Cartel battles are making southern Mexico unlivable (2024)

International View

Victoria Razo / The Washington Post / Getty

Thousands of families have already fled the violence in the Chiapas region of Mexico, and residents are too often caught in the deadly crossfire between warring cartels. Official security forces are of little help.

Thomas Milz (text), Comitán de Domínguez, Andrea Mittelholzer (photo editor)

June 20, 2024 10 min

A colorful sign greets visitors at the entrance to Comitán de Domínguez. Situated in the mountains north of the Angostura reservoir, the town with its historic churches is a «pueblo mágico,» a magical town – at least according to its tourism advertising slogan. But the magic is dampened a bit by the armored military vehicle sitting between the two lanes of the Carretera Federal 190 highway, and the sandbags that are stacked waist-high to the left and right. Behind them are officers from the Guardia Nacional police force as well as soldiers standing next to a machine gun mounted on a tripod.

This is the Corredor Central, one of three routes in the state of Chiapas that are used to transport migrants and drugs from Guatemala northward to the United States. On the Pacific route, which leads further south through the city of Tapachula, as well as on the corridor further north through the jungle areas around the city of Palenque, migrants can regularly be seen moving along the roads. Here on the central corridor, however, they are invisible. That's because they are transported hidden in trucks.

Until 2020, the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín «El Chapo» Guzmán, who is serving a life sentence in the U.S., controlled the region between Comitán and the border around an hour's drive to the east. However, fights for control of the area with the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel and its Guatemalan allies Los Huistas are now flaring up again. At the beginning of the year, hundreds of families fled from the border region to Comitán in the mountains. In the villages near the border, battles frequently cause civilian casualties.

The La Krystalina pastoral center is located in a small wooded area on the outskirts of Comitán. In recent months, it has served as a refuge for families who fled here from the villages around the Angostura reservoir and the border region. Some families have already moved on to other states in Mexico or even to the U.S. for fear of the criminal gangs, while others are hiding with friends and relatives in Comitán, says Gloria Murúa, a nun who is head of the pastoral office for social and migration issues.

All that remains in La Krystalina is a room full of plastic bags of clothes. Families who have returned to their villages in the conflict zone have deposited them here, in case they have to flee again. Many went back to harvest the corn on their farms and look after their cattle. However, they did not feel safe when they returned to their villages, as the criminals had plundered farms and stolen livestock. For this reason, nobody leaves their houses after 5 p.m., Murúa says. «But this is their life, and they want to preserve it,» she adds.

Most of the refugees are Indigenous. The fighting is especially traumatic for many of them, Murúa says, because they have had to flee before – to southern Mexico in the 1980s to escape the genocide against Indigenous people in neighboring Guatemala. The diocese has informed the central government about the situation several times, but officials have played down the danger, Murúa says. «If they acknowledged the problem, they would eventually have to do something about the reasons,» she adds.

Politicization by the church

In Chiapas, the poorest state in Mexico, the church is an important social anchor. The Indigenous regions of southern Mexico are among the areas of Latin America that have been most strongly influenced by Catholic liberation theology since the 1960s. The movement supports the political participation of marginalized people. That strong politicization led to the 1994 uprising of the Indigenous peasant militia, known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which fought against neoliberal economic policies and for Indigenous autonomy.

The government responded by deploying the military in large numbers. With around 20,000 Guardia Nacional soldiers and officers stationed here, Chiapas is now one of the most heavily militarized states in the country. The EZLN, which acts as a vigilante group in the Indigenous regions, nevertheless accuses President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of inaction, saying that he tolerates criminal gangs and corrupt entrepreneurs running riot and threatening the Indigenous people. Chiapas is heading toward civil war, the EZLN warned back in 2020.

In fact, the region has suffered years of unrest. San Cristóbal de las Casas, around two hours' drive north of Comitán, is the center of tourism in Chiapas. Here, too, criminal gangs engaged in wild shootouts in June 2021. Tours to the nature parks and Mayan ruins along the border with Guatemala are currently canceled due to the security situation. Travel agencies also report that they now have to pay tolls to the criminal gangs and hire their guides.

The Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas (Frayba) has its office near the center of San Cristóbal. The Catholic human rights organization’s building is secured with fences and barbed wire. According to the organization, around 10,000 people have been displaced since the fighting between the two cartels began in 2021. A report by Frayba from the beginning of the year provides insight into the conflict's background. It lists numerous residents who were caught between the front lines or who refused to work for the gangs, and were subsequently tortured, murdered or disappeared.

The president plays down the violence

At the beginning of April, Frayba published details of an incident that had taken place on March 31 near the town of La Concordia. Residents there were caught in the crossfire during battles between the Guardia Nacional and criminals. At least 25 people are said to have lost their lives, and many more were injured. Frayba called on the central government to investigate the massacre.

President López Obrador, who until then had simply denied that Chiapas had a security problem, reacted angrily. Frayba was conjuring up «a scenario of violence» that was greatly exaggerated, he claimed. After 11 more people were murdered near the town of Chicomuselo in mid-May, the president insinuated that the victims were criminals. Frayba contradicted this account, saying that the victims were local residents and two employees of the Catholic Church.

At the beginning of June, around 4,200 Indigenous people were evacuated by soldiers from the town of Tila, around 100 kilometers north of San Cristóbal de las Casas. Afterward, the president said it was due to a conflict between residents. However, eyewitnesses reported that criminals had terrorized the residents for days, setting houses and cars on fire. At least two people died.

Nevertheless, López Obrador insists that Chiapas is one of the safest states in Mexico. This is shown by his government's official statistics, he has claimed. And he promised at the end of May, during a visit to Chiapas, that he would put an end to what little violence there was by the end of his term of office at the end of September. However, human rights organizations doubt the validity of government statistics.

An employee of an organization that looks after threatened activists in Chiapas says that the population is afraid to report violent crimes. According to the activist, who asked to remain anonymous, residents are persecuted not only by criminal gangs, but also by state authorities. Moreover, the criminal gangs also smuggle their people into social organizations such as cooperatives in order to harness the villagers into working for the interests of the cartels. If this fails, they use force to persuade the residents to cooperate, for example by erecting roadblocks.

Another employee of a human rights organization, who also wishes to remain anonymous, describes the border region as «silenced.» Residents are afraid to report violence because they do not know whether the authorities are in cahoots with the criminals, this source says. «We are worried that the government is not ensuring that people can report violence without danger. Instead, they simply deny everything,» the employee says.

Corrupt security apparatus

López Obrador does not tolerate any contradiction to his narrative that everything is fine, says Falko Ernst. He is senior Mexico analyst at the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental organization. The fact that very few crimes are investigated or solved in Mexico – more than 95% go unpunished – makes it easy for López Obrador to support this narrative.

Ernst describes the state security apparatus as a «nontransparent black box with a lot of corruption and no internal oversight.» Some local commanders have worked with the Sinaloa cartel, others with its opponents from Jalisco Nueva Generación, he tells the NZZ. «If the state only cooperated with one side, it would be much more peaceful. But there is no uniform line within the state organizations.»

But this is a general phenomenon in Mexico, he says. «Where there is money to be made, the law is sold to the highest bidder. Impunity and access to the state are offered as a business model.» And there is a lot of money to be made in Chiapas, Ernst adds. Territorial control is a veritable gold mine, he says. In addition to the transportation of migrants, Chiapas also offers profits from the extraction of raw materials and the extortion of protection money.

The human rights activists in San Cristóbal also suspect a connection between elements of the state security apparatus and the criminal gangs. For example, the increased presence of the Guardia Nacional on the border with Guatemala, which was intended to curb migration, has instead led to higher prices being charged for crossing the border, they say.

Hooded men stop Sheinbaum

At the end of April, López Obrador's strategy of playing down the violence in Chiapas to the public suffered a setback. A video distributed nationwide by the media showed how the motorcade of Claudia Sheinbaum – who was recently elected as López Obrador's successor – was stopped by hooded men near the border with Guatemala during the election campaign. In the video, the men, who claim to be local residents, ask Sheinbaum to clear roads that a cartel had blocked, and to work for peace in Chiapas.

Sheinbaum later expressed doubt that they were actually local residents. Instead, she said she believed that media figures critical of the government had set a trap for her. However, the media speculated that members of the Sinaloa cartel might have been behind the spectacular action.

Ernst, the security expert, says it doesn’t really matter who was ultimately behind the action. More worrying, he notes, is the fact that the masked men were able to stop the candidate's motorcade, which was escorted by the Guardia Nacional and soldiers, apparently without having to fear any consequences. In Chiapas, as elsewhere in Mexico, the drug cartels are able to operate largely unhindered – either because the security forces are allied with them, or because the forces do not dare to confront the criminal organizations.

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