1 Indigenous Autonomy as a Strategy for Social Inclusion: Some Paradoxes of Social Policy in Contemporary Mexico1

January 2004 marked the tenth anniversary of the uprising of the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Proclaiming the need for a global campaign against neoliberalism, and rapidly repudiating the charge that its intellectual authors were foreigners, the EZLN rebellion brought together an already organized indigenous grassroots leadership and leftist insurgents whose outlooks were transformed by their experience in the Selva Lacandona. The global impact of the movement was undeniable. For a new generation of anti-globalization activists in Europe and North America, the new Zapatismo suggested “a new way to do politics”. In the words of one European solidarity activist, it “created a new language that knows how to say this world is shit, but knows how to say it with humor, joy, candor, without authoritarianism ” (Hernández, 2004: 4).2 Its national impact was also significant, not only because the rebellion reanimated a broader range of movements opposed to the neoliberal turn of the Mexican State, but also because a meeting of the Commission on the Application of the Norms of the International Labour Organization, meeting in June 1995, declared Mexico to be violating international standards with regard to the rights of rural workers and indigenous peoples and called for a rectification of the country’s indigenous policy (ibid.: 2). Nevertheless, ten years on the continuing significance of the Zapatista movement needs to be debated. The low-intensity war that followed the failure of Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s initial efforts to annihilate the EZLN made a clear contribution to a sapping of its grassroots support in Chiapas outside the inner core of the insurgen