By: Luis Hernández Navarro

The San Javier Crossroads, on the Palenque-Trinitaria Highway, is a strategic point of the old Desert of Solitude. Communities that make up the Lacandón Community intersect there: Frontera Corozal, Lacanjá and Nueva Palestina, where Choles, Lacandons and Tseltals live. The crossing is, symbolically, the headquarters of the communal property commission. The indigenous prosecutor’s office and the municipal police are also located there.

As part of its strategy to take over the territory, a commando from the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG) took control of the place and began to extort protection money. Every vehicle that crosses must pay a fee. The police had their uniforms taken away.

To transport a shipment of sugar, the community of Nueva Palestina hired a transporter who is a member of Pueblos Unidos in Defense of Uses and Customs (Paduc), an association of more than a thousand vehicle owners, to transport people and goods in the jungle. They organized to confront extortion by organized crime. They carry walkie-talkies in their vans and trucks to provide help in emergency cases.

When the drug traffic stop halted the transportation of the sweetener, the driver refused to pay the fee they demanded and alerted his associates from Paduc in Nueva Palestina. He claimed that the merchandise was not his. The criminals, in addition to savagely beating him, carved the initials CJNG on his back with a sharp weapon.

Six of the driver’s companeros came to support him but were subdued with heavy-caliber weapons. Inside the prosecutor’s office, they were kidnapped and tortured, pulling out their nails. They tried to disappear them, but a crowd, with machetes and weapons, came to rescue them. The criminals fled, probably towards the municipality of Benemérito de las Américas, where they have had a base of operations for years.

So that there would be no doubt about their intentions, they distributed a notice entitled “Tread carefully, raza.” There they warn that the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel has arrived and established a curfew starting at 11 p.m. They threaten to torture, kill and dismember the fucking rats that we have already located (sic). They prohibit driving in vans with tinted windows (very widespread in the area) and announce a total clean-up, especially of glass sellers and consumers.

What happened at the San Javier crossroads is just a sample of what is experienced in the region. On July 22, 18 Chol families from the Corazal ranch were evicted from their lands by criminals. They took refuge in the community of Salvador Allende, on the border with the town of Amador Hernández. On August 28, they did the same with 34 families from San Gregorio, who sought asylum in Ocosingo. There is a strategic landing strip and it is also the route to reach the impressive waterfalls of the Río Negro and an unexplored archaeological zone.

On September 6, the authorities of Nueva Palestina addressed a letter to President López Obrador in which they denounced the attacks they are experiencing at the hands of a commando linked to the Sinaloa Cartel of Mayo Zambada. A day before, the hitmen entered the offices of the community property commissioner, attacked elements of the rural police and announced that they would take control of the town.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Lacandón territory has been invaded by organized crime. It has taken over its jungle. Drug traffickers have opened clandestine landing strips to transport cocaine. They control the trafficking of undocumented immigrants. They charge floor rights to small merchants and fees to tourism service providers. They carry out forced evictions of hundreds of families. They threaten to kill community leaders. They enslave young Central American women to work as prostitutes. Simultaneously, the northern culture – as it is known in the region – with its corridos tumbados and narco-corridos, flourishes in the towns, while the consumption of glass, marijuana and crack spreads. Gangs of boys have emerged who wear colored headscarves as a badge.

On August 7, more than 3,000 residents of Nueva Palestina, with signs painted by hand on cardboard, demanded: Out with cartels! and No more polleros! They traveled 3 kilometers and denounced the construction of land rights. On September 8, the people of Frontera Corozal marched peacefully against organized crime and to demand security. Their banner read: Mr. President of the Republic: we demand security in the Lacandón area, particularly in Frontera Corozal.

Since 2008, to achieve peace and security, and leave behind the shadow of the Viejo Velasco massacre, the Lacandón Community has carried out an absorbing and incessant work of dialogue and reconciliation with the 52 ejidos that surround it. The signing of a territorial reorganization and promulgation decree is pending that would create conditions to reestablish new bases of coexistence in the area. The war of the cartels against the inhabitants of the jungle is a broom in the hornet’s nest of inter-community conflicts that derails the possibility of peaceful coexistence.

Organized crime advances in the Lacandón Community. It seeks to appropriate the territory, recruit young people, dismantle the associative fabric and tighten the siege on the peoples in rebellion. The alarm lights are on.

Twitter: @lhan55

Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Tuesday, September, 12, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/09/12/opinion/023a1pol and Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee