La reivención de los gobiernos purhépechas

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to show what the Purhépecha self-governments are today and what their main challenges are. The right to govern themselves according to their uses and customs, as well as to receive the portion of the budget that corresponds directly to them, is a demand that has been going on for several decades. Although the Purhépecha communities have maintained protest movements since the early 1980s, the search for autonomy had its greatest momentum in the 1990s, after the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). I propose that it is not possible to understand its current advance and configuration without considering the political context (a left-wing populist government) and social context (violence and extractivism) in which organized crime and predatory agents of the territory stalk communities and their resources. Beyond formal recognition (or de jure, as jurists say), the challenges for communal governments are to maintain order and social cohesion, in the face of the disruptive tendencies of the predatory agents of neoliberal capitalism.