Mexico Rebels Take Pride in Own Democracy : Tradition: A hybrid of Indian customs and liberation theology, the consultative process emphasizes consensus.

Half-squatting on the narrow benches of the cramped one-room schoolhouse, seven delegates from the village of Ibarra mopped sweat from their foreheads with red bandannas and took turns writing notes in a graph-paper tablet.

At the head of the classroom, a man in a white palm-leaf hat was talking in Tzeltal, the most common of the four indigenous languages spoken in Ibarra and in the region of the southern state of Chiapas where peasants rose up against the Mexican government on New Year’s Day.

The villagers followed his comments on a 32-page document. Written in Spanish, the document was used by the Zapatista National Liberation Army to analyze the peace proposal the government made in March. The rebels rejected the proposal last month after a three-month consultation process that began at meetings like this one, though last week they agreed to resume talks.

Harsh critics of the government’s lack of democracy, the Zapatistas take pride in their own decision-making process, a form of referendum they call consultation with the masses. The results of that process surprised some analysts, not because the peace plan was rejected but because of the margin by which it was rejected: 97.88%.

“Any time a government or organization claims to have gotten 98% of the vote, I get skeptical,” wrote Sergio Sarmiento, political columnist for the business newspaper El Financiero.

But experts who have studied villages in the despoiled remnants of this rain forest say the numbers are reasonable because the style of democracy practiced here emphasizes consensus rather than confrontation.

“There is never a 60-40 vote in indigenous communities,” said Neil Harvey, a political scientist at Brown University who has done research in Chiapas. “They keep discussing it until everybody is in agreement. This can take from several days to several months.”

Zapatista democracy is a hybrid of Indian customs and the ideas brought to the jungle by social workers and priests who believed in liberation theology, a movement in the Roman Catholic Church that emphasizes grass-roots religion and cooperation. As the rain forest was settled over the past three decades, those ideas have developed in a climate of betrayal by a succession of leaders that has fostered a general distrust of leadership. The result is an elaborate form of direct democracy that relies on constant consultation with the rank and file.

“Long before they took up arms, there was a tradition of collective decision-making,” said Luis Hernandez, a social critic who works in a cooperative for coffee growers with plots smaller than five acres, like many in this jungle.

Indian settlers from the Chiapas highlands brought the tradition of cooperation with them when they began to colonize the jungle in the 1960s, he said.

That foundation was reinforced by the priests who accompanied the settlers. They encouraged the colonists by turning their sojourn into a pilgrimage to the Promised Land with readings from Exodus--translated into Tzeltal.

They also educated villagers who showed leadership skills and developed the kind of grass-roots Christian base communities that were evolving throughout Latin America. These were communities of believers who worked together to overcome their miserable conditions and to build a better future.

“They promoted collective practices and reinforced the role of the family and the community,” Hernandez said. The church remains vital in isolated jungle communities. Every day at dusk, the church bell in Ibarra rings and villagers file quietly into the settlement’s only painted building. They pray silently for five minutes and then resume their daily chores.

Collective decision-making was honed during the 1970s, when the colonists were threatened with expulsion because of government efforts to save the last North American rain forest.

Ibarra was one of the villages scheduled for destruction. “We knew that we all had to work together or we would lose everything,” recalled one middle-aged man who, like many Zapatista sympathizers, refused to identify himself.

Villagers banded together with the help of outsiders from the northern city of Torreon who had organized poor urban neighborhoods to demand services, Hernandez said. Known as the Union of the People, they firmly believed in Mao Tse-tung’s ideas of confidence in the masses. Their ideology fit well with the collective traditions developing among the Lacandon settlers.

In those days, once a decision was reached, settlers would pitch in money to send a representative to the state capital to make their demands known. Occasionally, they raised the $200 air fare to the nearest town with a paved road, where the representative could catch a bus. Normally, the person chosen walked or rode a mule for four days over muddy trails to town. The result was usually the same.

“They sold us out,” said an outspoken woman who gave her name as Oralia. “They came back with new boots, new clothes and no results.”

After 15 years of struggle, the government redrew the boundaries for the Lacandon reserve in 1989 and let the settlers keep the land they now farm but prohibited further incursions into the jungle. The experience undercut the settlers’ faith in representatives but helped them build a structure for making collective decisions and resisting the government together.

Harvey witnessed the decision-making process while doing field research seven years ago in Venustiano Carranza, a town near the region now controlled by the rebels.

“They were deciding whether to lead a demonstration to the state capital in Tuxtla Gutierrez,” he recalled, “whether that was the correct action to take, or to continue negotiating with the government.”

The issue, as it often is in Chiapas, was a land dispute. A demonstration would require a trek to the city, carrying supplies, sleeping outdoors and leaving land and livestock to the care of a few who stayed behind. The product of all that sacrifice might simply be angering the government and spoiling the negotiations. The question was hashed out over two days of assemblies.

“Core groups of leaders did most of the talking,” Harvey said. “They would break up into small groups that drew their own conclusions, then went back to the general assembly.”

By the time they finished, everyone had agreed they should march on the state capital.

Even reporters taking the pulse of rebel sentiment are expected to conduct interviews in front of the entire community. An assembly is called, and everyone who wants to speak expresses a viewpoint on each question. And everyone listens.

When private conversations about this year’s crop or village history turn to political questions, Zapatistas usually demur politely, suggesting, “Let’s save that for the assembly.”

Based on that tradition, the seven delegates from Ibarra hiked for two days from their village to a rebel base camp to hear Zapatista representatives explain the peace proposal.

“We all came to make sure we understood,” one man said in a group interview during a break in the assembly. “Relying on one person could lead to mistakes.”

That was a diplomatic way of saying that Zapatista villages no longer trust a single delegate. “Sending a committee is a kind of guarantee,” Hernandez said. “They keep an eye on each other.”

The Ibarra delegation took its responsibilities seriously, filling the graph-paper tablet with explanations for words that do not translate easily from Spanish into Tzeltal, such as autonomy.

Once all the delegates were certain they understood the proposal, they returned to their communities to discuss the plan. Photos in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada showed voting by raised hands and tallies on chalkboards, which most reporters were not allowed to see.

That glimpse of Zapatista democracy contrasts sharply with the federal elections that rebels watched in 1991.

Only 104 voter precincts were set up in Ocosingo--a county about half the size of Delaware in a state where barely one-fifth of the roads are paved. Most of the Zapatista-held territory is in Ocosingo.

“In order to vote, peasants had to walk for hours,” Hernandez said. Nevertheless, election results show that 20,931 people voted in Ocosingo in 1991, nearly 200 voters per precinct. Less than three years before residents took up arms against the government, 72% voted for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, according to official vote tallies.

Hernandez does not believe those figures. “It’s obvious that they stuffed the ballot boxes,” he said. “The election did not reflect the concerns of the voters.”

With that history, observers said, Zapatistas are understandably skeptical about the presidential elections scheduled Aug. 21. While no one expects the federal government to transform the national political system into the elaborate consultation system common in Indian communities, some observers say the government could learn from the Zapatistas.

“The regime of a ruling party is over,” Hernandez said. “It must be modified into a democratic system.”