Violence and Terror in Chiapas Facilitate Dispossession of Territories Say Activists

San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas. In the face of the plundering of peoples’ territories by the “capitalist hydra”; the deprivation of liberty in prisons that are “spaces of extermination”; what they call the “development pole on the southern border and to confront the immigration policies of the new president of the United States, the necessity to unite and organize, was raised in the round table held this Sunday within the framework of the activities of Zapatista January, “The Storm and the Sun in our geographies, connections between Kumiai territory and Chiapas.”

In this context, the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Center for Human Rights (Frayba), stated that from 2023 to 2024 it documented the existence of 15,780 victims of forced displacement in Chiapas due to violence, a figure similar to that from 1994 when the Zapatista armed uprising occurred.

Estela Barco, from the organization Economic and Social Development of Indigenous Mexicans, Civil Association (DESMI), said that “the capitalist hydra is the cause with its multiple heads, of this storm that we are living through; of the dispossession of the peoples and of the common goods that they still have.”

She added that “the States are accomplices of the capitalist hydra, because they facilitate the work, theft and plunder by companies. This war that we, the people, face was unleashed by the hydra to continue reproducing itself: the plundering of the land, culture, seeds, freedoms, territory.”

She pointed out that “with the idea of ​​development, the governments facilitate megaprojects, arguing that there will be work, well-being and economic improvement. When they have not been able to achieve plunder, they have implanted violence in the territories to spread fear. Violence and terror is what has been experienced most in recent years in Chiapas so that organized crime can carry out the plundering of goods with the complicity of the municipal, state and federal governments, denying what is happening in those territories.”

Carlos Ogaz, from Frayba, stated that “the reality that the system imposes on us is one of war, of genocide. In Chiapas, the war is reflected in three types of violence: that which has to do with the dispute over territory by organized crime; the counterinsurgency carried out by armed political and social organizations linked to the Mexican State that dispute the territories of those who fight for life and defend autonomy, as well as criminal groups that have functions and often control in assemblies, municipalities and municipal presidencies.”

He added: “In Frayba we have also seen that there is the push for the development pole of the southern border with megaprojects for economic development, agro-industry, energy, infrastructure such as roads, trains, airports, hotels, the Mayan Train and the Trans-isthmic corridor.”

He affirmed that “now with the entry of Claudia Sheinbaum, what they call the southern border development pole is being oiled, which is the deepening of what Andrés Manuel López Obrador began in the south, in Chiapas, particularly.”

He said that “now with the arrival of the new state government, it seems that the conditions for violence have been created for more violence to occur, but with the consent of society.”

Juan Pi, from the Grupo de Trabajo No Estamos Todxs, an anti-prison collective that was founded in 2010, said that “with this security makeover we are going to see prisons filled more with innocent people, as well as the strongest discourse of the bad government in which the solution is not going to be more just conditions or to see how we generate another form of justice, but rather to fill the prisons with more people day by day.”

Members of the Kumiai territory (San Diego / Tijuana) also participated in the discussion, who raised various problems that occur in those areas, such as migration.

Original article by Elio Henríquez, La Jornada, January 2, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.

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