GNV News – August 30, 2024

Since July 2024, security has deteriorated in Mexico’s Chiapas state, and many people are crossing the border into Guatemala to seek refuge. This is because criminal organizations from Sinaloa and Jalisco have been engaged in fierce fighting across Mexico, especially over smuggling routes along the Guatemalan border. For many years, the Sinaloa organization monopolized the routes for transporting drugs and weapons between the United States and Mexico via Chiapas, but around 2020 a group called Jalisco New Generation made inroads into the area, and the situation worsened.

Amid this situation, the militarization of Mexico’s National Guard has advanced, and multiple reports of human rights violations against residents have emerged. Particularly in Chiapas, assassinations, kidnappings, and forced displacement have become routine, leaving residents caught between criminal organizations and the government. Since early 2023, at least 16,000 people across the state have been forced to flee due to violence. In addition, the Zapatista movement, which was launched in southern Mexico in 1994 as an anti-government organization to expand Indigenous rights, has been threatened by the current deterioration in security and is facing a crisis in which the regional development it has long pursued is being dismantled.

Learn more about Mexico’s domestic and international challenges → “Reforms advancing in Mexico”

Learn more about Mexico’s drug cartels → “Mexico’s avocado problem: an industry resisting drug-trafficking groups”

Mural depicting residents resisting a soldier, Chiapas state (Photo: Adam Jones / Wikimedia Commons [CC BY 2.0])