ISSA Proceedings 1998 – Legitimacy And Seduction Of War: The Declaración De La Selva Lacandona, Chiapas 1994

• by: Pedro Reygadas - Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia & Université Lumière

l. The communication conditions and the discursive macro-act
In 1994, we awoke on New Year’s day with the news of a modern guerrilla movement in Chiapas, in the south-east of Mexico. Grown beneath the shadows during more than ten years, the National Liberation Zapatista Army (EZLN) was making its public appearance. From the first day, an acute polemic has been surrounding this movement about the origin and number of its members, the villages where they have an influence and their financial support. Nonetheless, if we reconstruct the events with first hand sources and find out who the rebels are, we realise that more than two thousand Zapatistas, mainly Mayan indigenous people, occupied San Cristóbal de las Casas and several villages of La Selva and Los Altos of Chiapas.
After one day of surprise, the Mexican Army put the Zapatista region under intense fire -even rockets- until a peace agreement was proposed by the government and accepted by the Zapatista army on January 12. Along with those twelve days full of military actions and civil movements, we also witnessed a discourse war (Reygadas et al 1994). The Declaración de la Selva Lacandona, that we are going to analyse, was the foundation’s discourse of the Zapatista movement and one of the most important political documents of the recent history of Mexico. The discourse, solemn as it is, was propagated by written and oral means in the New Year of 1994 and marks the first appearance of a collective subject until then practically unknown to the public, that of the EZLN and its General Command that signed the declaration.
The document itself establishes its genre with its tittle and then gives its exact definition, that of a war declaration (§ 6, 51). The discursive subject (the EZLN and its General Command), the discursive object (the war and its legitimacy) and the discursive macro-act (the war declaration) give the Declaración de la Selva Lacandona its character as a written and formal political-military discourse. Argumentation is its dominant macro-operation -the essence of its functioning- although it displays some important narrative and prescriptive paragraphs.
Argumentation is obviously not physical war but we deal here with argumentation as an important component of a war situation. The declaration is an act, which corresponds to the formal beginnings of a war. Such a fundamental macro-act involves at least the subjects who declare war and the one they are going to fight against. The one who declares war must have the means to do it and a program to defend, but above all the legitimacy to launch warfare. The object of this paper is to analyse the construction of this elements. We will reconstruct the rhetoric of discourse, the enunciation functioning and the argumentation that leads to the pretended rational claim of the necessity of war, but first we need to set our theoretical approach.

2. Argumentative analysis tendencies
Argumentation theories can be grouped schematically in five general fields that emphasise different components of arguments: linguistics, dialectics, logic, rhetoric or the relationship between logic and rhetoric:
I. Linguistics (Ducrot & Anscombre)
II. Dialectics (van Eemeren & Grootendorst)
III. Formal logic (Toulmin)
IV. Natural logic (Grize & Vignaux)
V. Rhetoric (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca)

These different theories as well as other important contributions (Habermas, Moeschler, Blair, Walton) are often compatible. We will use here different theoretical reflections to postulate an operative model to analyse the argumentative macro-operation in the Declaración de la Selva Lacandona:
A. The war’s legitimacy construction
What the theory separates (linguistics, logic, rhetoric and dialectics) is unified in an ordinary discourse. Hence we will put attention here to the dispositio related to organisers and connectors (Ducrot 1980), to the layout of arguments (Toulmin 1958), to the discourse anchorage based on cultural preconstructions (Grize 1982) and to the partially rational character of arguments (Eemeren & Grootendorst 1996) -we say partially because in politics, reason has to be considered as related to power and ideology-.
B. The enunciative functioning
Here we will consider mainly the classical approach of linguistics and the discourse analysis which is derived from Pêcheux (Pêcheux 1969).
C. The seduction of discourse
Here we will describe the emotions and the persuasion’s mechanisms. These mechanisms report argumentation directly to its audience and to the collective mentalities.

3. Legitimacy of war
The legitimacy of war and rebellion is the core of the Zapatistas’ argumentation. Their proposition with respect to this theme is: “the war is legitimate”. We are going to analyse this “legitimacy of war” in two main parts: the arguments and their dispositio. First of all, we have to describe how the Zapatistas, to justify their decision, recall historical, linguistic and legal arguments.

3a1. Poverty and war’s legitimisation
The Declaración de la Selva Lacandona includes a brief assessment of Mexico’s history to reach the captatio benevolentiae. The historical argument for legitimacy makes use of the assimilation and identification principles to construct the EZLN’s identity. By this means, the EZLN can be “individuated” as a political subject with “definiteness”, with “uniqueness”. The EZLN legitimates its existence based on the historical continuity of the struggle and on the persistence of poverty.
At the same time that the discourse establishes the continuity of the “true makers of our nation” (the poor people in perpetual struggle), the causal argumentation postulates that today’s extreme poverty is a fact. From this fact, the argument establishes a causal relationship and formulates an hypothesis via the weight of things: “poverty is untenable”. This subjective basis -that was not accepted by the intellectual people attached to the state- is a judgement that does not accept resignation and that uses the causal link and the historical argument to declare war.

3a2. The cultural preconstructions’ legitimacy
Words are potential narrative programs and rudimentary arguments. By means of lexical selections we construct objects of discourse which we determine by assigning them different predicates (Grize 1982). The war and its legitimacy, in the case of the Zapatista declaration, is constructed via the notion of dictatorship, composed of two opposite concepts: the dictator and the people.
The notion “dictatorship” anchors the argumentation to the cultural “preconstructions” these concepts involve. Based on such selection and construction, the Zapatistas are able to stand for warfare against Carlos Salinas de Gortari. We pass from words to a narrative program and from it to practical action.

On one side of the opposition, the discourse talks about the dictators and the dictatorship:
– the porfirista dictatorship on the nineteenth century (§ 1 and 2),
– the postrevolutionary dictatorship (§ 2),
– the present dictatorship (§ 5),
– the dictator Salinas (§ 6),
– and the present dictators, in plural (cf. supra § 16, 104-105).

In the same camp of dictatorship we find syntactic phrases like camarilla de traidores, conservadores et vendepatrias that qualify the national enemies, also defined as those that “ransack the nation’s wealthy” (cf. infra, 5). There is a scale of antagonism-alliance that goes from the actual dictator to the people, the irreducible enemies are associated to the foreign enemies (that are historically “Spain”, “the American expansion” and “the French empire”):
1. Carlos Salinas de Gortari (“the dictator”),
2. the power party (PRI) and the camarilla de traidores y vendepatrias,
3. “the dictators” (those in charge of using violence against Chiapas’ people),
4. the irreducible people’s enemies (they warn them),
5. the enemy quarters (they ask for their surrender),
6. the bandits, the narcoguerrilla, the narcotraficantes, those from whom the Zapatistas want to be distinguished.
7. the soldiers (they suggest to them to join the Zapatista army),
8. the people (the historical people, the working people).

On the other side of the opposition, we have the people’s construction. The EZLN assumes himself as a part of the people and assumes at the same time that the people are on its side (this can be interpreted as a conclusion without no argument, as an example of petitio principi and argumentative quasi-paraphrase or maybe is just a case of synecdoche, where the Zapatistas people represent the Mexican people -§ 7 , 60-61-):
(1)
Tenemos al pueblo mexicano de nuestra parte…
(The Mexican people are on our side… )
The declaration builds up associations between the pronoun “we” and some key-words (brotherhood, people and nation) that make a capital contribution to the construction of the “people” and the construction of arguments. To Zapatistas, common Mexicans are not only subjects of alliance but symbolic kin they address with emotion (hermanos /brothers/). Zapatistas also establish a field in which the central actor is el pueblo /the people/ and their social struggles: Zapatistas summon Mexicans as nation-people to fight for a democratic program and talk about the people of the villages as submitted to “genocide”. Finally, the “we” is related to a juridical link (estado-nación /nation-state/) that is challenged (§ 2, 19-21, cf. infra).

Of the people, the declaration predicates its poverty, its labour and its vexing conditions, or its association to the struggle and to the historical people that gained the independence: los insurgentes /the insurgents/. The predicates that determine the people (mexican, rebel, labouring) give them a positive value, in opposition to the pejorative predicates that the declaration attributes to the enemies (Robin 1977). The dichotomy is clear: on one side the traitor dictators that kill and ransack the nation; on the other, the mexican people that labour and fight.
The images of the dictator and the people (Pêcheux 1969) are part of the historical argument. In constructing the concept of the field “people”, the data function under two argumentative expedients: the analogy and the cause. The cause, as we already described, establish poverty as untenable. The analogy establishes a continuity, a single category that makes the past and the present comparable: Zapatistas aim at fighting against today’s ruling class just like the national heroes did against the colonial and conservative powers.

The declaration’s historical summary serves the purpose of establishing a link between the struggles of the Mexican people and the EZLN’s cause. What gives the Zapatistas labels the quality of an argument is the identity achieved by combining three elements:
1) the army subscribes to Emiliano Zapata’s popular image and legacy by naming their organisation Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional;
2) the Zapatistas highlight the wide scope of their struggle as struggle of the poor, as it was the case with Zapata’s peasant guerrillas (§ 1, l. 8-10):
(2)
…surgieron Villa y Zapata, hombres pobres como nosotros a los que se nos ha negado la preparación más elemental…
(…Villa and Zapata appeared, poor people like us, to whom the most elemental preparation has been denied…);
3) and the guerrilla self-proclaim (petitio principi) an identity that constructs the EZLN’s militants as (§ 2, l. 19-21):
(3)
…los herederos de los verdaderos forjadores de nuestra nacionalidad…
(…the heirs of the true makers of our nation…)
3a3. The constitutional legitimacy
The Zapatista discourse is the discourse of a proponent, therefore the declaration must prove the legitimacy of war and the necessity of its main proposition: “to depose the ‘dictator’”. It is because of this proponent’s character that the declaration recalls explicitly – with bold letters – the constitutional entitlement to change government (the argumentation backing). We deal here with a clear case of text authority citation (§ 3, 36-40 and § 4, 41-45):
(4)
...como nuestra última esperanza después de haber intentado todo por poner en práctica la legalidad basada en nuestra Carta Magna, recurrimos a ella, nuestra Constitución, para aplicar el Artículo 39 Constitucional que a la letra dice:
(…after having tried everything possible to enforce the rule of our Magna Charta’s law, we refer to it, to our Constitution, to implement its 39th Article, that literally says:)
“La soberanía nacional reside esencial y originariamente en el pueblo. Todo poder público dimana del pueblo y se instituye para beneficio de éste. El pueblo tiene, en todo tiempo, el inalienable derecho de alterar o modificar la forma de su gobierno”.
(The national sovereignty lies essentially and originally in the people. Every public power emerges from the people and is instituted for its benefit. The people have permanently the inalienable right of reforming or modifying the government”.)

The declaration anticipates even the possible rebuttals of the enemy and writes about war as the last chance (§ 3, l. 36-37 et § 16, l. 102-103):
(5)
…estamos conscientes de que la guerra que declaramos es una medida última pero justa.
(…we are aware of our war effort is a last resort, but a just cause)
The discourse contrasts law and justice: for the Zapatistas the struggle for justice is worthwhile, more so than accepting a certain law’s application without the provision of land and food for the poor.

3a4. The international legitimacy
The Zapatistas are looking for international recognition, so they construct themselves as subjects of universal rights and international law (§ 7, 57-60):
(6)
…nosotros declaramos ahora y siempre que estamos sujetos a lo estipulado por las Leyes sobre la Guerra de la Convención de Ginebra, formando el EZLN como fuerza beligerante de nuestra lucha de liberación.
(…we declare now and for ever that we recognise the Geneva Convention about War Laws, constituting the EZLN as a belligerent force of our national liberation struggle.)

According to the Geneva Convention, a belligerent part, an armed force, has to fulfil several requirements. Hence, the Zapatista army specifies that the EZLN meets some of these requirements (§ 7, 61-67):
(7)
…tenemos Patria y la Bandera tricolor es amada y respetada por los combatientes INSURGENTES, utilizamos los colores rojo y negro en nuestro uniforme, símbolos del pueblo trabajador en sus luchas de huelga, nuestra bandera lleva las letras “EZLN”, EJÉRCITO ZAPATISTA DE LIBERACIÓN NACIONAL, y con ella iremos a los combates siempre.
(…we have a Native Land and the tri-coloured flag is beloved and respected by the INSURGENT combatants, we use the red and black colors on our uniform, symbols of the working people in their strike struggles, our flag has the letters “EZLN”, NATIONAL LIBERATION ZAPATISTA ARMY and with it we will always combat.)

The EZLN declines its identity: a name, an hymn, a flag and a uniform. The Zapatistas not only recognise the war laws (cf. supra § 7, 61-67) but the General Command gives the troops the order of respecting those laws (§ 11, 81-83):
(8)
Segundo. Respetar la vida de los prisioneros y entregar los heridos a la Cruz Roja Internacional para su atención médica.
(Second. Respect the prisoners’ life and bring the injured people to the International Red Cross for its medical survey.)

The Zapatistas’ acceptance by the international community is closely linked to the Zapatistas’ claims. The declaration creates the image of an empty-handed people. Based on this device, the discourse creates a parallel and an action program: “poor people don’t have anything” (the initial state) because of the dictatorship, so Zapatistas demand the so-called 11 points, eleven claims to achieve the welfare state (the final state). It is human rights and absolute values with which they are dealing with (§16, 107-109):
(9)
…trabajo, tierra, techo, alimentación, salud, educación, independencia, libertad, democracia, justicia y paz.
(…work, land, roof, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.)

3a5. The layout of arguments
Now we can resume the layout of arguments (Toulmin 1958):
– The Zapatistas proposition is the dictator’s deposition. Zapatistas wage war to achieve the dictator’s deposition:
(10)
Conforme a esta Declaración de Guerra pedimos a los otros Poderes de la Nación se aboquen a restaurar la legalidad y la estabilidad de la nación.
(In accordance with this War Declaration we ask the other Nation’s Powers to depose the dictator in order to restore the nations legality and stability.)

The proposition defines the regime as an illegal one (what is implicitely said by means of demanding to “restore” legality).
– The untenable poverty and the empty-handed condition of the Mexican people, the nation’s pillage, the continuity of people’s struggle, the illegal character of the dictatorship and the fulfilment of the international requirements are the main arguments to support the legitimacy of Zapatistas’ war declaration.
– The explicit and unusual backing of the argumentation is the 39th Article of the Mexican Constitution, which authorises people’s rebellion.
– Anticipating the possible rebuttals, the discourse establishes that war is not a goal but a last resort.

3b. Argumentation and rhetoric
The explanation runs parallel with seduction. In ordinary argumentation it is almost impossible to distinguish the rhetoric component (emotion, efficacy, audience) from the dialectic component (reasons for resolving a dispute -van Eemeren & Grootendorst 1996-). This is the case of the Declaración de la Selva Lacandona, where the discourse cannot be understood if we do not look at the rhetoric component of the arguments.
Among the five parts of rhetoric (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memory and action), we analysed partially the inventio (section 2). We are going to analyse here the dispositio of the arguments and we will finally analyse the pathos separately (section 5).

3b1. Textual articulation and pragmatic organisation
The transphrastic texture gives us the anaphors, the thematic organisation, the cohesion and the segmentation of the discourse. Texture is closely related to the rhetorical and sequential structure. We will partially describe this discourse levels by means of describing the dispositio of the Declaración de la Selva Lacandona.
If we pay attention to some words or key syntactic phrases: connectors, organisers and enunciative particles that give the text its cohesion and part of its coherence (Halliday & Hasan 1976), we can describe by linguistic means a very rigorous dispositio that assembles the argumentation and the rhetorical component (Table 1).

Table 1 The dispositio

The discourse is composed of 10 main parts. Their link with the argumentation is clear:
– The Title.
– The watchword.
– The address formulae.
– The historical argument.
– The backing.
– The conclusion, the main proposition, the international legitimacy argument and the refutation of the possible counter-discourse.
– The orders to the Zapatista army.
– The exhortation to fight and the call to join the army.
– The signature.
– The date.

The discourse functioning is a combination of order and coindexation, because the discourse goes backwards and forwards.

4. The enunciative functioning
Now we know what the main arguments are, but, who is taking to whom? How thus the time frame and the spatial deixis function? This is not a matter of simple syntax or enunciation. We have to study the enunciative functioning and how they are related to power and ideology.

4a. Who is talking?
Pêcheux proposes that every discourse has some automatic “imaginary formations”: those of “A”, “B” and the discourse itself (“R”). We deal with places (A and B) and with an imaginary formation’s matrix: the A’s image of A, the A’s image of B, the A’s image of R, the B’s counterpart and the anticipation we make of the other’s images. With this tools we can describe the enunciation’s functioning in combination with the “enunciative shifting” by means of which the discourse’s subject can assume different positions.

The Declaración de la Selva Lacandona has an impressive construction of the discourse’s subject (A) that goes from a restricted “we” (the General Command) to an aggregated or “amplified” “we”, in which both synchronic and diachronic dimensions are considered:
– EZLN (“our military forces”)
– People of Chiapas villages (“our villages”) and
– the Mexican people (“poor people as us”, with equality of predicates)

This “we the people”, as it has been described (cf. supra 3a1 and 3a2) oscillates from the present to the past, is ubiquitous and provides a continuity.

The people are part of “we” (the poor people), part of “you” (we call them to join the army) and part of “they” (the working people, the constitutional people).

The “people of Mexico” as part of “you” are the only real second person. Zapatistas demand them tu participación decidida /your determined participation/ and to join the army: INTÉGRATE A LAS FUERZAS INSURGENTES DEL EJÉRCITO ZAPATISTA DE LIBERACIÓN NACIONAL /JOIN THE INSURGENT FORCES OF THE NATIONAL LIBERATION ZAPATISTA ARMY/.

Finally, the General Command constructs an “impure” deixis, a delocutive “you”: (a grammatically “they” but a pragmatically “you”), to whom the zapatistas demand indirectly an answer. On this delocutive “you”, which is forced by the written discourse (Zapatistas are not talking face to face to declare war), we find the army (emitimos la presente al Ejército federal mexicano /we send forth this declaration to the Mexican Federal Army/), the Nation’s Powers (…pedimos a los otros Poderes de la Nación…/…we ask to the other Nation’s Powers…/) and the mediators (…pedimos a los Organismos Internacionales y a la Cruz Roja… /…we ask to the International Organisations and to the Red Cross…/). There is here an extra ambiguity of the pronoun due to the partial neutralisation of the second and the third person (emitimos, pedimos).

We can make a summary of this enunciation operation and of the speech acts associated to it (TABLE 2). The enunciation reveals the discourse’s subject character: the General Command that orders, the EZLN that fights consciously and obeys orders, the communities that suffer “genocide” and the Mexican people the Zapatistas want to convince by constructing their participation as a discursive fact. “A” (“we”) is the discourse proponent, “B” (“you”) is the blank and the delocutive “you” constructs a new scale: mediators-Nation’s Powers-the military enemy.
The enunciation has not just one level. The discourse act of the war declaration (and sometimes one single syntactic phrase) has multiple values and is addressed, at the same time, to different audiences. That is the personal deixis reality when we analyse true discourse, that which is anchored in everyday life.

4a1. The anticipation
The anticipation is closely related to the argumentation functioning. The Zapatistas anticipate B’s image of A when the discourse refuses the association with the bandits and the narcoguerrilla. The anticipation permits them to counter-argument. They anticipate B’s image of R (the illegality of war) when they elaborate the war’s legitimacy. They anticipate B’s image of B (the constitutional president) when they declare the illegality of dictatorship.

4b. The time frame and the legitimacy of war
Enunciation includes spatial and temporal deixis. The most important fact in spatial deixis is the almost mythical recreation of the Selva Lacandona. This space became the rhetorical place that served to “individuate” the Zapatista movement. The war declaration tense frame is a more important device to justify the Zapatista rebellion.

The discourse conceives war as an ongoing process (§ 16, 103-105):
(11)
Los dictadores están aplicando una guerra genocida no declarada contra nuestros pueblos desde hace muchos años…
(Since many years ago, the dictators have been carrying out a non-declared genocide war against our villages…)

The original declaration, date back to 1993, asserts that the enemies were already fighting against the people of Chiapas in an organised way, as the verb aplicando /carrying out/ suggests. The Zapatista’s war had also already begun. We can verify this by analysing the sentence where the EZLN asks the international organisations to enforce the international law (§ 7, 55-57):
(12)
…vigilen y regulen los combates que nuestras fuerzas libran para proteger a la población civil…
(…survey and regulate the combats that our forces engage to protect the civil population)

This declaration’s sentence describes with the present of indicative (libran /engage/) what should normally be written with the subjunctive (libren) or other irrealis construction.

In conclusion, the “silent” war comes from years before. The Zapatistas only give it a voice by declaring the warfare state. To defend peace and status quo is easy. To stand for change through warfare has to be justified. And this is what the declaration does, asserting that there is an ongoing war. The temporal deixis tries to compensate the ideologically marked position (the war against the peace) for the collective mentality.

4c. Deixis and the identification principle
The pronominal and tense constructions work together to reinforce the identification principle of past and present, because the “we” who talks is transposed to the past, is ubiquitous, as in the next example:
(13)
…después la dictadura porfirista nos negó la aplicación justa de las leyes de Reforma…
(…and then the porfirista dictatorship denied us the fair application of the Reform laws…)

4d. The written traces of enunciation
Other interesting and still not studied enunciation’s traces are present in written discourse as lettertype selections and formatting options. In the case of the original Declaración de la Selva Lacandona, the authors selected capital letters, bold letters and red letters that create a second and complex lecture. We have a kind of hypertext that constitute an instruction to read the first one. This instruction indicates the key words and phrases, among them we find some of the basic actors (Nation’s Powers, EZLN and People of Mexico) as well as the authors subjective dispositio: the watchword, the backing, the “war declaration”, the main proposition, the orders to the army and the call addresses to the people.

5. The seduction of discourse: how the wrath is constructed?
The dispositio, the arguments, the cultural preconstructions and the enunciative functioning convey part of the meaning to the Declaración de la Selva Lacandona, but we also have to analyse the core of rhetoric: the persuasive mechanisms and the emotions that the talking subjects experience and try to convey to the audience. Zapatistas arguments have a strong emotional impact. The Declaración de la Selva Lacandona has a purposeful style aimed at inducing emotion (the pathos). The discourse constructs “brotherhood” for the ally, and “warning” and “threat” for the enemy. But its emotional axis is related to the basic discourse opposition: dictator-people. For dictators, the discourse creates “hatred” and for people, “pity”, the essence of pathos.

Combining the “we’s” ubiquity, the time disposition and repetitio (first…, after…, after…) the Zapatistas try to construct the people’s identity and continuity. At the same time, they make a call for pity: poverty, the absence of everything (also constructed by repetitio) identifies the historical people with the Zapatistas (cf. supra § 1, 8-9); the people are carne de cañón (§ 1, 11); the villages are submitted to war (cf. supra § 16, 104-105). The people are partially constructed as victims, but as fighting victims.

Once pity has been constructed, the discourse defines who is the “ambitious” responsible of the situation, that is: the main enemy (§ 5 and § 2, 23-26).

(14)
…la ambición insaciable de una dictadura de más de 70 años encabezada por una camarilla de traidores que representan a los grupos mas conservadores y vendepatrias.
(…the greedy ambition of more than 70 years of a dictatorship whose leaders are a traitors’ coterie that represents the most conservative groups.)

The same procedure to address the people is used to construct the enemy’s image, but now repeating the syntactic phrase son los mismos /they are the same/ the discourse tries to construct the dictators image. These constructions go in parallel with the lexical selections that bring about hatred against the enemies. The discourse uses the unidimensionalisation of the adjective that minimises the subjects’ complexity and transforms them into hated subjects: dictators, traitors’ coterie, conservatives, vendepatrias. In addition, the dictators historical predicates are to “massacre” and to carry out “genocide”. So in this way the wrath and the need for action (the proposition) do emerge como nuestra última esperanza /as our last hope/ (§ 3, 36): we must depose the dictator!

6. Conclusion
The most important argumentation theories isolate argumentative components, but the argumentative analysis needs to construct operative models that put them together.
Argumentation has a very limited scope if does not look to discourse. In political speech, for example, the enunciation has to be necessarily considered as related to interaction, to social production conditions. The latter explains the significance of the Declaración de la Selva Lacandona as a document that breaks the neoliberalist silence about the poverty and discrimination of indigenous people in Mexico in an articulate way and that contributes to a new left’s discourse formation.
The appearance of the Declaración de la Selva Lacandona is a singular historical event that carries the traces of Chiapas indigenous people’s past and of their demand of a welfare state for the future, for the XXI century of neoliberalism that threatens them and most of the workers of the subdeveloped world with even worse life conditions. The argumentation here is not only a matter of reason but is also a matter of ideology and power’s functioning. With a relative freedom, each one talks according not only to the discourse genre and to the communicative situation but according to its place and to its social, ideological and discursive formation too.
Argumentation’s future is linked not only to the partial development of analytical instruments (linguistics, dialectics, logic, and rhetoric) but also to the development of interdisciplines able to re-assemble language, semiotics, cognition and society. Only the interdiscipline can describe the complexity of argumentative functioning.

Corpus:
DECLARACIÓN DE LA SELVA LACANDONA
HOY DECIMOS !BASTA!
AL PUEBLO DE MÉXICO:
HERMANOS MEXICANOS:

§ 1 (1-18)
Somos producto de 500 años de luchas: primero contra la esclavitud, en la guerra de Independencia contra España encabezada por los insurgentes, después por evitar ser absorbidos por el expansionismo norteamericano, luego por promulgar nuestra Constitución y expulsar al Imperio Francés de nuestro suelo, después la dictadura porfirista nos negó la aplicación justa de las leyes de Reforma y el pueblo se rebeló formando sus propios líderes, surgieron Villa y Zapata, hombres pobres como nosotros a los que se nos ha negado la preparación más elemental para así poder utilizarnos como carne de cañón y saquear la riqueza de nuestra patria sin importarles que estemos muriendo de hambre y enfermedades curables, sin importarles que no tengamos nada, absolutamente nada, ni un techo digno, ni tierra, ni trabajo, ni salud, ni alimentación, ni educación, sin tener derecho a elegir libre y democráticamente a nuestras autoridades, sin independencia de los extranjeros, sin paz ni justicia para nosotros y nuestros hijos.

§ 2 (19-35)
Pero nosotros HOY DECIMOS ¡BASTA!, somos los herederos de los verdaderos forjadores de nuestra nacionalidad, los desposeídos somos millones y llamamos a todos nuestros hermanos a que se sumen a este llamado como el único cambio para no morir de hambre ante la ambición insaciable de una dictadura de más de 70 años encabezada por una camarilla de traidores que representan a los grupos más conservadores y vendepatrias. Son los mismos que se opusieron a Hidalgo y a Morelos, los que traicionaron a Vicente Guerrero, son los mismos que vendieron más de la mitad de nuestro suelo al extranjero invasor, son los que trajeron un príncipe europeo a gobernarnos, son los mismos que formaron la dictadura de los científicos porfiristas, son los mismos que se opusieron a la Expropiación Petrolera, son los mismos que masacraron a los trabajadores ferrocarrileros en 1958 y a los estudiantes en 1968, son los mismos que hoy nos quitan todo, absolutamente todo.

§ 3 (36-40)
Para evitarlo y como nuestra última esperanza, después de haber intentado todo por poner en práctica la legalidad basada en nuestra Carta Magna, recurrimos a ella, nuestra Constitución, para aplicar el Artículo 39 Constitucional que a la letra dice:

§ 4 (41-45)
“La soberanía nacional reside esencial y originariamente en el pueblo. Todo poder público dimana del pueblo y se instituye para beneficio de éste. El pueblo tiene, en todo tiempo, el inalienable derecho de alterar o modificar la forma de su gobierno“.

§ 5 (46-50)
Por tanto, en apego a nuestra Constitución, emitimos la presente DECLARACIÓN DE GUERRA al ejército federal mexicano, pilar básico de la dictadura que padecemos, monopolizada por el partido en el poder y encabezada por el ejecutivo federal que hoy detenta su jefe máximo e ilegítimo: Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

§ 6 (51-53)
Conforme a esta Declaración de guerra pedimos a los otros Poderes de la Nación se aboque a restaurar la legalidad y la estabilidad de la Nación deponiendo al dictador.

§ 7 (54-67)
También pedimos a los Organismos Internacionales y a la Cruz Roja Internacional que vigilen y regulen los combates que nuestras fuerzas libran protegiendo a la población civil, pues nosotros declaramos ahora y siempre que estamos sujetos a lo estipulado por las Leyes sobre la Guerra de la Convención de Ginebra, formando el EZLN como fuerza beligerante de nuestra lucha de liberación. Tenemos al pueblo mexicano de nuestra parte, tenemos patria y la Bandera tricolor es amada y respetada por los combatientes INSURGENTES, utilizamos los colores rojo y negro en nuestro uniforme, símbolos del pueblo trabajador en sus luchas de huelga, nuestra bandera lleva las letras “EZLN”, EJÉRCITO ZAPATISTA DE LIBERACIÓN NACIONAL, y con ella iremos a los combates siempre.

§ 8 (68-72)
Rechazamos de antemano cualquier intento de desvirtuar la justa causa de nuestra lucha acusándola de narcotráfico, narcoguerrilla, bandidaje u otro calificativo que puedan usar nuestros enemigos. Nuestra lucha se apega al derecho constitucional y es abanderada por la justicia y la igualdad.

§ 9 (73-75)
Por lo tanto, y conforme a esta Declaración de guerra, damos a nuestras fuerza militares del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional las siguiente órdenes:

§ 10 (76-80)
Primero. Avanzar hacia la capital del país venciendo al ejército federal mexicano, protegiendo en su avance liberador a la población civil y permitiendo a los pueblos liberados elegir, democráticamente, a sus propias autoridades administrativas.

§ 11 (81-83)
Segundo. Respetar la vida de los prisioneros y entregar a los heridos a la Cruz Roja Internacional para su atención médica.

§ 12 (84-90)
Tercero. Iniciar juicios sumarios contra los soldados del ejército federal mexicano y la policía política que hayan recibido cursos y que hayan sido asesorados, entrenados, o pagados por extranjeros, sea dentro de nuestra nación o fuera de ella, acusados de traición a la Patria, y contra todos aquellos que repriman o maltraten a la población civil y roben o atenten contra los bienes del pueblo.

§ 13 (91-96)
Cuarto. Formar nueva filas con todos aquellos mexicanos que manifiesten sumarse a nuestra justa lucha, incluidos aquellos que, siendo soldados enemigos, se entreguen sin combatir a nuestras fuerzas y juren responder a las órdenes de esta Comandancia General del EJÉRCITO ZAPATISTA DE LIBERACIÓN NACIONAL.

§ 14 (97-98)
Quinto. Pedir la rendiciòn incondicional de los cuarteles enemigos antes de entablar los combates.

§ 15 (99-100)
Sexto. Suspender el saqueo de nuestra riquezas naturales en los lugares controlados por el EZLN.

§ 16 (101-112)
PUEBLO DE MÉXICO: Nosotros, hombre y mujeres íntegros y libres, estamos conscientes de que la guerra que declaramos en una medida última pero justa. Los dictadores están aplicando una guerra genocida no declarada contra nuestros pueblos desde hace muchos años, por lo que pedimos tu participación decidida apoyando este plan del pueblo mexicano que lucha por trabajo, tierra, techo, alimentación, salud, educación, independencia, libertad, democracia, justicia y paz. Declaramos que no dejaremos de pelear hasta lograr el cumplimiento de estas demandas básicas de nuestro pueblo formando un gobierno de nuestro país libre y democrático.

INTÉGRATE A LAS FUERZAS INSURGENTES DEL EJÉRCITO ZAPATISTA DE LIBERACIÓN NACIONAL.
Comandancia General del EZLN.
Año de 1993.
Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, México.

REFERENCES
Ducrot, O. (1980). Les mots du discours. Paris: Minuit.
Eemeren, F: H. van & R. Grootendorst (1996). La nouvelle dialéctique. Paris: Kimé.
Grize, J. B. (1982). De la logique à l’argumentation. Geneva: Librairie Droz.
Halliday, M. A. K. & Hasan R. (l976). Cohesion in english. London: Longman.
Pêcheux, M. (1969). Analyse authomatique du discours. Paris: Dunod.
Reygadas, P., I. Gomezcésar and E. Kravzov (1994). La guerra de año nuevo. Mexico: Praxis.
Robin, R. (1977). El campo semántico de la feudalidad. Estudios de Historia Social Nº 2-3.
Toulmin, S. (1958). The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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