The history of ecological marginalization in Chiapas

The revolutionary Zapatista government lasted only four days in San Cristobal and other urban centers of the Central Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. In the following year, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN), or Zapatista National Liberation Army, would bring the plight of Chiapan peasants to the attention of other Mexicans, foreign investors, and the international community, challenging anew the legitimacy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the long-standing ruling party of Mexico. By exploring the ecological history shared by the people and natural environment of Chiapas in this century, a better understanding emerges of some of the tangible, proximate sources for the grievances of the EZLN, the group responsible for organizing many of the ecologically marginalized poor of Chiapas into open rebellion. The changing supply and quality of soil and forest resources can be traced through social periods defined by the general principles under which state elites managed resources and manipulated property rights. From the Spanish Conquest until the Mexican Revolution, an almost feudal social order in Chiapas allowed state elites to capture resources as necessary. The revolution sought to stop this practice by redistributing land resources to peasants, but powerful elites in Chiapas still manipulated the resource regime as the competition for resources grew fierce and their supply dwindled. The Mexican debt crisis of the early 1980s prompted an economic restructuring which allowed elites to be more aggressive, resulting in a large population of ecologically marginalized poor, some of whom organized the Zapatista Rebellion in 1994. Because marginalization results from an interaction between ecological trends and social institutions, several components of the environmental history of Chiapas must be followed - deforestation, soil erosion and nutrient loss, human population growth, and the manipulation of the resource regime by powerful elites. Much of this stody takes place at the periphery of the Lacandon Rainforest, which at the turn of the century extended from the Eastern Lowlands up to the foothills - an area called Las Canadas - of the Central Highlands. Throughout the 12th century, the frontier of the forest receded from the foothills as logging concessions, ranching operations, and farming communities grew.