Three decades after the “Enough is enough!” Zapatista, organized crime groups are rampant in Chiapas in collusion with local powers. Faced with this, the EZLN withdraws and the federal government, without abandoning its extensive military presence, presents itself as a simple spectator of the violence. Is a different Chiapas possible?
For Guadalupe García Luna
On January 1st, 1994—the same day that the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States and Canada came into force, which promised well-being for the population of the north of the continent through the integration of its three markets. through the free exchange of goods and services—the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) took up arms demanding for all the Mexican people “work, land, shelter, food, health, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace”. In their first Declaration of the Lacandona Jungle (January 2nd, 1994), the insurgents rejected “in advance any attempt to distort the just cause of our struggle by accusing it of drug trafficking, narco-guerrilla warfare, banditry or any other adjective that our enemies may use” (EZLN, 2001: 33-35)1. They believed, then, that “another world is possible.” Their revolutionary struggle would contribute to giving birth to it.
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Drug trafficking and organized crime, phenomena known in Chiapas for many decades, have acquired a new dimension, at least in the last 15 years. From being relatively discreet and non-violent activities, today they are public, aggressive and lethal.
For two years, the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels, along with their respective local allies, have been involved in a fierce fight for control of the territory, drug trafficking routes (in the jungle, the border, the Pacific, the center and the Highlands), of the population and the exploitation of migrants.
Frontera Comalapa, a region bordering Mexico and Guatemala, has become another scene of this criminal dispute. There, the conflict has reached such a magnitude that the indigenous population is forced to defend local partners – or who present themselves as such – of the Sinaloa cartel, acting as human shields, blocking roads or through forced recruitment of young men to fight their enemies. Anyone who refuses to collaborate is fined, beaten or killed. There are also people who voluntarily join criminals and receive money for their services. Others, however, have decided to leave their communities and seek refuge elsewhere until the situation returns to normal because they no longer tolerate the daily abuses, extortions and murders in their own towns. Thus, entire towns are surrounded by criminals for weeks, so that no one and nothing can enter or leave there. Their electricity, telephone service, and transportation of people and goods are cut off, while they are exposed to clashes between rival groups. In such a situation, the momentarily victorious criminal gangs are received as “armies of liberation,” even though this means that people are subject to their will.
Despite insistent requests for help from local, state and federal authorities, the response to the terrified population has been null or late. Representatives of communities, social leaders, peasant organizations or human rights activists, who raise their voices to demand that the government guarantee public security and punish those responsible, suffer threats and, in many cases, are murdered. When the army or the National Guard appear in communities and areas affected by violence, they only limit themselves to patrolling for a few days and unblocking roads. Afterwards, they retire to their barracks without intervening in the protection of the population, their lives and their property – a task that would correspond to the municipal and state police, who either do not do much in this regard or who, outright, are in collusion with the criminals.
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Violence is not restricted to rural and indigenous areas. In San Cristóbal de Las Casas, criminal gangs are also very active. There they also extort merchants and businessmen. Some even offer “protection services,” serve as “shock groups” and distribute drugs at a micro level—as is the case of the various small groups popularly identified as “Los Motonetos,” which also engage in assaults on passersby. Their origin is linked, apparently, to a former municipal president who provided scooters to kids from the La Hormiga neighborhood. These bands of indigenous and mestizo youth, inhabitants of the impoverished peripheries of the city, work for local politicians and chiefs, who, in turn, are protected by municipal and state authorities. Their drug dealing activities are in competition with those of drug dealers in the different markets of San Cristóbal, who offer their products for everyone to see—even promoting them with price lists. The latter are protected by evangelical leaders expelled from San Juan Chamula and now settled in Betania, divided among themselves and who usually settle their differences with the use of violence and the mobilization of their respective clients-congregations and shock groups.
In San Juan Chamula, the traditional local strongmen formed, in the first decade of this century, the so-called Chamula Cartel, which is characterized by having adopted the forms of violence and extortion of Los Zetas, when the latter invaded Chiapas.
The Chamula Cartel not only exercises control of an important part of the production and distribution of drugs. It has also specialized in arms trafficking, the theft of gasoline, automobiles and auto parts, and wood, as well as in the distribution of indigenous pornography. Its area of influence includes northern Guatemala, the Lacandona Jungle, Comitán and, of course, the Highlands (San Juan Chamula, San Andrés Larráinzar, Chenalhó, Pantelhó, Mitontic, Jitotol and Pueblo Nuevo Solistahuacán).
Right in the Highlands is where the new criminal violence merges with old community conflicts over land—for example, in Chenalhó, where groups of displaced people have even been recently attacked—and with electoral and political conflicts, as in Oxchuc and Pantelhó., where local caciques resist the change of power, whether by the method of party elections or by customs and practices, because what is at stake is not only political power, but the co-management of organized crime. These conflicts are usually “resolved” by resorting to the use of weapons, the expulsion and/or murder of opponents.
The degree of insecurity is such that, as in Michoacán and Guerrero, civilian “self-defense groups” have been formed. This is the case of the group called “El Machete”, in Pantelhó, created, apparently, in 2019. Their most spectacular action then consisted of the kidnapping and, possibly, the execution of severalLadinos from the municipal seat, who would have ventured into the illicit businesses run by the indigenous people. The dispute over the management of local the black markets—including drug trafficking—has led to another wave of expulsions of Ladinos and the return of the municipal seat to the indigenous.
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After its support, along with the rest of the organizations of the National Indigenous Council, for the failed presidential candidacy of María Jesús Patricio in 2018, the EZLN expressed its rejection of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the project of the so-called Fourth Transformation. Specifically, it has opposed the construction of the so-called Mayan Train—one of the emblematic megaprojects of the current administration—and the Sembrando Vida reforestation program, for not considering the opinion and interests of the indigenous populations, for the exploitation of natural resources of the territories (water, wood and minerals) in favor exclusively of businesses, due to the serious damage to nature and archaeological heritage, and due to the lack of tangible benefits for the indigenous people.
Despite its opposition, the EZLN lacks real capacity to mobilize its support bases and other regional, national and international groups critical of these projects and policies. In fact, it is increasingly difficult for it to recruit new members into its ranks, for which it lacks any attractive and viable economic development project that respond to the demands of farmers to improve their living conditions and income. Also for economic reasons, members of their support bases leave the EZLN and seek to benefit from the income from participating in Sembrando Vida. It seems that they are no longer willing to give up part of their agricultural production to support the rebel movement. Due to its weakness, the EZLN’s rejection of López Obrador’s government has only manifested itself at a discursive level, but with little media resonance.
On the other hand, the EZLN has described the security crisis that Chiapas has been experiencing for a few years as a “civil war.” In the face of current criminal and political violence, it even decided to close the doors of his Caracoles and Good Government Councils to outsiders with the aim of protecting the Zapatista population. Its silence would not mean passivity, but only a temporary absence of public activity. The Zapatista withdrawal is based on the fear of being the target of attacks by criminal gangs or paramilitary groups. Their concern is not unfounded, although many of the conflicts that occur in the “Zapatista zones” are, in reality, the well-known town disputes and disputes over spaces, resources and population between organizations with diverse ideological-political ideas.
An unintended effect of the demobilization of the EZLN insurgents at the beginning of the century is that the presence and relative control that their combatants maintained in their areas of influence left a vacuum that was eventually filled by other armed groups, criminal gangs and drug traffickers, despite the extraordinary military presence of the Mexican army—and now also the National Guard—in the state, a product of the 1994 uprising.
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This entire current bleak panorama in Chiapas would seem to indicate that, a few years from now, a “civil war” would take place due to the absence of the State. Rather, the armed conflict we are witnessing is of the type that specialists call post-interstate “new wars.” In new wars, ideologies, the division between combatants and the civilian population, the combat front, peace and war, the public and the private, order and disorder, the civil and the military, the legal and the illegal, the friend and the foe, legitimate and criminal violence, are blurred.
Otherwise, the State is not absent in Chiapas. On the contrary, public policies such as Sembrando Vida, the implementation of vaccination campaigns, the holding of elections or the presence of the army and the National Guard are notorious signs of state presence. However, it does little to decisively intervene and pacify society. You get the impression that it prefers to let conflicts fester.
Often, the National Guard only witnesses the commission of crimes even in front of their own barracks. It seems to embrace criminal groups, which, despite this, or perhaps precisely for this reason, continue shooting at a defenseless civilian population or who, where appropriate, decide to take up arms to respond to their aggressors.
In the midst of this disorder and insecurity, the Federation is rethinking its relations with local political and economic elites, the general population and criminal groups to lay the foundations for a new political and social order that has not yet taken shape—perhaps because it lacks an idea of its own of what this new order would consist of and what its development model would be.
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The General Command of the EZLN closed its first public announcement by stating: “We, upright and free men and women, are aware that the war we declare is a last measure, but just. Dictators have been carrying out an undeclared genocidal war against our people for many years. […] We declare that we will not stop fighting until we achieve the fulfillment of these basic demands of our people by forming a government of our free and democratic country” (ezln, 2001: 33-35)2.
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I thank Juan Pedro Viqueira for his comments and suggestions on a previous version of this piece.
1ezln, Documentos y comunicados, t. I, México, Era, 2001.
2ezln, Documentos y comunicados, t. I, México, Era, 2001
Original article by Marcos Estrada Saavedra at http://tinyurl.com/2p8s9t67
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.
https://schoolsforchiapas.org/another-world-is-possible-30-years-after-the-zapatista-uprising/