Please read the letter below and email your signature (your name and/or organization as you want it to appear on the letter) to the Chiapas Support Committee’s email: [email protected] saying that you agree to sign on by close of business (5pm) on Friday, September 18, 2020. Thank you!

Dear Consul General Gomez Arnau,

We write to express our alarm over the growing violence in the Highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, specifically in the municipalities of Chenalho and Chalchihuitan, where paramilitaries have violently attacked and forcibly displaced thousands of indigenous people from their homes, fields and communities. We are demanding that the Mexican government stop the paramilitary violence, stop any support being given to the paramilitaries and dismantle them.

According to the internationally respected Fray Bartoleme de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba), paramilitary-style groups in Chanalho municipality perpetrate the violence, shooting indiscriminately into the civilian communities where displaced persons are sheltered, often causing them to flee for safety in the mountains, thus leaving them outdoors without shelter and food. In Aldama, for instance, bullets fired from
Chenalho injured 13-year-old Maria Luciana Lunes Perez in the face and shoulder while she was working on her loom inside er home in Koko`, Aldama.

These paramilitary groups also patrol roads and block access to fields so that those displaced cannot grow or harvest their food, creating famine in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic, as well as preventing the harvesting and sale of cash crops that provide the only income these subsistence farmers have. Meanwhile, deaths and injuries are claimed on both sides.

A troubling photo apparently taken from a video in the local press shows heavily armed men in Chenalho dressed in camouflage uniforms, wearing ski masks and sporting high-powered rifles. The video's release, in which the paramilitaries introduce themselves to society, would seem to assert: "We have impunity!" Further evidence of impunity appeared on social media with the news that 80 residents of Santa Martha (Chenalho) took weapons & uniforms away from a detachment of police in that town and continued to retain the weapons.

Another report from those displaced in Aldama indicated that there have been 30 attacks in three days against the people of Aldama, with the gunfire coming from Chenalho. This shocked readers in Mexico and abroad. These egregious human rights violations must be stopped now to avoid further loss of life and serious bodily injury. Human rights defenders and those displaced are seeking such intervention.

This is a crisis situation that requires the Mexican government's immediate intervention to dismantle the paramilitaries and repair the damage done to all victims. Mexico's federal and state governments failed to do this before and after the December 22, 1997, Acteal Massacre in which paramilitaries attacked and murdered 45 women, men and children. Paramilitary violence forcibly displaced thousands in the months before that massacre, as is happening now. Additionally, there is evidence that the current paramilitary group is related to the one involved in that massacre.

The growing paramilitary attacks on Aldama feel eerily reminiscent of the conditions that preceded the Acteal Massacre. And the present reminds us all too painfully of the past. The Mexican government can prevent a greater calamity from taking place by stopping and dismantling the paramilitary violence now.

We, therefore, urge the Mexican federal and state governments to stop the paramilitary attacks, dismantle the paramilitary group(s) in Chenalho and begin repairing the damage done to all the victims.

Sincerely,