Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T15:23:00.670Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the Zapatista Juntas de Buen Gobierno

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2011

Shannon Speed
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
Mark Goodale
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia
Sally Engle Merry
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access

Summary

What was lost in the promulgation of human rights theory in the 1990s was the connection between rights and subjects who can exercise those rights.

Chandler 2002: 114

Now, we have to exercise our rights ourselves. We don't need anyone's permission, especially that of politicians … Forming our own autonomous municipalities, that's what we are doing in practice and we don't ask anyone's permission.

Comandanta Esther August 2003

FROM GUNS TO SHELLS

Introduction

On an August day in 2003, I huddled beneath a plastic tarp through a typical afternoon downpour in the highlands community of Oventic, Chiapas. While the weather was not unusual, the day itself was far from typical: I stood, accompanied by several thousand others – indigenous people from throughout the state and activists from throughout the country and the world – listening to the speeches of Zapatista leaders. They spoke of the birth of the five “caracoles” (literally, shells, but indicating meeting points) and the formation of the five Juntas de Buen Gobierno (“Good Governance Councils,” herein referred to as Juntas) to be seated in them. It was a major turning point for Zapatismo, signaling a transition from military to civilian governance and the formal end to their petition for state recognition of their collective right to autonomy. In the words of Rosalinda, “The government didn't pay attention to us. Que se queden con sus pendejadas. We know how to make our municipalities work.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Practice of Human Rights
Tracking Law between the Global and the Local
, pp. 163 - 192
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Assies, Willem, Haar, Gemma, and Hoekema, Andre, eds. 2000. The Challenge of Diversity: Indigenous Peoples and Reform of the State in Latin America. Thela Thesis, Amsterdam.Google Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Holquist, Michael. Trans. Caryl Emerson, and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bengoa, José, ed. 2000. La Emergencia Indígena en América Latina. Santiago, Chile: Fondo de Cultura Económica.Google Scholar
Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Wendy, and Halley, Janet. 2002. Left Legalism/Left Critique. Durham: Duke.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brysk, Alison, ed. 2002. Globalization and Human Rights. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Burchell, Graham. 1996. “Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self.” In Barry, A.Osborne, T., and Rose, N., eds. Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism, and Rationalities of Governance. London: UCL Press.Google Scholar
Carozza, Paolo. 2003. “From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights.” Human Rights Quarterly 25(2): 281–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chandler, David. 2002. From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar
Chandler, David. Constitución Política de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos. 2000. Mexico, DF: Instituto Federal Electoral.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. London: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. “Postscript on Societies of Control.” In Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations 1972–1990. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Donnelly, Jack. 2003. 1989. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. Cornell: Ithaca.Google Scholar
Dugan, Lisa. 2003. The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Esther, Commandanta. 2002. Speech before the Congress of the Union. Available on-line at fzlnnet.org. Accessed May 25, 2005.
Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Tavistock.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Two Lectures.” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Frankovits, Andre. 2001. “Why a Human Rights Approach to Development?” Paper submitted to the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into Swedish Policy for Global Development, April.
Gill, Lesley. 2000. Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life, and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Gledhill, John. 1997. “Liberalism, Socio-economic Rights and the Politics of Identity: From Moral Economy to Indigenous Rights.” In Wilson, R., ed., Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press, pp. 70–110.
González Hernández, Miguel, and Elvira Quintanar. 1999. “La reconstrucción de la region autónomo norte y el ejercicion del gobierno municipal.” In Burguete, Cal y Mayor, ed., México: Experiencias de Autonomía Indígena. Copenhagen: IWGIA, pp. 210–233.Google Scholar
Guehenno, Jean Marie. 1995. The End of the Nation State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gourevitch, Alex. 2004. “Are Human Rights Liberal?” Available on-line at www.columbia.edu/cu/polisci/pdf-files/gourevitch.pdf. Accessed February 6, 2007.
Gustafson, Bret. 2002. “Paradoxes of Liberal Indigenism: Indigenous Movements, State Processes, and Intercultural Reform in Bolivia.” In Maybury-Lewis, David, ed., The Politics of Ethnicity: Indigenous Peoples in Latin American States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hale, Charles A. 1990. The Transmission of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Hale, Charles A. 2000. “The Civil Law Tradition and Constitutionalism in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Legacy of Emilio Rabasa.” Law and History Review 18(2): 257–280.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Charles R. 2002. “Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala.” Journal of Latin American Studies 34(3): 485–524.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hardt, Michael. 1998. “The Withering of Civil Society.” In Kaufman, Eleanor and Heller, Kevin Jon, eds. Deleuze and Guattari: New Mapping in Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 23–39.
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hernández, Rosalva Aída. 2001. Histories and Stories from Chiapas: Border Identities in Southern Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Hernández Navarro, Luis, and Herrera, Ramón Vera. 1998. Los Acuerdos de San Andrés. Mexico: ERA.Google Scholar
Ignatieff, Michael. 2001. Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Jackson, Jean E., and Warren, Kay B.. 2006. “Indigenous Movements in Latin America, 1992–2004: Controversies, Ironies, New Directions.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 549–573.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Gregor, Mary J., ed. (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kymlicka, W. 1997 Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Locke, John. 1960. Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
López Monjardín, Adriana, and Dulce María Rebolledo Millán. 1998. “La Resistencia en los Municipios Zapatistas, in Poder Local, Derechos Indígenasy Municipios.” In Rosario, Cobo, Monjardin, Adriana López, and Sarmiento, Sergio, eds. Cuadernos Agrarios 16, Mexico. pp. 63–74.
Marcos, Subcomandante. 2001. “Communiqué from the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee – General Command of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Mexico. April 29, 2001. Available on-line at www.ezln.org.mx/ Accessed February 6, 2007.
Menon, Nivedita. 2004. Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. Illinois: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 1992. “Anthropology, Law, and Transnational Processes.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 357–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Montag, Warren. 2000. Bodies, Masses, Power. London: Verso Press.Google Scholar
Negri, Antonio. 1990. The Savage Anomaly. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Postero, Nancy. 2001. “Constructing Indigenous Citizens in Multicultural Bolivia.” Paper in Possession of author.
Postero, Nancy. 2004. “Indigenous Responses to Neoliberalism: A Look at the Bolivin Uprising of 2003.” In Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), co-edited special issue, Speed, Shannon and Sierra, Teresa, eds. 28(1).Google Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ramírez Cuevas, Jesús. 2002. “The Mexican State on Trial.” Masiosare, La Jornada May 7, 2002.Google Scholar
Montes, Regino, Adelfo. 2001. “Negación Constitucional.” La Jornada, April 28.Google Scholar
Rose, Nikolas. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture. 1999. Trans. Lynn Stephen, and Jonathan Fox. Cultural Survival Quarterly 12(1): 33–38.
Sierra, María Teresa. 2001. “Human Rights, Gender and Ethnicity: Legal Claims and Anthropological Challenges in Mexico.” POLAR 23(2): 76–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Speed, Shannon. 2004. “Dangerous Discourses: Human Rights and Multiculturalism in Mexico.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), co-edited special issue, Speed, Shannon and Sierra, Teresa, eds. 28(1).Google Scholar
Speed, Shannon, and Reyes, Alvaro. 2002. “In Our Own Defense: Globalization, Rights and Resistance in Chiapas.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR) 25(1).Google Scholar
Speed, Shannon, and Reyes, Alvaro. 2005. “Rights, Resistance, and Radical Alternatives: The Red de Defensores Comunitarios and Zapatismo in Chiapas.” Humboldt Journal of Social Justice 29(1): 47–82.Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Gutmann, Amy, ed. Charles Taylor. Multiculturalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 25–73.Google Scholar
Tedlock, Dennis, and Mannheim, Bruce, eds. 1995. The Dialogic Emergence of Culture. Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Terrazas, Carlos R. 1996. Los Derechos Humanos en las Constituciones Políticas de México. Mexico: Miguel Angel Porrua Editorial.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Ralph. 2001. “The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive KindCurrent Anthropology 42(1).Google Scholar
Cott, Donna Lee. 2000. The Friendly Liquidation of the Past: The Politics of Diversity in Latin America. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press.Google Scholar
Warren, Kay B. 1998. Indigenous Movements and their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Warren, Kay B., and Jackson, Jean E., eds. 2001. Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Richard, ed. 1997. Human Rights, Culture and Context: Anthropological Perspectives. London: Pluto Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×