Economic Salvation Through the Internet

In this town in the highlands of Chiapas, the coffee-bean buyers are easy to spot. Their two-story concrete houses, complete with garages and metal doors, occupy half a city block. The homes of the Indian peasants who grow the coffee are adobe. And therein lies an unexpected story.

The Indian peasants have no access to world coffee markets other than through the local buyers in Bochil. As a result, they are financially abused. Captive and poor, they pay for life’s essentials by indebting themselves to loan sharks who abound near here.

I went to Bochil recently to meet the members of a coffee cooperative, known as Mut Vitz, that was formed two years ago by 650 Indian peasant growers to break the stranglehold of the local coffee buyers. Mut Vitz--”Bird Mountain” in the Tzotzil Indian language--has a small office, warehouse and packaging operation. But it still exports less than 10% of the 950 tons of coffee beans it produces annually.

All that would change if Mut Vitz had what it covets above all else--an Internet connection. Coffee buyers in other countries pay up to five times more than the buyers in Bochil do, but Mut Vitz can’t contact them cheaply. Telefonos de Mexico, or Telmex, the former state monopoly, says that connecting the Indian cooperative to a major city that has Internet service wouldn’t be profitable. So, the closest Internet connection is two hours away, in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas’ former capital.

On Jan. 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect, the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) rebelled not far from Bochil. Protesting the abject poverty in which millions of Mexican Indians live, the EZLN in part blamed globalization for the Indians’ sad fate. But the case of Mut Vitz demonstrates that, if anything, Mexico’s Indians suffer from too little globalization.

Globalization is connectivity to the world chiefly through technology and open markets. Its basic tools are literacy, electricity, roads, airports, telecommunications and the Internet. The Indians in Bochil, as do their counterparts in the rest of Mexico, have none of these. They are victims of centuries of disinvestment in education, communication and transportation--the essentials of connectivity.

Globalization has thrown into brutal relief just how isolated Mexico’s Indians are. Some still live in areas that are accessible only by small aircraft on clear days. Many Indian villages are hours by foot from schools and health clinics.

These are obvious signs of isolation, but the less obvious ones are no less pernicious.

On my way to Bochil, I met Juan Manuel Perez, a 22-year-old Tzotzil Indian. He is a student at the Center for Full Indian Development, a private vocational school in San Cristobal de las Casas. Perez’s goal is to learn how to type, a skill that rivals that of reading and writing in today’s high-tech economy. No one in Perez’s village knows how to type. So, he spends half his day at the center in front of a sticky manual typewriter, a towel draped over his hands and the keys, copying government documents for practice.

Almost every student who arrives at the center doesn’t know how to type. Many can’t read or write. Some don’t know how to drive a car. The school also offers courses in baking, weaving, farming and animal husbandry because the Indians’ knowledge in these traditional activities is so paltry.

This lack of basic knowledge is also the bane of the Mut Vitz coffee cooperative. Only two of the co-op’s members know how to use e-mail. Andres Diaz, 19, and Mariano Gonzales, 21, both sons of coffee growers, take computer training one day a month as money permits. Web site design remains a total mystery to these young men.

Improving Indians’ economic lot has become a major theme of Vicente Fox’s administration, Congress and Indian and human-rights groups. The Mexican president has proposed an ambitious infrastructure-building program, known as Plan Puebla-Panama, to connect the most isolated and poorest communities in Mexico’s southeastern states, where the country’s largest Indian population lives, to seven Central American countries. It’s unclear where the money to pay for all the roads, bridges, airports and telephone lines will come from, but few doubt the need for such an undertaking.

Much smaller-scaled efforts are already underway. In Chiapas, Margarito Ruiz, coordinator of the National Indigenous Assembly for Autonomy, shops for science and engineering scholarships to award his Indian students. Eleven of them are in Havana studying medicine on Cuban government scholarships.

“People who are malnourished and shoeless, that’s poverty. It’s not Indian culture,” said Ruiz, a Tojolabal Maya Indian. “A strong society that uses cars and planes strengthens its identity because it has time to think how to develop its identity. It isn’t thinking constantly how it’s going to feed itself or its children who are dying.”

Indian doctors or computer technicians? For many Mexicans, those are strange notions. Mexicans often imagine Indians as colorful repositories of national culture--folks trapped in time and natural habitat. But geographic and intellectual isolation is a recipe for cultural decline and poverty.

At the moment, most Indians face two fates: subsistence farming or, when that fails, selling gum on the streets of Mexico City. If globalization is allowed to reach the highlands of Chiapas, and if the Indians there and elsewhere in Mexico are given the opportunity to learn its tools, those alternatives will dramatically multiply. Indian economic self-determination, as with Mut Vitz, may only be an Internet connection away.