The Political Imaginary of Zapatista Autonomy as Part of the National Indigenous Governing Council in Mexico

• In Event: Reframing Autonomy: Decolonizing Practice in Indigenous and Afrodescendant Communities

Abstract

This paper critical reflects on the way Zapatista governing bodies and conceptualizations of the political, as part of two decades of de facto exercising their right to indigenous autonomy as the margins of the state in Chiapas, have influenced in the past two years the national level indigenous governing initiatives as part of the National Indigenous Congress’s (CNI) Indigenous Governing Council (CIG). At the end of 2017, the CNI and EZLN announced their launching of an independent presidential candidate, Maria de Jesús Patricio, colloquially referred to as Marichuy, in the context of the 2018 presidential elections. Rather than an individual candidate, Marichuy was to be the vocera, the spokesperson for the CIG, a national level council made-up of indigenous men and women from the various organizations. By drawing from the political practices of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, the rotating governing bodies within Zapatista territory, this initiative of the CNI proposes to create a parallel network governing body in indigenous regions throughout the country to politically mobilize against dispossession, extractivist development projects and for what they term a politics of life. In what ways do the everyday autonomy practices in Zapatista autonomous municipalities shape the political discourses and practices of the CIG? What are the possibilities and challenges of expanding local autonomous practices to a national network level? What new anti racist decolonizing imaginaries emerge as part of these dialogical spaces between indigenous organizations and members of the CIG? Reflections on these questions will guide this paper. 

Author

• Mariana Mora Bayo, Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS)/ Ciudad de México