Venustiano Carranza, Chiapas, is one of the municipalities that's been historically characterized by its exercise of its rights through the social struggle organized by the people. Its main platform of struggle has been the demand of the different levels of government to resolve the many problems of the region, specifically the situation of land and territory that has been ancestrally in the hands of large business landowners. The aforementioned exercise their power through the use of weapons, implementing premeditated scandals such as the assassinations of leaders and campesinos, incarcerations and intimidations against the families of the leaders of social movements who demand and reclaim their rights to establish a democratic government including and representing the social bases, the people, that make these demands.

The Organization Campesina Emiliano Zapata (OCEZ), Region Carranza, is one of the groups that has demanded and fought for immediate answers to these demands, those to which this struggle have been constantly met with different types of hostility, looking for ways to put a stop to our resistance. These action and plans of extermination have been the constant provocation from different branches of police: the Sectoral, Ministerial Police, AFI, AEI, PGR, SEDENA, and Special agents of CISEN. Along with these groups are paramilitaries implementing their own attacks, which lead to the inevitable assassination of innocent people in the region, with the result of discrediting the movement and forging a plan to militarize the region and attack the many different communities. Such is the case of what happened on August 28th, 2007 when 500 members of the SEDENA special corps of the Mexican Army approached with tanks and armored vehicles with an attack on the community of 28 de Junio, interrupting the daily life of the inhabitants, supposedly looking for guerrillas and delinquent gangs involved in robberies, narcotrafficing, etc. For whatever reason that they entered, they realized that nothing that they were looking for existed in the community. In light of all of this, the organization solicits support of those in defense of human rights and has installed a Civil Encampment of International Observers for Peace in order to put an end to this wave of hostility and intimidation and to be testimony to the violations of our human rights.

Also, the most recent case of hostility are the murders of 2 campesinos Gabriel and Francisco Gonzàles Vazquez, ages 17 and 23, members of the community of Laguna Verde. This community has been recently perpetrated by the organized delinquency led by groups of landowners of CHUS ORANTES and the BORRAZ family who maintain the anxiety and chaos of the region by creating an atmosphere of ingovernability and vandalism which draws in the and capacitates the state and federal government’s justification of police presence in the area and continues the plan to exterminate the social organizations that fight for the defense of their demands that are most important to the people.

On another note, on Monday, December 17th 2007, a group of narcotrafficers, “Los Coyotes”, were dismantled while the different corporations knew of their existence and newly sought out these actions as a way to justify the state presence, chaos and investigation in the homes of our people, in which we consider to be another hostility and intimidation and violation to our human rights. With this they strive to continue the plan designed by CISEN to exterminate and detain the leaders of our organization (OCEZ).

In light of the situation in which we are living, we make a call to the national and international defenders of human rights to make pronouncements and solicitations to the Mexican Government and that of Chiapas to stop the hostility, persecution, and militarization of the many social democratic organizations and the communities that have made the denunciations against a government that defends and represents the interests of the powerful and has put an end to our aspirations for democracy, justice, equality, and the dignity of our communities.