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"We are desperate and nobody is listening to us," said Juan Torres, a resident of the Tila municipality in the Sierra Madre mountain range of Chiapas. Torres fled with his family to the neighboring city of Yajalón on June 7, following three nights of terror that shook the town and displaced thousands of people.
On the evening of June 4, Tila became "a war zone like you see in films," said Torres, whose name has been changed for security reasons. Gunshots were heard throughout the night and the horizon lit up with the flames of burning buildings.
According to Gaby Coutiño, an independent correspondent in Chiapas, three people were killed, four were injured, and a total of 17 houses and 21 vehicles were burned. The incursion was one of the most violent events in a long-running conflict involving communal and municipal property owners in the remote region of Chiapas.
High in the mountains and some 95 kilometers from the state capital Tuxtla Gutierrez, Tila stretches over the Sierra Madre mountains to the Tabasco state border. The municipality takes in resource-rich land of interest to multinational corporations and the Mexican state, including oil extraction and infrastructure megaprojects as well as a rumored uranium deposit. As in other parts of Mexico, municipal bodies and the local economy are enmeshed with criminal groups that extort local businesses and deliver services such as construction and public transportation. With the increase in mass migration through Chiapas to the U.S.-Mexico border, Tila has become an even more lucrative site for organized crime, with much of the southern area of the state currently contested by the Jalisco and Sinaloa cartels.
After the outbreak of violence, residents stayed indoors for three days, attempting to communicate with emergency services and ask for help via social media channels. Rumors circulated that whole families were being murdered. With the arrival of the Armed Forces on June 7, thousands fled with the military’s assistance to the town of Yajalón, where the municipality housed them in tents on an unused sports field. The Associated Press described it as one of the largest displacements of people in southern Mexico since the 1990s.
The advocacy organization Foro para Desarollo Sustentable, which ran a survey of 6,965 displaced people on June 16, estimates that the overall number of the displaced was more than 12,000, the majority to Yajalón.
Entrenched Conflict over Land and Territory
Conflict between civilian groups in Tila is typically characterized as a battle over property ownership between the Tila ejido—an organization of Indigenous Ch´ol communal property owners whose rights were established as a result of post-Mexican Revolution land reform —and mestizo property owners aligned with the Tila municipal entity. Since 1966, ejidatarios, as ejido members are known, have been contesting their right to 130 hectares that was included in the establishment of the ejido legal entity. The municipality was required to cede the land to the ejido, which it has not done despite two court injunctions in 1994 and 2008 that ruled in favor of the ejido. The case was sent to the Supreme Court in 2010 where it still awaits a ruling.
During the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the ejidatarios supported the Zapatistas' re-appropriation of land and establishment of an autonomous, communal system of government. They were confronted during this period with state and paramilitary forces dedicated to dismantling the Zapatista revolution, which saw considerable redistribution of communal land to Indigenous communities in the state.
As has been documented by Ch´ol academic Emilio Pérez Pérez, attempts to recover the land by the ejidatarios have included mass marches through Tila, the burning of municipal real estate, and, in 2015, the expulsion of Tila’s elected authorities and imposition of communal self-government. As a result, the municipality was forced to move its offices elsewhere, and conflict has continued to simmer.
Some 60 years after the legal founding of the ejido, social media posts and media reports indicate that a group of Tila ejidatarios known as "Los Autonomos" is in conflict with "Los Karmas," a group aligned with the municipality. Most reports attribute the June 4 incursion to Los Autonomos, noting their affiliation with the National Indigenous Congress.
However, a statement published on the website of the Tila ejido and republished by Radio Zapatista denounces "the criminal group Karma," who the ejido holds responsible for murdering some of their members in recent years, including National Indigenous Congress councilor Carmen López Lugo on January 12.
"On Tuesday, June 4th, the delinquent group Karma showed up armed with high caliber weapons and provoked the current ejido authorities to stop maintaining peace," declares the statement, saying "we are now in a scenario of forced displacement, death, and threats to our survival as a Ch'ol people."
A Fraught Return
During the tense weeks in Yajalón, the state government coordinated an inter-institutional roundtable made up of representatives from the Army, National Guard, and Security Ministry, while services were provided by the departments of health and civil protection. After two weeks, the roundtable proposed having the military escort the displaced back to Tila, a plan that was roundly rejected by a mass assembly on June 13. Participants demanded representation on the roundtable and expressed suspicion around the role of the church and non-government organizations in supporting the proposal.
On June 22, a leader of a group opposed to the ejidatarios was found murdered in Yajalón with signs of having been tortured, further embedding doubts about a secure return of the displaced to their homes.
"We are demanding that the military set up a barracks in Tila to guard the entrances and exits and to register weapons," said local resident Torres by phone on June 17. "We want them to guarantee that they will intervene in the event of further disturbances and not wait on 72-hour orders to act," as they had after the June 4 attacks.
By late June an agreement was reached and the displaced began their return home, accompanied by members of the Armed Forces who remained in Tila until last week.
As the military installments made their departure, warnings had already begun to circulate online that the violence will flare up again.
A Diversification of Armed Actors
Many issues involving land ownership have led to "social and political disputes over the years" in Tila, a spokesperson for the Fray Bartolomé Human Rights Center, known as Frayba, explained in an interview. "Violence has been escalating throughout the decade," they added, citing deepening polarization within the community on the rights of the ejidatarios.
As tensions have escalated, the state has abrogated its responsibility to address the underlying land disputes, thus failing to “contribute to the construction of a lasting peace between all the inhabitants of Tila," said the spokesperson. Furthermore, Frayba noted, Chiapas has a law for the prevention of and attention to forced displacement that the state is not implementing.
“As several sources tell us,” the spokesperson continued, “there is now the presence of not one, but several armed groups that have been attacking each other." Since June 4, human rights violations such as the burning of homes and vehicles, murders, and rapes have been reported in Tila.
"During the last few years we have seen several episodes of violence and the actions of armed groups that lead to these massive displacements," said the spokesperson, while official state responses tend to "minimize and invisibilize" the events.
In his daily press conference on June 10, President AMLO downplayed the mass displacement from Tila, saying the conflict was not a struggle against state or local repression but "a confrontation between the people themselves, because they have not been able to harmonize."
According to Frayba´s December 2023 report Chiapas, a Disaster, the organization documented the forced displacement of at least 16,755 people in the state of Chiapas between 2010 and 2022. During that time, Frayba has observed "a diversification of armed actors" in Chiapas that is "very complex and varied according to the territory."
The human rights group has also observed a resurgence in the presence of paramilitary groups in the region not seen since the 1990s, with no intervention on the part of the state to promote or support peace. Independent news outlets Aristegui Noticias, Este País, and Chiapas Paralelo have contributed to reporting on this resurgence, noting that the Karma group includes former members of the paramilitary group Paz y Justicia.
"Strategies, forms of mobilization, even the weapons" of past paramilitarism are "reappearing as its successors," said the Frayba spokesperson, referring to the entanglement of self-defense, community welfare, and local public services with armed groups that recycle strategies first used in attempts to contain the Zapatista uprising of 1994.
Since then, Frayba observes that violence has diversified into a number of very complex armed groups that battle for control of social and economic operations, from neighborhood transport services to state power, and are ¨very difficult to categorize.” The fragmentation and proliferation of conflict is reflected on local social media channels, where accusations and misinformation spread rapidly and contribute to a heightened culture of fear.
Writing for Ojalá, Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández, a feminist environmentalist and educator from Chiapas, notes the gendered dimensions of displacement, writing "women are under siege in this war against the people."
"Women fear for their daughters, their territories and the men in their lives," writes Cruz Hernández. "When they have to leave their communities, they do so carrying their lives on their backs. They seek refuge elsewhere when their spouses or sons are intimidated into joining the ranks of drug traffickers or their daughters are forced into romantic relationships with members of a criminal group."
Reverend Alejandro Ornelas, a parish priest in Tila, told the Associated Press he thought organized crime may now be involved with "both sides" of the conflict. In an interview, an anonymous source from Tila was more blunt: "Los Karmas never existed, they were created in order to blame innocent people."
Torres, for his part, is wary of the role of the Catholic church and NGOs operating in the region. “They’re complicit, working with the municipality,” he said.
With the return of the displaced back to Tila, there have been reports of further threats and gunshots. In some parts of town, doors and windows remain locked, and some residents are relocating to other communities. “You have to leave, because there’s no life,” Rafael Gutiérrez, a Tila resident, told AP. “We can’t live with this anxiety."
Meanwhile, the June 11 statement signed by the Tila ejido emits a warning: "All the authorities that have recently intervened in the territory occupied by the Ejido should be aware of this information and avoid any harm to their security, freedom, personal integrity and even their lives."
Ann Louise Deslandes is an independent journalist based in southern Mexico.
Editor's note: This article was corrected on July 29, 2024, to remove inaccurate references to Councilor Carmen López Lugo and his assassination.
