By: Luis Hernández Navarro

On June 1, narco-banners were hung on four pedestrian bridges in the municipality of Frontera Comalapa, Chiapas. Ten days later, notices reappeared on public roads, indicating that the Army took journalists to report on risk areas.

The local press documented the news and published photographs. On one of the narco-banners, painted on a red and yellow background and with letters labeled in three colors: “General Arturo Gonzalez Jimenez. How much is your compadre Mosh paying you and your narco-military Felix Moreno Ibarra and Andrei Calderon Muños to clean the plaza for the Jalisco cartel and the Huistlas. You come to our villages where we live in calm knowing that the conflict is not here but in the villages of your friends, diverting the attention that even reporters brought. Why don’t you go to Sabinalito, Paso Hondo, Potrerillos, Frontera Comalapa and Chicomuselo” [sic] (https://cutt.ly/AwyeK8RH).

The Frontera Comalapa region, on the border with Guatemala, experienced days of terror in late May and early June. Videos documenting shootings, roadblocks, burned cars, deployment of armored vehicles known as “monsters” and denunciations of forced disappearances circulated profusely in the social networks. Thousands of villagers had to leave their homes and animals to protect themselves from kidnappings (levantones) and violence. On May 30, hundreds of soldiers and National Guard members carried out an operation in the region and established checkpoints.

On June 2, 2023, many kilometers away from Frontera Comalapa, in the town of Polhó, municipality of Chenalhó, very close to where the Acteal massacre was perpetrated, seven people died in an ambush. In a warehouse of the community were 200 refugees displaced from the Santa Martha ejido. As they passed by, Gilberto Pérez Gómez, his family and two members of his personal guard, belonging to the Los Ratones group, were ambushed and died. The other person who died is Fernando Ruiz, son of the owner of the place where the refugees live.

Although there are rumors that Los Ratones could have been responsible for the crime, authorized sources indicate that they were traveling in a van behind Pérez Gómez, but many of the bullet impacts on Gilberto’s truck were in the front.

History goes way back. On March 3, gunmen killed Petrona López Pérez, wife of Daniel López Méndez, commander of the El Machete Peoples’ Self-defense Group in Pantelhó. Various sources indicate that Doña Petrona was killed by the late Gilberto Pérez, originally a member of the self-defense group, who ended up allying himself with the Herrera clan, a rival group of El Machete. The people displaced from Santa Martha would have protection from the armed civilian group.

For years, the Herrera family controlled the municipality of Pantelhó with blood and fire. With the support of gunmen from Campeche, Veracruz and Sinaloa, this group conquered territorial control through terror, murders, disappearances, robberies, dispossession and forced displacement, carrying weapons and explosives for the exclusive use of the Mexican Army. Electorally it used the acronym of the PRD (https://cutt.ly/EwyeImaf). The clan’s patriarch, Austreberto, is in jail for killing two people in the municipality in April 2015. In July 2021, the catechist Simón Pedro Pérez, who had chaired the board of directors of the Civil Society Las Abejas de Acteal, was killed in Simojovel.

During their bonanza days, the Herrera clan had Enoc Díaz Pérez (Encuentro Social Party) as an advisor, boss of the criminal gang Los Cacheros, later re-baptized as Los Diablos, and of the paramilitary-style movement named Proyecto Amigo Revolucionario No. 7 (Revolutionary Friend Project Number 7). Enoc had been municipal president of Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacán, when the municipal council (and the region) was controlled by heroin traffickers, Antonio Laredo Donjuán and his wife Mercedes Barrios Hernández, who were arrested in 2018 at the request of the United States government, which asked for their extradition.

On June 7 2021, the El Machete Peoples’ Self-defense Group irrupted violently in the municipal seat of Pantelhó, to expel the sicarios (hit men), drug traffickers and organized crime, because we don’t want more deaths for the poor Tseltal and Tsotsil campesinos. They successfully fought with firearms against the Herrera group. They have controlled the region since then. However, their self-declared righteous vocation faded very quickly.

Just this last June 19, the paramilitary group called the Regional Organization of Ocosingo Coffee Growers (ORCAO, Organización Regional de Caficultores de Ocosingo), simultaneously attacked three Zapatista support base communities in the Moisés Gandhi region. They torched plots of land and fired gunshots for three days straight. It is the ORCAO’s eleventh armed attack on the rebels so far, under the current administration. All have been perpetrated with absolute impunity. Not a single person has been arrested for the attacks.

This brief account sets aside, for reasons of space, many other acts of violence against different communities in resistance in Chiapas or in cities such as San Cristóbal. Those acts of violence also intersect with 1) disputes between organized crime gangs that fight over plazas, markets, territories and routes; 2) old and new paramilitary groups (which have been linked to drug cartels and polleros); 3) ) gunmen or gangs that have diversified their activities such as  Los Ratones or Los Vatos Locos and, 4) self-defense groups. This, despite the enormous deployment of the Army and the National Guard in the state.

Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Tuesday, June 27, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/06/27/opinion/019a1pol and Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee