Following the report last month from the Commission for Access to Truth and Justice in the Ayotzinapa case, the arrest of former Attorney General Murillo Karam, and the arrest warrants issued for dozens of military personnel, the parents of the 43 disappeared students are witnessing backtracking from positions of power, in particular the protection of the military. The victims’ families demand to know why.
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 them. The press and the social networks explain these actions as the confrontation between several criminal groups over control of the market, mentioning the Motonetos, the Vans and the San Juan Chamula cartel as some of the groups confronted in these fights over territorial control. …
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 historical tensions that, after the visibility gained in the political agenda, came to be of national interest. Great and terrible days followed in the next decade. Chiapas became a rehearsal for the future on two opposing fronts. The organized indigenous people in rebellion and resistance, …
Narco Governments and Organized Crime Add to the Repression in Chiapas READ MORE »
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.
