What happened last July 2 in Cherán was not an isolated event. It was a new armed offensive that seeks to wear down the autonomy that these P’urhépecha people have built with courage, dignity and memory. Since 2011, when they rose up against organized crime and institutional complicity, Cherán has been a beacon of resistance and those who have sustained that light in the midst of the siege have been, above all, the women.
The recent aggressions are part of a continuum of patriarchal and extractivist violence that seeks to subject indigenous territories to dispossession. But in Cherán, this machinery of death has encountered a living wall, that of the women who resist from the body-territory. They not only defend life, they cultivate it, teach it, transmit it. Their resistance is not only physical, but symbolic, political and spiritual.
The Fogata de Mujeres por la Memoria de Cherán (Women’s Campfire of Memory of Cheran) has been one of the spaces where this defense is woven on a daily basis. They have promoted community projects to recover herbal medicine, revitalize the P’urhépecha language and strengthen the passing on of knowledge to the next generation. They have promoted agro-ecological gardens, and have participated in projects for their own forms of justice where the dignity of the people is not negotiable. They have practiced a politics of care, rootedness, word and action. And they have done so by putting their bodies, facing threats, imposed silences and bullets.
This community life project makes even more sense if we look at it from the context that surrounds Cherán. Michoacán is experiencing a brutal upsurge in violence with more than 500 intentional homicides by June 2025, the assassination of six mayors in four years, explosives launched by drones, kidnappings, forced displacements, and entire communities turned into spoils of war for the cartels. The regions of Uruapan, Zamora, Apatzingán or Tepalcatepec are tragic examples of how the State has abandoned its role as guarantor and has retreated or allied itself, sometimes tacitly, with the interests of armed capital.
In this scenario, what value does the resistance of the women of Cherán have? All of it. Because they are not only defending a forest, a language or a hearth, they are defending the very possibility of living in community, of inhabiting the territory without fear, of deciding collectively how to live and how to heal. They have removed from their territory the so-called “green gold,” the avocado, which has brought dispossession, violence and ecological devastation, and have said yes to life in profoundly political ways with resin, plants, rainwater harvesting, with language and with the recovery of their history.
Unlike the militaristic projects that have been tried in other contexts such as Colombia, where after decades of war it has been demonstrated that more weapons do not bring more peace, the Cherán experience shows that peace is built from below, with autonomy, memory and justice. The report Cicatrices son memoria (2023) (Scars are memory) clearly points this out; militarization in indigenous territories not only fails, but also reproduces violence, criminalizes those who defend life and allows extractivism to advance disguised as security.
That is why what the women of Cherán are doing is not only relevant but urgent. In a Mexico plagued by fear, they are betting on life. In a state where politics has been hijacked by dark interests, they make community politics. In the face of death, they not only resist, they create, sow, heal and re-exist.
The July 2nd attack seeks to break that dignity, but they will not succeed because what is being defended in Cherán is not only a territory, but a way of inhabiting the world that challenges us all. Defending nana echeri (mother earth) is not a romantic slogan, it is an urgent necessity in the face of the current civilizational collapse.
Cherán is still standing and with it, the women who have made it possible. Their verb is to live and their example is a beacon for all the territories that still resist.
Original text by Malely Linares Sánchez published in Desinformémonos on the 4th of July, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.