LAB council member Elva Narcía Cancino reports from Chiapas, Mexico, where Zapatista indigenous women meet for a training day for Resistance and Rebellion — against the background of rising levels of violence fueled by drug trafficking gangs and a government which has been ineffectual at best. Translated from Spanish by Mike Gatehouse.
I’m sitting on a chair with a bright-yellow wooden seat. Placed on twelve yellow tables, decorated with brightly painted flowers, are 18 Olympia manual typewriters, with royal blue cloth covers. On the bare walls of red brick are two keyboard diagrams.
Manual typewriters. I notice this, and it surprises me a little.
I’m in the Indigenous Centre for Integrated Training Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, an NGO, part of the University of the Land. We have come to the International Meeting for Resistance and Rebellion, commemorating the 31st anniversary of the armed uprising by the Zapatista Liberation Army (EZLN), on 1 January 1994.
Part of the programme includes Zapatista indigenous women speaking about their achievements relating to gender equality. They give public recognition to the prominent part played by Comandta Ramona in the struggle for the rights of original peoples. They also acknowledge their debt to their grandmothers. Thanks to them women now have more freedom: freedom to study, freedom to take leading roles, and to be involved in decision making.
“You didn’t bring with you all women, you didn’t bring the indigenous women, you didn’t bring the victims of femicide, those who have been kidnapped, those who have been raped”
From these round tables for analysis and reflection, indigenous women, their faces covered by balaclavas, send a simple message to Dr Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the first female President of Mexico: when you came to power you didn’t bring with you all women, you didn’t bring the indigenous women, you didn’t bring the victims of femicide, those who have been kidnapped, those who have been raped’.
Thus, at a stroke, they condemn the social programmes of the Morenista government, because they do not address the root problems, and they derive from a government which they describe as ‘the misnamed Fourth Transition’.
It’s lunchtime and people are queuing up to buy food, others sitting on the grass, some selling posters, books and t-shirts.
‘People with only individual aspirations will never understand collective struggle’, reads the logo on one of the t-shirts, kindly held up for me by a curly-haired boy.
Dark times are coming, the Zapatista women warn. We have to keep up the struggle, in rebellion and resistance, they say, before this anniversary meeting adjourns for the night.
Dark days in Chiapas
Elva Narcía Cancino adds:
The background to the International Meeting for Resistance and Rebellion is the wave of violence in Chiapas, of which women are often the victims.
Among recent actions in line with the security strategy of the Mexican government supposedly to reduce criminality in the southern state of Chiapas: 26 unmarked graves have been discovered; 92 police have been arrested for alleged links to organized crime; a municipal president in Frontera Comalapa was arrested for corruption and links to criminal groups.
Chiapas, located on the frontier with Guatemala, has seen, in the last three years, a rising tide of violence, especially severe in 21 of the 124 municipalities in the state, particularly those located along the Guatemalan border.
While the federal government was focusing on states with high levels of criminal violence, such as Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Michoacán and Guanajuato, in Chiapas a network of organized crime was developing relatively unnoticed, and colluding with authorities at different levels of government, to carry out illegal activities such as people-trafficking, arms running and drug smuggling.
Experts date the re-emergence of violence in the state from 2021. That was when members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel murdered Ramón Gilberto Rivera Maravillas, alias ‘Junior’, son of Gilberto Rivera Amarillas, alias ‘Uncle Gil’, who until 2016 was the Chiapas head of the Sinaloa Cartel. In the resulting turf wars, there were reports of road-blocks, forced disappearances, kidnappings, extortion, assassinations and protection payments.
In the first half of 2024, civil organizations recorded at least five cases of mass displacement caused by criminal violence. At the start of 2024 alone, the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre documented the forced displacement of 2,300 people; seven months later a further 600 people were forced by the violence to flee their homes.
According to the National System of Public Security (SESNPS), in the six year period 2018–2024, there were more than 7,000 homicides in Chiapas. Disappearances increased by more than 200 per cent, with 119 cases in 2020 and an upsurge to 339 three years later.
This wave of violence even reached the state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, where the governor was the Morena member Rutilio Escandón Cadenas, now the Mexican consul in Miami, Florida.
After the six-year term of Rutilio Escandón, another member of the left-wing Morena party, Eduardo Ramírez Aguilar, took over as governor, who since taking office on 8 December has promised to govern without fear and to confront the criminal groups to restore peace to the state.
Several times both the governor and his security committee have denounced the inertia of his predecessor but nothing has been said about holding him responsible, despite the campaign slogan ‘Zero impunity in the fight against insecurity’.
Ramirez Aguilar has committed himself to embracing the security strategy of President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, a strategy aimed at addressing the causes of violence, strengthening social programs, achieving better coordination between the different forces of public order, improved intelligence and arrests of the leading drug-traffickers.