Altar of the Popular Campaign against Violence against Women and Femicide in Chiapas. Photo credit: courtesy.
In observance of the Day of the Dead, several organizations and collectives organized commemorative events in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. For one, Melel Xojobal, a civil association that works to promote, defend, and exercise the human rights of children and youth through participatory processes, organized an act against child mortality due to discrimination, violence, and poverty. With slogans such as “they should not die” protestors marched through downtown, where they installed an altar with information regarding several cases and statistics on child mortality in Chiapas and Mexico. “We do these marches to raise our voices, so that people come to realize that the government does nothing, that when something happens to children or youth, impunity remains,” said a youth protestor.
For its part, the Popular Campaign against Violence against Women and Femicide in Chiapas also installed an altar. Using photos of femicide victims, both from the state as well as from other parts of the country, they commemorated the victims of violence against women and demanded the end of the violence against women and female human-rights defenders.
Beyond this, Roberto Paciencia Cruz, Lucio Hernández Patishtan, and Juan de la Cruz Ruiz, prisoners held in the Center for Social Readaptation (CERESO) of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, published a letter denouncing “the injustices, discrimination, and unjust incarcerations” due to which “we have not been able to visit our homes” to remember their dead. “Today and in this space we create our own altar to commemorate our families, friends, and all those who fell in 1994, as well as those killed in the Acteal massacre, tatic Samuel Ruiz García, who lamentably has left this world. Some of them died in the struggle, such that they are not present any longer as persons, but their spirits will live on in our hearts.”
For more information (in Spanish):
Día de muertos – Melel Xojobal (Vientos Culturales, 5 de noviembre de 2015)
Carta de presos en el día de muertos (Chiapas denuncia pública, 31 de octubre de 2015)
For more information from SIPAZ (in English):
Mexico: 5 years since the massacre of 72 migrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas (11 September 2015)
Mexico/National: Honduran migrant dies of drowning in presence of migration agents, says La 72 (22 March 2015)
Chiapas: Justice is demanded in the case of the feminicide of the youth Itzel Yanet Méndez Pérez (16 May 2012)
Chiapas: XV Aniversario de Melel Xojobal (9 February 2012)
Chiapas: “Violence and infancy in the state” (27 November 2011)
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