The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) has raised the alarm at the growing wave of violence suffered by their communities by paramilitary groups and cartel hitmen who are fighting over territory. Along with 800 organizations and 1,000 personalities allied to Zapatismo, the guerrillas have signed a statement warning that the State of Chiapas is "on the brink of civil war" and in which they call for an international day of protest next 8 June to prevent the tension from escalating further.
"Chiapas is on the brink of civil war, with paramilitaries and hitmen from the various cartels that are fighting for the plaza and self-defense groups, with the active or passive complicity of the governments of Rutilio Escandón Cadenas (governor of Chiapas) and Andrés Manuel López Obrador", denounces the statement signed, among other personalities, by the American intellectual Noam Chomsky, the former presidential candidate María Jesús Martínez, the film director Alfonso Cuarón, the actors Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal and Daniel Giménez Cacho, and the writers Juan Villoro, Jorge Volpi, Gabriela Jáuregui and Guadalupe Nettel.
The crisis in Chiapas had been brewing since the beginning of the six-year term, when several paramilitary groups, such as the Ocosingo Regional Coffee Growers Organization (Orcao), began to invade Zapatista territories to seize land in order to use it to benefit from social programs. , such as 'Sembrando Vida', which offers financial resources in exchange for planting fruit and timber trees. The EZLN denounces that the members of Orcao are using these public funds to buy weapons and wills, "they keep one part and the other is given to the officials so that they can publish that they are complying with assistance. With these weapons, they shoot all the nights against the Zapatista community of Moisés and Gandhi".
The tension between the two groups has progressively escalated since, between September 11 and 19, 2021, the paramilitaries kidnapped two Zapatista leaders to "provoke a reaction from the EZLN in order to destabilize a State whose governability depends on a thread", as denounced in a statement. More recently, on May 22, an armed command left the Zapatista Jorge López Santíz seriously wounded, provoking the unanimous reaction of the guerrillas: "before the action and omission of the state and federal authorities regarding the current and previous crimes, We will take the pertinent measures so that justice is applied to the criminals of the Orcao and officials who sponsor them".
Since it took up arms in 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation has managed to consolidate a total of 43 territories in the Chiapas highlands that are governed by self-government and have their own laws and autonomous authorities. However, that independence has been affected by a growing wave of disappearances, torture, attacks on human rights defenders and journalists, dispossession of land, forced displacement, and the appearance of up to 147 military camps in territories adjacent to their communities. Recently, the newspaper La Jornada, close to the ruling party and at odds with the Zapatistas for several years, warned in a column about the instability in the south of the country: "it is not an exaggeration. The Chiapas powder keg could explode at any moment."
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