In their local community in southeastern Mexico, individuals once lived a peaceful life. The 30 or so people planted caffeine, corn and beans, while some kept birds and a few cattle.
” We were not frightened of anything”, said Melina Martínez, 28. ” We had arrive home at night, at 1 o’clock in the morning. It was peaceful”.
Late last year, when gunmen started showing up in the castle, known as México Nuevo, and setting up checkpoints on routes to rob people for money, there were the earliest indications of problems. People claimed that at least two young men were kidnapped from their beds at gunpoint and drafted into a substance gang.
Finally, late last month, the majority of the locals trudged through the tree for two hours across the boundary to Guatemala after a significant shooting broke out outside.
” We all decided to run because we thought they would attack our community”, explained Martínez, who left with her 8-year-old child.
They are one of the thousands of people who have been displaced by the turf war that has ravaged little of Mexico’s Chiapas state, which is known for its indigenous cultures, stunning natural beauty, Maya ruins, and lovely imperial towns, in the kind of violence that has already ravaged so much of the nation.
Rival criminal groups are fighting for profitable smuggling routes along the 400-mile border with Guatemala, a hall for heroin, arms , and workers.
Some of the crowds operate semiautonomously, but most appear to be linked to one of Mexico’s two big organizations — Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation.
Assassinations, robberies and displacements have come to occupy living across vast swathes of Chiapas, said Gerardo González Figueroa, a scientist with El Colegio de la Frontera Sur in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas.
” This has become a high-intensity conflict between two organizations with incredible amounts of firepower”, he said.
People are encircled, and the state has been unable to do much to change it.
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Chiapas is Mexico’s poorest condition. Almost 70 % of its 5.7 million people — nearly a fourth of them Indigenous — live in poverty.
In 1994, hostilities erupted when a motley group of rebels who called themselves Zapatistas launched a revolt that attracted international attention. Inequality has long been the source of unrest. With the assistance of allies ‘ militias, government forces rebelled, eventually resulting in discussions that gave the insurgents a limited degree of autonomy. Chiapas rekindled their comparative tranquility.
Not that Chiapas had n’t seen its share of drug trafficking. Cocaine from South America traveled through Chiapas and onto the US for years. At the head was Mexico’s largest and most historic legal firm.
” Ostensibly the Sinaloa cartel for ages had a monopoly in Chiapas”, said Victor Manuel Sánchez, an organized-crime specialist at the Autonomous University of Coahuila.
The gang had little need for violence because drugs moved with gentlemanly performance and there was little opposition or government intervention.
Around 2020, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which was violently expanding throughout Mexico, started to change.
In July 2021, after attackers ambushed and , killed a top leader , of the Sinaloa cartel and his guards in the state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, the Jalisco gang released a , people statement , claiming payment. The hit sounded like a public outcry against Chiapas.
At least 16, 000 people across Chiapas — 4, 000 of them from one town, Tila — have been displaced by violence since the beginning of last year, according to the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Center of Human Rights. Thousands more have been trapped in their communities, penned in by cartel checkpoints. Even to avert residents who refuse to cooperate, mafias even cut off electricity.
In the interim, various gangs have posted online images of fighters posing with automatic weapons.
In a video that went viral in September, a midday parade of pickups and SUVs — some outfitted with turrets hosting masked men brandishing machine guns — ferried Sinaloa cartel , pistoleros , through the town of San Gregorio Chamic as bystanders along the major border highway shouted their allegiance: “¡Arriba Sinaloa“!
And as the cartels attempted to recruit allies in local political offices this year, there were at least 16 fatalities in Chiapas in the weeks leading up to the election and prompted scores of candidates to resign their electoral campaigns.
Then in late June, police in Chiapas discovered the , bullet-riddled bodies , of 19 men in and around an abandoned dump truck on a dirt road in the township of La Concordia. Authorities claimed that at least six of the attackers were Guatemalans, and images of bloody corpses surrounded by discarded rifles that were posted on social media, apparently by the attackers.
” Violence has spread like a cancer in our state”, the Fray Bartolomé center recently reported. ” This situation is characterized not only by the armed confrontation among criminal groups, but also the intent to control, with strategies of terror, the social, economic and political life of the communities”.
In other words, Chiapas has come to resemble some of the most conflict-ridden parts of Mexico.
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In the village of Tzanembolom, in the mountains of central Chiapas, gunmen gathered in the street, opened fire into the air, and evicted about half the 200 residents from their homes on one day last month.
The attackers are described as “narcos” and “hit men” from a gang known as Los Herrera, and as a result of false accusations by those who are targeted that they support a rival organization known as El Machete.
Victims said they knew little about either group, including whether they had any affiliations with Mexico’s well-known cartels.
The displaced fled to a school that was manned by police and waited before being forced out of their homes.
” We suffered through nine days of terror, trapped inside a school like hostages”, explained one of them, Felipe Hernández, 27. ” There was little food. We feared we would all be killed”.
Finally, on July 20, Chiapas state authorities arrived and escorted the trapped villagers to safety.
They ended up in the town of Chenalhó at the church of St. Peter the Apostle, where they slept on mats in a community center. Gathered on a patio on a recent afternoon, women in colorful, handcrafted blouses chatted as they heated tortillas on braziers. The women, who spoke Tzotzil and limited Spanish, directed a reporter to village men.
” If authorities ca n’t do anything to stop the violence, we want the government to give us land to start all over again”, said Vicente Rodríguez, 36, who had fled Tzanembolom with his wife and three children. We’re too afraid to go back right away. They will kill us”.
In Guatemala, the residents of México Nuevo— along with several hundred other people who had fled southern Chiapas in late July — were staying at a rural schoolhouse, or living with area families.
Guatemalan soldiers waited outside the school while irate teenagers sat in soccer and soccer while playing catch and soccer with a basketball. One boy lamented that the family cornfields were so far away:” We miss going with our fathers to the , milpas“.
The majority of those interrogated said they feared giving their full names. A 56-year-old man from Mexico named Javier described how two of his nephews, ages 25 and 15, were kidnapped earlier this year by gunmen from the Jalisco cartel.
” They came at night and took them from their beds”, he said. ” What they want is more recruits”.
Pedro, a 40-year-old displaced man, explained that he had spent years working as a golf coursekeeper and scouting for the countryside before moving back to Mexico and constructing his dream home in the town of San José with his wife and two children until the gangs forced them all out.
” These people will take over our houses”, he said. ” But at least we are alive”.
The Mexican government has been embarrassed by the Mexican government’s flight to Guatemala. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans who sought refuge in the 1970s and 1980s during that nation’s civil war, are among the many people who have a long history of seeking refuge in Mexico.
” The incredible message here is that Guatemala is doing a better job protecting its people than Mexico”, said Manuel Sánchez, the organized-crime expert.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who leaves office Oct. 1 and plans to retire to his family ranch in Chiapas, has repeatedly minimized the chaos. During a recent visit to La Concordia to inaugurate a new bridge, he said,” I have faith that very soon all this region is going to be pacified and brotherhood and concord will return.”
Many displaced Mexicans in Guatemala claimed they had no faith in the Mexican soldiers who stopped by and delivered food. The residents also rejected government offers to move them to a shelter in the Mexican border city of , Tapachula, far from their villages.
” The army should be doing its work on the other side, going after the criminals, not sitting back in their barracks”, said a sobbing 38-year-old mother of four. ” The soldiers in Mexico patrol along the main roads, but they do n’t get up into the mountains. That’s where the gunmen are”.
Froilán Pérez, 80, a lifelong resident of México Nuevo, said his children in the United States have urged him and his wife to join them.
” I’m too old for that”, Pérez said as the couple waited for an exam with volunteer nurses. ” We are poor people. We want to go home”.
Among those stopping by the school was the town mayor, Audilio Roblero. When his family moved to Chiapas from Guatemala, where he and his siblings and parents spent nine years, as a boy, to escape the war-torn region.
” I spent my entire adolescence in Mexico”, the mayor said. ” I appreciate Mexico’s assistance to us during our challenging times. And I fully comprehend what these individuals are going through. They came to save their lives”.
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