Chiapas: harassment and risk of forced displacement in autonomous community of San Patricio in the northern zone

Roberto Barrios (@tierraylibertad.com)

On 14 September, the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Center for Human (CDHFBC) released an Urgent Action denouncing the imminent risk that different death-threats and acts of harassment could develop into a possible forced displacement of the residents of the autonomous community of San Patricio, autonomous municipality La Dignidad (official municipality of Sabanilla), in the northern zone of Chiapas.

According to the denunciation released by the Good-Government Council (JBG) “New seed that will produce” from Roberto Barrios on 12 September, on 7 September 2011, Messrs. Ambrocio Díaz Gómez, Santiago Díaz Cruz, and Miguel Díaz Díaz arrived at the home of one of the autonomous Zapatista authorities in San Patricio to threaten to invade and displace the community on the pretext that they are not paying their land tax.  They added that if the recuperated lands taken by Zapatistas were not handed over–these lands being where the community actually resides–they would “enter to massacre everyone.”

The JBG communiqué notes that since the night of the 10th, the community has found itself surrounded by some hundred persons from tillerent communities of Tila and Sabanilla who have installed a camp not far away.  In the following days it was denounced that these persons have been shooting, blockading all paths, destroying corn crops, and burning 18 hectares of grazing property belonging to Zapatista support-bases.

The CDHFBC warned that “In light of this situation the BAEZLN residents of San Patricio find themselves without the possibility of accessing their lands so as to work and cultivate them, a situation that is causing there to be conditions of nutritional emergency.”  It has invited national and international civil society to pronounce itself by sending urgent actions to the authorities of the government of Chiapas and Mexico.

For more information (in Spanish):

JBG Nueva semilla que va a producir, denuncia amenazas y agresiones a bases de apoyo zapatistas de San Patricio (12 September)

Acción Urgente: Hostigamiento y riesgo de desplazamiento forzado a comunidad autónoma (CDHFBC, 14 September)

Denuncian “sitio” de paramilitares al municipio La Dignidad, en Chiapas(La Jornada, 14 September)

Protesta contra la violencia paramilitar en San Patricio, Sabanilla(Comunicado del Centro de Derechos de la Mujer de Chiapas, 15 September)