Four families displaced in October 2023 from the community of Lacanjá Chansayab, municipality of Ocosingo, by organized crime groups, requested the intervention of federal and state authorities to facilitate their return or to compensate them.
In a document, they stated that the four families were forcibly displaced because staying in the community meant “agreeing to work for criminal groups, surviving being extorted, paying them their tax as a right of way and participating in their illicit activities, functioning as a social base, as their police and participating in their mobilizations as blockades and becoming accomplices to their crimes.”
Lacanjá Chansayab, located in the Lacandon jungle, was the scene last Sunday of an operation carried out by several hundred elements of the federal and state forces against the criminal group that operates in the area, resulting in 20 people arrested, whose leader, Segundo Cabrero López, managed to escape and for whose capture the State Attorney General’s Office is offering a reward of 500 thousand pesos.
“We want to recover what is ours, what we built with our families, which is our heritage, the effort of many years of work, decades and our heritage itself is millennia old. All this has been left in the hands of criminals, but we do not resign ourselves to this situation and we want to recover our property and to be paid for the damages and losses caused by the displacement we suffered,” said the four families.
They added: “We have the right to payment for environmental services, since we have been responsible for the care of the jungle and although we have been displaced from our community we have the right to that resource, which, usurping our name, organized crime has collected its share of what corresponds to us.”
They recalled that on October 12, 2023, “our homes, family businesses such as small shops, a small hotel, a restaurant, and our vehicles were abandoned, in addition to leaving behind our cornfields and orchards. Our innocent little animals were cruelly murdered by the violent members of the community as an act of intimidation and warning against us.”
The four families are taking refuge in the neighboring community of Nueva Palestina, “where fellow community members generously agreed to receive us, without the government at all three levels having done anything to support them or seek their return.”
They pointed out that they suffer “displacement from our territories of origin and the dispossession of our heritage; due to the lack of health, education and food, which is leaving strong traumatic consequences for our children, who are beginning to suffer from malnutrition, which is why our situation is very worrying.”
They asked the government to “enforce our legitimate right to property, to well-being, to the enjoyment of the heritage that we have been able to develop over the years, as well as to the territories that belong to us as indigenous community members defending Mother Earth, but if this is not possible, then we request that the government assume its responsibility to compensate us financially for the real value of those heritages from which we have been illegally expropriated.”
Source: jornada
