The southeast of Chiapas deepens its drift towards misgovernment, captured by battles between criminal groups, which fight for control of key communities for their businesses: migrant trafficking, extraction of natural resources, drug trafficking, etc. Calls for help from towns in municipalities such as Chicomosuelo, Frontera Comalapa or Amatenango have been constant for years, but the authority limits itself to deactivating the alarms with statements, pointing out that the situation is not as serious as they paint it.
The case of the Grecia and Nueva Morelia ejidos perfectly illustrates the paradigm. Last week, residents of Nueva Morelia, part of Chicomosuelo, reported that a confrontation between criminals had left at least 20 dead in the area, two of them “civilians”, that is, unrelated to the fight. The battle, the residents wrote, in a letter replicated by the Fray Bartolomé De las Casas Human Rights Center, lasted seven hours. “We call for international solidarity, they are killing us, they are forcing us to leave our homes and others to be part of them,” they implored.
In videos released on social networks these days, allegedly recorded in Nueva Morelia and surrounding areas, the shootings can be heard, which according to the residents occurred on January 4, with the green hills and low clouds as a backdrop. In another one published this Wednesday by the Chiapas reporter Isaín Mandujano, three boys appear, each with his rifle and bulletproof vest, running up and down the mountain, firing shots left and right, shouting: “Puro Sinaloa, pure mayiza, dude “To hell with the people of Mencho, up with the big eme!”
His words, of course, refer to the Pacific criminal organization, also known as the Sinaloa Cartel, and to one of its historical leaders, Ismael Zambada, alias El Mayo, elusive like few others, heads on the coin where the tails are his old colleague. , Joaquin El Chapo Guzmán, who is serving a life sentence for drug trafficking in the United States. The other obvious reference is El Mencho, alias of Nemesio Oseguera, alleged leader of the enemy group of the Pacific organization, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), in apparent expansion for years, throughout different regions of Mexico.
At this point, no one is scared by the video of a group of boys shooting with another group of boys, from mountain to mountain. In just over ten years, the crime battles in Mexico have transcended the marginality of its geography, reaching the virality of the networks, accessing the prime time permanent presence of smartphones and tablets, sharing space with content of all kinds, normalizing their presence. The consumption of content of this type also has a parallel with the responses of the government bureaucracy, which counterattacks with photos and videos that represent “tranquility.”
This is what the Chiapas Prosecutor's Office did this Tuesday night, four days after the first reports of clashes in the mountains emerged. “The State Attorney General's Office (FGE) announced that thanks to the coordination with the authorities of the three levels of government, tranquility prevails and the safety of the residents is guaranteed, in the municipality of Chicomuselo (… ) In this sense, citizens' complaints are followed up promptly to clarify the facts of the different regions of the entity, therefore, it reiterates that in the municipality of Chicomuselo, there are no reports of homicide due to any type of confrontation ”.
The agency goes further and points out that the complaints from previous days are nothing more than “misleading publications.” The statement leaves many questions. The most important points to the motivations of the residents to invent such a situation, given the certainty, furthermore, that what would have happened in Nueva Morelia has been happening for years in different parts of the region. Reading between the lines, however, it seems that the dependency is cured in health, pointing out that they have not received any complaint for homicide, not that these have not occurred. The Prosecutor's Office has not indicated whether its conviction responds to minimal field work in the area.
In any case, the situation in Nueva Morelia is bad, just like in Grecia, a neighboring ejido. Located in the foothills of the mountains, residents and non-governmental organizations have denounced in recent months that criminal groups are trying to take advantage of an economic vacuum, the exploitation of a barite mine, an abundant mineral in the area. Since the early 2000s, a Mexican company and then a Canadian one, blackfirethey exploited the barite mine, necessary for drilling oil wells, according to a report from the Ministry of Economy, in addition to making car paint.
The protests of residents over the irregularities in the concession and exploitation procedures barely had any echo. Only at the end, in 2009, after the murder of one of the community leaders, Mariano Abarca, did the State Government close the exploitation, citing environmental reasons. The above is explained in a report by IWGIA, a global human rights organization dedicated to promoting and defending the rights of indigenous peoples. The report also notes that, after the closure, criminal groups, with a growing presence in the area, tried to fill the void.
Criminal groups, notes the report, signed by indigenous law expert, Elisa Cruz, “coopt residents, social organizations and municipal officials under threat of death. With this, they guarantee territorial control and mining extraction through intimidation and threats.” Cruz adds: “In this context, at the beginning of 2023, representatives of the Nueva Morelia ejido were visited by a group of armed men who presented themselves as independent of any mining company and argued that their job was to extract the barite that blackfire had left on a property within Nueva Morelia. The mineral was looted.”
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