiful programs," says Esteva, "but we knew from evaluations that these programs were damaging to the people. The logic of the government and the logic of the people never coincided. So I quit." From the time that Esteva made his exit from the upper echelons of Mexican government, he has committed his life to creating "autonomous niches" in civil society.

In fact, Esteva has opposed Mexico's governments for the past thirty years. For example, at the end of 1994, the first year of the Zapatista uprising, the people of Chiapas organized against a fraudulent election for their governor. They set up a tribunal against the state. Esteva was the judge, along with a popular jury to evaluate the elections. Not surprisingly, they pronounced a sentence against the government. The trial had no legal standing, but the governor only lasted eight days in office. Such is the strength of autonomous niches in society.

                Respect for indigenous community life is central to Esteva's philosophy of development. It is naive to "think globally and act locally," he says.  No one has the capacity to "think" from within every person and culture. No person can ever "know" the Earth, except by reducing it statistically.  Men and women can only think wisely about what they actually know well: a minuscule part of the Earth. The most they can do is think locally and act locally within their own spheres. All the while they must be humbly aware of the existence of many other spheres -- each with its own frame of reference, values and ways of operating.  Moreover, global emphasis is disempowering.  It impotently awaits the emergence planet-wide movements and solutions before acting.  It thus plays directly into the hands of the elite who alone possess the infrastructure and finances for grandiose projects.  In contrast, the grassroots think small and value the beautiful in the little.

                Esteva credits the Zapatistas for his own insight into the limits of national government. Early in 1996, in the Fourth Declaration of Selva Lacandona, the Zapatistas suggested to create small dialogue committees to discuss what they could do without political parties and without government. After several months of dialogue, many committees jokingly concluded: "There is only one thing we really need someone in Mexico to make a decision about , that we cannot decide on a local level: how to designate Mexican ambassadors in other countries. All the rest we can do ourselves."

                For Esteva, formal democracy has come to an end.  Its modern notion continues the age-old practice of surrendering decision-making power to a self-serving elite.  This relegates the non-elite to the role of voting occasionally for those who are presumed to "know better" and who therefore are allowed to make decisions regardless of the wishes of their would-be constituents.  Both the nation-state and formal democracy are basically structures of domination and control. We thus need an alternative political horizon, in reorganizing the society from the bottom-up.

                For both Gustavo Esteva and Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the Zapatistas have opened a door of hope: "Hope is the very essence of popular movements; people mobilize only when they have hope. Hope is not a conviction that something will happen.  Hope is the conviction that something makes sense whatever happens."