By: R. Aída Hernández Castillo* Last June 14, heavily armed indigenous youth took over the popular market of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, and maintained control of the northern zone of the city for more than three hours, stealing, burning vehicles and terrorizing the population, without the various security forces doing anything to stop […]
Chiapas is on the brink of war and hopefully, as Mercedes Sosa sang, we will not be indifferent.
Hermann Bellinghausen The hegemony of the PRI, assumed a given [in politics] for decades in Chiapas, was broken in one night on the New Year of 1994. The reality was much more porous, it turned out that the complexity of the indigenous peoples came from deep within, having great diversity and being marked by important […]
Since the Zapatista uprising on January 1st 1994, the state of Chiapas has experienced various iterations of the poorly-named low-intensity warfare, or counter-insurgency, that combines anti-zapatista paramilitary violence (tinyurl.com/fzwdfpdb) with different political and social measures, including media blackouts, public assistance programs, and the instrumentalization of social organizations and political parties, all with the purpose of isolation and containment of the rebels.
R. Aida Hernández Castilllo links the deaths of two defenders of people and territory with a “pedagogy of terror ” and a “culture of death” allowed and perpetuated by the state.
