The Zapatista Army of National Liberation spoke out against President López Obrador’s megaprojects, highlighting that they do not lead to development and harm indigenous peoples
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) denounced that the different drug cartels that maintain a dispute over territory in Chiapas not only fight to the death for the control of drug trafficking routes, but they do so for the down payments will be left by the construction of the megaprojects of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador: the Mayan Train and Trans-Isthmus Corridor.
In the context of clashes between different cells of cartels from Sinaloa and Jalisco, as well as other well-known local ones such as El MAÍZ, El Machete and the Chiapas Cartel, a situation that has caused the displacement of hundreds of people to different locations, including Guatemala, the EZLN made a statement on the matter, highlighting that it is not only about drug trafficking.
“The so-called megaprojects do not lead to development. They are only commercial corridors opened so that organized crime has new markets. The dispute between rival cartels is not only about human and drug trafficking, it is above all the dispute over the monopoly of the protection racket in what is wrongly called the Mayan Train and the Trans-Isthmus Corridor,” said the EZLN in its statement titled “Adagios,” published on the night of Thursday, August 15th.
The text, signed by the Captain, one of the nicknames of the insurgent Marcos, explains that since “trees and animals cannot be charged fees,” then the criminal groups will do so “to the communities and companies that settle in that other useless border in the Mexican southeast.”
The EZLN warns that with these disputes over control and ptotection of the criminal groups, “the growth of wars for territorial control is thus assured, in which the hologram of the Nation State will be absent.”
Original article by Andrés Martínez in Infobae, August 16th, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.