Jorge Durán Solórzano, 7 May 2019, 16h

ArgLab Research Colloquium

Av. de Berna 26, I&D Building, 1st floor, room 1.05

Competing narratives for change: can speech events from the organized civil society reconfigure disagreement spaces in social conflicts?

Jorge Durán Solórzano, Leiden University, The Netherlands

In 1992, the Mexican government modified articles 4 and 27 of its constitution to be able to comply with the requirements to enter the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada. In the early morning of the first of January of 1994, the same day NAFTA took effect, a group of 3,000 rebels descended from the mountains to take over six municipalities in the Southern state of Chiapas. The guerrilla presented itself as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) (Montemayor Aceves 1998). During the first days of the conflict, competing narratives between the EZLN and the Executive power aimed to win the support of the public opinion and other state and non-state actors. In this presentation, I analyze three speech events that happened during the first days of the conflict. Taking insights of pragma-dialectics (van Eemeren 2010) and normative pragmatics (van Eemeren et al. 1993; Jacobs 2000), the focus of the analysis is on how the EZLN exploited opportunities and frames available from the disagreement space. Moreover, I argue that these speech events reconfigured the disagreement space in favor of the EZLN.