Rejection Grows in the Chiapas Sierra to Territorial Regularization Program

** Ejido owners from different municipalities suspect that it can be used to plunder

** Interest because of support for productive processes causes dissent between authorities and residents

By: Hermann Bellinghausen, Envoy

El Porvenir, Chiapas, January 20, 2012

Rejection grows in communities of the Chiapas Sierra to the Program of Certification of Ejidal Rights and Titling of Urban Plots (Procede). In fact, Chiapas is one of the states where the titling of land has advanced the least on a national scale. Now a new ingredient appears: farmers that entered the program and now want to leave it. In Cambil ejido, in El Porvenir municipality, 233 ejido owners renounced Procede. What goes on now before this scenario of desertion?

The rejection by Cambil ejido owners is indicative of what happens in the Chiapas Sierra, where the rejection of potential mining exploitation also increases, and to evictions and de-populating like what they’re attempting to carry out in Motozintla and other localities, with the argument that they are high risk places for the residents because of the mudslides and floods that in recent years have affected the region. The campesinos perceive the ghost of rural cities (one is currently being constructed in Jaltenango) as a future option.

Despite the governmental pressures and the PRI apparatus in the countryside starting in 1995, the resistance to Procede is still important. In 2006, upon finalizing the time period programmed for the titling, it was reported that a high percentage of lands without regularization still exist in Chiapas. At the beginning of 2007, the National Agrarian Registry (RAN, its initials in Spanish) announced the “regularization” of 84 percent of the agrarian nuclei, corresponding to a surface of 2 million 427 thousand 716 hectares (59 percent), with 41 percent remaining, one million 692 thousand 38 hectares, pending regularizing.

According to the investigator Dolores Camacho, of UNAM’s Program Multi-Disciplinary Investigations on Mesoamerica and the Southeast (Proimse, its initials in Spanish), “the agrarian nuclei that have been regularized are small; in surface they represent barely one half; that explains the concern that the governments have in that respect.” The Fund for Support to Agrarian Nuclei Without Regularization (FANAR, its initials in Spanish) was created with the intention of “resolving” the mishap, to which abundant resources will be destined for achieving that objective.

The state government foresaw regularizing 278, 000 hectares in 2011, according to what Ernesto Gutiérrez Coello, RAN delegate in Chiapas, declared. Even in the absence of conclusive information, everything indicates that the goal will not be reached. The FANAR offers support to productive projects. “That induces party leaders and ejido commissioners to pressure the campesinos to accept, causing more conflicts because of differences of opinion, because they are more convinced every day to reject the program for fear of losing their lands due to seizures,” Camacho points out.

Rejection of Mine in Chicomuselo

Residents of villages bordering on the Santa María ejido, in the also mountainous Chicomuselo municipality, denounce that in November a barite vein was detected on a plot of said ejido. They maintain that the engineers Pedro Palmas Echeverría and Romeo Aguilar Méndez promote the eventual extraction. The engineers want the ejido owners to constitute themselves in a civic association “to be able to exploit said mineral.”

In December, a concrete base was constructed for registry, the text of which says: “P.P.D, lot: ‘the pear’ Sup. 2180 hrs. Ag. Tuxtla Gtz. Chiapas. Exp. 109/00258.” The Chicomuselo communities surmise, “that it refers to the exploration permit.” They remember that Governor Juan Sabines Guerrero has said, “that during his administration he will not authorize more mining exploration and exploitation permits in our state,” and they ask him to continue that way.

More than a dozen communities in the municipalities of La Concordia, Chicomuselo and Socoltenango demand the cancellation of any permit for the extraction of minerals. They argue that “they would put our lives and the lives of our animals in grave danger, would contaminate the environment and we would have a greater scarcity of water,” which is great due to a lack of natural springs. “We get our supply from wells that also run the risk of being contaminated by the toxic residues.”