Chiapas Support Committee
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¡Stop the war against the people of Mexico and the world!
By Gilberto López y Rivas, La Jornada
The National Indigenous Congress (CNI, Congreso Nacional Indígena) and its Indigenous Council of Government (CIG, Consejo Indígena de Gobierno) made public a call to commemorate, this October 12, the 531 years of the beginning of the resistance and rebellion of indigenous peoples and communities against what was described as the “greatest genocide in the history of humanity, against the conquest, against the dispossession of our lands and territories, against the extermination of our institutions, languages, culture and traditions… against the death that global capitalism produced and continues to produce.” In addition, on this date the 27th anniversary of the founding of the CNI “as the space for struggle and unity of the indigenous peoples of Mexico” is celebrated, within the framework of the San Andrés dialogue between the government of the Republic and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).
The CNI-CIG call constitutes a vigorous denunciation of the character of the current government as a safeguard and guarantee of big capital, which, based on militarization and complicity with organized crime and paramilitarism, seeks to implement its megaprojects of death, such as the Mayan Train, the Interoceanic Corridor, the Morelos Comprehensive Project and Santa Lucía International Airport, “which, based on colonialism, patriarchy, homogenization, […] hatred and fear, seek to order and reorder our territory.”
As unequivocal and forceful signs of this war against the people: the siege against the Zapatista communities and the EZLN, massacres such as that of Acteal, the executions and forced disappearances of members of the Consejo Indígena y Popular de Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata (Indigenous and Popular Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata) are pointed out. and the Nahua community of Ostula, as well as the disappearance of the 43 young people from Ayotzinapa, along with the growing and continuous violence against women, and the murder of land defenders, such as the case of Samir Flores Soberanes.
The CNI-CIG, together with the Espacio de Coordinación Nacional Contra la Guerra (National Coordination Space Against War), express their view that Chiapas is Mexico, and it is in this state that the violence that afflicts the entire national territory is concentrated. Likewise, it is considered that the border has moved to the southeast and, with it, the war, which the current administration has not stopped, but rather deepens with the process of militarized and criminal recolonization. The people are organizing to stop this war that is structured through increasing dispossession and exploitation, which involves the plundering of water, the extraction and distribution of hydrocarbons, mining and infrastructure megaprojects aimed at the violent reorganization of the communities, the borders and territories.
It is in this socio-political context, to which the interoligarchic conflicts and contradictions entailed by next year’s early electoral process are added, that the CNI-CIG calls on the people of Mexico and the world who resist against death and oblivion, to social, civil and political organizations, and to good-hearted women and men, to raise their voices against the war in Mexico and the world–especially the war against the Zapatista peoples and the native peoples of the country. The CNI-CIG calls on everyone to carry out on October 12, “according to their times, ways, calendars and geographies”, a global action against this war, a national and international day of dislocated actions, to celebrate the third anniversary of the taking of the building of the Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas (National Institute of Indigenous Peoples), by the Otomí indigenous community, and to a central mobilization in the heart of Mexico City.
This call shows the analytical-conceptual level and the organizational-representative capacity achieved by the National Indigenous Congress-Indigenous Council of Government during these 27 years of resistance.
The ethical congruence demonstrated and recognized by the electoral authorities in obtaining citizen signatures in support of the candidacy of their spokesperson Marichuy, in 2018; legal defense and political support for communities and defenders of land and territories; their active and committed presence in the resistance of the peoples of the entire national geography against the recolonization and comprehensive occupation of the territories, as a recognized and honest interlocutor; permanent accompaniment to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation; their defense of the Zapatista autonomous governments and the autonomous processes of leading by obeying in various regions of the country, make the CNI-CIG, together with the EZLN and its solidarious movement, a bastion of anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, to the left and from below struggle, which, irreducibly, it does not tire, it does not give up and keeps the flame of rebellion and fight for life alive, of everything for everyone, for us nothing, and the hope of a better world.
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Translated by the Chiapas Support Committee from the original in Spanish published September 29, 2023, in La Jornada, Mexico City. Available here: https://www.jornada.com.mx/noticia/2023/09/29/opinion/alto-a-la-guerra-contra-los-pueblos-de-mexico-y-del-mundo-1975
Diocese of San Cristóbal: Chiapas, a failed state, overwhelmed and colluding with criminal groups
Comalapa and San Gregorio Chamic are cheered by residents. See the video here.
Mexico City | Desinformémonos. Faced with the growing dominance of organized crime groups throughout Chiapas, the Diocese of San Cristóbal criticized “the silence of the authorities” which demonstrates “a failed state that has surpassed and/or colluded with criminal groups,” whose presence and territorial disputes subject the population to a general climate of violence in which forced recruitment, kidnappings, threats and dispossession predominate.
“Criminal groups have taken over our territory and we find ourselves in a state of siege, under social psychosis with narco-blockades, which they use as a human barrier to civil society, forcing them to be there and putting their lives and that of their families at risk,” The Diocese denounced in a statement released on September 23, in which it pointed out the omission of “municipal and regional prosecutors, municipal presidents, and the state and federal governments.”
Journalist Hermann Bellinghausen, a correspondent in Chiapas, summarizes the situation of violence as generated largely by territorial disputes among cartels in search of new routes to the north of the state, especially the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel. The climate of violence is also due to the presence of armed civil groups in municipalities such as Pantelhó and Chenalhó, the so-called “motonetos” in San Cristóbal de las Casas, the protection fees for spaces in public markets and “old” territorial conflicts.
“The alarming cocktail [of violence] is accompanied by the immense wave of Central and South American migrants that floods the land border strip and who seek to enter the country at all costs. They constitute another commodity for criminals,” highlights Bellinghausen.
Control by organized crime groups extends from the capital to the municipalities and roads throughout the state. Just today a video was released in which a caravan of armed men from the Sinaloa Cartel can be seen on the highway between the municipalities of Frontera Comalapa and San Gregorio Chamic, amidst cheers and applause from the civilian population on the sides of the via. [See the video at Desinformémonos here.]
According to the Diocese of San Cristóbal, organized crime not only keeps the population of Chiapas subject to threat, harassment, persecution and shortages, but also exerts “pressure and social, political and psychological control of different groups so that the people take sides with one party or another of the criminal groups.”
So far, there has been no clear statement about the government’s intervention to protect the people of Chiapas and address the crisis of violence that the state undergoing. Already in 2021, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) had already framed the violent panorama in its statement “Chiapas on the brink of the civil war,” where the EZLN denounced the armed and paramilitary attacks on the indigenous communities of the state, the pilfering by officials “of everything they can from the state budget,” as well as the alliances of public servants with drug traffickers. “The government of Chiapas not only supports drug trafficking gangs, it also encourages, promotes and finances paramilitary groups,” Subcomandante Galeano said then.
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Translated by the Chiapas Support Committee from the original published September 25, 2023 by Desinformémonos available at https://desinformemonos.org/chiapas-un-estado-fallido-rebasado-y-coludido-con-los-grupos-delincuenciales-diocesis-de-san-cristobal/
The socio-cultural aspects of the Maya Train
By: Gilberto López y Rivas
First of all, I would like to highlight the non-consulted nature of the Tren Maya mega-project among the affected populations, which include original peoples protected by the Constitution and by international agreements, such as ILO Convention 169 and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which stipulate, among others, the right to prior, free, informed, good faith and culturally appropriate consultation regarding projects and actions of the State and corporations of various kinds that could affect their lands, territories, identities, cultural heritage and environment.
In this sense, the communiqué of the Office in Mexico of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN-HR) was very clear in calling attention to the indigenous consultation process carried out by the INPI, from November 15 to December 15, 2019, for not having complied with all the international standards on the matter, assuring that the authorities unilaterally decided the method of the process without the agreement of the communities, for which it criticized the partiality of the consultation.
For its part, the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature, which met to hear the case of the Maya Train, held the Mexican State responsible for ecocide and ethnocide for the violation of the fundamental rights of nature, of the Maya people, of Mother Earth, and of the right to life and existence. It also ordered Mexican authorities to immediately suspend the megaproject, as well as the demilitarization of indigenous territories and the suspension of the processes of dispossession of ejido land.
In the cultural sphere, the conflictual rupture within an institution whose task is the research, dissemination and preservation of the cultural heritage of the nation and its peoples is notable: the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), a situation aggravated by its participation in the Maya Train, and by serious problems within the institution that have not been resolved. Specifically, the commitments acquired by INAH with the Maya Train, under the control of the Secretary of National Defense (SEDENA), have caused the deepening of this rupture between authorities who obey the demands of tasks, times, disciplines and ways of working of SEDENA, and the union of academics of the institution that has expressed its rejection of the repressive policies of the authorities against researchers who maintain critical perspectives towards the megaproject, as demonstrated by the paradigmatic case of the archaeologist colleague Fernando Cortés of Brasdefer.
Likewise, it is worth mentioning opinions that consider that INAH should limit itself to one of its disciplines, archaeology, such as in the Maya Train, and, consequently, minimize or ignore the contributions of other anthropological and historical sciences that within the institution are represented by numerous researchers, whose knowledge, specialties and opinions are not taken into account in INAH, except for those who are in favor of what is considered the anthropology of social dissuasion, which, as in the State indigenism of the past, mediates the resistances of the peoples in favor of the neo-developmentalist policies, as the current government is doing.
Also, and based on the condemnations of international organizations, ignored by the Federal Executive, it seems to me necessary and urgent to become aware of the global context in which this mega-project is embedded. This is something that the Zapatista Mayas consider to be the storm that is approaching and is reaching us, and which is neither metaphorical nor symbolic, nor does it allude to an apocalyptic vision of prophetic voices, but rather to the real and scientifically-based possibility of a catastrophe on a planetary scale. Carlos Taibo referes to it as a collapse, a general and massive collapse of the dominant system, characterized by substantial reductions in industrial production; the simultaneous and combined financial, commercial, political, social, cultural and ecological meltdown due to its own contradictions and verifiable realities that are taking place: climate change, depletion of energy raw materials, irreversible damage to biodiversity, social conditions of unemployment, poverty, hunger, massive forced displacements, exponential increase in mortality from curable diseases and pandemics, wars for raw materials, and geopolitical strategies to impose or continue the economic, political and military domination of imperialist powers in certain regions; genocides, ethnocides, ecocides, state terrorism, proliferation of nuclear weapons, collapse of mega-cities and the transition to necropolis, and the spread of criminality and criminal gangs as the other face of recolonization or militarized and mafia-like accumulation.
Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Friday, September 15, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/09/15/opinion/012a2pol Translated by Schools for Chiapas and Re-Published by the Chiapas Support Committee
Indigenous peoples: Farewell to the so-called new relationship
By: Magdalena Gómez
At the time of the suspended dialogue between the federal government and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) it was claimed that a new relationship would be built between the State and the indigenous peoples. The farewell ceremony began in September 1996, when EZLN declared the suspension of the dialogue due to a crisis in what was to be the second round table on democracy and justice. It has been 27 years since that event, which was not announced as a rupture, since the Law for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Dignified Peace in Chiapas of 1995, established that while the dialogue is maintained, the State will not exercise persecutory actions for the armed uprising of the EZLN on January 1, 1994. This law, still in effect by the way, did not establish sanctions against the State in case of non-compliance with the agreements signed on February 16, 1996, those of San Andres on indigenous law and culture resulting from the first roundtable, which ultimately was the only roundtable. It is not possible to extend this anniversary, since it is already well known that successive governments since then have waged war by other means, as the classic would say. Including the indigenous counter-reform of 2001, which in Fox’s time, along with allied parties, tried to declare the San Andres Accords fulfilled. With that, it put an end to the political will expressed by the EZLN to resume the dialogue if the conditions they set, among them the constitutional reform in accordance with the referred agreements, were fulfilled.
From 2001 to this date, the State has not risked its word in this regard. The aforementioned farewell has been endorsed in times of the so-called 4T and it must be recognized that the President of the Republic has not offered anything in this respect, despite the initial expressions of the current head of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) that had to be omitted. He did put together a strategy of indigenous consultation forums with which they supported a proposal for a new constitutional reform, although it never came to life as an initiative, they recently organized a campaign with indigenous people and academics involved in this process, demanding that the President keep his word, which he did not do even with the Yaquis, when they publicly handed him the document containing the proposal. The campaign was silenced like the mariachis when one of the deputies of the Commission of Indigenous Affairs publicly affirmed that there were no conditions for such demand. Its proponents have remained silent.
This brief recounting of the farewell serves to remind us that the National Indigenous Congress has pointed out that the peoples do not define their struggles by sexennia and, nonetheless, we can already guess the hackneyed discourse on the subject, since at the end of the day its members represent potential votes. We already have two pearls voiced by the two women who will be on the ballot for next year’s presidential election.
The newly elected Claudia Sheinbaum as national coordinator of the Committees for the Defense of the Fourth Transformation, a prelude to Morena’s candidacy for the Presidency of the Republic in 2024. Even while campaigning, sorry, in an informational assembly in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, on August 13 she declared: “I will never fail you, I will always be close to the heart of the indigenous peoples, after receiving from indigenous women present the baton of authority and traditional dress ceremony. She highlighted, among the advances of the 4T, the construction of historic works, such as the Mayan Train and reiterated: It is a historic moment for the country, in addition justice is being done for the indigenous peoples which is something that must not stop and must continue, which represents recovering land, territory. Water. It means the wellbeing of the peoples. It means support for the indigenous peoples, but not from the top down, but in a dialogue between the peoples and their authorities.”
I would like to know her data to support this discourse because I have other data. Days later, on September 2, Xóchitl Gálvez, elected by the Frente Amplio por México, also in San Cristóbal stated, I confess that to my astonishment: I will comply with the San Andres agreements. She acknowledged that they are still pending and criticized the incapacity of the current government to promote a constitutional reform. She is informed, no doubt, but she does not recognize the many failures of the Fox government in which she participated. And she outlined her plan that, in addition to economic support, there will be infrastructure development and ecotourism projects and equitable access to education. It is difficult for both speeches to be transformed even when they come from women, and assuming that the axis of the peoples is autonomy and self-determination; even worse: they do not sympathize with the violence that is being suffered throughout the country, especially in Guerrero and Chiapas. True, it is too much to ask. They are only campaigning.
Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Tuesday, September 12, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/09/12/opinion/022a2pol and Re-Published by the Chiapas Support Committee with English interpretation by Schools for Chiapas
The “Narco” in the Lacandón Jungle
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
Allende and don Pablo through the great avenues
By: Raúl Romero*
Pablo González Casanova used to narrate with irony what his detractors said about him and his constant trips to Chile during his time as rector (1970 -1972): I traveled so much, that they told me that I was more in the Palacio de la Moneda than in the Rectory, and that is why what had happened to me had happened to me. Interviewed by Claudia Rojas, Hugo Miranda, who was director of the Casa de Chile in Mexico, will recall: the former rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) Pablo González Casanova goes to Chile, has links with the University of Chile, gives conferences, has meetings with the intellectual world and all that is creating a friendship and a very close bond between Mexico and Chile.
For those years, don Pablo not only occupied the UNAM’s Rectory, in his works Democracy in Mexico and Sociology of Exploitationhe had expressed his commitment against inequality and exploitation, choosing as an alternative the struggles for socialism, democracy and liberation, which years later he would refer to as three alternatives in one. The experiences of the government of Jacobo Arbenz, the Cuban revolution and the world revolt of 1968 would deeply mark González Casanova in those years, and of course, he would follow with attention the rise of the Popular Unity to the government of Chile. From different spaces, it will be deeply committed to the Chilean road to socialism, and will also open spaces for the dissemination and strengthening of that experience. After the fateful September 11, 1973, don Pablo will devote his energies to help bring to Mexico intellectuals and political leaders who in Chile will be at risk of imprisonment, torture and death. His relationship with Pedro Vuskovic, who was Minister of Economy under Salvador Allende, and who after the coup d’état was exiled in Mexico, will be testimony to this solidarity.
With his great friends Luis Cardoza y Aragón and Lya Kostakowsky, don Pablo will approach a powerful network of intellectuals, artists and popular leaders committed to the struggles of Latin America. Thus, González Casanova will forge friendship with Pablo Neruda, who will also keep him informed about the details and particularities of the process in Chile.
If the Cuban revolution summoned González Casanova to be in the front line of solidarity in the anti-imperialist struggle, Popular Unity and Salvador Allende will lead him to reflect on the peaceful, legal and democratic path to socialism, a socialism that at the same time posed the struggle against imperialism and for internationalism. The processes of the nationalization of copper, iron and coal allowed the rector of the UNAM to observe the difference of the Chilean process with other populists and revolutionary nationalists in the region.
But González Casanova not only recognized the feat of the Chilean people, he also had a deep respect for Salvador Allende, whom he saw as a great orator, a great politician and above all a revolutionary. Just a few weeks after having resigned from the UNAM, in November 1972, at Allende’s direct request, Don Pablo will participate by making contacts and relations for the historic trip that the Chilean president made in December of the same year to Mexico.
Don Pablo highlighted Allende’s congruence, of doing what he said and to what he was committed: He used the word as an exact announcement of the action. Salvador Allende, recognized that the author of Democracy in Mexico had a place next to Fidel Castro as leaders of revolutionary processes that theorized about their processes and that with their speeches and writings contributed to educate and arm the peoples with theory.
Six years after the coup d’état in Chile, Don Pablo will write: He died like no Latin American president, invested with the symbols that the people gave him, weapons in hand, the palace burned and destroyed, the project of defense of the law for the popular program alive, and a new history that they would write being born, as he thought, America and its people.
The neo-fascist and neocolonialist repression that would be unleashed first in Chile, and then in much of Latin America, would commit González Casanova to support exile and collaborate in safeguarding the heroic memory of the Chilean people. Thus, among other initiatives, he supported the Salvador Allende Center for Latin American Studies, which will promote the analysis of the Chilean road to socialism and recover writings of the former Chilean president.
Each people is free to choose its own path to socialism, said Salvador Allende, and González Casanova helped to understand that the path chosen by the Chilean people was a contribution to the struggles of Latin America and the world. Today Allende and Don Pablo walk through the great avenues of history, and sooner rather than later the peoples of our America will travel that path that they and so many other men and women helped to trace.
*Sociologist
Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Sunday, September 10, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/09/10/opinion/006a1pol and Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Inhabitants of Nueva Palestina demand help in the face of an invasion by organized crime
From the Editors
Approximately 3,000 residents of the community of Nueva Palestina, municipality of Ocosingo, Chiapas, marched yesterday to demand the presence of security forces because members of organized crime, who are disputing the territory, are trying to charge small businesses with “derecho de piso” (extortion to continue operating, aka “protection monay”).
At the same time, authorities of the town, located in the Lacandon jungle, sent a letter to President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador asking him to protect the town by land and air, as we are being threatened by organized crime.
During the demonstration, which concluded in the central plaza, the Tseltales affirmed that they marched to reclaim their rights “to life, tranquility and peace.”
“Andrés Manuel López Obrador: we still believe in you. Send us the Army, the Navy, the federal forces, the National Guard; send them to New Palestine, they demanded.”
With a bull horn placed on a vehicle at the front of the march, they warned: “If the government does not act, the people are also organizing to take care of themselves.”
They pointed out that members of the Sinaloa Cartel are extorting them and asked: “What derecho de piso, if we are farmers and ranchers? We are peaceful and hard-working people.” Then they chanted: “Out with the Sinaloa Cartel! Out with organized crime! Yes to the Army! We want order, peace and tranquility! On their placards they read messages such as: No more smugglers in Nueva Palestina, no more cartels, and we denounce the collection of money by criminals.”
They claimed that at the San Javier intersection, located seven kilometers from Nueva Palestina, members of the Sinaloa cartel are positioned, operating alongside the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
Extortionists announce they will take over the community
Authorities commented that on Tuesday “about 16 hired killers arrived in two white vans. They entered the offices of the ejidal police station armed, wanting to kill us. Then they left. They are angry because we did not give them permission to charge the small businesses.”
They explained that they forced the door and entered. They told them that they were going to “work in an orderly manner without disrespecting anyone”, that they were “only” going to charge a “floor fee.”
They slapped the rural policeman who was recording them, snatched his phone and erased the contents. They warned that they would enter the community “because it was their right.”
In the letter addressed to the President they recounted what happened on September 5 and added that the individuals arrived to inform them that they would take control of the town and the region that day. Later they surrounded the house of the president of the commission, but fortunately they retreated.
They stated: “We are a peaceful people and we confirm that we are willing to receive the troops of the Mexican Army and the police, to whom we urgently request their actions with flyovers and by land.
The local leaders confirmed that they were alerted that an armed group “that calls itself the Sinaloa Cartel of El Mayo Zambada is surrounding the town,” the reason for which they insisted on requesting the government’s prompt intervention.
Other sources said that the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) has control of the San Javier intersection, a key point in the Lacandon Community, and is charging a fee. The driver of a sugar truck had the letters CJNG engraved on his back because he refused to pay them.
An anonymous letter circulated in recent days states that in the last two months the inhabitants of the San Javier crossing have been threatened by self-proclaimed members of the Jalisco Cartel, who are charging all the truck drivers and migrants who pass through. There have already been violent encounters and people marked on their skin with the initials CJNG.
Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Friday, September 8, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/09de8/estados/024n2est English translation by Schools for Chiapas and Re-Published by the Chiapas Support Committee
Thousands march in Ocosingo to demand an end to the “cobro de piso”
By: Elio Henríquez
San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas
Thousands of indigenous Choles from the community of Frontera Corozal, municipality of Ocosingo, marched peacefully this Friday to demand the presence of federal security forces, due to the fact that members of narco-trafficking organizations seek to collect floor rights (protection money).
The demonstrators – 7,000, according to community authorities – said that because it is a border point, the government must put more interest and reinforce security in the area.
Today we demonstrate to show the federal government and the entire world that we are peaceful communities and peoples. We want peace; Frontera Corozal, as its name implies, is the gateway to the Lacandón Jungle and Mexico, but the organization must also prevail, they said.
We have the same problem as the community of Nueva Palestina, because the drug trafficking groups want to enter to charge the inhabitants a flat fee and that is why we are demanding that there be security, they said.
They pointed out that they are on par with Nueva Palestine, where 4,000 inhabitants marched on Thursday to also demand the presence of federal and state forces.
They remarked: we are indigenous and we are used to living in peace, tranquility and working calmly in what we are used to, which is to cultivate the land.
The march began at the entrance arch to the town and after walking two kilometers concluded in the central square. A banner with the legend: Mr. President of the Republic. We demand security for the Lacandón area, particularly in Frontera Corozal (sic), led the mobilization.
They affirmed that they marched to fulfill the agreement that the Frontera Corozal assembly took on Thursday because the situation is getting worse every day due to insecurity.
He added that in the last three years, the territory of the Lacandón has been invaded by organized crime, which with impunity has been increasingly seizing control of its jungle, opening clandestine airstrips for the transfer of cocaine, controlling the trafficking of undocumented immigrants and floor rights of floor to small merchants, as well as quotas to tourism service providers; carrying out forced evictions of hundreds of families, disappearing people and committing femicides.
Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Saturday, September 9, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/09/09/estados/022n1est and Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas: Paramilitarism in counterinsurgency
BY: Gilberto López y Rivas
In the context of the multiple forms of neoliberal violence that prevail at the global and national levels, in the forum: “From the horror of war to the resistance for life,” summoned by the emergency situation that prevails in territories of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, I exposed, at the table around violence, the deepening of the counterinsurgency war strategy through the action of various armed actors. On the one hand, paramilitary groups, such as the ORCAO, which multiply their attacks against Zapatista communities, and, on the other, the growing presence throughout Chiapas of cartels of so-called organized crime, within the framework of a process of militarization and militarism continued by the current government.
The action of paramilitarism has lasted for several decades, starting with a military counterguerrilla tactic known as anvil and hammer, according to which the Army and police institutions adopt the passive function of containment forces (anvil), which allow them to perform, in this case, the active function of harassment of paramilitary groups (hammer) against the EZLN and its support bases. Since the outbreak of the Zapatista rebellion, the paramilitary groups have been reformed.
Thus, there is a crucial element in the counterinsurgency strategy: the action of paramilitaries who are used in tasks that the armed forces prefer not to perform directly. This was a tactic used in Guatemala, although there the army directly played the fundamental role in the genocide against the indigenous people. In the Guatemalan conflict, exacerbated in the 1960s, we find what could be the workshop of para-militarization and militarization in Central America and Mexico. Ultra-right groups that showed themselves to be autonomous, but attached to the intelligence section (G-2) of the Guatemalan army, civil self-defense patrols, which in principle were forcibly recruited by the army and played a role in massacres and military control of communities, scorched earth practices during the government of Efraín Ríos Mont (brought to justice for genocide), in the 80s, which were nothing more than the bombing of the communities with the population inside, are samples of an experience that left, over a period of 36 years, 100 thousand dead, 40 thousand disappeared, 50 thousand refugees abroad, many in Mexico, a million displaced to other parts of the country, 600 collective killings and an accumulated experience of repression that transcends the borders of Guatemala: the kaibiles, a particularly bloodthirsty army corps that trains the Mexican armed forces.
The state link provides a fundamental element for a definition of the Latin American experience: thus, paramilitary groups are those that have military organization, equipment and training, to which the State delegates missions that the armed forces cannot carry out openly, without implying that they recognize their existence as part of the monopoly of state violence. Paramilitary groups are illegal and unpunished because it suits the interests of the State. The paramilitary consists, then, in the illegal and unpunished exercise of State violence and in the concealment of the origin of that violence. Above all, in the cases of Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca, paramilitarism serves the purposes of counterinsurgency, destroying or severely deteriorating the social fabric of communities and social organizations in resistance. It acts under the most diverse expressions: it attacks social service providers, causing conditions of expulsion and displacement of indigenous and peasant communities, colludes with civil authorities, exercises harassment through the actions of venal judges and judicial police, infiltrates religious associations, carrying out intelligence work, poses developmental dilemmas that cause clientelism and environmental deterioration, as Sembrando Vida (Sowing Life), and places as enemies of development communities that refuse to follow the logic of capital and, above all, originates or increases the spiral of violence in communities by imposing that this is a way of life. The insertion in the communities of Chiapas, and other states of the country, of phenomena such as prostitution, alcohol consumption, and domestic violence, are also the result of the presence of the Army, as documented by Juan Balboa since 1997 (La Jornada, 1/27/97).
This is only part of the broad-spectrum war that is being waged in Chiapas (and in other states of the country), and that we denounced in that forum, with the purpose of breaking the media siege and denialism that the Mexican State encourages impunity.
Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Friday, August 4, 2020, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/08/04/opinion/019a2pol and Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
The right to dissent
By: Gilberto López y Rivas
Fernando Cortés de Brasdefer, noted archaeologist with a trajectory of more than 40 years as a research professor at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), currently attached to its regional center in Quintana Roo, has been the object of a singular campaign of discredit, workplace harassment, lifting of administrative records and threats of dismissal by state and central authorities of this institution, for expressing, in a chat with colleagues, his well-founded criticisms of the so-called Maya Train. These opinions were uploaded to social networks by third parties, which led to excessive repressive reactions, in which the Archaeology Council ultimately participated, with an unsigned statement. Since 1970, the Archaeology Council, has served as a consulting body to INAH’s national directors, lacking, of course, the legal abilities to normalize research into that ambit, and much less to apply sanctions, counterclaims or accusations to the researchers, who, correspond to the National Archaeology Coordination.
The paradox is that there is a record of a 2018 federal government statement, in which Cortés is presented as the discoverer of several archaeological sites in the Maya area in his long and meritorious career, and author of important books in renowned publishers, such as the Encyclopedia of Archaeology and Monuments of Quintana Roo, now described by the secret council as an inexperienced researcher who has carried out perhaps a couple of salvage interventions without reaching good terms.
For its part, the National Union of Professors of Scientific Research and Teaching of the INAH, in compliance with the agreement of its general assembly on August 15, made known to public opinion its energetic rejection and indignation at the attempt to dismiss the colleague and colleague Fernando Cortés de Brasdefer, as well as to demand that the general director of the institution cease hostilities against our colleague, the immediate withdrawal of the
On August 21, unionized INAH personnel in Chetumal, Quintana Roo, held a protest in support of the archaeologist who denounced the archaeological devastation caused by the work of the Maya Train, while, in various regional centers and offices of the institute in the country, they deployed support banners and carried out peaceful demonstrations for the same purpose.
On August 22, the Sélvame del Tren collective released a document in which its members sympathize with the archaeologist for his courage and his decision not to be an accomplice to the destruction that the mega-work misnamed the Mayan Train is causing, also pointing out that in our tours to document the environmental impact of the jungle and the aquifer, archaeologists expressed their rejection of this megaproject, because they needed more time to rescue all the richness of the elements found in this area that should be protected, as stipulated by law . In the face of anomalies, looting and violations of the law, archaeologists have been forced to remain silent for fear of losing their job or being persecuted like the archaeologist Fernando Cortés de Brasdefer. With his brave words, Cortés de Brasdefer has revealed that the INAH has become a cowardly cover organization for the disasters committed in the Maya jungle. Scientists, academics, activists, and divers involved in monitoring the destruction caused by the train in the Maya jungle have documented the destruction of vestiges and cenotes in videos, photos, and testimonies.
During these years, criticism of the mega-work has proliferated, based on the document Why we oppose the Maya Train, addressed to the President of the Republic, which on April 1, 2022 was disseminated and endorsed by hundreds of researchers from various disciplines and institutions. academics, as well as by organizations dedicated to the preservation of nature and territories.
Books have also been written, such as “Peoples and territory versus the Maya Train, coordinated by Giovanna Gasparello and Violeta Núñez Rodríguez, in which a frontal criticism is made of the rhetoric of progress, conflict engineering and the anthropology of social deterrence that accompany this high-impact mega-work, denouncing its destructive nature for the archaeological, historical, natural and social heritage, as well as the community disintegration of peoples and the commodification and reification of their culture.
Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada, Thursday, August 31, 2023, https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/08/31/opinion/019a1pol and Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 