By: Ángeles Mariscal and Andrés Domínguez
The Permanent Commission of the State Congress unanimously approved the resignation of Delia Yaneth Velasco Flores, interim municipal president and of the entire municipal council of Pantelhó, to later appoint a municipal council made up of two men and a woman.
Evelio César Morales Díaz, legal counsel for the municipality, presented Velasco Flores’ resignation to the State Congress together with those of the trustee Adelina Morales, first councilor Pedro Juárez Méndez, second councilor Aura López Martínez, third councilor Julio Cruz, fourth councilor Carmen López Zepeda, fifth councilor Martín Sánchez and of the councilor of the Green Ecologist Party of México, Cornelio Encino Núñez.
Morales Díaz specified the follow-up on the agreements made to de-escalate the problems that occurred in the municipality with the presentation of the resignations that took place in the extraordinary and urgent council session on August 6.
The session was held one month after the “El Machete” Self-defense group expelled them from the municipal headquarters. In that meeting that isn’t specific as to where it took place, the mayor and eight of the ten municipal council members agreed to resign their positions, “in order to suit my personal interests,” each one pointed out separately, in the letters that they individually sent to the Congress.
In the resignation of the municipal president she wrote: I resign voluntarily and irrevocably from the activities that I was carrying out, therefore starting from this date I suspend my activities
After reading and approving the resignations as urgent, José Octavio García Macías, president of the Executive Board of the Congress, declared the disappearance of Pantelhó’s municipal council, as established in Article 81 of the state’s Political Constitution, due to the resignation of eight of the ten council members.
Consequently, in the meeting room of the legislative power he named a municipal council and swore in Pedro Cortés López, Miguel Hernández Pérez and Sandra Luz Gutiérrez Cruz, who the population elected on August 9 as their new authorities, through the indigenous normative system.
New Pantelhó municipal council members.
This municipal council has legal validity until next October 1, the date on which the three-year term of a municipal government ends. Constitutionally, from that moment on, Raquel Morales Trujillo, the former mayor’s husband, would assume as the elected mayor, because he won the elections of last June 6 through the PRD.
However, just like the former mayor, the population of Pantelhó accuses Morales Trujillo of having ties to criminal groups, and he lives in exile from the municipality.
It should be remembered that since the murder of the indigenous leader and former president of Las Abejas of Acteal, Simón Pedro Pérez, which occurred on July 5, the Pantelhó population made public the El Machete Self-defense group, formed to confront the actions of organized crime.
This self-defense group expelled municipal authorities and a hundred inhabitants of the place, accusing them of different crimes and illicit activities such as the trafficking of drugs, weapons and persons.
Meanwhile, the indigenous prosecutor who was carrying out the investigation into these events, Gregorio Pérez Gómez, was murdered on August 10. The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, announced that his death was related to the Pantelhó investigation.
State and federal prosecutors have not reported on the progress of investigations into this case, the case of the municipal authorities and the rest of the people accused
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Wednesday, August 16, 2021
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 