The bullet landed almost right in the middle of the lungs. Close enough to the spine that doctors don’t dare remove it yet, and deep enough into the left lung to leave Miguel bedridden. His brother, Marcos, tells it, holding the x-ray in his hand where the white spot of the projectile can be seen between the shadows of the ribs. It happened a couple of months ago, when they went out with the van to work picking coffee. “They fired a lot of bullets at us. They hate us,” recalls Marcos, 36, who does not want to give his family name out of fear.
Marcos is sitting with his wife at the entrance of their house in Tabac, a Tzotzil community of just 200 inhabitants in Los Altos, the highland and indigenous area of central Chiapas. Four strings of dried chiles hang from the self-raised concrete walls, and the tin roof has two plastic patches fastened with nails. They are to cover more bullets that fell on the house these months.
The shots come from the town a little further up the hill, Santa Marta, which maintains a conflict with the neighbors below that is lost in time over 60 hectares of land that both claim as their own. “Lately they are good at night. We are in bed and they listen. Sometimes they stick on the wall or on the ceiling. That’s why we put the patches on,” explains Marcos, pointing to the roof.
Human rights organizations denounce institutional neglect for a conflict that has already claimed at least seven deaths and 26 injuries. Last year alone, the organizations registered 1,468 armed attacks in Tabac and in 11 other communities in the municipality of Aldama, adjacent to the disputed land. Some land with hardly any economic value, like the rest of the mountains. The peasants live from the wool of the black sheep and the milpa and coffee crops.
Los Altos is one of the poorest areas of Chiapas, where already more than a third of the population does not have enough to cover basic needs. Before going out to the coffee plantations again, Marcos explains the reason for so much fury over a handful of hectares: “It’s not about money. It is for pride. They want to expel us from the land of our great-great-grandparents and the government does nothing.”
To get to Tabac, you must first climb from San Cristóbal de las Casas, the capital of the region, nestled in a valley of pines and oaks. It is barely 40 kilometers but the state of the roads on a slope, a crusher of stones, branches and earth, turns the communities in the area into a mousetrap with few exits. When it rains they can barely move from their houses. In these towns, governed by indigenous uses and customs, the municipal police have a club as their only weapon and to get up here it takes more than 40 minutes.
The conflict has escalated to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), which will visit the area at the end of the month. One of the objectives is to verify compliance with the peace agreements reached a couple of years ago with the mediation of the Mexican government. Civil organizations have more questions than answers, which, of course, go beyond a fight between poor neighbors: Who exactly are the groups that are shooting? Where do the weapons come from? Who is financing them? What power groups control the area?
Acteal’s legacy
On March 22, 1997, a paramilitary squad entered a church and cold-bloodedly murdered 45 people, including 18 children and four women. It was in Acteal, another of the towns in Los Altos, a little over an hour from the villages of Aldama, where bullets are raining today. The Acteal massacre, directed against the indigenous human rights organization Las Abejas, is one of the darkest episodes of that turbulent time in Mexico. The monolithic PRI began to crumble, the Zapatista Army had taken up arms three years earlier in San Cristóbal, and counterinsurgency groups began to emerge in the mountains.
The PRI government of Ernesto Zedillo, the last one before the democratic opening, always denied any connection but the case, which was falsely closed with the fabrication of culprits, as Justice showed years later, charged both his secretary of the interior and to the governor of Chiapas. Two years ago, the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador intoned the mea culpa on behalf of the State and recognized that the murderers were “paramilitary groups with the complacency of the authorities.”
The organizations that have been working on the ground for years consider that the legacy of the Acteal massacre has not yet been buried. The reparation and justice processes of the current Government have barely started. While the breeding ground for armed coups, impunity and institutional oblivion continues to ferment.
Less than half an hour by car from Acteal is Pantelhó. Another town in Los Altos with a tangle of violence where political and economic powers, armed groups and in recent years organized crime are confused. Since 2019 there have been reports of disappearances, murders and land dispossession of peasants in this municipality of nearly 25,000 inhabitants where 66% live in extreme poverty.
Organizations such as the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) speak openly of “paramilitary groups that have mutated into organized crime.” Specifically, in Pantelhó all fingers point to a family of local bosses, the Flores, who once again won the municipal elections in June last year.
Los Flores, according to civil organizations, would be behind the armed groups linked to drug trafficking that devastate the town. And that beyond serving as shock forces for politicians, they have redoubled interest in the area in their search for new routes for their businesses -migrant trafficking, arms trafficking, drugs- from the border.
On July 5, just a month after the elections, a hitman on a motorcycle shot and killed Simón Pedro Pérez, president of the same indigenous human rights organization that was gunned down in the neighboring town of Acteal. Twenty-five years later, the Bees continued to denounce the abuses in Pantelhó and in the rest of Los Altos, where the violence has left more than 2,000 displaced in the last three years, according to figures from civil organizations.
Pérez’s crime provoked a new wave with attacks on homes that supposedly belonged to the Flores family, cars set on fire and direct confrontations with the National Guard and the police. The offensive was claimed by a new group called Machete in a statement that declared as its objectives “to expel the hitmen, drug traffickers and organized crime.”
Halfway between the self-defense groups born a few years ago in Michoacán and the insurgent rhetoric of the EZLN – “an army at the service of the people” – Machete was succeeded by other similar groups, with not very clear origins and interests, which are contributing to give another twist to the spiral of violence in the area.
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