Civil Society, Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

MEXICO: Police Arrested for Killing Indigenous Protesters

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Oct 7 2008 (IPS) - The recent killings of six indigenous people and the injuries suffered by 17 others in a clash with police in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas were the result of a strategy of “criminalising social protest” adopted by the state’s “supposedly leftist government,” according to a prominent local human rights group.

Thirty police are under investigation or arrest in connection with the deaths.

In Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state, “most expressions of indigenous discontent are treated as criminal acts, whether openly or in a veiled manner,” Jorge Luis Hernández, an activist with the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre, told IPS.

On Friday, Oct. 3, around 40 police officers swarmed into the village of Miguel Hidalgo, which is home to 750 families of the Tojolabal indigenous community, and used tear gas in an attempt to evict local protesters who had occupied the entrance to a nearby Maya archaeological site since Sept. 1.

Hundreds of protesters were blocking the entryway to the Chinkultic ruins, which belong to the state, to demand that locals be given a role in administering the site, and that some of the revenue brought in by the tourism it draws be reinvested in infrastructure and other projects in the area.

Instead of dispersing when the police began their operation, the protesters fought back with sticks and rocks, and seized, disarmed and locked up a number of police officers.

The police then sent in 300 reinforcements to free their colleagues, and six indigenous people were killed and a number of villagers and police were injured in the resulting violent confrontation.

Five injured villagers were still in hospital on Tuesday, one seriously wounded by gunfire.

The 36 locals who were arrested during the incident were released in exchange for the return of the guns seized from the police by the community.

“What happened in Miguel Hidalgo is part of a pattern adopted by the authorities in Chiapas in response to protests by indigenous people, regardless of their political or religious affiliation,” Hernández said in a telephone interview with IPS from the human rights group’s offices in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas.

The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre was founded in 1989 by Catholic bishop Samuel Ruíz, a follower of liberation theology, which is based on a “preferential option for the poor.”

In Mexico, indigenous people are variously estimated to make up between 12 and 30 percent of the country’s 104 million people (the smaller estimate is based on the number of people who actually speak an indigenous language). But in Chiapas they form a much larger proportion of the population.

Since December 2006, the Chiapas state government has been led by Governor Juan Sabines of the leftwing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

But Sabines, a former member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico from 1929-2000, has had several public differences with the PRD.

Hernández, who pointed out that a number of state government officials belong to the PRI, said the characteristics of the administration are more along the lines of that party than the PRD.

After Friday’s incident, Sabines visited Miguel Hidalgo to apologise and offer his condolences. “The government here is not fighting with the people; these incidents did not only happen to you, they happened to everyone in Chiapas,” said the governor.

“Justice will always be on the people’s side,” said Sabines. “I am outraged by what happened; you can count on me.”

The state government promised to punish the police who were responsible for the violence, indemnify the victims’ families, provide scholarships to their children and pensions to their widows, and launch productive projects in the community.

But Hernández said that although the state government took an “apparently different stance this time, the pattern of criminalising social protests remains in place.”

The human rights group has closely followed a number of cases in which indigenous people in Chiapas have been oppressed, mistreated or framed on false charges.

Hernández challenged the state government to take the investigation of the incident in Miguel Hidalgo all the way up to Sabines’s close associates in the government, and to hold them accountable if they are found to be responsible. “We’ll see if this goes any farther than rank and file police officers,” he said.

The Human Rights Centre documented several incidents of what it described as “repression” in rural areas of Chiapas blamed on “state agents” this year.

In April, several indigenous villagers were threatened with fines or jail terms by officials for working on privately-owned land located near an archaeological site.

In July, the police forcibly evicted indigenous people who had occupied land caught up in an ownership dispute. And in September, the police entered an area under the influence of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to arrest two locals who were not facing any charges, the human rights centre reported.

The EZLN, a barely-armed indigenous guerrilla group, staged an armed uprising in the state in January 1994, demanding justice, democracy and respect for native rights. Two weeks later it agreed to an armed truce with the government and since then has been holed up in remote mountainous jungle areas of Chiapas, where a number of villages remain under its control, although it has lost the degree of national and international influence or solidarity it once enjoyed.

In Chiapas, where most of the population is indigenous, the literacy rate stands at 80 percent, 11 percentage points lower than the national rate, and life expectancy is two years lower than the national average of 74.5 years.