Helping Indigenous Communities Protect their Lands

Protecting the land... some consider it a faraway concept--- Yet, for many communities and rural towns in Chiapas it is a constant in their daily lives, due to the threats and risks they encounter and depriving them access to their lands…

Not only threats but also direct attacks are becoming more and more common in rural Chiapas, making it so that families are forced to abandon their homes as their lives are in imminent danger. The danger is a generated widespread violence against the original peoples, the dispossession of land is not only an afterthought but sought directly. The dispossession threats risk not only against their life and integrity, but are also direct attacks against their autonomy, their organizational capacity, and their cultures when it comes to indigenous peoples. The threats the indigenous communities face range from development and infrastructure programs by the government and private companies, extractivist campaigns mass projects for tourism and infrastructure.

In the last couple of months, we have seen an increase in the generalized violence in the border area with Guatemala, creating ghost towns and villages, intermittent displacements, fear, homicides, and disappearances, that also take a toll on the social fabric of the entire communities. Months after months, we see government omission to take action.

The Zapatista communities, Support Bases of the EZLN, are living particular threats by armed groups that attempt to displace them of their territories, in a strategy we recognize as a continuous of the government plans of dispossession and the decades long counterinsurgency policies. In Moises y Gandhi region, el Esfuerzo, Nuevo San Gregorio, we see brave communities living an emergency. In may we published our annual report, ¨Chiapas: un Disaster¨.

In light of those risks, Frayba accompanies the community’s hand in hand, so that they themselves can take the lead in their own defense and protect the families and their lands. The land is where they sustain themselves. One of the most important things for Frayba is to take into account the consequences and impacts that this entails for women, for this reason we organized a regional conference "Women in Defense of Territory, Building Peace" which took place in May, and in which women from different geographical areas of Chiapas got to meet to share and exchange experiences of their struggles in each of their territories and how they have become Human Rights Defenders, leading their own processes in defense of the land.

One of the main reflections among the women defenders’ participants were the following words, poem, wrote together about the mother earth:

"We give you good morning, we thank you because we dawn well. Thank you for feeding us, thank you for giving us everything. Because you shelter us, you welcome us, you give us the opportunity to see the different animals that live on you, mother earth. Thank you for your love and tenderness, for your colors and fruits. Thank you because when we place a seed in you, you allow its germination. Thank you for all the blessings you allow us to have our crops, life, trees, earth.

Thank you because we can have health and wellness in our bodies. We love you, we take care of you and we defend you because you are the one who nourishes and cherishes us. Oh beautiful mother earth! We admire you for the life you give us, with all your fruits that sprout from the depths of your womb".

Thanks to the support we receive through donations; we can continue to accompany the struggles of those who face the policies of dispossession through extractive companies, Mega projects and criminal groups that seek to evict people from their lands for commercial and economic purposes

Links:

• Report: Chiapas: un Desastre