This article highlights the plight of campesino farmers in Chiapas. Despite massive profits being made by middlemen and the agroindustry, Chiapas remains the poorest state of the Mexican federation. It also illustrates the inherent flaws of the Sembrando Vida program, which, although it may be beneficial to larger landholders, is perjudicial to most.
“In psychology there is a thing called the internalization of damages. A harm that has occurred socially becomes internalized. Parents ask themselves if they were not to blame. The five of us sat in on those conversations; we had to let ourselves be touched by their stories in order to understand what was happening to them. Out of that came invisible things that are defining.”
An educational tradition committed to the underclasses, normal schools ike Ayotzinapa and the student teachers graduating from them have long served peasant and indigenous communities across the Mexican countryside. But the State, has long considered them a threat.
Gilberto López y Rivas on the deepening of counterinsurgency tactics under the current administration. He was one of several panelists on the topic of violence in the Forum: From the Horror of War to Resistance for Life, held July 31 and August 1.
Despite the continuing spiral of violence in the state and all the evidence to the contrary, AMLO continues to be in a state of denial and insist that clam reigns in of Chiapas.
