Photo @SIPAZ
On 19 March, in observance of its twenty-fourth anniversary, the Fray Bartolome de Las Casas Center for Human Rights (CDHFBC) released its report “Between systemic politics and alternatives for life,” an account of the violations of individual and collective rights over the previous six-year administration, when “the federal and state governments exacerbated the neoliberal projects for looting and sought to impede autonomous social processes.”
The report was presented by Abel Flores, from the Believing People, Marina Pagés, coordinator of SIPAZ, and Michael Chamberlin, director of Inicia, the researcher Mercedes Olivera, and Víctor Hugo López, director of the CDHFBC. According to the report, during the prior six-year administration, “the gap between the recognized rights of indigenous peoples and the exercise of these grew ever wider.” Territorial looting deemed “legal” has continued by means of projects “that include national-security considerations and protection of investments made by firms linked to the governments that have interested in these territories of great natural resources.”The communities in resistance, regardless, “continue to defense the territory and land in conformity with the San Andres Accords, 17 years after their non-observance.” Mercedes Olivera stressed the role of women in “the struggle against forgetting,” given that they are “builders of memory.”
For more information (in Spanish):
Entre la política sistémica y las alternativas de vida (Informe sexenial del CDHFBC, 2012)
En el sexenio pasado, tortura y militarización
en Chiapas (La Jornada, 19 de marzo de 2013)
For more information from SIPAZ (in English):
Chiapas: Annual report from the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Center for Human Rights (22 September 2011)
Chiapas: Special report by Frayba: Government creates and administers conflicts (8 March 2011)
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