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The Guerrilla Movement as a Project

There seems to be a tendency among Latin Americanists at a time of highly refined counterinsurgency techniques to see guerrilla movements as generally detrimental to the rural base communities supporting them. I am referring in particular to David Stoll’s book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (1999), in which he confirms the statements made in an earlier book on peasants of the Ixil triangle caught in the crossfire of opposing armies (Stoll, 1993). Stoll argues that not only is the Guatemalan Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor—EGP) responsible for the enormous loss of life in the rural population but the international solidarity brought about by Menchú’s publication has led to a prolongation of the war and the murderous violence in Guatemala. It is not my purpose here to contest Stoll’s findings for Guatemala, especially because I lack the necessary knowledge about the area to do so, but I would like to use the recent debate (see especially Latin American Perspectives 26 [6]) about his book to show how by getting involved with a guerrilla movement one peasant community has been able put itself in a position that is in many ways better than before. The case that I present in this article, which I believe to be representative of many other communities in the area, is that of the village San Emiliano, a colonist community settled in the 1950s in the remote Las Cañadas/Selva Lacandona region of Chiapas, Mexico. At the time of my fieldwork there, this community was unanimously supporting the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army for National Liberation—EZLN), an organization whose remarkable rootedness in the local peasant communities will be made explicit here. I also want to show that at least at the time of the research in spring 1997, involvement with the guerrillas on the part of communities striving to improve their living conditions had