Like a corridor, the two sides of the road are occupied by people waiting for the cars to arrive. These are suburban trucks with tinted windows and some small vans with groups of armed men in the back. As they pass, they honk and people applaud and cheer: “Puro Sinaloa”! The images spread across social networks this weekend and were taken on the highway between Frontera Comalapa and San Gregorio Chamic, two Chiapas communities on the border with Guatemala. An area increasingly oppressed by organized crime groups contesting routes to the north.
Since the beginning of the month, several townships have been surrounded by the mafia, cutting off electricity and water supplies and causing shortages of food and gasoline, residents complained in the local press. The cheers in the videos released this week were interpreted as Comalapa residents’ support for the Sinaloa group in the face of the siege by their rivals from Jalisco, the country’s two most powerful mafias, whose local franchises are said to be fighting each other for that territory.
Versions are also circulating in local media that suggest that the neighborhood celebration was staged forcibly to support the population. In any case, the scene once again shows the penetration and extent of the mafia’s impunity in the poor and forgotten south of Mexico, a relatively quiet area until a few years ago. Human rights organizations have long denounced a wave of enforced disappearances, forced recruitment and massive displacement of the population.
In addition to the spectacular scenes of the caravan, there were also deaths in the nearby communities of La Frontera and Sierra Madre over the weekend. In total there were four bodies, which appeared together with a message from the Jalisco group in which they claimed the murder on the grounds that they were “Chapulines”, that is, traitors who changed sides.
The conflict at the border has now lasted more than two years and the red circle is expanding. From the Lacandona Jungle, the symbolic heart of Zapatismo, to San Cristóbal de las Casas, one of the tourist jewels of the south of the country, more and more areas crossed by the routes to the north are experiencing an increase in violence. A new ingredient in the explosive cocktail that has convulsed the state of Chiapas for decades: a latent armed conflict caused by a mix of paramilitaries, soldiers, guerrillas and self-defense groups. Everything between a tangle of economic and political interests and institutional task.
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