Limiting Indigenous Autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico: The State Government's Use of Human Rights

Abstract

* Shannon Speed is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a research affiliate at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social del Sureste (CIESAS-Sureste) in Chiapas, She conducted research for this article with support from the Social Science Research Council-MacArthur Foundation Program on International Peace and Security in a Changing World. ** Jane F. Collier received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Tulane University in 1970. Her research was supported by the National Science Foundation, Mapping Interlegality in Chiapas, Mexico. She has done research on customary law in Chiapas since the 1960s and published Law and Social Change in Zincantan in 1973 (Stanford University Press). She also co-edited History and Power in the Study of Law (Cornell University Press, 1988). She is Professor of Anthropology, Emerita, Stanford University. We are grateful for the comments and suggestions of Araceli Burguete, George A. Collier, Susan Coutin, Miguel Angel de los Santos, Aida Hernandez, Xochitl Leyva, Saba Mahmood, Bill Maurer, Sally Merry, Jan Rus, Rachel Sieder, Teresa Sierra, and participants in the internal seminar at CIESAS-Sureste. 1. Mary Robinson made this statement at a press conference held in Geneva, Switzerland. Because La Jornada is published in Spanish, the headline actually read: Los derechos humanos no deben ser otra forma de colonialismo. The text of the article later reported the full sentence from which this clause was extracted: No es, de ninguna manera, la imposici6n de valores de Occidente, porque los derechos humanos no deben ser otra forma de colonialismo.