Right, left and indigenous peoples

Otomí indigenous woman protesting the paramilitary attacks against the EZLN on April 12 in Mexico City.Gerardo Vieyra / NurPhoto via Getty Images

In the book

, the historian Federico Navarrete talks about Manuel Lozada, the famous

, who commanded an army mainly composed of indigenous Coras and also a mestizo population that, between 1855 and 1870, had control of a region of western Mexico. These communities were opposed to liberal laws that stripped them of the lands that they had historically owned communally. In this context, liberals and conservatives fought for control of the country and the latter had managed to bring Maximiliano de Habsburgo to govern Mexico establishing what he has called the Second Mexican Empire. In nationalist history, liberals are identified with the left and conservatives with the right. Why then did the army and the communities that fought with Manuel Lozada against the dispossession of their lands allied with Maximiliano?

The defense of indigenous rights has always been identified with the left, however, a deeper approach begins to reveal that this statement has its complexities to consider. In principle, categories like left and right are not so easy to define. For example, for some people anarchism is clearly identified with the left while for other people it plays outside the left-right spectrum. In some contexts, the guerrillas are identified with the left, as are some political parties, although their methods and forms are very different. The right is also a complex framework and, as with the left, its manifestations will change according to the historical period. Within this complexity,what is true is that these categories arose and developed within a certain specific tradition, within the modern state and not within the political and thought history of indigenous peoples.

More information

• Associations of indigenous peoples demand that the Government recognize their rights and their territories

• “Zapata lives!”: The 421 squad of the Zapatista army disembarks in Galicia to begin its tour of Europe

As the Guaraní poet Elías Caurey says, for indigenous peoples “the State is the great other”.

This does not mean that on many occasions alliances are not established that later may have their limits or that there are no individuals from indigenous peoples or collectivities that adhere and operate within that spectrum.

It is not possible to deny, for example, the great support and shelter of the Mexican left to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, especially in the crucial days in which greater massacres had to be avoided, but over time, when the EZLN began a process autonomy that moved away from the dynamics of the state, a large part of that same left, especially the partisan, accused the EZLN of playing the game to the right and even of being a product of it.

If you want to support the development of news like this, subscribe to EL PAÍS

Subscribe

Traditionally it is assumed that, if you say that you are neither from the left nor from the right, it is that you are from the right, but in the case of indigenous peoples it is important to understand that our traditions and socio-political structures cannot and should not be read only within that spectrum .

The movement headed by Manuel Lozada made a momentary alliance with Maximiliano because it was necessary to defend the land that the liberal laws were depriving them of and not because the Cora population identified with the conservative side.

If we read in a left-right key, this movement joined the conservative side, if we analyze their political struggles from their own history and tradition, what they did was defend their territory as they had done for centuries.

Subscribe here