Pacifist group expresses grievances of indigenous communities throughout Mexico
Mexico City | Desinformémonos. The pacifist organization Las Abejas de Acteal denounced the “numerous shootings of weapons of exclusive army” in the vicinity of the community, as well as “the land and air patrols of the military that do not resolve or intervene to stop the violence” in Chiapas, provoked by territorial disputes of organized crime.
In the context of the commemoration of the 26 years and two months since the Acteal Massacre, Las Abejas spoke out against the different cases of violence that the communities and peoples of Chiapas and the country are going through, and criticized the actions of the government that have militarized the territories and divided the populations.
“The government does not deliver justice, but rather rejoices when we the people fight among ourselves, thus guaranteeing that the violence increases and that all the executions, massacres, femicides, forced displacements, torture, extortion, threats, rapes and disappearances remain unpunished,” Las Abejas stated in a communiqué.
In addition to taking a stand against the different human rights abuses in the country, such as the cases of forced displacement in Chicomuselo, the impunity in the murder of defender Samir Flores and the armed attacks against the community of Ostula in Michoacán, Las Abejas expressed their rejection of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s proposed indigenous law, with which the president “wants to pretend to bring justice to indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples by recognizing us as subjects of law.”
“The new law initiative is deceitful and crafty because it is full of lies and falsehoods. On the one hand they want to give us and recognize our right to be subjects, holders of rights, but on the other hand, the federal government wants to continue legally taking away our lands, which belong to us,” they criticized.
Among the reforms rejected by Las Abejas and contemplated in the bill is that the companies should be the ones to carry out the consultations with the peoples on the mega-projects or works in their territories, which they described as “incongruous.”
“We demand that, if these constitutional reforms on indigenous rights and culture are approved, at least the right to a true consultation of the peoples be guaranteed, in accordance with the stipulations of the International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and not in the deceitful way in which these types of consultations have been organized for the consent of the dispossession of the indigenous and peasants that we have seen during this six-year term,” they emphasized.
Finally, Las Abejas reminded the federal government that “with or without law, recognized or not in the Constitution as subjects of law”, they will continue exercising their internal community law “misnamed by the powerful as ‘Uses y customs’.
Below is the complete communiqué:
To the National Indigenous Congress
To the Indigenous Council of Government
To the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
To Human Rights Defenders
To the Free and Alternative Media
To the National and International Media
To the National and International Civil Society
Sisters and Brothers:
Today we find ourselves commemorating, once again, the terrible events that took place in this land 26 years and two months ago, where the lives of our 45 martyred brothers and sisters and the 4 babies who were raped while still in their mothers’ wombs, in an operation carried out by PRI and Cardenista paramilitaries from Chenalhó; planned, financed, protected and covered up with the counterinsurgency coordination of the three levels of criminal government and whose perpetrators remain in total impunity.
Today, once again, the survivors of the Acteal Massacre and other members of our organization woke up yesterday with the anxiety of hearing numerous gunshots from weapons used exclusively by the army in the vicinity of this Sacred Land. Today, once again we saw land and air patrols by the military that do not resolve or intervene to stop the violence.
Only this time it is not about the Chiapas 1994 counterinsurgency plan. This time, it is due to the confrontations between rival organized crime groups that dispute the control of our region. Similarly, since 2021 such groups impose their law in the border zone with Guatemala, as documented by our compañeras and compañeros of the Red TDT (Red Nacional de Organismos Civiles de Derechos Humanos “Todos los Derechos para Todos, Todas y Todes”) in a valuable report they presented this month, whose name also describes perfectly what we are living today in Chenalhó and Pantelhó: “Siege to daily life, terror for the control of territory and serious human rights violations.“
As if the suffering of the 10,000 displaced people who have had to flee the violence in Chiapas since the fights for the plaza between different organized crime groups began in 2021 were not worth it, the government does not deliver justice but rejoices when we, the people, confront each other, guaranteeing that the violence increases and that all the executions, massacres, femicides, forced displacements, torture, extortion, threats, rapes, disappearances, persecution of journalists who speak the truth and of human rights organizations continue to go unpunished. And with its remilitarization of Chiapas, it has only increased violence, the violation of the human rights of our Central American migrant brothers and sisters, prostitution and drug and alcohol consumption around military posts.
In our municipalities of Chenalhó, Pantelhó and Simojovel there are many weapons. There are the weapons of the paramilitaries of the late nineties, who today are free and were never disarmed; on the contrary, they were rewarded and continued to be paid by the government. In addition, in many cases, new armed support groups have been formed with the money of candidates and officials of the political parties active in our communities. And there are also new weapons that have entered the communities, financed by various drug cartels. And it is with the help of all these weapons that today we continue to accumulate the number of people executed, killed by stray bullets, and sheltering displaced people, in a daily display of terror and fear, a situation which the authorities responsible for ensuring the security of Mexicans are taking advantage of in Chiapas and the rest of the country, in order to impose their mega-projects and do their business, often allied with drug traffickers and hired killers, thus getting rid of the defenders of land, territory and life.
This is why today, more than ever, we understand and echo the demands of our compañeros and compañeras of the Nahua Indigenous Community of Santa MarÃa Ostula (founders of the CNI) who continue to repel attacks by armed commandos like the one they suffered on February 1, while the National Guard, the Civil Guard and the Michoacán State Attorney General’s Office overlap and protect the Jalisco Cartel – New Generation (CJNG) but criminalize the Ostula Communal Guard.
That is why all of Las Abejas today send our encouragement to all those who are suffering from these tremendous injustices, like the Zapatista brothers and sisters of the autonomous region of Moisés and Gandhi (of Caracol Patria Nueva, located in the official municipality of Ocosingo, Chiapas) who on February 11 resisted more than a hundred shots from members of the Regional Organization of Coffee Growers of Ocosingo (ORCAO), from the communities of 7 de febrero and San Antonio Las Flores, at a distance of 150 meters from the town, where since January 19, 28 people have been displaced by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, whose homes and belongings were destroyed and forced to flee their community of La Resistencia, attacked by a group of more than 40 members of ORCAO, who carried firearms, machetes and sticks and remain protected by the government, unpunished for causing this dispossession and forced displacement. We demand an end to these armed attacks on our Zapatista brothers and sisters and justice for the displaced families.
We also want to continue sending encouragement and support to our displaced sisters and brothers from Frontera Comalapa and Chicomuselo, as well as to all the relatives of the people executed and disappeared in this cruel war.
And we also especially remember the relatives and companions of our teacher, brother defender and community communicator Samir Flores, on the fifth anniversary of his murder, which also remains unpunished. We know that the only line of investigation that the government has not wanted to follow, the one that involves his role as a defender of the land and water of the peoples against the imposition of the Integral Morelos Project, is the real cause of his elimination, precisely on the eve of the rigged consultation organized by López Obrador to approve the construction of the gas pipeline on his land.
And it is the same reason why the right to land and territory of the native peoples of Mexico is once again mutilated in the proposed indigenous law that the President has just sent to the Congress of the Union on February 5, with which Andrés Manuel López Obrador wants to pretend that he is doing justice for the indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples by recognizing us as subjects of law, after the betrayal of the three branches of government, which in 2001 guaranteed that what had been agreed upon at the Roundtable on Indigenous Rights and Culture with the EZLN and the Indigenous Peoples of the entire Mexican Republic would not be incorporated into the Constitution. The new law initiative is deceitful and cunning because it is full of lies and falsehoods. On the one hand they want to give us and recognize our right to be subjects, holders of rights, but on the other hand, the federal government wants to continue to legally take away our lands, which belong to us, even before the Spanish crown granted our peoples the royal cedula of possession and return of the lands that were taken from our grandmothers and grandmothers. Likewise, in the initiative of the new law, the President of the Republic wants to wash his hands like Herod, saying that companies or individuals are responsible for consulting with our people. Mr. President is being inconsistent with his speeches. He is not in favor of our peoples, nothing about the poor first, “giving back to the people what was stolen” covers up the real interest which is to hand over to big capital the little that remains of our lands and territories. We remind the government that with or without law, recognized or not in the Constitution as subjects of law, we will continue to be subjects of our histories, exercising our internal community law, misnamed by the powerful as “Uses y customs”. We will continue to exercise our autonomy and self-determination as we have done before and after the Spaniards arrived.
In recent days exactly 28 years have passed since the signing of the San Andres Accords, which resulted in the proposal of the then Cocopa (Commission for Concord and Pacification), which contained the minimum reforms to the Mexican Constitution with which the EZLN and numerous indigenous organizations independent of the government agreed, which we later formed as the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), to regulate the access of Indigenous Peoples to the rights that were already recognized internationally in ILO Convention 169, which although Mexico has signed, have been systematically violated in our country with all the neoliberal structural reforms and even worse in the six-year term of López Obrador. As we know, AMLO has pushed forward, at all costs, the Megaprojects of the Mayan Train, the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the Morelos Integral Project, irreversibly destroying biosphere reserves, dispossessing communal property and ejidos along the way, rearranging the territories of our peoples according to the logic of big capital, criminalizing or eliminating all those who oppose these plans.
Proof of this is that only this February, arrest warrants were upheld against 17 inhabitants of the town of Puerto Madera, Oaxaca, and the Oaxacan defender David Hernández Salazar was sentenced to 46 years in prison, a fine and payment of millions of dollars for defending the Common Use Lands of Pitayal. We demand that this absurd sentence be revoked and that criminal case 446/2022 be dropped in order to restore peace of mind to the comrades who have arrest warrants, whose only crime has been to defend their lands so that they are not dispossessed by the Industrial Park and the Inter-Oceanic Corridor Megaproject of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which has already brought a total of 52 indigenous Ayuuk and Binniza brothers and sisters under criminal charges.
And the last straw is that, in addition to shaving the Cocopa Law, the government of López Obrador, removing all mention of the right of indigenous peoples to property, management and care of their collective lands and territories, also wants us to thank him for handing over on a silver platter the financing and organization of the necessary consultations to obtain the consent of the peoples in the acces of their resources to the companies that want to dispossess and pollute our territory. In the same way that years ago it organized a “ritual to ask permission from Mother Earth” to properly outrage her in the construction of the Mayan Train. We demand that, if these constitutional reforms on indigenous rights and culture are approved, at least the right to a true consultation of the peoples be guaranteed, in accordance with what is stipulated in the International Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and not in the crafty way in which these types of consultations have been organized for the consent of the dispossession of indigenous and peasant peoples that we have seen in this six-year term.
We pray especially for the mothers and fathers of the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa, who have once again been victims of the harassment and contempt of the federal government, which, as it did with us, is trying to divide them, having now as interlocutors a small group of four relatives, who were convinced to favor the interests of the Abarca family and the criminal gang Guerreros Unidos, if they want to find the whereabouts of their children. We ask the God of life to continue to sustain their dignified struggle to find their children and to find and punish those truly responsible for their disappearance, whoever falls.
And with the strength that we have left, nourished by the grace that our Martyrs give us, to resist in these times of tribulation, we will continue denouncing all the efforts that the bad government continues to make to divide the organizations in resistance against injustice, lies and impunity and asking our Creator, Formator, Father-Mother God to strengthen us in our struggle for true justice and the construction of our autonomy and the exercise of our free determination as Tsotsil people, from our way of life and struggle which is Non-violence.
That is why we ask those who have supported and accompanied us in different ways during all these years to continue demanding with us Las Abejas de Acteal that the Merits Report of Case 12.790 Manuel Santiz Culebra and Others (Acteal Massacre) be published now before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), as a way to begin the rectification of the river of impunity in which we have had to navigate for so many years. That the IACHR abandon now any possible doubts it may have or that the Mexican State has sown through its false claims and misleading and deceitful actions.
Stop the violence! Cease fire between rival criminal groups in our towns!
Justice for our brother Samir Flores Soberanes of Amilcingo, Morelos and all those executed and disappeared for defending the land and peace!
Stop armed attacks against organized people and civil society!
No more forced displacements, justice for all displaced families in Chiapas!
Stop the criminalization of defenders of land, territory and life!
Constitutional guarantee of a true prior, free, informed, good faith and culturally appropriate consultation with the peoples in any matter that affects them!
Stop the war against the Palestinian people!
Punishment of those materially and intellectually responsible for the Acteal Massacre, to avoid future massacres in Chiapas, Mexico and the world!
From Acteal, House of Memory and Hope.
Sincerely.
The Voice of the Civil Society Organization Las Abejas de Acteal.
Original text published by Desinformémonos on February 23rd, 2024.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.