Impending Massacre in CHIAPAS Mexico

by Saskia Fischer
Oct 12

Chol de Tumbala
Oct 11

Tension is mounting in this community under siege, harassed by the constant sight and sound of low flying government planes and helicopters, and news of troops and paramilitaries gathering at the outskirts of town. The word is that the Mexican Army will invade any day now to forcibly remove the entire community.

While much attention has been focused on the struggle between poor communities and the state authorities in Oaxaca, the Mexican government continues to wage a low-intensity war against indigenous communities in the very fertile and resource-rich state of Chiapas.

This particular battle is taking place in the village of Chol de Tumbala , an indigenous community in Northern Chiapas. The village is part of the network of autonomous Zapatista municipalities in the state, this one named El Trabajo. The Chols are about to face eviction, for the second time, from the ancestral lands they have struggled over the past decade to get a legal claim to. The lands, which once were covered with dense jungle, and inhabited by the Chols, have over the past decades been deforested by vast cattle ranches, and their valuable timber sold on world markets.

Today the San Cristobal based human rights organization, the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolome de las Casas (CDHFBLC), which monitors and promotes the human rights of poor people in the region, made a public appeal to the state government not to use force against the Zapatistas camped in Chol de Tumbala. They also revealed that when they voiced their concerns to officials over a week ago, they were told that the government was facing pressure from the president of the ranchers, Pedro Fons, to reclaim the land. They were assured that the police wanted to avoid a violent confrontation. However, given the recent history of violence against the villagers, the Center said that these assurances could not be taken for granted.

The Chols battle to (re)establish a community on their ancestral lands in Palenque municipality, began in 1988, when they submitted a formal petition to the federal secretary of Agrarian Reform. Between the time the request was published in 1990 and 1995, the federal and local authorities issued numerous contradictory decisions, finally ruling against the Chols in January of 1995. The land in question consists of 532 hectares. Once it became clear that legal avenues were closed to them, that the government would not act to protect their right to land and a living, the community decided to take a bold stand and in their words liberate the land. In September 1999, 30 families, members of different communities in the area, and supporters of the EZLN, reoccupied these ancestral lands and set to work building a future for their families and future generations.

On August 3, 2006, life in Chol de Tumbala was violently disrupted. At 10.30 in the morning, villagers were presented with an eviction notice from the Federal Judge of Playas de Catanza, who told them they had 10 minutes to vacate the land. At 11.30, vans carrying more than 260 people- among them municipal police, public security forces and people dressed as civilians, invaded the village and set about destroying it. They burned and bulldozed the houses, and destroyed clothes, kitchen utensils, dishes and fruit trees, before taking all the villagers´ property, including the husked maize which is the staple of their diet. Three villagers were imprisoned, forced to sign documents saying they had left the land voluntarily, and then later released. At this stage the government produced a list of prior owners of the land.

At the behest of the Zapatista Junta de Buen Gobierno (Good Government), on October 1st about 300 Zapatistas- among them men, women and children, returned to the village to reoccupy the land. On the 3rd, the police began flying helicopters over the area. However, a day later, after the CDHFBLC had made public its concerns, the police withdrew- without any apparent change in the situation. Also on the 3rd, a number of social justice and civil rights organizations decided to travel to the village and set up a peace camp there to ward off violence from the state and/or the ranchers. They remain there at the time of writing.

Since 1994, when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) launched its campaign to fight for the rights of the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, the Mexican government has deployed an array of tactics against the Zapatistas and their supporters- from attempts to discredit the movement in the press, to torture, rape, imprisonment and outright murder. Although the people of Chiapas are poor, the state is a rich one, with valuable sources of water, timber and cattle ranching. These lucrative industries however are dominated by large landholders, latifundas. Together with the state and federal governments, and their private armies of paramilitaries, these landowners have waged war against the indigenous peoples of the state. One of the most horrific example was the massacre of 45 people attending a church service in Acteal in 1997. However the Acteal massacre was only one in a long history of forced displacement, assassination and rape, in which hundreds have died and hundreds more have been made landless.

While the world´s attention is focused on Oaxaca, they face the imminent threat of another, potentially more violent, eviction from their homes and lands.