This intercultural element has also been evident in the year old Movement for Peace with Dignity and Justice led by poet Javier Sicilia from Cuernavaca; which movement I was introduced and briefly participated in during my stay in Cuernavaca. This civil society movement started on 28th March 2011 after Sicilia’s son and six other persons were murdered in Cuernavaca, Mexico. After this, Sicilia and thousands of other people joined forces to denounce the government policies in Mexico on narco-trafficking since drug war was declared in December 2006 and other issues which have left more than 50,000 murdered, 20,000 disappeared and 250,000 displaced by war. The movement has focused on visiblising the victims, who are to the government merely statistics or collateral damage, has organized various travelling caravans throughout Mexico, the U.S. and Guatemela and has numerous supporters in civil society throughout the Mexican states, Europe and the world over. Sicilia was also recently featured in 2011 as a Time Person of the Year, and just before the papal visit of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, he visited the Vatican in Rome to ensure the Pope was well informed of the troubles plaguing Mexico. He was also recently awarded in April, the Don Sergio Mendez Arceo National Human Rights Prize by the Don Sergio Mendez Arceo Foundation; a foundation in which the Dominican sisters I lived with in community in Cuernavaca, Mexico actively participate.
Another important intercultural dialogue that has continued to place at a political level in Mexico since 1994 is between the Zapatista group and the Mexican government. The Zapatistas were themselves the fruit of a rich history of dialogue on development occurring from the 1970´s to the 1990´s about the significance of being indigenous in Mexico. The Zapatista National Liberation Army– a leftist revolutionary group started in 1983 and based in the southern state of Chiapas in Mexico is named after Emiliano Zapata, the agrarian reformer and commander of the Liberation Army of the South during the Mexican Revolution. The efforts of Zapata and other revolutionaries led to the Art 27 of the Mexican constitution being adopted which sanctioned the communal ownership of land and water in Mexico to indigenous communities who have struggled throughout history to keep their land, customs, languages and dignity. The Zapatista movement is based on the ideology of zapatismo. The Oxford Dictionary of Politics shares how “The new zapatismo has embraced indigenous’ rights and cultural diversity as well as anti-globalization and anti-capitalist protests around the world. Rather than emphasizing class struggle they stress the need for broad coalitions and grassroots movements (globalization ‘from below’) to oppose the neoliberal world order. Likewise, rather than furthering their objectives through armed conflict they have concentrated their strategy and discourse on the international media (being dubbed the first ‘virtual guerrilla’ movement in the world).”
For the past eighteen years, since the momentous armed uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army on 1st January 1994, a prolonged intercultural dialogue has been ongoing between the Zapatistas and the Mexican government, interspersed with violent attacks on indigenous by government paramilitary groups who seek to maintain the status quo of power. The Zapatistas for the most part represent culturally the oppressed indigenous class that comprise 70% of the population (despite the fact that their spokesperson is not indigenous) and included in the Mexican government are the 10% of the population who hold the resources of the country. The Zapatistas on the 1st January 1994 felt they had to make a bold statement to protest the coming into effect of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Canada, U.S. and Mexico. Marcos the EZLN leader stated “We did not take up arms to gain a political post, or some other important place. We rose up in arms because we would not die forgotten”. 3000 members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army took over six large towns in Chiapas leading to a cross fire between them and the Mexican army. A cease fire was agreed to 12 days later. The government appointed Catholic Bishop Samuel Ruiz Garcia to be mediator in the dialogue that resulted in the ceasefire. This ceasefire was brokered in February 1995 by the Mexican government. As a result of dialogue between the Mexican President and the Zapatistas, an intercultural agreement- the San Andres Larraiza Accords 1996 were drawn up which had the goal of granting autonomy to indigenous populations of Mexico, increasing participation of indigenous in government and increasing indigenous political involvement in public affairs that affect their indigenous communities.
Since the San Andres intercultural agreement in 1996, the Mexican government has not been honouring this. Since then there has been violence against the indigenous from the hands of the Mexican army and paramilitary groups sponsored by the Mexican government. The famous 1997 Acteal massacre is an example of this to which ex President Vicente Fox is presently answering to before a U.S. court. In 2001 the Zapatistas continued the intercultural dialogue going to the Mexican Congress to get increased rights for their indigenous communities. They refused to accept compromised agreements that would not benefit them and fortified their sense of culture by creating 32 autonomous municipalities independent of the Mexican government. The Zapatistas are exemplary in cross cultural dialogue, whether face to face or by virtual means, as part of their new strategy to garner both national and international support. They make great use of the internet to share information about their plight and have garnered support from NGO’s and leftist organizations not only in Mexico but in Europe and Canada. In 2005 they lead an Other Campaign – an alternative to the National Presidential Campaign and garnered much support in the civil society arena. Recently in 2012 they partnered with Cideci.- Unitierra to host a seminar on Anti- Systemic Movements from December 30th 2011 to January 2nd 2012 to celebrate 18 years of the Zapatista uprising and to share with movements from other countries who oppose the evils of capitalism and undemocratic governments.
The civil society and the grassroots movements are clearly doing their job at a global level. The challenge remains as to how political decision-makers can integrate the principles of cultural diversity and the values of cultural pluralism into all public policies, mechanisms and practices. Attempts have been made to meet the challenge at a highly institutional level such as the UN system which sets standards on human rights at a global level.
While international standard setting is good in that it sets out clearly the global ideals, true change takes place at a ground level since this is where the change in hearts takes place, through interpersonal and intercultural sharing based on the recognition that all humankind forms part of the larger family of God. During the second day of his papal visit to Latin America this year, Pope Benedict XVI in his homily during the outdoor Mass at Guanajuato Bicentennial Park on March 25 – (which Mass I had the good fortune to attend during my stay in Mexico) stated, “When addressing the deeper dimension of personal and community life, human strategies will not suffice to save us,” “We must have recourse to the one who alone can give life in its fullness, because he is the essence of life and its author.” He cited the responsorial psalm for the day’s Mass “Create a clean heart in me, O God” stating that evil can be overcome only through a divinely inspired change of the human heart.
In Catholic Social Teaching we also have the important principle of subsidiarity introduced in the papal encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891 which spoke out against the subordination of the individual to the state. In Quadragesimo Anno 79 Pope Pius XI described the principle as such, “As history abundantly proves, it is true that on account of changed conditions many things which were done by small associations in former times cannot be done now save by large associations. Still, that most weighty principle, which cannot be set aside or changed, remains fixed and unshaken in social philosophy: Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them.”
