EZLN Claims Cartels in Chiapas Are Fighting Over Mayan Train Protection Fees

"Socalj" for Borderland Beat

From an Infobae Article

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) denounced that the different drug cartels that maintain a dispute over territory in Chiapas, not only fight to the death for control of drug trafficking routes, but they do so for the down payment that will be left by the construction of the megaprojects of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador: the Mayan Train and the Trans-Isthmus Corridor.

In the context of clashes between different cells of the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, as well as other well-known local cartels such as El MAÍZ, El Machete and the Chiapas Cartel , a situation that has caused the displacement of hundreds of people to different places, including the country of Guatemala, the EZLN made a statement on the matter, highlighting that it is not only about drug trafficking.

“The so-called megaprojects do not lead to development. They are only commercial corridors opened so that organized crime has new markets. The dispute between rival cartels is not only about human and drug trafficking, it is above all the dispute over the monopoly of the protection fee on what is wrongly called the Mayan Train and the Trans-Isthmus Corridor,” the EZLN stated in its statement titled “Adagios,” published on the night of Thursday, August 15.

The text, signed by the Captain, one of the nicknames of the insurgent Marcos, explains that since “trees and animals cannot be charged fees,” then criminal groups will do so “to the communities and companies that settle on that other useless border in the southeast of Mexico.”

The EZLN warns that with these disputes for control and the collection of fees by criminal groups, "the growth of wars for territorial control is ensured, in which the hologram of the Nation State will be absent."

The Mexican guerrilla group says that organized crime is a consequence of the Mexican State's inaction. "The objective is agreed upon: the State wants an open market ('free' of intruders - that is, of indigenous peoples), and the others want control of a territory."

“Those who say that there is an alliance between governments and organized crime are lying, just as there is no alliance between a company and its clients. What exists is a simple – albeit costly – commercial operation: the State offers an absence and the cartel in question “buys” that absence and replaces the presence of the State in a locality, region, zone, country,” reads the EZLN statement.

“The gain is mutual between seller and buyer, the loss is for those who survive in these places. 'Whoever pays or lends, commands' is the old aphorism that analysts and 'social scientists' forget,” Marcos points out, who points out that the Mexican State thinks that organized crime is its servant, who “comes and goes as they are told or forced to.”

“It is because of this belief that they get the surprises they suffer,” says the EZLN, while posing a question: “Why, in a federal state that has been militarized for 30 years, are cartels and their confrontations now flourishing with the government’s approval of those who invaded the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, claiming that they were thus avoiding the ‘balkanization’ of the republic? Yes, it seems that Mexican territory is more fragmented than ever.”

Source Infobae