How you can resist funding the government → other forms our opposition can take → nonviolent action; “People Power” → in Latin America • TPL

The Christian Science Monitor covers the “people power” rebellions that are spreading in Latin America, and Jesse Walker at Reason magazine, notices that “Latin America’s outbreak of people power hasn’t received as much stateside attention as its counterparts in Central Asia and the Middle East… presumably for the same reason media accounts of nonviolent Arab movements often ignore Palestinian resistance to Israel’s ‘security barrier’: The uprisings aren’t aligned with U.S. interests.”

For much of the twentieth century, the chief means of overthrowing a government were guerrilla warfare and military coups. Nonviolent resistance existed — at times it thrived — but it was generally regarded as an odd aberration that rarely worked. But since the ’70s, for a variety of reasons, the trend in revolution-making has been a gradual global shift from violent “people’s war” to nonviolent people power. In an important new book, Unarmed Insurrections, the Rutgers sociologist Kurt Schock points out that there were 31 major nonviolent rebellions in the second and third worlds from 1978 to 2001, starting with the Iranian revolution of 1978–79. (It’s important to distinguish the overthrow of the Shah, a classic example of people power, from Khomeini’s later consolidation of state power, a much more coercive affair.)
Nonviolent resistance, Schock reminds us, is not the same thing as “passive resistance.” It’s a set of tactics, not a politically correct lifestyle; it’s aimed not at persuading leaders to change their policies, but at making it impossible to enforce those policies. Gene Sharp has been cataloging those tactics for decades, listing 198 of them in 1973’s three-volume study The Politics of Nonviolent Action and citing several more since then. They fall into three general categories: methods of protest and public persuasion (e.g., a march), of organized noncooperation (e.g., a tax strike), and of “nonviolent intervention” (e.g., a land occupation). Contrary to the conventional wisdom, such methods have frequently worked under repressive dictatorships as well as under relatively benign systems; many times they’ve succeeded where guerrilla tactics have failed. In 23 of those 31 rebellions, from Bolivia to Bulgaria and from Mongolia to Mali, the uprising contributed directly to regime change.
And that statistic understates what has happened, since it focuses on the most visible sort of success. More substantial changes can occur without the government formally changing hands. Of the recent turbulence in Latin America, the most interesting event may be the revolt of the Bolivian Indians. They were the backbone of the protests that drove President Sanchez de Lozada out of power in 2003, and of the more recent turmoil as well, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. I’m referring to the fact that about a fifth of the country’s population now lives in villages that run their own affairs, outside of the capital’s control. This power was not ceded to them. They simply took it.

I recently finished reading Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy by New York Times reporters Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon.

It does a great job of giving a one-book overview of the enormous changes in the Mexican political system over the last fifty years or so and how they came about. Mexico transformed from an impregnable one-party totalitarian state that controlled nearly every aspect of public life into a thriving, multi-party republic in a process that was difficult and frustrating but relatively (though certainly not entirely) bloodless. It is fascinating to read about the combination of enduring grassroots struggle, top-down glasnost-like reform, and behind-the-scenes cross-ideology opposition partnerships that brought this off.

It’s surprising to me how little of this story has become part of the political dialog in the United States. Compared to things like the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yeltsin standing on a tank, the Tiananmen massacre, glasnost & perestroika, Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid, or Lech Walesa and Solidarity, for example, how many aspects of this revolution of our next-door neighbor have become commonplace parts of the discussion here and how many of its figures are household names? How much of it got the sort of wide-eyed media coverage the current Egyptian struggle is getting?

But all that aside, I did keep my Picket Line eyes peeled for mentions of tax resistance and did find an interesting passage on the Zapatista movement. The Zapatistas burst onto the scene as an armed guerrilla uprising, full of revolutionary bluster, but quickly found themselves to be hopelessly outgunned by the government. So they changed tactics:

The Zapatistas’ townships, called municipios autónomos, built on the Indians’ sense of being separate in both politics and faith but magnified it. Although the EZLN had a clandestine army of as many as one thousand guerrilla fighters (most of them peasant farmers by day), early in their uprising they made it clear that they were not anxious to engage in combat. Rather, their method of defiance was to set up their own alternative town administrations with their own policies and social programs while rejecting all contact with government agencies. The Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, and Chol Indians (among others) who lived in the autonomous townships called their political philosophy resistencia: civil resistance to government authority. In the late 1990s there were thirty-eight Zapatista townships in Chiapas, including less than 10 percent of the 700,000 Indians in the state, but with a political impact in the indigenous communities that far outweighed their size.
The Zapatistas sought not to found a new Indian nation but to make a place for Indian self-determination within the Mexican state. In their townships they kept their own birth and death records, discouraging followers from registering with official bureaucracies. They stopped paying taxes to any government and refused to allow social workers from government health and welfare agencies to set foot inside what they considered their boundaries. They opened their own health clinics staffed by volunteer Mexican and foreign doctors and local herbal healers and organized agricultural and crafts cooperatives that operated mainly through regional barter. In some townships they held trials and set up jails.