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Risky Situation: The threat to the communities
Operación Garrucha: Informe de CAPISE
According to Marcos, the Zapatista communities are under threat. There is an anti-insurgency campaign underway. The Center for Political Analysis and Economic and Social Investigations (CAPISE) in Chiapas corroborates this. For five years, the Center has taken note of military and paramilitary activity in Zapatista areas, and registers 56 permanent military encampments, that military troops have been replaced by elite forces, and that six paramilitary troops are active in the area.
The main objective of this strategy is to dismantle the communities, the five autonomous regions that have broken with the federal and local government. They were created by the EZLN in 2003, and they together form 39 communities in Chiapas where tens of thousands of indigenous people live. Within each, the EZLN has created governing bodies, a judicial system, and their own health and education systems. These programs have improved the quality of life of the inhabitants. CAPISE calculates that currently there are 74,134 hectares at risk of losing Zapatista control. These are lands abandoned by their owners after the 1994 uprising and expropriated by the EZLN. The government is using three methods: take the land using violent means with paramilitaries, police or enemies of EZLN, using the agricultural bureaucracy, and by federal expropriation, supposedly for environmental reasons.
The EZLN created the communities to protest the indigenous law that Congress passed in 2001, different from the San Andrés Larráinzar Accords that codified indigenous autonomy and which was rejected by Congress that same year. The San Andrés Larráinzar Accords protest came about after 7 years of talks with the EZLN, legislators, intellectuals and indigeneous leaders.
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