Self-Defense Group Emerges After Criminal Attacks in Chiapas, Mexico
DISPLACEMENT
/26 JUL 2021
BY PARKER ASMANN
Amid government inaction, Indigenous communities in the highlands of Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas are throwing their support behind a self-defense group that formed to fend off attacks by organized crime groups on their communities.
Thousands of Tzotzil and Tzeltal Indigenous community members gathered recently in the municipality of Pantelhó to back a local self-defense group known as the Autodefensas del Pueblo El Machete, local media group Chiapas Paralelo reported.
The armed group, made up of local community members, came together earlier this month "to drive out the hitmen, drug traffickers and organized crime groups," they said in a statement. "We came because we don’t want any more killings.”
The group's emergence occurs in the wake of at least 3,000 people being forced to flee their homes in Chiapas following targeted attacks carried out by an unidentified criminal group. One early morning ambush in an Indigenous region involved high-powered weapons and explosives.
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Indigenous community leaders are being targeted across Mexico. On July 5, in broad daylight, an assassin shot dead Indigenous rights activist Simón Pedro Pérez López, former president of the civil society organization Las Abejas de Acteal.
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Armed actors colluding with or operating with the approval of government officials in this area of Chiapas have had deadly consequences. In late 1997, a paramilitary group massacred 45 Tzotzil Indigenous women, children, and men - all members of Las Abejas de Acteal - while attending a prayer meeting in what became known as the Acteal Massacre. Twenty-two years later, the federal government acknowledged its role in deliberately failing to intervene and allowing the group to carry out the mass killing.
https://insightcrime.org/news/self-defense-group-attacks-chiapas-mexico/
Short video, spoken in Spanish, shows a community only a monster would ever harm:
vimeo.com/297036394
