Mexico’s Indigenous Peoples Look to Fox’s Promise They’ll Be Heard

TEMOAYA, Mexico — When residents of indigenous communities like this rug-weaving town talk about the political opposition, they generally mean the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD.

Led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, namesake of the most famous Indian hero in Mexican history, the PRD has actively--though not always successfully--courted the votes of this country’s estimated 8.7 million indigenous, or Indian, citizens. So the victory of Vicente Fox, the presidential candidate of the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, came as a shock here.

“We don’t know anything about the PAN,” acknowledged Felix Flores, who runs a home rug-weaving business with his wife, Cristina Mendoza. “That makes a lot of people uncomfortable.”

After all, one of the most repeated sayings in rural Mexico is “Better the devil you know.” On that basis, indigenous people have remained among the most dependable supporters of the long-ruling party known as the PRI, even though in return for their loyalty, they have stayed the poorest of Mexico’s poor.

Now, national indigenous leaders are rethinking that folk wisdom in light of Fox’s campaign pledge to use their own manifesto, which gives Indians more control over actions that affect them, in his indigenous policy.

“We have to look for a new relationship between the government and indigenous people,” said lawmaker Marcelino Diaz de Jesus, who is one of 1.2 million Nahuatl, the largest Indian group in Mexico.

Leaders such as Diaz de Jesus are considering the possibility that the promise of change that won Fox votes among the prosperous, urban Mexicans who form his political base might also benefit predominantly poor, rural Indians. The president-elect promised at a postelection news conference, “We won’t accept any decision or budget request from any Cabinet member unless it can be shown to benefit the indigenous and the poor.”

During his campaign, Fox made a commitment to carry out a 10-point program that included creating a National Council for the Development of Indigenous People that would be composed of representatives of ethnic groups and would recommend and evaluate policies related to Indians.

“The experience we have had with other political parties that say they have an indigenous base is that they do not listen to our demands,” said Margarito Ruiz, coordinator of the National Indigenous Assembly for Autonomy, whose members represent about 90% of the country’s Indian ethnic groups. “We do not care whether a political party is left, right or center as long as it recognizes our right to autonomy.”

Idea of Autonomy Anathema to PRI

The idea of autonomy was anathema to the PRI--the letters stand for the Institutional Revolutionary Party--which ruled this country for 71 years by assimilating the diverse sectors of Mexican society. Indians have been grouped in with peasants in the party structure.

“The PRI used the indigenous people, including us, in order to subordinate us,” Diaz de Jesus said.

That put the PRI at odds with the rising autonomy movement among Mexico’s indigenous people, seen most clearly in the demands that arose during the negotiations after the Zapatista uprising in the south’s Chiapas state six years ago. Those talks have been suspended.

Further, indigenous groups strongly opposed the PRI government’s free-market economic policies--which Fox also supports--that reduced subsidies. That slashed the value of the products Indians sell at the same time that it raised the prices of merchandise they buy.

The PRD tried to capitalize on that discontent. But when Cardenas visited the Zapatistas during his second presidential campaign in 1994, he came away disappointed: He received a lecture instead of an endorsement.

The party still tried to win indigenous support by setting aside some of its congressional seats for Indian leaders such as Diaz de Jesus. The PRD often became the second political force after the PRI in towns like Temoaya, less than an hour away from Toluca, the bustling capital of the state of Mexico.

Poverty Among Indian Groups

Nearly three-fourths of Temoaya’s 50,000 residents are indigenous, mainly Otomi, the largest Indian group in the state. According to the latest census data available, 38% of those older than 15 are illiterate and one-fourth of the children between the ages of 6 and 14 don’t attend school. The government classifies Temoaya as extremely poor, like most predominantly Indian towns.

“Nearly 60% of the extremely poor counties are indigenous,” said Laura Ruiz Mondragon, a researcher who has studied the political participation of Indians in four elections over the past nine years. She reeled off the statistics of misery:

* 90.4% of the indigenous population lives in houses without sewers, compared with 21% of the overall population of Mexico.

* More than half of Mexico’s Indians don’t have electricity, compared with 12% of all Mexicans.

* While just 12.4% of Mexicans older than 15 are illiterate, the percentage for adult Indians is 48.2%.

The effect of those numbers is clear in Temoaya, where the most impressive building in town is the gleaming white Otomi cultural center. Except for a few new mansions on the side of town closest to Toluca, the buildings here are low-slung, concrete-block structures that are perpetually under construction.

Most, like the Flores-Mendoza compound, shelter both home and a small family business, often the upright loom used to weave some of the finest, hand-knotted rugs in Mexico.

Mendoza learned the technique at the town’s rug factory, which has since become a cooperative, and taught her husband when they started their own business 15 years ago.

Depending on the design, they charge about $1,000 for a 4-by-6-foot rug that takes two months to weave. They have been able to earn enough to keep their three children in school, and their oldest son is attending the Mexican military academy, a proven route to the middle class.

The Otomi continue to vote for the PRI in the hope of favors, Flores said. “People here can get loans for traditional family businesses, like making brooms or weaving rugs or chinquetes,” the traditional woolen skirts of Otomi women, he said. “I have not gotten a loan, but I know many people who have.”

The Otomi have kept the PRI out of indigenous affairs, he said. The supreme chief and his assistants, called vocales, are separate from local government and deal strictly with cultural matters, Flores said.

That contrasts with communities in Chiapas and another southern state, Oaxaca, where local politics and indigenous religious offices are tightly entwined. In those states, with their rural communities, local political bosses exercise maximum control over voters, Ruiz Mondragon said.

Nevertheless, in this election the PAN made major strides in indigenous communities, emerging as the second political force after the PRI, she said. The vote for the PAN in indigenous communities jumped 10 percentage points, compared with the 1997 midterm elections, to 28.2%.

“Even though Fox’s campaign relied on the electronic media, he managed to get his message to people who do not have electricity,” Ruiz Mondragon said. “They must have bought batteries to listen to him on the radio.”

Now comes the test of both the effectiveness of Fox’s indigenous policy and the depth of his commitment to a group of people who, by and large, didn’t vote for him and remain skeptical of his proposals.

“A change of party does not mean a change of economic model,” warned Guillermo May, the Yucatan Maya representative to the National Indigenous Congress, whose members represent Indian communities across Mexico. “This is the same model of misery.”