Zapatista Revolution
In his book Bitter Harvest Paul Hart attempts to illustrate the roots of the Zapatista Revolution in nineteenth century Morelos, Mexico. In doing so, he hopes to convince his readers that the conditions that resulted in the emergence of the Zapatistas, though localized, were not limited to Morelos in particular, but were the ultimate result of an expansive economic system adopted by the Mexican government. He writes, "From the 1840s on, Mexico pursued a national policy of economic growth and modernization that included the promotion of commercial agriculture at the general expense of village communities."1 Although a number of factors contributed to the widespread displeasure of the agrarian class in Mexico, the overall source of the social upheaval was the process of modernization; this process displaced many farmers, deprived them of their autonomy, and attempted to shape them into cogs in the mechanized process of corporate farming. This overhaul of agriculture inspired revolutions across the world; accordingly, as Hart contends, it should be seen as almost inevitable that the Zapatistas, or a group similar to them, arise out of such dramatic social unrest. To begin with, the Zapatista Revolution emerged out of the growing e
Objectively, it is likely that the "classic" Mexican political system captured a little of both views; playing upon humanitarian principles at some times, and strengthening an oppressive class hierarchy at others. So, at the core of the Zapatista Revolution was this concept of individual independence in the face of mechanical and inhuman oppression. "10 Fundamentally, the reforms that originated in the middle portion of the nineteenth century brought society in Morelos to the brink of armed peasant rebellion in the following way: it created a society that was wholly dependent upon a single crop, with the failing of that crop meaning only loss of revenue for the upper classes, bus loss of livelihood and starvation for the lower classes. In Morelos this single crop was sugar. "6 Unfortunately for the agrarian class, once the liberals gained power in the 1870s, they acted to methodically dismantle communal land ownership and put increased incentives upon the bosses and land owners to become more centralized. "5 This generated dissatisfaction from both above and below, and intensified the process of turning the agrarian class into a class of wage-laborers dependent upon the market forces of a single cash crop-sugar, minerals, or beef. This also happened to occur at the same time as Cuba, following a revolution, began to produce sugar and export it cheaply to the United States; "Morelos produced by far the most sugar in Mexico ad its beautiful haciendas were famous as the most mechanized and productive in the country. Unable to find legitimate political representation and unable to find justice in the law, many rural people-poor, underfed, disenfranchised, and already living on the margins-suddenly found themselves not only landless but also unemployed. Nevertheless, the backbone of the revolution was made-up of peasants who were having their communal land inheritances eliminated, and of hacienda workers who suffered increasingly intolerable conditions working long hours on growing plantations: "Displaced by the loss of communal land holdings, subjected to harsh working conditions on the estates, met with government neglect, and lacking other options, they stood up arms to demand a reversal of the sweeping process of enclosure that had been taking place for the last sixty years. If the moral justification of one is accepted, then the other must be rejected. However, once the negative effects of overproduction began to be felt in the state, the government resorted to increased methods of repression in order to maintain the social structure and minimize the threat of rebellion: "The state government, for example, considered a law suspending individual 'guarantees' for certain classes of criminals. Because of the ideological foundation of nineteenth century liberalism, many peasants granted them their support, in the hopes that they would use their political clout to reverse the changes in land policy. Furthermore, even some capitalists in Mexico came to resent the Diaz regime because it enacted a number of policies that offered foreign investors "preferential tax incentives, relinquishing subsoil rights, and granting massive land giveaways totaling more than twenty-five percent of the surface of the country.
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