8 Restoring the Assembly in Oxchuc, Chiapas: Elections through Indigenous Normative Systems (2015-2019)

Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor

Over the last decade, a new momentum has emerged in the struggle for Indigenous self-government in Chiapas; a struggle aimed at displacing the political parties from control of the decision-making process in municipal council elections. This trend has been visible for the last seven years (2015-2022). The municipality of Oxchuc, which forms the subject of this chapter, was the first to achieve council elections run through the electoral procedures of Indigenous Normative Systems (INS). These are also known as Internal Normative Systems or the customary (“habit and custom”) electoral system, terms that I will use interchangeably in the following.

In the years that followed the signing of the San Andrés Accords¹ between the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and the federal and state governments² in 1996, the government’s delays in implementing the agreement resulted in stagnation. A worldview thus began to emerge from within the Indigenous territories around the notion that “autonomy” referred to those controversial areas that were exercising de facto autonomy, self-proclaimed in practice. The EZLN was recognized as the main protagonist of this demand (Mora, 2010). Constitutionally recognized rights to self-determination and autonomy were simply not available or accessible. The failure to enforce these rights was partly the result of government omission, since State³ institutions had long ignored them despite their inclusion in the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States since 2001 (González, 2002).

From 2011 on, however, things began to change. That year marked the beginning of a new stage, one in which the courts and the Supreme Court of Justice began to play a role in resolving issues of Indigenous consultation with regard to electoral matters. This has led to a judicialization of the right to self-government, the result of the impact of international law, and has culminated in a normative transformation and unprecedented activism on the part of the courts (Sieder, 2011; Hernández, 2016; Bustillos, 2017; Aragón, 2018; Alejos, 2018). It was a constitutional reform in the area of human rights in 2011 that opened the path for Indigenous Peoples to take their demands for autonomy to the courts, with the municipality of San Francisco Cherán pioneering this breakthrough. Since then, local political actors have gained new resources in the dispute over municipal political power, opening up cracks in the monopoly of political parties and displacing them. At the same time, they have sought to revive their INS, strengthening the assembly as the electoral space (Martínez, 2013).⁴ Successful results have been obtained from this strategy in the municipalities of Cherán, Michoacán in 2011 (Aragón, 2015, 2018), Ayutla de los Libres, Guerrero in 2018 (Gálvez & Fernández, n/d), and Oxchuc, Chiapas in 2019 (Méndez, 2020).

A trend is therefore emerging. The good results in other municipalities and, above all, the minimum floor of rights to political autonomy that has been created by jurisprudential bodies such as the Electoral Tribunal of Judicial Power of the Federation (TEPJF) (Alejos, 2018) has motivated political actors to fight for a change in their electoral system, i.e., to move from elections through political parties to appointing their authorities through their own normative or customary system. This is seen as a way of regaining control over decisions regarding their local authority, a power that had been strongly violated by the intervention of political parties. The judicial avenue has been shown to be very effective as a space for disputes over Indigenous Peoples’ collective political rights.

Political Opportunity Theory, developed by McAdam et al. (2005), refers to the notion that the fate of social movements depends on the opportunities that arise for them to change the institutional structure, at times when power is sensitive to the demands of social actors, by finding allies within the structures of power. In the case in point, the regime change toward INS in the municipality of Oxchuc in 2019 occurred in a context of political opportunity, favoured by the unprecedented activism of the courts (Aragón, 2018) at a time when a powerful social movement within the municipality was disputing the State’s control of its political decisions and found a political opportunity to change the electoral system.

Progress in exercising the right to Indigenous political self-determination in the area of municipal self-government is also fuelled by other experiences. Since 1998, Oaxaca has recognized the coexistence of two electoral systems by which to elect its local council: political parties and Indigenous Normative Systems (Canedo, 2008), within a context of broad recognition of Indigenous law (Hernández, 2016). Each of the state’s 570 municipalities has the power to choose one or other of the systems, by means of internal self-consultation procedures. By 2019, 73% (417 municipalities) of the 570 municipalities had opted for a customary system,⁵ giving rise to a great diversity of procedures in the renewal of office (Velásquez, 2001).

Due to its long history and the large number of municipalities organized under this system, the TEPJF has received numerous challenges in this regard (JDCIs: Judgment for the Protection of People’s Political Electoral Rights under the Regime of Indigenous Normative Systems) and issued resolutions on these together with copious jurisprudence (Bustillo, 2017), resulting in “a wide range of rights.” On this basis, the Permanent Commission for Peace and Indigenous Justice of Oxchuc Chiapas (CPJIO) took advantage of this normative framework as a political opportunity and appealed to the courts to be able to exercise their autonomous right to elect their local council through procedures determined by their own assembly, without the interference of political parties.

The jurisprudential criteria set out by the TEPJF, based on an human rights principle, recognize that the legal system of Indigenous communities, as producers of law, is in constant flux, creating, recreating and transforming itself (De la Mata, 2018). This recognition establishes that the general assembly is the highest body of regulatory production (Jurisprudence 20/2014) (Protocol, 2017, p. 75). This capacity to produce regulations has been called the “power of normative self-determination.” In the event of conflicts, it is therefore recognized that the assembly has the right to resolve such issues through its own procedures.

Since 2014, jurisprudential criteria have resulted in changes to electoral law. These point toward the formation of a pluricultural State that recognizes that the Mexican legal system comprises both Indigenous law and statutory law. In this respect, Thesis LII/2016 establishes that:

Indigenous law should not be considered as mere habit and custom constituting, according to the sources of the legal system, a subsidiary and subordinate source, since they are two distinct legal systems in coordination. The Mexican legal system therefore forms part of a legal pluralism, which considers that the law is made up of the law formally legislated by the State, as well as Indigenous law, generated by the Indigenous Peoples and the communities that comprise them. (Thesis LII/2016) Mexican legal system consists of Indigenous law and formally legislated law) (Protocol, 2017, p. 33).

These theses and jurisprudence, issued as resolutions to the challenges, have their origin in and are directed mainly at grievances coming from the state of Oaxaca, but their scope is not limited to the municipalities of that entity. They also form a source for other Indigenous Peoples’ litigation in other areas, as well as for the courts that have to resolve these matters and, as we shall see in the case at hand, also of the Local Public Electoral Bodies (OPLE). The Indigenous consultation process and the election that took place in Oxchuc municipality, organized by the Institute of Elections and Citizen Participation of the State of Chiapas (IEPC), passed through this filter of jurisprudential criteria. The CPJIO, promoting the demand for autonomy, also appealed to them.

After a long battle in the streets and in the courts, and in the context of an acute post-electoral conflict that led Oxchuc to the verge of a political crisis, the CPJIO finally obtained a ruling in its favor on 28 June 2017 (TEECH/JDC/19/2017). The court ordered the IEPC to consult its population so that they could decide on their preference for one or other electoral system: that of political parties or “customary” system (i.e., INS). After the Indigenous consultation process, which is documented in this contribution, an assembly of 11,921 voters gathered on the esplanade of the central park on 13 April 2019 to elect their new local council by means of a “show of hands” procedure. Prior to this, more than 300 community assemblies had been held all around the municipality, contributing to the restoration of its assembly system through deliberative exercises in different areas. This innovation sought to overcome more than two decades of political conflict created by party-political disputes that had left a long aftermath of violence. Ten days after the election, the new council took office in a smooth handover that was celebrated with a festival.

The question guiding this contribution is as follows: how was it that Oxchuc, a municipality with a long history of internal conflict, fragmented into 11 electoral assemblies organized by the different political parties in order to elect their candidates, was able to restore the “single community assembly” and elect its local council through a system based on habit and custom? And how did the CPJIO take advantage of the political opportunity created by the electoral jurisprudence of the TEPJF to transform a post-electoral conflict into a struggle for autonomy?

What follows here is the result of my attendance at different activities throughout the municipality, the participant observation carried out, interviews with actors and my participation as an electoral observer registered with the IEPC, as well as an analysis of documentary information. This contribution contains a description of the documented process and a critical analysis in this regard. The text is organized into four sections. The first documents the post-electoral conflict that erupted in 2015 and the gradual shaping of the CPJIO as an autonomous political subject; the second focuses on describing the consultation process for a change of system as well as the way in which the handover of authority was implemented; the third refers to the difficulties faced by the new council once it was established, and I conclude with a final reflection on the challenges of replicating this electoral model in other Indigenous municipalities around the state.

The 2015 Post-electoral Conflict and the Shaping of an Autonomous Political Subject

Indigenous municipalities in Chiapas have undergone profound transformations since 1994. After the armed uprising of the EZLN, the municipality became the locus for the construction of different subjects with distinct political actions. Authors such as H. Zemelman (2010) emphasize the importance of the subjectivity of the subject in the potential for change that they engender and develop, in the context of their own history. In this sense, the social actors in the Indigenous municipalities are subjects within their own historicity and, in turn, are constituent members of new realities, which they create and are capable of transforming, this potential being one of the features of the subject. After 2016, the Oxchuc dissent was shaping to be an emancipatory subject that would make it possible to change the instituted social order, making way for new forms of social organization and prospects for the future developed within a framework of autonomy, highlighting the emancipatory potential of the law (Aragón, 2018).

At the turn of the 21^st century, a significant number of Oxchuc citizens were disappointed with the electoral system that was being used to elect their local municipal council. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had for several years prevented any other party from winning an election. In the Indigenous municipalities of the Chiapas highlands, a form of political organization was in place which J. Rus (1995) denoted as, “Institutional Revolutionary Community.” This name was a parody of the dominant single-party system in Mexico, characterized by corporatism, coercion and vote-buying. This is why, when the EZLN called the people to rise up to oppose this political system, a group of dissidents in Oxchuc, such as Juan Encinos, joined as sympathizers of the rebel army. But the local PRI, structured as a cacicazgo [‘fiefdom’] did not permit them to become an opposition force and instead repressed them heavily, with their main leaders becoming internally displaced. Some communities remained as rebellious supporters but with a very low profile, having no impact on local politics. This was until all this pent-up frustration suddenly manifested itself in a post-election conflict in 2015.

The period 2015-2018 was particularly intense in the political struggle in Oxchuc municipality. It began with an internal political dispute within the PRI (February 2015) regarding the procedure that named María Gloria Sánchez Gómez as its candidate for municipal president. She would be running for a second time (she had already held office from 2005-2007), succeeding her husband, Norberto Sántiz López, who had been president in 2012-2015 and 2002-2004, and federal deputy from 1997-2000. This couple had therefore held power for a 15-year period due to their activism in the PRI. Their long tenure in power had allowed them to shape a fiefdom characterized by a lack of transparency in public resource management and violence against their adversaries (Burguete, 2020a).

The conflict within the PRI intensified when, a month before the election (19 July 2015), María Gloria Sánchez abandoned the PRI to run under the banner of the Green Ecologist Party of Mexico (PVEM), then the ruling party in the state. As on previous occasions, the election results again favored the cacicazgo candidate, as she had resorted to vote-buying and intimidation, both common political practices (Méndez, 2020).

Dissatisfied, her opponents came out to protest. A few days after she took office, party activists occupied the municipal palace building. They set up barricades and blocked the road. Up to that point, her opponents had lacked coordination, they had stood under the banners of 11 different political parties; however, their rejection of the president and defence of the municipal building to prevent her from taking office was a force that unified them. The population declared their resistance and confronted the police, who tried to evict them. In this spontaneous uprising, an intense collective action of blockades, house and vehicle fires and road takeovers led the state government to pressure the elected municipal president to request an “indefinite leave of absence,” which she obtained on 11 February 2016.

Following this decision, it was up to Congress to decide which councillor should replace her, as established by municipal law. Their opponents, however, were determined to prevent this. On 16 February 2016, they gathered on the esplanade of the central park and formed themselves into an assembly, taking the decision to appoint a council by self-proclamation, which promptly rejected the elected president. The assembly of dissidents appointed Oscar Gómez López as interim municipal president and added Juan Encinos and Ovidio López Sántiz as members of the self-proclaimed council, both of whom had, at different times, been close supporters of the EZLN. To back up their decision, they organized a demonstration in San Cristóbal de Las Casas (50 kilometers away), taking advantage of the media interest at that time due to the imminent visit of Pope Francis. Other contentious actions such as the closing of the tourist highway from San Cristóbal de Las Casas to the archaeological zone of Palenque, thus preventing foreign tourists from visiting, moved things in their favor. Under such pressure, the state government gave in. On 10 March 2016, the State Congress issued Decree 178 ratifying the council elected by the assembly a month earlier.

María Gloria Sánchez Gómez and her council were unhappy with the congressional decisión, so she took action through the courts. Her appeal (TEPJF SUP-JDC-1756/2016) was resolved on 31 August 2016, determining that the evidence provided by the complainant was proof that she had been forced to sign her leave of absence from office and that, given the manner in which this took place, it lacked constitutional or legal justification. The TEPJF therefore ordered the State Congress to reinstate her in her post. At that same time, another woman, Rosa Pérez Pérez (2015-2018), president-elect in the neighboring Tsotsil municipality of Chenalhó, was also forced to request a leave of absence under similar conditions of violence and pressure to resign (Eje Central, 2016). She, too, was unhappy and went to court to denounce political gender-based violence. Just like the president of Oxchuc, Rosa Pérez obtained a ruling in her favor (TEPJF, SUP-JDC-1654/2016).

In the case of Oxchuc, however, the assembly and the CPJIO rejected the court’s ruling and refused to hand back the municipal building. Feminists demonstrated in support of María Gloria Sánchez in various parts of Mexico, demanding her reinstatement. The “Red de Redes por la Paridad Efectiva” [Network of Networks for Effective Parity], made up of women from 15 states around the country, launched a campaign through Change.org that obtained 24,882 signatures (Cintalapanecos.com, 2018). Feminist support for Sanchez brought the clash between two human rights paradigms into perspective: that of the right of an Indigenous people to self-determination in order to decide their own government, which had been elected by popular assembly, and that of the human rights of Indigenous women, including the right to be elected and to hold office.

Legal anthropology has emphasized the relevance of approaching the study of diverse realities through intercultural dialogue, ensuring not to lose sight of the fact that the human rights discourse can become a colonial and globalizing ideology of the dominant sectors, while at the same time stressing the relevance of recognizing power inequalities within that reflection (Sousa Santos, 1998; Sierra, 2004; 2009; Sieder, 2010). This analysis does not ignore the recurrent tensions between both paradigms, since the expulsion of elected women presidents from office has been a frequent practice in the Indigenous municipalities of the Chiapas highlands over the last five years when women have gained access to these spaces due to policies of gender parity (Burguete, 2020b).

The decision taken in the electoral tribunal session called to discuss the case of the Oxchuc president, ruling in favor of restoring her municipal powers, was not unanimous. In the SUP-JDC-1756/2016 ruling, Justice Manuel González Oropeza put forward a dissenting view, positing that the tensions experienced in Oxchuc were situated in the realms of a conflict between normative systems. He felt that the people of Oxchuc had the right to self-government in the context of exercising Indigenous Peoples’ right to self-determination, for which reason the community assembly should decide on the system by which they wanted to elect their authorities, whether political parties or their own normative systems. He urged the government authorities to convene an immediate consultation before proceeding to restore the president who had been elected through the party-political system.

Justice González Oropeza’s opinion opened a window of political opportunity that had initially not been foreseen. The CPJIO accepted this proposal and focused its strategy on demanding a change of system toward “customary elections,” suppressing political parties in the fight for municipal power and preventing the president from returning to the municipal palace. The CPJIO then proceeded to litigate the autonomous right to self-government through the justice system by appealing to the strong “gamut of rights” that had been generated by the courts. After a long journey, on 28 June 2017, the Electoral Tribunal of the State of Chiapas issued judgement TEECH/JDC/19/2017 ordering the IEPC to “determine the viability of implementing the customs of said community” through a cultural opinion (expert or anthropological) aimed at verifying “the historical existence of an Indigenous Normative System in accordance with the constitutional framework of human rights...” In addition, it was to document “the situation of social stability in the municipality,” and then proceed to an Indigenous consultation in line with ILO Convention 169, so that the population could decide on the electoral system they preferred to use to elect their municipal authority.

Although this ruling accepted the CPJIO’s demand, the conflict on the ground in the municipality did not cease, thus hindering the possibility of an immediate consultation. There was growing polarization against a backdrop of further upcoming elections (2018). Finally, an unfortunate and violent event was to define the confrontation. On 24 January 2018, Board members of the CPJIO suffered an armed attack in which four people lost their lives, including Ovidio López Sántiz, a member of the self-proclaimed council, and another 10 community members were injured. Council president María Gloria Sánchez was identified as the intellectual author behind these acts and members of her council as the material authors and likely perpetrators of various crimes. This led to her removal from office. The State Congress then proceeded to form a municipal council composed of the main leaders of the CPJIO. Oscar Gómez remained as council president, ratifying the decision of the February 2016 assembly.

From that point on, a new chapter opened up for the autonomous subject that had been in the making and which now had elements in its favor. Other circumstantial events worked in the CPJIO’s favor. Polarization waned when a new federal government headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had been elected in July 2018, came to power. Unlike the previous one, the new head of government in the state, Rutilio Escandón, elected in 2018, did not oppose the renewal of the Oxchuc council using the Indigenous Normative System but rather encouraged it by means of various actions, thus giving his approval. New officials at the highest level of the Instituto Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas [National Institute for Indigenous Peoples / INPI], such as the director Adelfo Regino and his team of lawyers, also visited Oxchuc to show their support for an Indigenous people that was walking a path to autonomy, in exercise of their right to self-government.

In this new scenario, the IEPC, especially the Permanent Commission on Citizen Participation presided over by councillor Sofia Sánchez, began preparing and organizing the consultation process, holding more than 300 community assemblies and thus contributing to paving the way for a single community general assembly, which the IEPC itself had determined would be the legal and legitimate space in which to elect the new council. In taking this route, the IEPC followed jurisprudential criteria on the importance of the assembly when recognizing INS (Sánchez, 2020). The Higher Chamber of the TEPJF had determined that the Indigenous consultation on system change should take place through community assemblies (SUP-REC-193/2016 and SUP-JDC-1740/2012). It is noteworthy that Thesis XL/2011.9 March 2011, states:

INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES. FORMATION OF THE COMMUNITY GENERAL ASSEMBLY (OAXACA LEGISLATION).

The term community general assembly refers to the expression of the majority will. This can be obtained in an assembly or through the sum of assemblies carried out in each of the communities, since in both cases it implies a form of joint decision-making such that the will to form the body responsible for appointing the municipal authority can validly be issued by the municipality’s community general assembly with the participation of its members or based on consultations carried out in each of the communities that make up the municipality. (Protocol, 2017, p. 188)

Although this thesis was issued to resolve a specific case in Oaxaca, the IEPC nevertheless interpreted this jurisprudential criterion and proposed that a general assembly should elect the new council once assemblies had been held in all of the municipality’s communities. And while such a guarantees-based decision favored recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights, achieving this in Oxchuc — a municipality with 48,126 inhabitants (99. 5% of whom are Tseltal speakers) (CDI, 2015) spread out across 130 communities (unlike Oaxaca where there are fewer)⁶ — was, nevertheless, a challenge.⁷ In addition, Oxchuc was faced by an atomization of its assembly, since 11 parties had contested the 2015 elections, each of them having formed its own electoral assembly. A further challenge therefore consisted of restoring the municipal general assembly to be able to conduct the election, if so decided by the population following the consultation.

The IEPC had a duty to abide by the court’s ruling, so, in compliance with this, it proposed being guided by the jurisprudential criteria as these were the only references available to it, given that the entity lacked any implementing regulations.

Restoring the Assembly in the Process of Indigenous Consultation for Electoral System Change

On 28 June 2017, the State Electoral Tribunal of the State of Chiapas (TEECH) issued judgment TEECH/JDC/19/2017 ordering the IEPC to take a series of actions culminating in a consultation by which Oxchuc would decide on its electoral system. This would commence with an expert or cultural report documenting the electoral practices in the municipality, the situation of “social stability in the municipality,” and then proceed to the Indigenous consultation in accordance with ILO Convention 169. In order to comply with these mandates, the IEPC had to reach a common understanding of what is meant by “Indigenous Normative Systems” from the legal framework established by the jurisprudential bodies, a notion that was new for the inhabitants of the municipality since the usual concept was that of custom. It also had to listen to the voices of those who were opposed to any system change. The first to express their opposition were activists from the 11 political parties. Others were also doubtful, for different reasons: some likened it to the return of the main Elders as authorities, figures associated with ancestral ceremonial rituals. This is what is usually called “traditional religion,” something that was undesirable in a municipality in which around 50% of the population professed to be evangelical Christian (Bastian, n/d).

Women’s associations also expressed concern, doubting that women would be included in the council. This was the position of the Frente Estatal de Mujeres Indígenas de Chiapas [State Front for Indigenous Women of Chiapas], as stated in a meeting on 24 January 2019 with IEPC advisers (Memoria, 2019b, p. 75). Other citizens were not in favour of a return to the assembly voting procedure, since the party-political assembly had been the arena for legitimized exclusion. Standing up to speak in full view of others, without anonymity, was seen as a risk. Showing dissent in an assembly was punishable. The show of hands had become a means of political control.⁸

The first task of the IEPC, then, was to disseminate information on what was understood by “Indigenous Normative Systems” while drafting the guidelines for the consultation. From 9 to 15 October, together with the council president, members of the council and representatives of the CPJIO, the IEPC established working groups to clarify doubts and make progress in planning the work. These working groups collated information on the number of communities in the municipality, validated the electoral roll and prepared a map to designate the roads by which the communities could be accessed. In addition, applications were received from people to be hired as route guides and Tseltal-Spanish interpreters. All of this was agreed by those participating in the groups, and the membership of these was plural, including dissenters, to ensure that concerns could be heard.

The planning process identified that there were 130 communities spread across the municipal territory and recognized that each of them had its own community assembly, its own body of authorities and its own forms of organization. It was agreed that each community assembly should have the power to decide on the procedure by which it would issue its support for (or rejection of) a change of system. It was also agreed that such decisions would be respected, as would the electoral procedure, whether by a show of hands or the ballot box. The latter was one of the most difficult agreements to reach, since the CPJIO stated that “true habit and custom” was a plenary assembly with a show of hands and not the ballot box, which was a party-political tool. The IEPC did not accept this condition.

For its arguments, the electoral body referred to an anthropological opinion that had been prepared by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (Megchun et al., 2018). Appealing to an interlegal approach, this body recognized that, in Oxchuc municipality, the “electoral custom” included both practices, and that they were not opposing. Limiting the communities to and imposing on them just one procedure — a show of hands — was in contradiction with the autonomous rights of the communities. The IEPC was insistent that the consultation should be carried out in compliance with democratic values and human rights, from a guarantees-based and intercultural perspective (Chacón, 2020). In other words, the consultation was to eradicate the vices of the party-political assemblies which, over the last two decades, had become embodied in the local political culture.

At moments of tension, the IEPC appealed to jurisprudential criteria, for example, to jurisprudence 37/2016 issued by the Higher Chamber of the Electoral Tribunal of the Judiciary of the Federation, entitled: “INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES. THE PRINCIPLE OF MAXIMIZING AUTONOMY IMPLIES THE SAFEGUARDING AND PROTECTION OF THE INDIGENOUS NORMATIVE SYSTEM,”⁹ which states:

Indigenous Peoples’ and communities’ right to self-determination must be recognized, seeking their maximum protection and permanence. In this sense, within the framework of the application of individual and collective Indigenous rights, the jurisdictional bodies must prioritize the principle of maximizing autonomy, safeguarding and protecting the Indigenous Normative System that governs each people or community, provided that human rights are respected. This entails both the possibility of establishing their own forms of organization and that of regulating them, since both aspects constitute the cornerstone of Indigenous self-government.

The working groups agreed on the universality of suffrage, without excluding anyone on the basis of religious, political, ideological or other differences. The inclusion of women, and respect for their right to vote and to be elected, was also discussed, this being another point of tension around which it was difficult to reach a consensus. In the Oxchuc communities, land is an asset that is in the hands of men; women do not have land rights and they therefore lack the status of “cooperante” (citizen with rights and duties). At this time, the authorities and political leaders were resisting giving women equal political and electoral rights. Finally, however, the guidelines for the consultation established that women would be able to vote and be elected and would participate in all the commissions created as part of the consultation process, under conditions of parity. It was also stated that the municipal council should be composed of half men and half women. Such acceptance was pragmatic, however; in fact, the incorporation of women was a pretence given that the male-female pairings established were spouses. “Parity” was thus met, but it was a sham (Burguete, 2019a).

Another relevant aspect that was included in the guidelines was the certainty of the election. It was established that the rules, agreements and procedures would be recorded in minutes, and that these would be validated by the signatures of all participants. Given the context of conflict, however, disagreement frequently broke out, which is why it was necessary to create a “conciliation commission” to resolve differences or disagreements and avoid any possibility of affecting rights. For this commission to function, the IEPC provided training in mediation, seeking to make respect for human rights the route to internal peacebuilding (Chacón, 2020; Jiménez & Ocampo, 2019). Finally, the “guidelines” were approved on 25 October 2018 (IEPC/CG-A/216/2018).

Once the electoral rules were defined, the next step was to implement the consultation, which would be carried out through assemblies. It began with the establishment of six “informative assemblies” held in key locations in micro-regional administrative centers. The purpose was to bring the communities’ authorities together within their area of influence to inform them of the guidelines and plan the 130 “community consultation assemblies.” A committee made up of traditional authorities, municipal workers and committees was in charge of preparing the consultation in each community. To ensure that all communities participated, the commission in charge of the consultation, including IEPC officials, needed to visit each community more than twice. They needed to get as many communities as possible to give their opinion. It was agreed that the community would have the authority to decide which method of election they wanted to use, whether a show of hands or the ballot box. The final result was that 73 communities decided to use a “show of hands,” and 47 preferred the use of the ballot box. The voting results from each assembly were recorded in minutes that were then notarized (Memoria, 2019b).

At the conclusion of the entire consultation process, on 5 January 2019, the IEPC and local electoral authorities finally convened a “Plenary Assembly for the Results of the Indigenous Consultation in Oxchuc Municipality” (IEPC, 2019a). Community representatives (one man and one woman, elected on a parity basis) were selected by their community assembly to present the results. Each community statement, in favor or against changing the electoral system, was added in full view of everyone, to a giant screen showing those who supported it. The final result was that 59.18% of all the communities voted in favor of electing their local council through INS, while 38.40% voted in favor of political parties, out of a total of 116 communities that attended the plenary results assembly. The missing percentage, 2.42%, refers to consultation assemblies that were not held. Support for change was therefore won by a margin of 20.78% which, although not huge, given the unlikely result was nevertheless a significant achievement.

The election took place at the end of the consultation phase. The local stakeholders formed a “discussion group” as an electoral body to build a proposal for electoral rules. Achieving this was not easy. The debate continued to be whether the election would be by a show of hands or through the ballot box. The decision reached was that the assembly would be held on 13 April in an assembly that would elect “by a show of hands.” This was going to be a major challenge to achieve in an assembly that was expected to involve more than 10,000 voters. Another agreement was that the municipal president would be a man, and the trustee a woman, and then councillors [“rejidores”] would be selected alternately by gender, in order to form a parity council. A meeting was called for 13 April 2019 on the esplanade of the central park. The electors were appointed by each community, in equal numbers of women and men. Once a quorum of 50% plus one of the list of registered voters had been achieved in the assembly, the election was held by a show of hands. The official number of voters was 11,921, from 115 communities (Hernández, 2020, p.131). On this occasion, no competing slates were fielded (as occurs in the party-political system), but people were instead voted in to fill the positions.

The atmosphere prior to the election was tense, and there were fears of a conflict erupting. The IEPC called on the population to “conduct themselves peacefully and civilly during the election of their municipal authorities.” These fears were more than overcome, and the assembly was seen as a great popular celebration. Adelfo Regino, head of the INPI, attended as an observer “on behalf of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador” (INPI, 2019). At the conclusion of the event, the state government secretary, Ismael Brito Mazariegos, expressed his delight at the way in which the election had been conducted (Ronda Política, 2019). The Bishop of the Diocese of San Cristóbal (Gómez, 2019) and the deputy president of the State Congress (3Minutos, 2019) commented the same.

A council composed of 15 people was elected. The position of president was held by Alfredo Sántiz Gómez, a young teacher, and Rufina Gómez López was elected as the trustee. Women were also elected to the posts of substitute trustee and three full and three substitute councillors. Of the total number of council members, seven were men and eight were women. They were inaugurated ten days after the election. In fact, the assembly passed without conflict, although there was some dissent since one of the candidates for municipal president, teacher Hugo Sántiz Gómez, who came second, did not accept the result, and left the podium after the winner’s name had been declared.

The election in Oxchuc was a statewide political event. Numerous observers and journalists, some of them foreign, were present on the day of the vote. The achievement of forming a single electoral assembly and holding the election without conflict was made possible because, during the consultation process, numerous mechanisms for deliberation were implemented that built a consensus, thus restoring the community assembly system. After the Oxchuc result, elections through INS were perceived as a new paradigm for peacebuilding among the Indigenous municipalities of the Chiapas highlands, which are often burdened by internal conflict as a result of party-political struggles (Burguete, 2019b).

Municipal Authority in the Midst of a Storm

These good results were quickly tarnished, however. Barely four months after the election, conflict erupted once more, with the same belligerence as displayed in 2016. I do not intend to analyse the operations or running of the municipal government that took office on 23 April 2019 here but rather to draw attention to the difficulties it has faced as a result of decisions made during the electoral process.

Since it commenced its work, the municipal authority has been like a tiny boat on a rough sea in the midst of a storm. One initial difficulty it faced was its lack of cohesion as a government team. Given that there were no contending slates in the election process, united by affinity, but simply individuals selected by their communities and voted on separately in the assembly, this meant that the members of the council had no prior or clearly defined common plan of the actions their government would take. This problem was exacerbated because the requirement for gender parity among the councillors meant that this legal requirement could only be met through the inclusion of peasant leaders who had little schooling. Despite their history of community work, they thus faced many difficulties in holding down these positions.¹⁰ The young president-elect effectively arrived alone, without a government team to support him in his decisions. This lack of cohesion also manifested itself in a dispute among its members over a decision to distribute the benefits of municipal funds, each favoring the members that they were sent to represent.

In the local corporatist political culture that had been established by the PRI, and reproduced by the cacicazgo that governed the municipality, voters supported candidates and/or political parties with the expectation of gaining direct benefits, either as individuals or as a community. In the country’s political history of the last half century, the municipal budget had been used for corporatist purposes, with no oversight from the state government, since there had been a tacit agreement that social policy would be used for electoral purposes. Conflicts therefore frequently broke out as a means of applying pressure by which to obtain benefits. In this sense, the vote in favour of the CPJIO, and the support for a change in electoral system that this resulted in, also contained this expectation, and activists expected an immediate return. When they did not obtain this, some of them turned against the council. This dispute over access to money from municipal resources weakened the council’s management. Municipal planning is hampered by the fact that the communities’ inhabitants are demanding cash distributions because “that’s the customary way.”

In order to lobby for this, a significant number of residents took to the streets and blocked the municipal building, among other contentious acts, replicating the same belligerence of 2016 when they fought for the resignation of council president María Gloria Sánchez. The opposition erupted very early and remained in place throughout 2020 (Moon, 2020). To resolve these conflicts, actors from outside the municipality, operators from the federal and state governments and the State Congress, have had to intervene as mediators, such that the municipality has effectively lost much of its autonomy in the exercise of government.¹¹

Other problems that have arisen derive from doubts that have been sown over who the actual winner at the electoral assembly really was. When the “discussion group” decided that the method of election in an assembly of 11,000 participants would be a show of hands “because that is the customary way,” it knew the risk it would run but decided to continue because it would thus have the certainty of controlling the result. In these post-electoral conflicts in Oxchuc, opposition groups were led by teacher Hugo Gómez Sántiz, the candidate who came second in the election and who did not accept the result. In his opinion, hundreds of raised hands voted in his favor and not that of teacher Alfredo Sántiz Gómez (they are not relatives but rather lineage surnames), who was declared the winner by the “discussion group,” which was the electoral body that validated the elections.

He may be right, of course. In reality, either of them could have won. I participated as an electoral observer and the number of hands raised and the shouts heard in support of each candidate looked more or less equal. It could have been a draw. Alfredo Sántiz Gómez, former municipal president (2019-2021), is identified as a political actor close to the CPJIO, while Hugo Gómez Sántiz is not, as he has been linked to former president María Gloria Sánchez.

It is difficult to process non-conformities through one’s own institutions. The general assembly has fractured once again and the design and membership of the council is not as politically plural as it could have been given the change in electoral system. There is a lack of checks and balances in the municipal government and the council that was formed offered no space whatsoever to those who were unsuccessful. In Mexico, municipal law provides that municipal councils elected through the political party system should include councillors elected by proportional representation, also known as “plurinominal councillors,” being a total of three to five people (depending on the municipality’s population) who sit without having been part of the directly elected council. Each plurinominal or proportional representation councillor is appointed by the losing political party. It may be the candidate for president who did not win the election, or any other person designated by the losing political party. This “proportional representation” was created to achieve political balance in a municipality, and thus include representatives of the defeated political parties in the spaces of municipal power and decision-making.¹² But the customary council that was elected on 13 April in Oxchuc did not include such a process.

Nor did it achieve plurality in any other way, although there were other options. For example, on changing the electoral system to INS, the municipalities of Cherán and Ayutla de los Libres altered the design of their town halls, turning them into government councils, with a slightly different form of councillor (concejiles, in extended municipal councils) and plural representation (Aragón, 2018;¹³ Gálvez & Fernández, n/d¹⁴). In Oxchuc, however, this step was not taken. In conversation with community lawyer Gabriel Méndez (13 March 2019), who was one of the main ideologues behind the process being documented, he commented to me that this change was not made in Oxchuc for two reasons. First, because it would give fuel to their opponents’ arguments, given that an extended council was not customary and, second, because this municipal design lacked certainty given that it is not recognized in either federal or state legislation, and the fear was that this could have repercussions on the process for accessing municipal financing, as was initially the case in Cherán and Ayutla. Perhaps in the 2021 elections, a next step could be to redesign the council to include opponents as part of the autonomous construction of Indigenous self-government, as this has been so haphazard in the first stage and appears to have failed completely.

This is not the first time that a struggle for autonomy has been frustrated in an Indigenous municipality in the Chiapas highlands due to the local political culture. C. Renard (2005) documented a process of “de facto autonomy” in the Tseltal municipality of Amatenango del Valle in the state’s highlands on the part of a group that declared itself Zapatista at the time of the armed uprising. Their political practices were soon to reproduce those inherited from the culture of the “institutional revolutionary community” (PRI), however, even though they continued to consider themselves “autonomous,” a sort of gatopardismo [saying one thing and doing another], with the transformative spirit of the experience finally evaporating. In this sense, Cruz and Long (2020), who analyzed the experience of the Indigenous consultation in Oxchuc, referred to the intolerance and exclusion that the leaders of the process resorted to as “gatopardismo.” Recondo (2007) had already observed gatopardismo in Oaxaca in the Indigenous municipalities in the middle of the first decade of the 21^st century.

In this general context, we can therefore conclude that the features of the local political culture may be a factor that limits and constrains social transformation (Gutiérrez et al., 2015). This has been the case in Oxchuc, where the process was tarnished by a stubborn clientelist political culture that held back the proposed momentum for autonomy. The results or the impact of the change in the electoral system will differ depending on the historical and cultural features of the subject, and so the transforming effects in Cherán, Ayutla or Oxchuc will be different by virtue of the different political culture in the municipality in question.

In the same vein, it is not possible to conclude conclusively on the role of the courts. On the one hand, their excessive intervention — in what has been called “a judicialization of politics” — has been questioned (Sieder et al. Al., 2012). However, while such an issue may be true in contexts like Mexico, where the executive and legislative powers often act against the rights of Indigenous Peoples, preferring neoliberal policies, the behavior of the electoral courts that is documented here, i.e., Aragón’s (2018) proposed use of the law as a tool for emancipation, seems to be closer to the Chiapas and Mexican reality. The electoral courts have created a political opportunity for the Indigenous municipalities to emancipate themselves from the political parties, at least thus far.

Challenges of an Electoral Model Using Indigenous Normative Systems in Chiapas: Final Reflections

The difficulty facing peace in Oxchuc is the strained coexistence between the various factions at dispute over power; some of them have proposed a return to the political party system, although they are unlikely to have much success. The jurisprudential criteria do not favor them: the TEPJF has given municipal assemblies of representatives the power to elect their authorities by means of INS and not the electoral institution (IEPC), and this decision has undergone a consultation process. This was determined by the TEPJF when resolving a challenge by citizens of Ayutla de los Libres municipality in Guerrero, who demanded a return to the political party system after having held elections through INS on 15 July 2018. In response to their petition, the Mexico City Regional Chamber of the Electoral Tribunal of the Judiciary of the Federation (TEPJF) reaffirmed that the “Municipal Assembly of Representatives of Ayutla de los Libres” is the authorized customary authority because it was “recognized as such when the municipal council was established following the election held through the Indigenous Normative System in exercise of the powers of the Indigenous Peoples and communities” (SRCDMX, 2020). With these measures, electoral bodies are thus transitioning from a stage of protectionism to one of minimal intervention and maximum autonomy of the Indigenous Peoples (De la Mata, 2018).

Interpreting these jurisprudential criteria, it can thus be stated that the decision to elect by means of INS has already been taken by a community assembly in Oxchuc and is therefore irreversible. The challenge that now remains is for the people of Oxchuc to proceed to elect their authorities in 2021 through their own normative systems, rectifying the mistakes made in the 2019 process and eradicating the political culture inherited from the PRI and the party-political assemblies, which persist even though there are no longer political parties.

It is worth noting that this exercise in autonomy on the part of the Tseltal people of Oxchuc is important for Indigenous social organizations interested in the struggle for Indigenous autonomy. In fact, many followed it with interest and contributed to it, such as the Red Nacional Indígena [National Indigenous Network / RNI], and it was hoped that this experience might trigger other processes and be replicated in other municipalities in Chiapas. And indeed this is what happened. The “Community Government Commission for Chilón and Sitalá” and its team of lawyers took their request to the courts to obtain a ruling in their favor aimed at electing their councils by means of their Indigenous Normative Systems, dispensing with political parties. The TEECH responded by issuing rulings in its favor in June 2018 (cumulative SX-JDC-222/2018 and SX-JDC-223/2018 plus TEECH/JDC/154/2018), instructing the IEPC to conduct the necessary anthropological research and proceed with the consultation to find out whether or not the citizens were in favor of changing the electoral system.

In order to comply with the rulings, in August 2019 the IEPC decided to commence a consultation in Chilón municipality. They first had to produce the anthropological report, and then complete the information and planning stages of the consultation with all local stakeholders. The consultation was to consist of two assemblies held in each of the municipality’s communities followed by a “results assembly” where the votes from each community assembly would be received. If they were found to be in favor of changing the system for a customary one, then they would proceed to hold elections without political parties. This is an action plan that replicated the methodology developed in Oxchuc.

The conditions were not the same, however. First of all, there were challenges in terms of population, geography and orography. In 2015, Chilón, a Tseltal municipality with a 98% Indigenous population, recorded 127,914 inhabitants, three times more than Oxchuc; in that same year it had 654 communities (four times more than Oxchuc) spread across a vast rural territory of more than 1,685 km², of which one-third was located in the Lacandón Jungle region of the state. In addition, it faced adverse political conditions. A survey could not be carried out in the field because the anthropologists were met with violence from opponents who wanted to prevent the research from being conducted (SIPAZ, 2019). Unlike in Oxchuc, the IEPC did not have the support of the municipal authority to facilitate the consultation and, in contrast, was seen to be sabotaging it (EDUCA, 20199). Not only that but both the IEPC staff and the members of the “Community Government Commission for Chilón and Sitalá,” who were promoting the initiative and who accompanied them, were attacked by opponents of the system change. All this was in the midst of a wider repressive context, with several dozen people forcibly displaced due to the militarization of the municipality.

Against this backdrop of violence, the IEPC demanded a certain level of security to be able to carry out the tasks required for the consultation process (Chiapas Paralelo, 2020). By 2020, further problems had emerged. The COVID-19 pandemic was preventing entry into the communities and they had closed their internal borders to avoid infection. Despite the fact that Chilón and Sitalá had obtained rulings in 2018 to enable a consultation by which to express their support (or not) for a change of system, this consultation had therefore not taken place by the end of 2020 and it is now unlikely to be held before the elections of 2021, since the electoral processes are already underway. This election process recommenced in 2021, when forty local parliamentarians and 123 councils were elected. And any system change that is agreed will not now be implemented until 2024.

Faced with these challenges, the IEPC has become tougher. When it conducted the Indigenous consultation in Oxchuc, it took the jurisprudential criteria that considered community assemblies to be subjects of the right to make decisions as a roadmap for its strategy. In the case of Chilón, however, the challenges it has faced have made it difficult to replicate this model. In a scenario of new municipal elections held in 2021, the IEPC “Chiapa-nized” the rules and, on 20 March 2020, approved a “Regulation to deal with requests for Indigenous consultations on electoral matters, submitted to the Institute of Elections and Citizen Participation of the State of Chiapas” (Agreement IEPC/CG-A/008/2020), which distanced itself from the way the system had been applied in Oxchuc. Reinforcing the regulations, the state’s constitution was amended to recognize the Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas’ right to elect their authorities through their own normative systems (24 June 2020) so that autonomous demands for a change of electoral system would no longer have to go through the courts to obtain this right. The IEPC is now the point of contact for the process.

These decisions mean there are several new developments. The regulation establishes that a request for system change must be filed by legally recognized community authorities and not by social organizations, as was the case in Oxchuc, Chilón and Sitalá. The authorities and the local population must build an internal consensus such that the request to be channelled to the IEPC is a product of a “general assembly of requesting communities” that “comprises the equivalent of twenty-five percent of the communities in the municipality, which in turn represent at least twenty-five percent of the electoral list of said municipal geographic demarcation”; furthermore, the request must be submitted once an electoral process has concluded in order to begin its preparation, which will take some time given the large number of assemblies that need to be held to gain the support and community consensus required.

Unlike in Oxchuc, where it was the IEPC that took on the task of restoring the assembly system in order to proceed with the Indigenous consultation, in the regulations now governing the consultations the IEPC has distanced itself from any excessive intervention and will now simply be the recipient of an Indigenous people’s demand when they are fighting to recover their political autonomy. Even the “management committee” will have to gather the documentation to establish the existence of an Indigenous people, without the necessary involvement of external anthropological experts, as the TEECH judgments had required in the cases of Oxchuc, Chilón and Sitalá. Given the atomization of their assembly due to political party membership, this challenge is perceived as difficult for those Indigenous municipalities that are interested. However, they believe that by changing to an Indigenous Normative System, these municipalities will have the opportunity to embark on a new path toward the restoration of their assembly system and, with it, their recovery as an Indigenous people.

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