By Tom Hayden

Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo recently told a World Trade Organization meeting in Davos, Switzerland, that modern progress is threatened by "global-phobics" like those who battled in Seattle's streets against the WTO.
At the time, I was visiting mountain and jungle communities in Chiapas where poverty, discrimination and eco-destruction are main causes of the indigenous Zapatista resistance. It is certainly a sense of globalism, not "global-phobia", that leads so many Americans and Europeans to visit Chiapas as eyewitnesses or to bring humanitarian assistance. Yet, the same Mexican government that curses "global-phobia" engages in a kind of xenophobia by expelling scores of these human rights travelers.

Those interested in reforming international trade processes to incorporate human rights, environmentalism, and labor agendas should pay close attention to Chiapas as a focal point of the global debate. After all, the Zapatista uprising of January 1, 1994 was timed to coincide with the launching of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was denounced as a "death sentence" for the indigenous people of Chiapas.

Chiapas is the poorest state in Mexico. Half the population is malnourished by minimal international health standards. In the highland, jungle and canyon communities where resistance is strongest, two-thirds of the families have no electricity, drinking water, or drainage, and almost 70 percent make less than the Mexican minimum wage. (Womack, 1999, p.11) Yet Chiapas is a resource colony for Mexico and the outside world, for mahogany, cedar, beef, corn, coffee, and has one of Mexico's richest oil reserve in the very heart of the Lacandon Jungle (James Nations, Cultural Survival Quarterly, Spring 1994, p.31).

The Lacandon Jungle also represents 50 percent of North America's remaining tropical rainforest (Inter Press Services, May 4, 1999). Long under siege by logging, cattle operations and increasing oil exploration, it is now impacted by thousands of Mexican troops in jungle army bases. Alongside the occupying forces are 1,500 types of trees, 4,000 species of plants, 345 species of birds, 800 species of diurnal butterflies, and 112 species of mammals including jaguars and ocelots. Forty-four percent of Mexico's butterfly species and 33 percent of its birds are native to the Lacandon.

In 1977, the Mexican government established the UNESCO-approved Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, but those protections will not prevent road-building and oil development. The Lacandon indigenous people are not engaged in the present conflict but are threatened with extermination nonetheless. These Lacandon Mayans, who are descendants of the Classic Maya (205-905 AD) number only in the hundreds today.

The Lacandonans blame the Mexican army for despoiling the jungle, hunting and selling lizard and monkey skins, and causing prostitution and alcoholism. Last year, Margarito Chancayum, spokesperson for the surviving Lacandon Mayans, called for "withdrawal of the army bases and police posts because they are the main destroyers of local ecology, killing animals, smuggling timber, beating and jailing locals, and abusing authority".

Community leaders in San Cristobal with whom I spoke with complained of the Monsanto corporation selling genetically-altered seed through state authorities, and of NAFTA- driven corn imports driving Mayan and Mexican farmers out of an economy and culture based on corn. Seventy percent of Chiapas' corn now is imported.

Also in Chiapas, the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) and the University of Georgia, along with multinational pharmaceutical firms, are engaged in projects to research and patent indigenous plants. "Sacking the riches of the herbal garden", declared the headline in La Jornada (Feb. 4, 2000).

"The plight of the Lacandones is not only for Mexico's conscience to grapple with. They are on the conscience of all of us, for their extinction will also seal the fate of the largest virgin rain forest north of the Amazon. The effect of this destruction on our climate, and on the ecological stability of our hemisphere, is incalculable", wrote Victor Perera and Robert Bruce in their classic The Last Lords Of Palenque (University of California Press, 1982, p. 310).

I can think of nothing sorrier than the indigenous Mayans of Chiapas being undermined by U.S.-supported troops protecting U.S.-designed corn imports intended to jolt an ancient culture onto the modern immigrant road to Mexico City and Los Angeles. But that will be "progress" NAFTA-style until more effective resistance grows around the world.

The denunciation of environmentalists and other "global-phobics" by President Zedillo must be understood in this context of corporate and military globalization and their impacts on the Mayans of Chiapas. The sarcastic reply of the Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos to Zedillo was to invite "all global-phobics and Zedillo-phobics, even phobic-phobics" to join the struggle to preserve Mayan heritage (EZLN communique', La Jornada, Feb. 6, 2000).

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