Popular Movements in Autocracies Religion, Repression, and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico ‐ by Trejo, Guillermo

Abstract

Trejo, Guillermo (2012) Popular Movements in Autocracies Religion, Repression, and Indigenous Collective Action in Mexico, Cambridge University Press ( New York, NY), xix + 307 pp. $99.00 hbk. Why, after centuries of segregation and marginalisation, have the indigenous peoples of Latin America only recently mobilised themselves to demand their rights? This question has attracted much scholarly attention over the past decades, the majority of works attributing the rise of strong and powerful indigenous movements to the adoption of economic neoliberal policies and the existence of an international regime for indigenous rights. As time has passed, however, these assumptions have proved to be rather inaccurate. While many indigenous groups have indeed actively mobilised themselves in defence of their political, economic, social and cultural rights, many others have remained passive and depoliticised. Some others have even supported non-democratic forms of government. The first of its kind, this book opens the black box of ‘ethnicity’ in order to better understand the causes and implications of indigenous mobilisation in Mexico. Methodologically speaking, the study is quite impressive. It is based on an extensive amount of original quantitative and qualitative data (including protest events, surveys, case studies and life stories) on cycles of indigenous mobilisation which occurred in 883 municipalities of Mexico during the period from 1975 to 2000. Moreover, the analysis relies on multiple research techniques and methods of analysis in order to validate its findings. With a degree of confidence, the study challenges many common assumptions in the literature. It demonstrates that neoliberalism was a necessary but insufficient factor behind the rise of indigenous movements in Mexico. In fact, in many municipalities of the country, neoliberalism was willingly accepted by various indigenous groups. Instead, the book argues, it was the approach taken by the Catholic Church, in the face of growing US Protestant missionary activity, that promoted the rise of strong and powerful indigenous movements; in order to retain members, progressive Catholic clergy organised dense and decentralised horizontal networks with large numbers of catechists leading communal Bible study groups and organising social and economic cooperatives. Not only were these networks more prone to establish alliances with parties challenging the rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party), but, given their architecture, these networks were less susceptible to state co-optation and repression. In fact, as state repression increased, the members of these Catholic social networks engaged in radical and violent forms of protest. That is, progressive Catholicism provided the organisational infrastructure for the guerrilla warfare organised by the Zapatistas, and those very groups engaged in rebel activities were the most likely to adopt the discourse of ethnicity. Thus, the book also shows that the existence of an international regime for indigenous rights was a necessary but not in itself sufficient condition for ethnic rights-based mobilisation, at least not in Mexico; nor was a shared ethnicity the mobilising vehicle – instead, it was down to the action of an external agent: the Catholic Church. That said, dissident indigenous mobilisation was not the product of radical Catholicism, based on the theology of liberation, as might have been expected; instead, the struggle for indigenous rights was the result of the structural characteristics of the social networks organised by the Catholic Church. These social Catholic networks had important implications for democratisation in Mexico. Had it not been for those social networks, operating at the most basic community level in southern Mexico, the Zapatista rebellion would never have happened, and the reforms that led to the establishment of clean and fair elections in Mexico would probably have been delayed or simply not adopted. In this way, the book tries to reconcile the dynamics operating at different levels of analysis (community, municipal, state, national and international) for explaining the impact of indigenous mobilisation in the unravelling of the PRI rule and democratisation in Mexico. The book thus calls for us to bring back the role of religious associations and social network structures to the study of indigenous and other forms of grassroots mobilisation in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. While this book focuses on authoritarian Mexico, its approach can be employed to better understand indigenous mobilisation in countries in the region where electoral politics are already established, including Mexico. If anything, the argument of the book is very intricate and not parsimonious. Nonetheless, it is a must-read for all Latin Americanists.