What are the implications of democratic opening for the mobilization and success of marginalized movements? The typical answer to this question anticipates an expansion of political opportunities that should lead, in turn, to better representation of marginalized interests. María Inclán, in this brief but stimulating work, offers a more nuanced argument.
In the first place, she suggests, we need to distinguish between mobilization, movement success, and movement survival. The conditions that lead to increased mobilization do not necessarily result in success. Second, and more critically, not all democratic transitions are created equal. In particular, protracted transitions like that of Mexico can lead to informal forms of elite pacting, which discourage the real representation of marginalized interests. In her analogy, opportunities become sliding doors; the opportunities for mobilization may slide open leading to movement formation, only to have the opportunities for success slide shut, leaving movements trapped in mere survival. The Zapatista movement in Mexico becomes an example of just such a movement, one which mobilized during a moment of political opportunity but failed to achieve insertion into the negotiations over the rules of democratic transition, and so saw the chances of achieving its goals diminish.
The book focuses primarily on the structural conditions facing the Zapatistas (EZLN). On the one hand, Inclán argues that “the Zapatistas were partly responsible for this outcome [their lack of success],” by refusing to take part in democratizing negotiations despite being offered the opportunity, refusing to build alliances with the electoral Left, and largely rejecting party and institutional politics (p. 135). On the other hand, the main thrust of the argument attempts to “take some of this responsibility off the shoulders of Zapatista leaders and argue that their rejection of party and institutional politics was a justifiable response to the political conditions they faced” (p. 136). The author’s account reads fatalistically: The Zapatistas could not, or perhaps more strongly should not, have done anything differently than they did. However, in so doing, Inclán overplays her hand by depriving the movement of agency. The Zapatistas did have opportunities to participate in the electoral opening presented by the transition, but steadfastly refused to do so. It is questionable whether any democratic transition—not just a protracted one—could be expected to “include” people who want autonomy rather than inclusion, and whose definition of democracy does not coincide in important respects with liberal representative democracy.
The “smoking gun” moment to which Inclán points in her analysis is the exclusion of the EZLN from parallel democratizing negotiations over reform of the state. Here, she preserves the influence of structural opportunities by citing one interview indicating that the federal government wanted to contain the Zapatistas, and she concludes that “the Zapatistas were right” to refuse to participate (p. 88). The question is what it took to contain them. The Zapatistas’ disdain for electoral rules meant that its claims were limited to indigenous autonomy and did not connect to broader concerns about electoral transition.
Inclán’s counterexamples are El Salvador and South Africa, where insurgents participated in the negotiation of the transition, but in both cases, the insurgents accepted electoral outcomes as the primary avenue for representation in the subsequent regime and have actively embraced elections. The Zapatistas did not. When Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, then the presidential candidate of the Left, traveled to Zapatista territory to meet with them in 1994, they publicly criticized him in ways that undermined his electoral support. They ultimately called for abstention in the critical 2000 elections when the conservative candidate, Vicente Fox, finally toppled the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) regime. It is not clear that the length of the transition, or even elite pacting over the rules of the game, definitively excluded the Zapatistas. Rather, to a significant degree, they excluded themselves.
The author is in on more solid ground when she shows, through an analysis of 10 years of original data on Zapatista protests, that the movement did not react to expanding political opportunities by protesting more. Instead, the presence of competitive elections seemed to diminish protests, while a PRI government in power increased them (p. 77). Because the Zapatistas did not generally run local candidates of their own, we cannot attribute this effect to having achieved their goals by gaining power. These findings bolster her claims that democratic openings do not necessarily provide movements with the means to achieve their demands, nor even with increased incentives to mobilize. These conclusions are somewhat reminiscent of Philip Oxhorn’s (Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile, 1995) argument about the demobilization of civil society after the Chilean transition, another pacted—but not protracted—transition.
Inclán’s chapter on Zapatista survival is also fascinating, on two grounds. First, she expands the definition of success and shows how Zapatista control affected the living conditions of municipal communities in a positive way despite their lack of government support. Second, she makes an interesting argument about how the internationalization of Zapatista support both enabled the movement to survive and marginalized it from key domestic political sectors, undermining its chances of achieving its original demands. This is perhaps the most understated conclusion of the book: that in shifting the movement’s discourse from local and national issues to “more foreign and diverse interests, [Subcomandante Marcos] unintentionally contributed to easing the pressure on the authorities to respond to the original causes of the conflict” (p. 101). The Zapatistas are widely and justly celebrated for pioneering an innovative discourse that enabled them to counter the Mexican government’s repressive inclinations; Inclán shows here that this innovation may have had a darker side as well. Again, the distinction among the conditions for mobilization, success, and survival proves to be a theoretically useful one. In this case, survival and success appear to be at odds.
Overall, whether one accepts the author’s sympathetic reading of the constraints facing the Zapatistas or not, the book forces us to take seriously the limits of democratic opening in Mexico for counterelite movements, particularly those that demand forms of representation going beyond the merely electoral. Mexico resembles a pacted transition more than is usually recognized, and Inclán highlights this elite behavior. Indeed, protracted transitions may be especially likely to involve the kind of pacting that excludes nonelite actors, although the case cannot be fully made without comparison to other protracted and nonprotracted transitions. Moreover, the separate chapters on mobilization, success and survival illustrate the ways in which similar initial conditions have had different implications for each of these outcomes. The Zapatista Movement and Mexico’s Democratic Transition will be of particular interest to scholars interested in social movement mobilization, as well as scholars of Mexico.
