The constitutional reforms carried out in Mexico in recent decades have been detrimental to Indigenous peoples, warned lawyer Bárbara Zamora, while participating in the workshop “Pyramids: Of History, Of Loves, and, of course, Heartbreaks,” held as part of the 32nd anniversary of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) uprising.
The jurist addressed the changes in agrarian, mining, hydrocarbon, foreign investment, injunctions (constitutional protection), and other laws that have been used to justify the dispossession of territories and the exploitation of natural resources.
“The Constitution has undergone hundreds of reforms that ostensibly grant rights, but whose true purpose is to exert greater power and eliminate previously granted rights,” she stated.
She elaborated that the law only applies to the people because those in power ignore it or modify it according to their interests.
She maintained that the modifications to laws related to land tenure promised legal certainty to farmers and indigenous people, but instead have given free rein to commercial enterprises (real estate, tourism, mining, and oil companies), and “the land problem continues to be a source of struggle and generates multiple conflicts.”
Furthermore, she explained that these reforms prioritize expropriation, often without compensation, which “means that government projects, whether trains, highways, or commercial tourism developments, take precedence over the use of communal lands.”
She even stated that the constitutional amendments allowing the military to perform public security tasks “increase the risk of dispossession” due to the construction of hundreds of barracks throughout the country, and that the military presence in communities “destroys the social fabric.”
Almeida, who also advised the EZLN during the San Andrés Accords in 1996, raised the need for a new Constitution that focuses on human beings and freedoms, rather than on private property and its resources.
Eduardo Almeida and Tamara San Miguel, from the Human Rights Network and the Urban Dignity Network, explained that human rights are the basis of government discourse but are used to justify abuses against the marginalized, Indigenous people, peasants, and the general population.
Under the guise of peace, the government has militarized; development has become the pretext for dispossession; labor rights justify exploitation; and the rights of Indigenous peoples are the pretext for folklorizing them, Almeida explained.
The activist argued that the “pyramid of the Mexican State” is sustained by those in power who divide up public offices, projects of “dispossession and death,” and who administer charity and violence.
“Rights don’t really exist; what exists are favors and threats institutionally disguised as rights,” he pointed out.
San Miguel added that capitalism has caused a series of “mass deaths that they try to erase” and “is leaving behind rubble, mass graves, that we as humanity have yet to name or fully grasp.”
“Palestine is the mirror of humanity toward which we are heading. International humanitarian law is in crisis,” she warned. In the case of Mexico, the reality is manifested in the mass graves and the pain of the mothers searching for their missing children, the femicides, and the attacks by the armed forces, such as the murder in May of this year of minors Alexa Medina and Leidy Rojas in Sinaloa by soldiers, which is minimized as “collateral damage.”
The Semillero activities continue until Tuesday, December 30th. Meanwhile, on December 31st and January 1st, the 32nd anniversary ceremony and a community dance will be held at the Caracol de Oventic, in the municipality of San Andrés Larráinzar.
Original article by Edgar H. Clemente, La Jornada, December 28th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.