the value of nothing - slow politics

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Although it wasn’t being reported in the mainstream English- language media,14 the Mexican press had been writing about the horrifi c health conditions at Granjas Carroll, a subsidiary of the U.S.- based Smithfi eld meat- packing company, for some time.15 At the company’s operation in La Gloria, in Veracruz, they kill nearly one million pigs a year.16 It was here, on March 30, 2009,17 nearly a month before the outbreak hit Mexico City, that health offi cials re-corded the fi rst swine fl u case. The virus that is currently in Mexico and the southern United States is a novel H1N1 virus, one that jumped species from pigs to humans.

Smithfi eld insists that it repeatedly tested its pigs and found them to be free of the virus, though The New York Times reports skepti-cism among some veterinary experts about whether these tests were meaningful. It’s still an empirical question as to whether Smithfi eld factory played a role in the epidemic, and some federal offi cials have said the disease emerged in Asia, not Mexico. Still, some sort of con-fi ned animal operation remains a highly likely point of origin of the disease.18

Meanwhile, anyone in public space in Mexico had to walk around in blue masks. The most dangerous part of us was our mouths.19 My destination, however, was not Mexico City but the country’s south-ernmost state, Chiapas. There, I saw altogether different masks when I met with the Zapatistas, the insurgent group that declared war on the Mexican government in 1994. Here’s how their proclamation formalized the state of affairs in their southernmost corner of Mex-ico over the past fi ve hundred years:

We are a product of 500 years of struggle: fi rst against slavery, then during the War of In de pen dence against Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism, then to promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire from our soil,

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and later the dictatorship of Porfi rio Díaz denied us the just application of the Reform laws and the people re-belled and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just like us. We have been denied the most elemen-tal preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads, no land, no work, no health care, no food nor edu-cation. Nor are we able to freely and demo cratically elect our po liti cal representatives, nor is there in de pen dence from foreigners, nor is there peace or justice for ourselves and our children.20

In the fi fteen years since that declaration, they’ve won land— by some estimates over half a million acres21— built primary health care facilities and made schools for the tens of thousands of people in their “liberated” territory. Their greatest victory, however, has been to build what has been hailed as a highly successful experiment in democracy and justice. I came to Chiapas to talk to the representa-tives of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (the Good Government Coun-cils, or Juntas for short). And when I met them, they were wearing their signature accessory— ski masks.

Beyond the rather obvious reason that they don’t want to be hunted by the Mexican government— a fate that seems increasingly likely with the recent expansion of military forces in Chiapas— there’s an-other explanation for the masks. The foundation of Zapatista de-mocracy is the village, which is usually anywhere between fi fteen and one hundred families. They hold regular assembly meetings that everyone is allowed to attend, and at which everyone is encour-aged to speak. At the meeting, the village appoints two or sometimes four responsables, men and women equally represented, who act both as local authorities and as representatives to a regional municipality


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(of about fi fteen to one hundred villages). Together these munici-palities select a pool of members from all villages to be on their Junta de Buen Gobierno— there are fi ve in total, covering all Zapatista- controlled territory. Once selected, the members leave their villages to serve at the Junta’s headquarters for one week out of every six, for a term of three years. After that, they’ll never serve again. With con-stant rotation, faces change all the time, but the Junta’s function re-mains the same.

The room of balaclavas is a sign that indigenous people are en-gaging in democracy without its most infectious symptom— elections. Rather than sitting in individual air- conditioned offi ces in front of large portraits of themselves, these demo cratic offi cials serve their communities anonymously, with their faces hidden by the masks of the offi ce they have assumed. The ski masks also serve another po-liti cal purpose. They are a reminder that when you visit the Junta, you aren’t there to see a par tic u lar person— you came to see the people. The masks reveal that the most important face in the room is yours. There’s still accountability, though— the Juntas sometimes publish denuncias, open letters denouncing a human- rights violation, as they did recently when the Mexican army, allegedly looking for marijuana fi elds while conducting “the war on drugs,” destroyed the main collective cornfi eld in the town of La Garrucha. In these cases, the Junta members will sign their real names, but when they’re work-ing, the mask is a mantle of offi ce.

At the entrance to the Zapatista territories, there’s always a sign that says “Está usted en territorio rebelde zapatista. Aquí manda el pueblo y el gobierno obedece.” (You are in rebel Zapatista territory. Here the people lead and the government obeys.) This is in marked contrast to the famously corrupt Mexican ruling party, the PRI (Insti-tutional Revolutionary Party, which, despite its name, is structurally more aligned with the U.S. Republican Party, or the British Conser-vatives). As one Junta member explained, “In Mexico, the federal



government tries to buy your vote, the PRI gives out soda to buy your conscience. Here, we don’t get paid— we do it because we have been chosen.” They were at pains to stress that they weren’t there by choice. When they are at the Junta’s headquarters, they need to fi nd someone to take care of their fi elds or their children, and yet, with-out exception, they said it was important to do.

Conducting an interview with a Junta is unusual. Names, ages, occupations and personal opinions are off- limits, because they’re ir-relevant (see above). I was asked to present a written list of questions, they privately pondered their collective response and I was invited back to hear every member of the Junta take a turn answering. This takes time. Not for nothing is the name of the fi ve Zapatista Junta headquarters “Caracol,” snail. I asked one of the Juntas why. “Three reasons— fi rst, the snail walks slowly but surely; second, our ances-tors blew through a conch shell to call a meeting together; third, the shape of the shell shows how information goes in and out of the Caracol, and that’s how we work: by listening and exchanging.”

Those familiar with the Slow Food movement will see some simi-larity here. Slow Food’s philosophy rejects the acceleration that capi-talism has brought to food, insisting that food should be produced in consonance with the environment and with a respect for the labor that produces it. Not fast food but Slow Food. If you’ve ever tried Slow Food, you’ll know what a sublime and transformative experience it can be. Although the Slow Food movement has the reputation of be-ing a middle- class supper club, its DNA is radical, and has a resonance with the Zapatistas— it shares the notion that everyone has the right to participate in, and enjoy, the world around them, and that genuine democracy takes time. The joke about the Zapatistas is this:

Q: How many Zapatistas does it take to change a light-bulb?A: Come back in two weeks.


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What Zapatistas are practicing is slow politics. Visitors and nongov-ernmental organizations trying to work with the Zapatistas can get a little impatient with the pro cess of constant consultation, discussion and deliberation. It doesn’t feel effi cient, and NGOs get frustrated at being made to wait, but that’s because they’re making a mistake in valuing time. It’s not as if the Zapatista government isn’t capable of swift responses. You wouldn’t want deliberative emergency ser vice, and the Zapatistas have two ambulances and a clinic that provide prompt and universal coverage. But to decide justice and politics takes time— you wouldn’t rush a criminal trial, or cut short the pre sen ta tion of evidence in order to reach a verdict more swiftly, and it’s the same with politics. Urgency is quick. Insurgency takes much longer.

It’s a point I heard made rather clearly. “People know that we de-clared war fi fteen years ago,” one of the masked men offered. “But what people also know is that the shooting war lasted only twelve days. Much more important was the po liti cal war. It takes time to build a secondary school— fi rst we had to build all the primary schools. There’s nothing that happens overnight. It takes time to fi nd the form.”

And, again, the form isn’t obvious, or even found the fi rst time. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” said a woman whose eyes suggested she might be thirty. “We didn’t know if a government run like ours was even possible. But we’ve shown that it can be.” That the pro cess works better if people spend more time on it is a fi nding only recently discovered by psychologists and behavioral economists. In one paper, researchers quote Henry Ford’s autobiography, where he states that “time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage.”22 What the economists demonstrate, and what the Zapatistas know, is that with a correctly structured system, you can build a great deal of trust between participants by taking time together.



The Juntas have been so successful in their deliberative democ-racy that ordinary non- Zapatista Mexicans seek their advice. The Zapatistas will receive anyone. Such is their reputation for impartial deliberation that their governing body is trusted by citizens and state alike to resolve cases ranging from divorce to grand theft. Local people prefer the Juntas’ deliberations to the federal court system, where the case will be decided on the basis of which side was better able to bribe the offi cers of the court.23 The justice that the Zapatis-tas offer is transformative justice rather than punitive. There is a jail that is mainly used for drunks, but incarceration is not the solution for most problems. The kinds of punishments that the Junta recom-mends are warnings, duties of care and community ser vice. In one case involving the theft of over $40,000 from a truck carry ing the salaries of local government employees, the Junta fi rst tracked down the robbers, forced them to return the money to the govern-ment and then deliberated over their sentences. It was decided that sending them to jail would only hurt their families, who would have to work in the fi elds without the robbers’ labor, so they were sen-tenced to 365 days of community ser vice, with half the time allowed to tend to family fi elds, and the rest spent on public work. This is, of course, a million miles away from the prison industry in the United States, which leads the world in incarceration in the name of “public safety.”

The Juntas are also involved in commoning, fi guring how to share resources from land that they have reclaimed from large land-holders. Balancing the economic needs of the community and the ecosystem’s ability to sustain them is a delicate art. One Junta has restrictions on chopping down healthy trees (and, if it needs to be done, three are planted in each tree’s stead). Revenues are shared between communities and the Junta.24 Another Junta noticed de-clining yields on the land they’d been corralled onto by the Mexican


the value of nothing - slow politics

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