Un análisis discursivo comparativo entre las narrativas del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN) y las del ex presidente Salinas de Gortari (México)

Abstract

The Zapatista rebellion which started on the first of January, 1994, can be considered a local response to an innovative approach towards globalization undertaken by the Mexican government under the presidency of Salinas de Gortari (1988 1994). This study includes a detailed discursive analysis of the Inaugural Speech and three of the anual State of the Nation Reports of the former president Salinas de Gortari and four of the anual declarations of the EZLN (1994–1998). One of the basic understandings of this study is that these political narratives perform a strategic function in a struggle for achieving hegemonic acceptance within the Mexican population for two different national projects that each of them has in mind. In another publication the detailed theoretical framework was presented, which was based on discourse theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough 1992, 2003; Reisigl and Wodak, 2001) and a Gramscian approach to hegemony and the application to empirical data of the discourse theoretical concepts myth and imaginary as well as the first stage of the analysis: content analysis and Deixis (Montesano Montessori, 2011). This article summarises the second and the third stages of the data analysis. The second stage implies an analysis of arguments and discursive strategies, what allowed Salinas de Gortari to rearticulate the future of Mexico in terms of civic nationalism and a liberal democracy, based on one keyword: modernization of the Mexican state and society. The EZLN rearticulates the future of the country en terms of an ethnic nationalism and a radical democracy. The third stage implies an analysis of metaphors and a detailed syntactic study of the keywords ‘modernization’ in the discourse of Salinas de Gortari and ‘democracy’ in the discourse of the Zapatistas. This last stage of the analysis allowed identifying ‘modernization’ as a nodal point and ‘democracy’ as an empty signifier.