Indigenous Autonomy and Land Defense

The long tradition of indigenous community self-governance and territorial defense in Mexico, especially as it intersects with land reform, extractivism, and the drug war. Includes the Zapatista project in Chiapas (1994–), the Purépecha community of Cherán’s 2011 expulsion of illegal loggers, police, and municipal government in favor of governance under pre-Hispanic customary law, and the broader pattern of communities using the protections of agrarian reform and usos-y-costumbres frameworks to resist criminal, state, and corporate incursion simultaneously.

The Mexican state’s post-1992 turn to “neoliberal multiculturalism” recognized pluricultural identity while withholding the specific federal regulations and political representation that would have made those rights load-bearing. Indigenous autonomy, in the current conjuncture, therefore tends to be constituted from below — through autodefensas, ejido assemblies, and regional coordinations — rather than granted from above.