To explain what happened on Tuesday at the market, the greengrocer asks his daughter to go get something at the back of the stall. The young woman returns with a clenched fist and when she opens her hand, seven golden shells the size of an almond appear. “We picked them up from the ceiling and the floor when we arrived the next day. I was not there but they shot with high-powered weapons, ”says the shopkeeper, who does not want to give his name out of fear. His daughter was there and she saw how, around noon, dozens of hooded men, dressed in bulletproof vests and armed with assault rifles, shot down the five warehouses in the north market of San Cristóbal de las Casas, the heart of Chiapas tourism.
It all started a little earlier in the parking lot of a shopping center, a couple of blocks from the market. “Some black vans and many motorcycles arrived. They got out and the shooting started,” says one of the workers in the area who collect the empty shopping carts. “We ran into the store. Shots were heard. We spent a little while in there with the clients on the floor. They gave us a soft drink and a bolillo for the scare, ”says the man, who does not give his name either.
For more than four hours, the northern part of the city (215,000 inhabitants) became a trench of war: burning cars, blocked roads and armed squads in broad daylight. All this under the impotent gaze of the authorities. The mayor acknowledged feeling overwhelmed and the military took hours to arrive.
Scenes like this have already been seen in Mexico. But they are more common in the border cities of Tamaulipas or in the historical cradles of organized crime such as Guadalajara or Culiacán. It had not happened until now in Chiapas, one of the poorest and most forgotten states in the country, where drug violence seemed to be concentrated closer to the southern border. Even less so in San Cristóbal de las Casas, a seemingly quiet colonial city nestled in a valley of pines and oaks.
Base camp for routes through natural parks and Mayan archaeological ruins, the survival of several indigenous communities is another of the tourist attractions in the area. The neo-Zapatista uprising of the 1990s against the misery and marginalization of its peoples placed San Cristóbal even more on the international map. Young foreigners fascinated by the rebellious indigenous people still coexist with the American pensioners who have bought houses here, with the boutique hotels, signature restaurants and art galleries.
The Scooters
The riot of war experienced this week has broken the mirage. The bullets in the market have once again brought to the surface the old latent conflict of exclusion, racism and structural violence, now adding the explosive ingredient of drug trafficking networks. Market traders give names of businessmen and local indigenous leaders as those responsible for the attack. “They have money and can pay the Motonetos to go on a rampage and cause fear,” says the owner of a chicken shop, also anonymous. The name of the Motonetos is repeated by the market stalls, but the meaning is not very clear: a cartel, a gang, some assassins, some thugs.
Human rights organizations that have been working in San Cristóbal for decades consider them “shock groups,” squads at the service of the highest bidder. Marina Page, coordinator of Sipaz, dates back to colonial times, when the Creole landowners of the city had the “white guards” to protect their lands and subdue the indigenous peasants. These groups were often made up of mestizos and declassed indigenous people. “Just like now the so-called Motonetos are children of the pockets of Tzotzil displaced people to the poorest outskirts of the city. These groups have always existed and have been used by different power groups.”
The priests, another of the key actors to understand Chiapas and who also prefer not to be identified in this report as a precaution, support the same thesis. From the Vicariate of Justice and Peace, created in the 1990s to mediate social problems, they point out that “every local leader, every politician, every businessman and now every cartel uses shock groups.” They point to the previous PRI government as a recent example, which in order to defuse the teachers’ protests against the educational reform, according to the Vicariate, took the thugs out on the streets: motorcycles, hooded men, shooting in the air.
The thesis of those who work close to the ground is that now the bosses of the Motonetos are the large drug trafficking groups, further raising the level of violence. They are already talking openly about a fight for the plaza. That is to say, the logic of organized crime according to which two rival gangs dispute the control of the territory. As a tourist center, until now the city had been more of a selling point with the presence of local groups from the neighboring population of San Juan Chamula. But the facts of the market represent a turning point. For Page “it goes beyond a fight between merchants. Control of the market means control of carriers, highways, and trade for all kinds of goods.”
New routes
The signs that the Plaza de San Cristóbal was heating up have been piling up over the past year. In January, the city was besieged for hours by another group related to the transport business. In October, journalist Fredy López Arévalo, a veteran who was keeping track of the latest events, was assassinated at the door of his house. Two men on a motorcycle fired four bullets at him. Two months earlier, the same thing happened with Gregorio Pérez, prosecutor for Indigenous Justice. Six bullets from a motorcycle. Pérez was also investigating recent massacres in a nearby community.
San Cristóbal is just over three hours by car from the border with Guatemala and one hour, by the same highway, from Tuxtla, the state capital. In December of last year, at the entrance to Tuxtla, a trailer overturned on a curve. In the accident, 55 migrants who were hidden in the cargo hold of the truck died. Another 105 injured results. The event revealed the new routes for organized crime businesses. Since mid-2019, the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has redoubled controls at traditional border entrances. Pressured by Donald Trump, he built a military wall especially in Tapachula and Tenosique, the gates to the north on both coasts.
As if they were moles to which they close a hole in the ground but always find another one to poke their heads through, organized crime began to look for alternative routes. With the ends plugged, the international highway that crosses central Chiapas is consolidating itself as the new hole. Towns that are on this path, such as Chamic or Comitán, are already suffering the consequences: curfews, roadblocks, murders, and disappearances. San Cristóbal and the capital, Tuxtla, are also on the same route to the north.
“We are outnumbered and outgunned”
“In recent years, organized crime has grown throughout this area with the presence of antagonistic groups that act at will. The authorities do not resist them. The mayor already said it, that they were overwhelmed,” says Juan Manuel Zardain, of the Chiapas State Human Rights Commission. What the municipal president, Mariano Diaz, said was the acknowledgment of their weakness: “they outnumber us and outweigh us.” He also downplayed the impact of the attack, denying that it was an issue linked to drug trafficking.
Díaz, from the Green Party, won the mayor’s office for the third time last year. On this occasion after a tight pulse with the Morena candidate, who did manage to win the governorship. Chiapas had been one of the traditional bastions of the PRI, in recent years through its ally el Verde, greased with welfare and patronage policies that have not removed the state from endemic backwardness. More than 75% of the population is poor.
Chiapas and the rest of the battered Mexican south is one of López Obrador’s banners. And one of the farmers vote for him. The elections of July of last year is another of the keys pointed out by analysts. “It is no coincidence that the State began to warm up during the pre-campaign. When there is a change in the institutions, especially local ones, there are usually agreements that change, that are broken or that are renegotiated, generating more violence as a method of pressure”, they point out from the Vicariate.
The assassination of a capo of the Sinaloa cartel is framed within this temporal logic. It was on July 8, a week after the elections, in the capital, Tuxtla. In broad daylight, Ramón Gilberto Rivera, son of Uncle Gil either The lord of the southern borderone of the trusted men of El Chapo Guzmán and mafia boss of the entire area until his capture in 2016. His son succeeded him in office until his murder, which was claimed by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the mafia today more powerful and with more tentacles around the country.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has acknowledged the links to organized crime in the shooting in San Cristóbal. In addition to defending his containment policy again, exemplified in the more than four hours it took for the authorities to arrive. One day before the attack, the Army had announced the launch of a special device with more than 500 soldiers and national guards. Barrack 31 is less than a half-hour drive from the market where the shooting took place.
Military camp 31 was also one of the barracks that the EZLN assaulted during the uprising. The starting shot was the seizure of the municipal palace of San Cristóbal on the morning of January 1, 1994, the day the Free Trade Agreement with the United States entered into force, the crystallization of the turn with open arms to the market of a PRI which, at the same time, unknowingly faced the last stretch of its hegemonic party dictatorship. In the same arcades where the indigenous rebels shouted almost 30 years ago “Enough is enough!”, today four homeless indigenous people sleep. While on the next street, between a wine shop specializing in pinot noir and an Irish pub, a group of American tourists hold their belts with their thumbs dancing the typical cowboy dance.
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