"Attacks on sustainable societies: the Wixárika answer"

Wirikuta, in the south of the Chihuahua desert, is the Wixárika’s most sacred place, where the world was created, their most venerated gods reside, and the sacred peyote cactus grows. The future of Wirikuta poses the biggest problem among the many challenges the Wixaritari are facing: different mining, agro-industry, toxic dumping and water management projects threaten to wipe out the entire Wixárika culture once and for all by bulldozing the peyote sacrament and its habitat out of this world. To put it in perspective: what the US government tried in vain to achieve through a chemical war against the coca plant in the previous century is now undertaken against peyote in the neo-liberal way by de facto outsourcing of the war on drugs to international conglomerates. The magnitude of this challenge and the great distance between the Huichol homeland in the Sierra Madre Occidental and the Cerro Quemado in the Chihuahua desert, some 500kms, are moreover compounded by the cultural adjustments to be made in order to organize a defense strategy.

The time-honored defenses by small groups and individual Huichols against aggressive proselytism, depreciation of peyote, criminalization of peyoteros, scattered land grabbing and attacks on separate ranches and communities in the Wixárika homeland, amongst many others, have been dwarfed by the sudden need for an overall plan to fight predatory businesses intent on scraping Wirikuta bare and annihilate the sacred natural sites that feed the Wixárika culture, its sacraments, its people, its ancestors and its gods. No longer could respect for rights be claimed from local administrations and the courts, as the Huichols now had to organize on the highest level and surpass their own history of a loose confederation of small quasi-autonomous religious communities and create an efficient central decision-making body to adequately address the strategies of the adversaries. Instead of operating in the shadows of a self-sought isolation and religious segregation, they now were forced to perform in the spotlight of the world theatre, to be transparent and come-up with confidence-building strategies. Most of all, they had to forge alliances the world over, the way their adversaries had done.

The 2012 joint consultation of the gods by the mara’akate (shamans) of over 20 ceremonial centers at Cerro Quemado was the historical response of the religious and political leadership to these new challenges and produced a cornerstone of Wixárika policy with ‘The Message of the Gods’ ( El Mensaje de las Deidades – Peritaje Tradicional Wixárika en Wirikuta) and ‘The Declaration of Wirikuta’ (Declaración de Wirikuta). In the first text the gods ask the mara’akate to respect and protect all the sacred places, to unite and live in a balanced way and to make peace. In the second text the Huichol leadership invited the support and help of the national and international community. These texts guided the DPI in its selection of the Huichol for the NPP-nomination.
This new ‘cooperation’ approach had a great start. People from all walks of life joined and the Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta, which combined Huichols and civil society, obtained acclaimed successes, like the 2012 Wirikuta Fest in Mexico City where over 60.000 people supported the Wixárika request for ‘the right to the sacred’, meetings at the UN and the Federal Government and a court ordered suspension of the mining exploitation.

Unfortunately, however, a variety of factors undermined these cooperative efforts as no substantial progress was made after 2012.  By the beginning of 2017, the Wixaritari were back to square one. Hurdles resulted from the immense lack of experience of Huichol leadership whose expectations of their allies were enormous. As frustrations grew between the different partners in the collaboration, mutual trust eroded, and progress came to a halt. Two issues at the heart of the matter, struck in particular.

The first one was the end of the indigenous dream of a successful UN-accompanied emancipation process. The world’s indigenous peoples had obtained during the previous 25 years a series of basic rights to defend themselves in the national and international arena. Paramount is the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples which grants them the rights to self-determination, develop their own decision-making institutions and participate in each decision-making that affects their rights. Important in the Huichol context are the rights to historical sites, medicinal plants and religious ceremonies, the recognition of the spiritual relationship with the land traditionally used and of the right to its conservation and protection. The UN Declaration obliges the Federal State of Mexico, as signatory, to take in good faith all measures necessary to ensure the implementation of these rights, which are refined in other international instruments within the UN system and were recognized in Mexico by constitutional and legal provisions. Final implementation however was mostly delegated to the State level and has in many instances been waiting ever since.
As the Huichols have actively participated in Mexican national life and the many upheavals of its history, they have a rich tradition of place-making and defense of identity through negotiating, networking and proceeding in the courts where they have claimed their rights whenever challenged. The new 2007 rights should have strengthened their hand. However, rights often are as strong as the strength of their rightful claimants and in the Mexican society the Wixárika people, like the other descendants of first peoples, are a marginalized minority that can seemingly be attacked with impunity by the dominant group. The universal ‘pacta sunt servanda’ (agreements must be kept) principle only applies if one can compel its implementation. Indigenous rights therefore do not stand by virtue of their codification but only after the indigenous people stand up for them, by relentless contestation of their disavowal by their adversaries, through years of lengthy court procedures and political mobilization. Even the legalization of the use of peyote for ceremonial purposes, in an ironic twist of history, is stripped of any meaning if Wirikuta and peyote with it were to disappear because of concessions granted by failing governments to greedy conglomerates. In the end, the generous conferral of rights translates in the first place in an accumulation of new obligations, an ever-growing burden to have these rights materialize; a poisoned gift which adds to the burden of indigenous peoples by requiring even more of their limited resources and energy. This state of affairs is not about to change in the near future but, to the contrary, will even increase in scope and speed as it is a structural and global phenomenon, dictated by the unlimited need for growth to satisfy our hyper-consumption society.
The full realization of this new reality came for the Huichols on February 3rd, 2017, when the Jalisco Senate abstained from voting the new Ley Indígena, thus deciding to not recognize its indigenous peoples as ‘subjects of public law’ but to keep them instead in the inferior position of 'subjects of public interest'. The implementation of the 2007 UN declaration thus was thwarted, in violation of international obligations but again with impunity.
The consequences for the Wixaritari: their political organization, the CRW, continues to not even legally represent them.

The second issue regards the violation of the specific indigenous right to develop the own decision-making institutions, to structure the indigenous identity into an efficient tool to unite and defend the common interest. It is the delicate process of nation building, requiring patience and diplomacy from the nation builders and restraint from the civil society allies, as it is a process easily subverted by adversaries. It is also a process of growth where the nation builders depend on the experience of loyal allies, the good faith of authorities and the commitment of their own people. Alas, the Huichols, a people against the state, were not to benefit from such a process: they are left divided, fighting government and feuding with their erstwhile friends.

The CRW, the political body of the Huichols, had to catch up from its start in 2011 with the Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta, the ambitious civil society group of both Huichols and non-Huichols, ‘foreigners’, established one year earlier in 2010 and at that time ‘designated by the Huichol authorities to coordinate the Wirikuta defense’, as stated on the Frente website. As the CRW, which united Huichol leadership, sometime after its inception left the Frente, the latter obviously was no longer in charge of the coordination which now was the responsibility of the CRW.  However, the Frente clung to its coordinating role and, despite CRW reminders to stop this impersonation, as late as in 2017 claimed to be the ‘only legitimate coordinating body of the Huichols’ and behaved accordingly. The Frente’s paternalism has undoubtedly caused a radicalization of the CRW and had it look outside of mainstream Mexican society for support with the indigenous peoples.³The indigenous feeling was that the colonial regime was prolonged unimpeded and that they better turned inward for support.

The close and intimate relationship with their ancestors and gods, in a cosmos where the living and the dead must be consulted to decide, produces what might be called a magical democracy but equally an extremely slow and inefficient government. Particularly when crucial questions determining the future of the whole nation must be addressed at the central level, where there is no precedent, no experience. The 2012 joint consultation of the gods by the assembled mara’akate was an a-typical, first-ever procedure for a people traditionally organized on the local temple level of the ceremonial center and the individual mara’akame. The policy of a united, unconditional defense of the integral Wirikuta pilgrimage that was decided at the 2012 consultation had to be implemented by an embryonic body, the CRW, that had no administration, no funds and no authority other than to coordinate between the six (originally three) historical communities in the Sierra that were created by the Spanish crown in the eighteenth century and now make up the CRW. CRW decisions moreover are not binding but rather propositions made to the communities where the population will decide on implementation. This decision-making process cannot easily be adapted to modern needs as in the Wixárika world there exists no meaningful delegation of power or even chiefs to hold such power, neither under the living nor under the ancestor gods, because the Wixárika culture is against concentration of power in single hands and the entire community is to decide. Even the mara’akate who communicate with the gods have only one vote in the assembly meetings with their equals. The need to oppose power accumulation is existential to the Huichols and has always stood in the way of the formation of a Huichol Nation and the corresponding rise of different classes of citizens.

As the CRW is at present pre-occupied to translate its ideological strength in an effective political organization, the DPI has concluded that in order not to intervene in this process, it would be wisest to propose the only other representative body of the Huichol people, the Huichol Center for Cultural Survival and the Traditional Arts, for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.

¹ E.g. Labate, Beatriz, Núcleo de Estudos Interdisciplinares sobre Psicoativos - NEIP - neip.info : “Member researchers investigate diverse aspects of psychoactives, such as their religious use (ayahuasca, iboga, San Pedro and coca leaves), and secular or non-religious uses of both legal substances (alcohol, tobacco, coffee, etc.) and illegal substances (marijuana, cocaine, crack, ecstasy, etc.), as well as their therapeutic use.”
2016 www.bialabate.net (text since modified)
²Sadly, the president of the meeting in Huejuquilla, Miguel Vázquez Torres and his brother Augustin, were killed in May of that year over a communal land dispute of their people with local landowners in Tuxpan de Bolaños, in a yet unsolved murder case. 
³ In “It is loved and it is defended”: Critical solidarity across race and place, Antipode Vol.0, pp.1-21.2018, Diana Negrín da Silva analyses the struggle of the Frente en Defensa de Wirikuta, that wished to express solidarity and affective ties with the Wixárika but first had ‘to unsettle its own entrenched racial and spatial relations.’