by Lucie Cabins for the Chiapas Support Committee
May, 2025 

“Impunity is not the result of a weak or deficient state, but rather it is actively provided to the gamut of armed groups who commit crimes and acts of terror against citizens, migrants and the poor. The provision of impunity to armed actors who are politically aligned with capitalism is part of a modern nation states’ raison d’etre “

Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism, p.17

In Drug war capitalism, Dawn Paley provides an in-depth account of how state militarization, justified by the so-called war on drugs, allowed capitalism to penetrate into territories that had been relatively inaccessible in northern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia. She explains how military and paramilitary forces were nurtured to clear the territory for transnational capital.  Activists who resisted displacement by capitalist transnationals were disappeared, arrested and assassinated, and often accused of participating in criminal gangs.   

The analysis developed in her book, published in 2014, is useful insight into events unfolding in the Mexican Southeast in recent years, as the region becomes a target of capitalist investment through a series of “megaprojects” that include the Maya Train, the Trans-Isthmic Industrial Corridor, gas pipelines, the Palenque-San Cristobal highway, and a projected industrial corridor along the Mexico- Guatemala border, promoted by Sheinbaum and the new governor of Chiapas. The area has until recently been somewhat outside of the plunder zone of capitalist enterprise, due to a number of factors including the difficulty of access to remote, often mountainous areas, the persistence of communal land ownership which makes it difficult for corporations to take control of the land, and an anti-capitalist ethos and way of life exemplified by the Zapatista territories.

In Chiapas today, we can see the deployment of state military forces throughout the state, purportedly to control crime, taking control of public space, deployed against those who resist destruction and displacement of their communities, thus laying the groundwork for exploitation and resource extraction by capitalist transnationals.    

False arrests of activists, impunity for crimes against population

On April 24, two Zapatista support bases José Baldemar Sántiz Sántiz and Andrés Manuel Sántiz Gómez, were kidnapped, their homes violently ransacked and their possessions destroyed and stolen, without warning or warrant, by a combined operation involving 39 vehicles including elements of the Mexican Army, the National Guard, (a branch of security originally created by AMLO to counter the corruption of the military, but later absorbed into the military) and the Pakales, a special ops force created with much fanfare by the recently elected governor of Chiapas, presumably to fight crime. 

Two days later, the authorities revealed that the Zapatistas had been incarcerated in San Cristóbal de las Casas, concocting a blatant lie that the men were arrested in their vehicles while attempting to flee from the authorities, who discovered weapons and white powder in their vehicle.  The Zapatistas were charged with aggravated kidnapping of Pedro Díaz Gómez, but then released without charges following an expeditious international campaign initiated by Fray Bartolome de las Casa Human Rights Center (FRAYBA) and an independent investigation conducted by the Zapatistas, which led to the apprehension and confession of the actual perpetrators of the crime that the Zapatistas had been charged with. The Zapatistas handed the perpetrators over to FRAYBA, to ascertain that their human rights had not been violated, and FRAYBA subsequently delivered them to the authorities, who incarcerated them and released the falsely accused Zapatistas. For an extraordinary account of the Zapatista process that led to the apprehension of the criminals see https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2025/05/03/innocent/)

This incident represents a brazen use of the state security forces against the indigenous resistance movement in Chiapas. It may signal a new phase in government terrorism deployed against the indigenous resistance of Chiapas, and in particular, against the zapatistas under the façade of a war against crime.

Impunity in the service of counterinsurgency

In the Aldama area itself, where the Zapatistas were kidnapped, local campesinos were subjected to constant attacks by highly armed groups between 2018 and 2022 over territorial disputes in which the government refused to intervene despite countless appeals. While land disputes are nothing new in Chiapas, the possession by the aggressors, of high-caliber automatic weapons was a new development that has emerged in tandem with the rise of cartel wars in the state.  

Following a pattern of government criminalization of activists, Cristóbal Santiz Jiménez, a spokesperson for the 115 displaced community members which included Zapatista families, was imprisoned for two years on trumped-up charges. The authorities tried three times to get him to cop a plea, and he refused(personal communication with Cristóbal Santiz). It took an intervention by the Inter American Commission on Human Rights to get the authorities to take measures to protect the 115 families displaced by the violence.   

The fabrication of crimes against land defenders is one of the many fronts of government attack on indigenous communities, and the increasing frequency of attacks in recent years correlates with the extraordinary wave of criminality that has hit Chiapas, just as the government prepares the way for capitalist industries to penetrate the area . Since early 2024 there have been 93 documented attacks against human rights defenders in Chiapas, The pattern is clear: impunity for criminal violence perpetrated by a complex web of cartels, paramilitary forces, old and new, often in the service of local elites, and state “security” forces presumably deployed to fight crime. The violence cocktail intimidates people from speaking out, inhibits mobility, ruptures the social fabric of communities, and generally weakens the ability of organized local populations to fight against the projects that decimate their communities and ways of life. Statistics on the rise of violence in Chiapas have been in the headlines for years, and the figures are astonishing: Frayba reports, between only January of 2023 and June of 2024, 15,780 persons (mostly indigenous peasants) displaced from their homes by violence, From December 1, 2018 to June 2024, (during the term of Morena Party Rutilio Escandon as governor)  the state prosecutor’s office recorded 6,147 cases of homicides , 177 femicides; 78 kidnappings; 943 sexual abuses; 18,550 robberies (to homes, businesses, public roads and transportation); 319 extortions; 5,795 drug dealing; more than 40,000 people forcibly displaced. And this does not include the vast numbers of crimes that are not reported for fear of reprisals. Chiapas is now one of the most violent states in Mexico. 

Two examples, amidst  thousands of cases, point to the systemic forces at work in the recent crime surge. The town of Nueva Morelia not far from the border area became a ghost-town in May 2024 as thousands of inhabitants fled their homes following the massacre of a family that had been organizing against illegal mining by the Sinaloa Cartel. The cartel had begun to illegally exploit a mine previously run by a Canadian mining company, Blackfire Exploration, that had been successfully shut down years before (following the corporation’s implication in the murder of an anti-mine activist). A relative of the murdered family recently stated that no authority has approached him about any ongoing investigation into the massacre. Then-president AMLO implied, with no evidence, that the murdered family was implicated with organized crime, which has been denied by residents of the town. Residents believe that the government wants to reopen the mines and is taking advantage of the violence perpetrated by the organized crime wars to silence the population that has been fighting against the reopening of the mines.  

Last year, the beloved, outspoken priest, Marcelo Pérez Pérez, was assassinated on the streets of San Cristóbal in broad daylight on his way to deliver mass, having already fled his previous parish due to constant threats against his life for denouncing organized crime, drug trafficking and criminal violence. Like so many land defenders and human rights activist, Pérez had been falsely charged on ludicrous claims that he participated in the disappearance of 19 people. The spectacular murder of a man of the cloth rattled the population of the state like no other crime could and signaled that there were no limits to the impunity that organized crime enjoyed. Six months on, the investigation is in limbo, making it clear that the government is in no hurry to pursue the case. 

A friend of mine active in the diocese from Pérez’s previous parish told me that although he did not speak about it publicly, he was very supportive of her involvement with the National Indigenous Congress. She also told me that when he frequented the villages in his parish, a group of women would surround him in order to protect him, whereas in San Cristóbal, he had no official protection despite his high profile and the threats against him. “We indigenous know how to protect our people” was how she proudly put it. 

Former president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and previous governor of Chiapas Rutilio Escandon, cynically denied the spiraling violence that in just a few years transformed Chiapas from being a state with relatively low visibility of organized crime to one of the most violent states in the country, rampant with criminal gangs. (Calling them “narco” is by now a misnomer as drugs are only one of the many businesses involved: migrant trafficking, control of public transit, sex trade, “protection” rackets on local businesses, extortion of all sorts– any activity where a buck can be made through intimidation.) As a frequent visitor to San Cristobal since 2016, it was shocking to find in recent years that  I was unable to travel around the state, to be warned not to go out at night, and to hear the rounds of machine gun fire emanating from the central marketplace a few blocks from downtown, where various police entities are always stationed.  In one incident in San Cristobal, a turf war at a different marketplace led to a 4-hour standoff terrorizing and imperiling residents who were caught in the crossfire. The National Guard and the police, routinely seen on the streets of this town, took four hours to show up to the scene of the shootout. Collusion between criminals and cops was obvious.

The extraordinary rise in violence in the state has been widely attributed to a turf war between the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generación, involving ancillary indigenous Chamula Cartel and the Guatemalan cartels, as well as many other  local criminal groups, old and new. 

The stakes are high. Chiapas is traversed by three major drug and human trafficking routes. Migrants fleeing violence in their home countries who enter through the Guatemalan border pay exorbitant amounts to be transported to the U.S, not always making it alive. The traditional coyote system was taken over by the cartels sometime around 2004-2005, and the region was, until recently, under the control of the Sinaloa Cartel, with the clear cooperation of immigration authorities, without which it would not be possible to move such large amounts of drugs, money and people. Recent incursions by the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG) , apparently facilitated by allies in the Chiapas State Attorney General’ s office and the Office of Public Security (see below), have “de-stabilized” the criminal activities on border areas, wreaking terror on the population. The CJNG has established alliances with local gangs and recruited people into the organization using the carrot of employment and money, and the stick of violence and terror. Reports of forced recruitments into the criminal gangs, locals being forced to set up blockades to prevent the police or rival gangs from entering an area, or being used as human shields in shootouts between rival gangs, extortion of taxi drivers, blackmail  have become a part of the daily life in the border area.

The violence has spilled over into other areas and the presence of narcos is sometimes literally paraded in the streets. Although there is no evidence for direct participation of cartels in violence related to long-standing land disputes and struggles over municipal power, the infusion of high-caliber automatic weapons in so many instances seems more than likely to be fueled by crossovers between the rise of organized crime, the remnants of paramilitary forces established in the 90’s to fight Zapatismo, and the sicarios (hitmen) used by local elites to grab land and power. As we know from the history of the Zetas and other gangs, military trained hit men become guns for hire, whether for cartels or for corporate forces seeking power in the area. Hitmen in the service of drug cartels can just as easily serve interests of local elites, including land disputes, and can eventually serve as “security” to defend corporate property, as occurred, for example, in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where the wind farm corporations routinely hired sicarios known to be involved in organized crime as security in the face of a disgruntled local population. In another part of Mexico, a land activist recounted that when she was kidnapped by hitmen from organized crime following a successful land struggle against a local capitalist, she was taken to a room in a municipal government building and told to leave the country (personal communication.

Some have labelled this meshing of government and organized crime a new form of state, a “narco-governance”. In any case, the collusion between criminal groups and government officials, from the level of the municipality to the governor’s office and beyond, is practically a basic banality. From taxi drivers to the mechanic who repairs my VW, to campesinos in the villages I visit, nearly  everyone I talk to in Chiapas acknowledges the involvement, at all levels of official government, with   organized crime.  The most obvious evidence of the collusion is the astonishing impunity of organized crime that has allowed the proliferation of forced recruitment, assassinations, extortion, blackmail, kidnappings and murders that occur daily throughout the state.  

Although positive correlation between foreign investments and criminal hegemony has been documented, uncontrolled violence created by fragmentation and infighting between criminal gangs can be bad for business. In particular, uncontrolled gang war over territorial control in Chiapas is bad for the transnational capital the state wants to attract for its “development” plans in Chiapas. These plans, which came to the fore under Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and have been bolstered by new president  Sheinbaum, who has added the development of  industrial corridor along the border with Guatemala to the catalog of megaprojects, in order to appease US antagonism towards migration. 

Enter the new governor of Chiapas, Eduardo Ramirez Aguilar  (ERA). The day of his inauguration he announced with much fanfare the formation of an elite special operations force, the Pakales, named after a powerful Mayan ruler known, fittingly, for his extensive construction projects.   

To the alarm of human rights groups, ERA named Álvaro Cuauhtémoc Serrano Escobedo to head the Pakales.  Escobedo is a former Federal Police commander who resurfaced following years of absence from government service during which he was sought for arrest by the Federal Attorney General’s Office for his role in a 2015 raid on a presumed criminal compound, during which dozens of civilians were massacred and the scene of the crime covered up by police.  

The roster of appointed public security functionaries in Chiapas reads like a who’s who in human rights violations. Jorge Luis Llaven Abarca, newly appointed State Attorney General, has been linked to the rise of the CJNG while he served under former governor Rutilio Escandon.  His appointment was publicly denounced by numerous human rights groups based on a record of torture and other human rights violations during police operations in Chiapas while he was prosecutor of the Homicide Unit.  He was implicated in the death by torture of Luis Ignacio Lara Vidal in 2005, as well as the detention and torture of members of La Otra Campaña in San Sebastián Bachajón. As far back as 2002, the National Human Rights Commissions recommended an investigation based on its review of allegations of torture of human rights defender  Noe Jimenez Pablo, which was ignored. Jimenez Pablo was murdered in 2019. 

Gabriela Zepeda Soto, head of the Secretariat of Public Security since 2018 under former governor Rutiolio Escandon, belongs to the power group associated with Abarca and has also been denounced for colluding with the cartels.  Head of the Secretariat of Public Security (SSP)  Oscar Alberto Aparicio Avedano, a buddy of Serrano, (and trained, incidentally, by the DEA) presided over a dramatic increase in violent crime while in charge of Public Security in Chihuahua when the state was in the midst of cartel wars.  He helped create the Immediate Reaction Force of Zacatecas (FRIZ) when he served as Undersecretary of Police Operations in this state, a unit that has been publicly linked to criminal acts ranging from the disappearance of people to homicides.

Pax narca

During the inauguration of the Pakales, the gov declared commitment to fight crime without ever mentioning the cartels or “organized crime” despite it making daily headlines and bearing on the minds of nearly everyone in Chiapas. The Pakales unit was launched in a highly publicized campaign announcing  “Zero Tolerance for Crime”, and was splashed all over billboards on the main highways and in urban centers, featuring  Ramboesque figures purporting to free the population from criminal terror. Masked men and women riding open vehicles, their fingers on triggers of automatic weapons, began to sweep the state. Their missions have led to scores of spectacular arrests, including dozens of police officers, in some cases leaving towns practically without a police force. The decrease in crime since their deployment has provided a welcome respite for many from the criminal terror that prevailed. However, rather than a significant attempt to root out the source of crime as the official narrative proclaims, evidence points to a “pax narca”, a deal the governor has brokered with and between organized crime groups, inside and outside the government.  No significant leaders have been arrested, and there has been a notable lack of armed opposition by organized crime even in areas with high presence of armed cartel operatives, and  despite their formidable firepower and hundreds if not thousands of members (Friends in San Cristóbal found  the idea that a convoy of Pakales could ride into Chamula and arrest dozens of “criminals” without inciting  a massive shootout risible, given common knowledge of the firepower and ferocity of the Chamulan cartel.) There have been minimal seizures of the prolific amount of drugs or high-powered weapons that circulate through the state. All of this points to a non-aggression pact between the state and criminal groups, or perhaps more aptly, between different branches of a criminal-state complex whom the Pakales serve by harassing and intimidating campesinos and challenging community control of their territories.  

The government’s “development” plans in the region

On the same day the Pakales were inaugurated, the new governor announced the construction of the San Cristobal Las Casas-Palenque highway, a project that had been floated by the Chiapas governor in 2013, but abandoned by 2016 following the mobilization of organized indigenous communities who would have been displaced by the project. ERA said the new highway would pass through Chilon and Ocosingo, both sites of extreme violence in recent years. He also announced that his administration would promote the construction of a “southern industrial border”, (echoing announcements by his staunch supporter President Sheinbaum) referring to it as an “opportunity” in response to the demands of the US government to contain immigration, as it would provide jobs for migrants who would no longer be driven to continue north. 

Scenes from the rout where the San-Cristóbal-Palenque superhighway will pass. Lives that will invariably be changed and changes to the landscape that extend far beyond the limits of the highway. Photos: Lucie Cabins

The connection between these two announcements the day of the inauguration was ominous. It has become clear in recent months, and particularly with the spectacular arrest of the two Zapatista support bases, that the Pakales are being used to intimidate and harass indigenous communities, to challenge their autonomy and to deter them from resisting the intrusion and destruction of their communities. Predictably, by April, there were accusations, reported by FRAYBA, that the Pakales’ sweeps were committing abuses against residents, including arbitrary detentions, torture, and excessive force. During visits to rural communities in February, I heard many accounts of the Pakales’ sweeps. With a pretext of seizing stolen vehicles, the Pakales confiscated motorcycles and trucks used by campesinos with no link to criminal activities. One campesino from a mountain town explained to me that since the Pakales came around, he could no longer ride his motorcycle to his milpa. He didn’t have the vehicle paperwork up to date (the case of many people in Mexico) which meant the Pakales would impound it and take it to Tuxtla, many hours away and difficult to get to even if he could eventually prove ownership. I heard of people staying home to avoid encountering the Pakales, not because they had anything to hide but because they were afraid to get harassed or extorted.

In my travels to remote communities, I found villages and neighborhoods that had organized to keep out the “narcos”, for example by instituting curfews and night watches to prevent outsiders from passing through, and by searching backpacks of students in the schools, since the pattern is that of narco infiltration into villages often begins with   recruitment of youth to sell drugs. For many in rural areas, far from being a source of new security against crime, the Pakales have meant yet another state institution that harasses, threatens and steals from them. I heard accounts of several towns where the Pakales don’t dare enter because community authorities stop them. In one case,   women in the community blockaded the town entrance.

Militarization is no solution

It is tempting to want to call on the forces of the state to intercede as protection from rampant criminalization that seems impossible to fight, and to laud their presence in the streets. But it is clear that bolstering state security has never had lasting results, quite the contrary. It was Felipe Calderón’s war on crime that actually triggered the worst wave of organized crime in the country’s history, paving the way for corporate invasion and impunity. AMLO’s National Guard, supposedly conceived to fight police corruption, is now just one more corrupt police force to contend with. The Pakales are no different. They are part of a ferocious rise in militarization that is affecting all areas of public life in Mexico, from the Maya Train to the airport,  backed by the staunch support of Sheinbaum. They are being deployed against the organized communities and land defenders struggling to protect (often indigenous) communities from the death machines of capitalism. In Chiapas, protection for the people and the earth means defending the ways of life and self-organization of the communities in whatever way possible.