The Indigenous Staff of Authority and Neo-indigenism in Mexico

The Indigenous Staff of Authority and Neo-indigenism in Mexico

La Jornada December 4, 2018
Luis Hernández Navarro

The inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) as President of Mexico was, at the same time, a republican ritual and a public political spectacle with many layers. The staging was multiple and prolonged.

I list some: surrender of protest in San Lazaro; reception of an indigenous staff; public occupation of the Presidential Palace of Los Pinos; meals with leadership; transportation in a modest white Jetta; conversation with a cyclist, and musical presentation.

Thousands of people participated in the different ceremonies and galas. With festive spirit they became actors of a historical event: the beginning of what has been baptized as the Fourth Transformation. They took to the streets and public squares of Mexico City not to protest, but to celebrate.

Among the many acts, one stood out: the presentation to the new President by indigenous leaders of a ceremonial staff, in a sui generis ceremony (invented for the occasion), with invocations to the four cardinal points, amulets, prayers and the incense of copal.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador is not the first president to whom a staff of authority is given. As Harim B. Gutiérrez recalled, the political use such is a custom of the electoral campaigns of the second half of the 20th century in Mexico. The PRI candidate for the presidency Adolfo López Mateos received a staff in 1957 in Guelatao, Oaxaca as well as have other acting presidents. José López Portillo was presented a staff in Temoaya, in 1978.  It is an exchange of political favors: the candidates and leaders obtain legitimacy while for the indigenous communities there opens the possibility of obtaining public works projects and resources. Since then, this ceremonial political pact has been repeated with each of the candidates and heads of the executive office in turn.

However, on this occasion, the delivery of the “staff of authority” occurred in a new scenario and as part of a new political plot: in the national capital's main plaza of the Zócalo, and in the name of "a representation of the 68 indigenous peoples of Mexico, coordinated by the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI)".

The virus is in the air and is contagious. Just as Claudio X. González and his NGO network pretends to speak on behalf of civil society, some indigenous leaders linked to the new government present themselves as the representatives of all Indigenous Peoples in Mexico.

Obviously, those who gave the new President the baton of command do not represent all the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico. They represent themselves and, in some cases, their communities and organizations. They do not speak for the indigenous movement as a whole, but for a current within the movement that seeks a space within the bosom of the new government’s institution: the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI).  Without having to go any further, the National Indigenous Congress, the most important articulation of the Indigenous world in Mexico, did not participate in this ceremony.

The same idea that ​​a single staff would legitimately represent all the Indigenous Peoples of the country has been questioned by many Indian intellectuals and community authorities. It is an invention. The Traditional Staffs of indigenous authority are not transferable from the roots of their origin in each community, tribe or nation.

Jaime Martínez Luna, one of the most brilliant Zapotec intellectuals, who among others is a creator of the concept of communality, wrote about the ceremony (which he described as a performance) of the investiture at the Zócalo:

"The person who gave the staff to the new President of the nation on this occasion does not represent anyone. He knows it, and the President knows it.  We know it.  We who see a ritual that does not exist in real terms, being offered to a non-existent nation."

Among those who participated in the ritual of the occasion there are prominent social fighters. The work of Carmen Santiago and her organization Flor y Canto in Oaxaca are exemplary. But many other participants are part of a group of professionals of indigenous representation in government institutions that, since 2000, are hunting for positions and resources. And together with emerging struggles, such as that of Oxchuc, in Chiapas, or Ayutla, in Guerrero, they are committed to becoming the interlocutors of indigenous peoples in the “Fourth Transformation” of the AMLO administration.

The investiture ceremony in the Zócalo put the indigenous world at the center of public attention. This historical moment, which should have been a great event, ended up being distorted, because it was done in a folkloric way. The culture and spirituality of the indigenous peoples were trivialized and exploited, in order to give indigenous anointment to the power of the new administration of the Mexican state. The new president did not need it, he who has held the line from his first steps in the indigenista policy in the Chontalpa, with a deep knowledge of the dynamics of the situation where the indigenous communities live vis-a vi the state. Why then put on a staged political theater?

The act can only be understood from the logic of neoindigenism that accompanies and justifies the undertaking of large megaprojects in territories of Indigenous Peoples. Although it is not widely recognized, or acknowledged, for the new administration, indigenous people are the object of policies to combat poverty, not subjects of inherenenrt rights ito rights, especially that of self-determination. It is enough to verify this, to see how the INPI was set up and instituted, the Monreal initiative for agrarian development or silence on compliance with the San Andrés Accords.

 

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Zapatistas and Indigenous peoples mark distance from López Obrador

They indicated that approving the San Andrés Accords in the current context, “the successive reforms to constitutional Article 27 being in effect, which have transformed land into merchandise and have put the subsoil’s riches in the hands of the big companies, without ending the concessions for water, mining, national wealth and hydrocarbons, without imposing limits on the imperial power repealing the current Free Trade Agreement and severely limiting the big transnational corporations, without destroying the control that the big crime cartels exercise, supported by military corporations, over their territories, will be living, in the best of cases, a vulgar illusion, which hides from them the onslaught of money against the original peoples.

“We, in the National Indigenous Congress-Indigenous Governing Council, have no doubt and we will not be part of any exponential capitalist transformation, which with its corrupt practices, has its sights set on our territories,” the organizations asserted. “We will not be part of their lie that thirsts for our blood and our extermination.”

Self Determination and Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the New NAFTA Trade Zone of North America [Canada-US-Mexico]

In making reference to the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, “our” Indigenous Peoples – with no mention of the international legal context as Rights Holders with Collective Rights as Indigenous Peoples before the state, in equality to all the peoples of the world as articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peoples, AMLO negates the rule of modern international law in Mexico.  He subverts the struggle of the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico and provides a smokescreen for the systemic impunity of state sanctioned corporate colonialism, whose product is the oppression and racism to which he refers.
Instead of recognition, respect, and guarantees of Indigenous Rights in Mexico, AMLO announce he will propose a policy of paternalistic "special attention". Instead of the affirming the official recognition of Indigenous Peoples as peoples equal to all other peoples now established the context of International Law since UNDRIP 2007, the new president of Mexico stepped onto the world stage and immediately attempted to reduce the surviving constituencies of the Original Nations of Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, Anáhuac to the designation of “preferred populations.”

This reduction is the exact same technique, in concept and style of the Reductions of the Spanish Crown that began centuries ago with the initial colonization of Mexico.  It is an effective technique of colonization and genocide that when the Hispanic Settler State apparatus of the Criollos broke from direct rule under the Spanish Crown in 1821, the formal processes of reduction remained operational as the Criollos formulated the Independent Mexican Republic.  The Federation of Mexican States is a colonial republic built upon subjugation of the Indigenous Peoples and projected internationally with an Aztec facade that is perfumed by symbolic gestures and adornments of the original indigenous ancestral cultures.

 

 

Trade Routes of the Telteca Confederacy