The municipality in Chiapas in the Zapatista conjuncture: an unexpected actor

Abstract

This collaboration attempts to analyze the new place the municipal institution has acquired in the armed post-conflict situation, after 1994. The municipality burst into Chiapas as an unexpected actor. In this context, the peasant-indigenous organizations who were protagonist actors from where the rebellious ranks were fed, no longer have the agrarian fight as their principle demand, but the municipal government and the material and symbolic resources that it contains. In the same way, the municipality (autonomous) and the articulation of those in the Meetings of Good Governance are constituted like the spaces where the EZLN realizes the autonomic experience. The municipality has also been the place where the State disarticulated the indigenous fights and rearticulated its hegemony, by means of political reform and the redesign of the municipality, when equipping it with new means and competencies. All this happened in three lustrums, without the demand (and the supply) for municipality had initially been raised between the relevant political actors in conjuncture with the armed rise.