Helping Indigenous Communities Protect their Lands

Dear Friend:

The land is not a commodity it is root, history, and life. On September 13 and 14, 2025, in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas.

we gathered with peoples, communities, and organizations from the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Puebla for the Land and Territory Gathering, to share our struggles, pain, and resistance in the face of a context marked by dispossession, violence, and the imposition of megaprojects that destroy communal life and entire communities in southern Mexico.

In this gathering, we reaffirm that our strength lies in the territory and in collective organization, which, rooted in our traditions, has sustained the life and resistance of our communities and families.

We also recognize the impacts of the advance of megaprojects: dispossession, violence, displacement, and the destruction of our peoples. We denounce the coordinated strategies through which governments, corporations, and organized crime work together to impose a model of development that benefits only a few, but for us means division within our communities, loss of identity, and death.

From within our resistance, we will continue to foster dialogue and gatherings to build organized networks in defense of land and territory. In this spirit, we demand that the authorities take responsibility in the face of climate and social crises to stop the dispossession, respect the rights of Indigenous and rural peoples, and hold accountable those responsible for the violence caused by this imposed model, which continues to uphold colonialism and patriarchy.

Now more than ever, it is time to walk together, to weave networks of solidarity, and to build autonomous processes that center life, justice, and the land. From our resistance, we invite you to organize and join the strength of our communities to sustain life and say yes to life, and yes to collective organization.

Links:

• Pronunciamiento conjunto

In Chiapas, forced displacement continues to be an open wound. More than 15,700 people have been forced to abandon their homes and lands due to violence, mostly exercised by criminal groups. The State continues to neglect the structural causes of the conflict and has failed to dismantle the criminal networks operating in the region.

In this context, women are disproportionately affected by displacement. The disappearance of women in Chiapas is deeply alarming: more than 60% of reported cases correspond to girls and adolescents—double the national average. Many of these disappearances are linked to trafficking and sexual exploitation networks.

Defending human rights in Chiapas continues to be a high-risk job. Human rights defenders, as well as community and religious leaders, continue to face threats, criminalization, and violence.

Faced with this situation in a discouraging panorama, we still have the capacity to organize ourselves and unite with allies in other parts of the world; therefore, we share with you that during May, we had the opportunity to visit organizations, collectives, and institutions in Barcelona, Brussels, and Geneva to continue to make visible the struggle for the defense of human rights in Chiapas and denounce the constant violations that persist in the territory. We share the situation of the most serious cases that come to Frayba and that we are currently accompanying, to demand a response from the State and to demand that it attends to the denunciations.

International advocacy continues to be a powerful tool to accompany individuals, communities, and Indigenous peoples, to contribute to the protection of their rights and to raise their voices in the face of injustice.

We concluded this visit with the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the Civil Observation Brigades, where people from all over the world participate as volunteers to observe and document human rights violations that occur in the territory by staying in the camps that exist in Chiapas, to carry out this work and thus contribute to strengthening a strategy of defense and denunciation that promotes international solidarity with what is happening in Chiapas.

But this year we did not just celebrate an anniversary—we celebrated resilience and enduring resistance in the face of systematic violence and injustice. This gathering was more than a celebration—it was a reaffirmation, a commitment, a living memory. We are still here: building community, sustaining resistance. Because remembering is also to fight.

It strengthens us to know that we are part of the Frayba Community, made up of collectives and individuals committed globally who have been in struggle for three decades, in solidarity with the defense of land, dignity, and justice.

You have witnessed those who raise their voices and of the lives dedicated to the defense of human rights.

We have witnessed the strength of solidarity, the transformative power of art as a cry for freedom, and the unwavering certainty that this struggle is collective.

We pay tribute to you—our donors, allies, and supporters—who continue to stand firm in international solidarity, contributing, joining, and amplifying these voices from your own spaces of resistance.

Thank you for celebrating hope and walking with us—along with the communities and Indigenous peoples of Chiapas—to make the world a place where human rights are respected.

Links:

• 30 anos de resistencia