Like a corridor, the two shoulders of the road are occupied by lines of people waiting for the cars to arrive. They are Suburban-type trucks with tinted windows and some pick up which in the back carries groups of armed men as cargo. As they pass they honk their horns and people applaud and cheer: “Puro Sinaloa”! The images have spread through social networks this weekend and have been taken on the highway between Frontera Comalapa and San Gregorio Chamic, two Chiapas municipalities on the border with Guatemala. An area increasingly subjugated by organized crime groups, which dispute the routes to the north.
Since the beginning of the month, several municipal seats had been surrounded by the mafias, cutting off the supply of electricity and water and causing a shortage of food and gasoline, according to complaints from residents through the local press. The cheers in the videos published this week have been interpreted as the support of the residents of Comalapa for the Sinaloa group in the face of the siege by their rivals from Jalisco, the two most powerful mafias in the country, whose local franchises are supposedly fighting for this territory.
There are also versions circulating in local media that suggest that the neighbors’ celebration was forcibly demanded to stage popular support. In any case, the scene shows once again the penetration and level of impunity of the mafias in the poor and forgotten south of Mexico, until a few years ago a relatively quiet area. Human rights organizations have long been denouncing a wave of disappearances, forced recruitment and massive population displacements.
In addition to the spectacular scenes of the caravan, the weekend also resulted in deaths in the nearby municipalities of La Frontera and Sierra Madre. There were four corpses in total, which appeared along with a message from the Jalisco group claiming the murder under the justification that they were “chapulines”, that is, traitors who changed sides.
The conflict on the border has now lasted more than two years and the red circle is widening. From the Lacandona jungle, the symbolic heart of Zapatismo, to San Cristóbal de las Casas, one of the tourist jewels of the south of the country, more and more territories crossed by the routes to the north are experiencing an increase in violence. A new ingredient to add to the explosive cocktail that has been stirring the State of Chiapas for decades: a latent armed conflict caused by an amalgam of paramilitaries, soldiers, guerrillas and self-defense groups. Everything, between a tangle of economic and political interests and institutional abandonment.
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