American Indian Airwaves - Thursday, June 18, 2026

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1. on the web at www.kpfk.org.
2. Peace and love.
3. If you stop to listen, you can hear their hearts beating loud.
4. Can't keep those California Indians down.
5. Hello everyone, you're listening to American Indian Airwaves.
6. For Marcus Lopez, I'm your host, Larry Smith.
7. On today's program, we go to Chiapas, Mexico, as human rights violations continue to escalate with the expansion of the cartels and the President Scheinbaum's operations to appease the Trump administration, resulting in massive displacement of indigenous peoples.
8. All that and more here on American Indian Airwaves.
9. You can hear when the moon shines bright
10. The lone blue owl in the black of night
11. You can hear, you can hear
12. The whisper in the valley
13. And you know when Kama Kani blows
14. To the Bahu drum
15. It's the warriors who are marching
16. Down the mountain
17. Because history ain't no mystery to me
18. Today on American Indian Airwaves, we go to Chiapas, Mexico
19. for an extensive update on the ongoing human rights violations
20. of approximately 16,000 displaced peoples,
21. including indigenous Mayan peoples throughout Chiapas, Mexico,
22. who are being forced to pay fines to return back home.
23. We'll get an update on other human rights and violations,
24. including missing migrants, the expansion of the cartel violence,
25. and the current Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum,
26. operating and ratcheting down on the cartels
27. as a way to appease the Trump administration's agenda targeting narco-trafficking.
28. All that and more here on American Indian Airwaves.
29. For the hour, I'm joined by Marcus Lopez, executive producer and co-host of American Indian Airwaves,
30. as we interview Richard Stoller-Schulke, who just returned from Chiapas, Mexico.
31. Richard Stoller-Schulke is a retired professor of political science at Eastern Michigan University
32. and a community activist involved with the School of Chiapas,
33. which is an organization of grassroots activists and communities working to support the autonomous indigenous Zapatista communities of Chiapas, Mexico.
34. We begin today's interview with a short summary of what is the EZLN here at American Indian Airwaves.
35. Sure great to be back with you The Zapatistas are a mainly indigenous group of people in the southern southeast Mexican state of Chiapas who rose up in rebellion in 1994 but they had actually been organizing for over 10 years before that clandestinely
36. And 1994 was the date they chose for their public rebellion
37. because that was the date that NAFTA went into effect,
38. the North American Free Trade Agreement.
39. And they wanted to kind of emphasize that for poor Campesino peasants
40. and also indigenous people, especially in the south of Mexico,
41. that the concept of free trade really was freedom for global corporations,
42. but not freedom for the very poorest and most vulnerable sectors of the population.
43. In fact, they described it as a death sentence for those populations
44. because it really eliminated not only physically eliminated people,
45. although it did that through hunger and desperation,
46. but it also eliminated ways of life or made it very difficult for people to maintain their communal ways of life rooted in the land.
47. It uprooted people from land and destroyed the idea of community in favor of the neoliberal concept of individualism and private accumulation of profit.
48. it. So NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, opened the doors to investments in
49. mega projects, large-scale projects, which have had a devastating impact on many communities,
50. particularly indigenous communities. So the Zapatistas organized to create spaces where
51. they could be autonomous, where they could not only govern themselves, but also have
52. projects of self-sufficient production and create their own systems for health and education and
53. agroecology, train themselves, become more empowered at the grassroots level rather than
54. waiting for things to come from above. And the government, the global capital, the powerful
55. interests that they were challenging did not take kindly to that. And so those forces have been
56. trying to get rid of the Zapatistas and suppress any kind of autonomous organizing ever since 1994
57. when the Zapatistas rose up publicly in their rebellion with their cry of,
58. Ya basta, or we've had enough.
59. Thank you, Richard, for that.
60. We know that this discussion, I wanted to just say that there's a lot of publications and books on the Zapatistas since then,
61. And people can go and search for that.
62. What I want to talk about, why don't you describe, Richard, the Freiburg,
63. Batoloma de las Casas Human Rights Center, or Freiburg,
64. because a lot of information that you gave us and we looked at talks about
65. in reference to a lot of the reports, especially Freiburg.
66. Who are this organization?
67. What is this organization? Let our listeners know about them a little bit.
68. Yes, the Freira Tolome de las Casas Human Rights Center, or FREIRA, is an organization that originated from the diocese of San Cristobal of the Catholic Church during the time of Bishop Samuel Ruiz, who was a liberation theology bishop and kind of a well-respected figure who took the time and trouble to go out to indigenous communities and listen to the voices of the voiceless.
69. So when the Zapatistas rose up in rebellion the bishop Samuel Ruiz at the time was a mediator initially in negotiations and dialogue between the government and the Zapatista rebels And he called on civil society to be a force for peace and to be peace observers to go
70. out into the communities to try to deter the government repression and violence.
71. And ever since then, the FRIBOT has continued documenting being a witness presence in situations
72. where human rights abuses throughout the state of Chiapas are occurring.
73. They've been advocating primarily on behalf of indigenous and poor
74. and campesino communities in the state.
75. And most recently, they've been documenting the significant upswing in violence in Chiapas
76. that's affecting the communities.
77. So important that these human rights organizations are now looking at the atrocities
78. atrocities and the violence and talk about the violence and atrocities. What is going on in
79. Chiapas as far as the towns and villages that are held hostage by the direct traffickers on the
80. southern border of Mexico? Talk about that, please. Yes, it's a very grave situation and it's very
81. different also from the way it's portrayed in the mainstream U.S. media. Mexico has had
82. the country overall an upsurge of drug cartel-related violence since 2006, since the
83. government at that time of Felipe Calderon declared a war on drugs and unleashed the military and gave
84. them basically free reign, and that escalated the violence dramatically, and killings have been at
85. just astronomical levels ever since then. In the state of Chiapas, though, there had been
86. a kind of stable truce between the various cartels so that they weren't fighting for turf.
87. And so there was a superficial appearance of relative peace in the state of Chiapas,
88. except, of course, for the continued structural violence against the indigenous communities
89. and government incursions against the Zapotecists.
90. But the cartel violence was relatively absent from Chiapas.
91. Not that the cartels were absent, but the cartel violence, because they had this pact of truce.
92. But that all broke down around 2021 or so, when the two major national cartels at the time, the Sinaloa cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generación,
93. the new generation of Jalisco cartel leaders, went to war with each other.
94. And ground zero for that cartel war was Chiapas.
95. and so we saw a lot of escalation of violence between about 2021 and up until last year,
96. and I'll talk about the past year in a minute.
97. So it's not a war on drugs per se,
98. even though both the U.S. and Mexican government pretend to be combating drug traffickers.
99. Very often elements of the Mexican government are very much involved with one or another of the cartels
100. and getting payoffs.
101. It's really a turf war between the cartels.
102. And one way to think about it is these cartels are basically business syndicates.
103. They're responding to market signals.
104. They are like capitalist enterprises.
105. They just have some other means they use to make profits.
106. And they're more than just drug cartels.
107. They've diversified quite a bit into lots of other operations,
108. and they shift their assets around as a corporation would depending on where the profit opportunities are greatest So one of the things one of the businesses if you want to call it that that they been involved in is human smuggling so migration is one of their big businesses
109. they make money on migration by charging the migrants taxes and sort of escort
110. fees you might say the Coyotes are the smugglers are often working with or
111. or working under the thumb of the cartels.
112. Sometimes the criminal organizations will capture the migrants,
113. detain them, and extort them,
114. and make them call their family members to send money
115. in order for them to be released alive.
116. So that's another part of the business, extortion.
117. Trafficking, either sex trafficking of women and girls,
118. or labor trafficking.
119. And one of the things that I found on this most recent trip that I just got back from Chiapas, talking to people who work closely with the migrants and migrant communities, is that labor, basically enslaved labor, has become a big business by the criminal organizations.
120. So now, rather than people being killed in the shootouts between the cartels, what's happening, especially increasingly over the last year, is that people are forcibly disappeared by the criminal organizations.
121. And then they're either forced as recruits to work for these organizations in their various business areas, from packing and smuggling drugs or arms or whatever else they're smuggling, to being lookouts, etc.
122. or in some cases they're even sent up to or they go up to agricultural estates in northern Mexico,
123. in the state of Sonora especially, where people go as labor migrants,
124. and the criminal organizations control some of those agribusinesses in northern Mexico.
125. So some of the people who are captured by the criminal organizations are forced to work
126. in what otherwise superficially appear to be legal businesses,
127. agriculture or even mining projects,
128. and that increases the profits of the criminal organizations.
129. What we heard from one of the organizations,
130. one of the human rights groups that works with migrants,
131. is that in the state of Sonora in northern Mexico,
132. there are agribusinesses that contract with regular U.S. corporations,
133. say Walmart and say they're going to supply them with produce.
134. And the business knows that they can't supply the amount that they've contracted for,
135. so they subcontract out to the cartel-controlled agribusinesses,
136. which are using this enslaved captive labor.
137. And then they make up their quota with the rest of the produce purchased from those enterprises.
138. So, in short, trafficking of people, extortion, and forced recruitment and slave labor are all contributing to a tremendous escalation of enforced disappearances.
139. So, we're seeing in the last year a decrease in the number of outright killings in Chiapas through this criminal activity because the cartels seem to be in the process of reestablishing some sort of accommodation after the several years of the turf war.
140. but now they're engaged in this practice of forced disappearance.
141. The government minimizes all this.
142. The government also denies that there's any forced displacement,
143. people fleeing from the zones where the cartels are seeking to control.
144. But human rights organizations, the FRIBOT, for instance,
145. has documented just in the last year 15,000 people forcibly displaced.
146. The displaced people are sometimes attempting to return to their communities,
147. and then the cartels will say, okay, you can come back, but you have to work for us,
148. you have to pay a certain amount.
149. All this is denied.
150. The government says there's no forced displacement in the state of Chiapas,
151. even though the human rights organizations say exactly the opposite.
152. And we want to remind listeners you're listening to American Indian Airways.
153. We're speaking with Richard Stuller Shulk, a retired professor of political science at Eastern Michigan University
154. and community activist involved with the School of Chiapas.
155. He just returned from Chiapas, Mexico, and he's speaking on the increased human rights violations of displaced,
156. including indigenous peoples and the increased cartel violence throughout the region
157. and Mexico's government's response to Trump's agenda in targeting cartel violence,
158. all that and more here on American Indian Airwaves.
159. And now back to the interview.
160. So there's a lot of violence and many of the poor and indigenous communities in Chiapas,
161. particularly in the border region, are suffering from this.
162. Yes, Richard. It seemed like within the border of Chiapas and Guatemala that many of the indigenous peoples are taking the brunt as well as a lot of Latinos and a lot of other people from different areas of South America.
163. Now, according to El Pais, which is a particular information publication,
164. it says that the activists, members of the federal police, and local journalists
165. confirmed that it's impossible to enter or leave Fonterra, Comalapa, or Selo.
166. Yes, of the two municipalities in Cea-Chapas,
167. where as violence and classes in both municipalities have worsened.
168. Now, why don't you unpack that?
169. How was it worsened?
170. You mentioned that, but why don't you go into the particularities for our listeners?
171. Sure.
172. We actually talked to several people who were kind of local organizers
173. who live in those communities, in those municipalities.
174. they have great difficulty in, you know, anyone has difficulty entering or leaving because those areas right along the Guatemalan border,
175. the southern border of Mexico, are actually controlled by what are sort of like virtual governments of the criminal organizations.
176. So they have to ask permission to come and go.
177. They have to do whatever tasks they might be assigned to by the criminal organizations.
178. and periodically there are these massive displacements
179. where the criminal organizations will just say,
180. okay, everybody's got to leave
181. or they'll come in and burn down people's houses.
182. So it's very difficult for people living under that kind of control
183. and they are victims as much as anything else.
184. The people who are living there,
185. they're not choosing to be part of these criminal enterprises,
186. but they are kind of enforced.
187. And the government looks the other way.
188. for the most part. The government was under pressure from the Trump administration to send
189. forces to southern Mexico and President Shambon responded by sending 10 National Guard troops to the southern border region but they never actually confront the criminal organizations or very rarely Occasionally they do a show operation
190. and there have been something like 55 cartel figures
191. who have been extradited to the United States to sort of throw a bone to the U.S.
192. and make it look like.
193. But in the meantime, the operations continue,
194. and it seems very clear that high levels of the government are in cahoots with the criminal organizations.
195. So there's a lot of kind of smoke and mirrors.
196. The new governor of Chiapas, Eduardo Ramirez, who is rumored to have close ties to the cartels himself,
197. is trying to launch this major publicity campaign, very slick campaign.
198. You have to wonder where he gets his advising and financing for this campaign,
199. saying that he's the governor of peace and he's brought peace to Chiapas and everything is fine in Chiapas.
200. And, in fact, the number of killings has decreased in the last year, again,
201. because they're just forcibly disappearing people and forcibly recruiting them, et cetera,
202. and not necessarily killings between the cartels.
203. So he may have had a hand in arranging some truce between the cartels.
204. so another factor behind all this in the Chico Mosello region for instance along the border
205. there is there are mining operations and the cartels have moved into the mining operations
206. and there's a bit of a turf war going on there one of the tactics that the these criminal
207. syndicates use they want to control of course the south to north transit routes for people for arms
208. for drugs, for whatever they want to smuggle.
209. So whenever there's a municipal-level election,
210. they'll move in and choose which candidate is going to allow them free transit.
211. And if a candidate doesn't, they get killed.
212. If they do, then they are rewarded with lots of money for their campaign,
213. and they win the campaign.
214. So this is kind of narco-politics at the local level.
215. the local elections all along the three major transit corridors that organized crime uses
216. through the state of Chiapas, all those local governments tend to be controlled all along the
217. transit routes by the cartels. And people who happen to have the bad luck of living right along
218. the border region are kind of in lockdown under the control of these sort of para-governments.
219. Yes, Richard, you're describing they have checkpoints and murders and control over phone services and even control over the food.
220. That is, you know, unconscionable, you might say, human rights violations, to say the least.
221. Now, but what, on the state of Chiapas as well as other states within Mexico, what is so important for the organized crime in Mexico?
222. What's the deal with the at least nine drug trafficking routes?
223. Give us the overall picture of it.
224. Well, mainly Chiapas has the misfortune of a strategic location for trans-shipment and movement of goods and people,
225. being the sort of plug at the bottom or south part of Mexico,
226. the kind of funnel that everything has to pass through to head north bordering on Guatemala So that has led to opportunities to make fabulous profits
227. through all kinds of traffics.
228. So the motivation is money,
229. and these criminal organizations can move drugs, arms, and people.
230. And then moving people, they can either charge those people directly
231. for smuggling them.
232. They can extort them and threaten to kill them if their families don't send money.
233. They can forcibly recruit them to either work for the other activities of the criminal organizations
234. or to work in other kinds of captive labor.
235. Potentially, there is speculation that a lot of the migrants, we'll talk about migration I think a little later,
236. who are being sort of stuck in Chiapas could be cheap labor for the megaprojects,
237. for the mining and infrastructure projects that have sprung up all over Mexico,
238. but some of them are in southern Mexico.
239. So I think that's what's at stake is the money.
240. But in order to, of course, make these huge amounts of money,
241. there has to be military muscle to be able to protect these criminal operations.
242. So the criminal organizations themselves are, of course, heavily armed,
243. but they also work in cahoots with many government officials and instances.
244. So they have been buying their way into all the local elections across all the municipalities
245. that are along the three main smuggling corridors of the cartels.
246. So whenever there's an election, the cartel people make it known who's going to win the election, and that person has to cooperate with them.
247. If they don't, they could be killed, and if they do, then they receive massive amounts of money for their campaign, and they win the election, and then they collaborate in these transit routes.
248. So there's money to be made by the criminal organizations,
249. and then some of the spillover money is made by corrupt government officials
250. who really don't have a whole lot of choice if they are local officials
251. on one of the transit routes for the smuggling.
252. And then the new governor of Chiapas I mentioned before, Eduardo Ramirez,
253. is playing this dual game.
254. On the one hand, his public discourse says peace has come to Chiapas
255. because he's well connected with the cartels
256. and seems to have arranged some sort of temporary truce
257. between some of the major cartels.
258. So he says there's billboards everywhere.
259. You arrive in the airport in Chiapas,
260. and there's big billboards with his picture.
261. I've brought peace, peace is here, Chiapas is at peace, etc.
262. And on the other hand, he created his own shock troops, a rapid and immediate response force called the Pacales, and they've been deployed.
263. And they're kind of at his bidding.
264. The state government of Chiapas has created a new police force, a state national guard on top of the federal national guard that the administration of President López Obrador, the previous administration, created.
265. So, heavy militarization goes along with the profitable opportunities and all the spin-off
266. activities of these criminal syndicates.
267. And that militarization of course is taking a terrible toll on the communities And it very different from the way it portrayed in the U which is that there somehow a war on drugs and nothing could be further from the truth There are violent conflicts between factions of the drug cartels
268. but there doesn't seem to be any serious or consistent effort
269. by either the U.S. or Mexican government to actually make war on the cartels.
270. Richard, the
271. Louis Arbarca
272. from the
273. Digna Ochoa Human Rights Committee
274. stated that
275. of at least 9,000 displaced people
276. in the last two years alone
277. that was a year or two years ago
278. up to last year
279. and that the committee
280. it seems like the Mexican government doesn't acknowledge the crisis in Chiapas
281. and that the situation with the two municipalities are neglected.
282. Is that true?
283. Yes, I would say so.
284. So the human rights group said in the last year there were 9,000 displaced people
285. just in the border region between Chiapas and Guatemala on the Chiapas side.
286. The government says there's no disappearance.
287. There's no forced disappearance or displacement in that region at all, which is patently untrue.
288. Human rights groups have documented between 2019 and 2023 a 358% increase in forced disappearances in Chiapas.
289. So, again, there's this, you know, kind of smoke and mirrors.
290. the government is saying everything is fine and there aren't as many shootouts between cartels
291. right now, presumably because there's been some sort of a pact restored between them.
292. But the forced disappearance is a profitable activity for the criminal organizations in and
293. of itself. So sometimes people are killed, you know, disappeared and then killed because they
294. are suspected of being part of a rival cartel or as a way to send a message, one cartel
295. sending a message to the other cartel, sort of like gang warfare.
296. But very often, they are simply spirited away and recruited either to work directly for
297. the criminal organizations or one of their spin-off activities, or they are kind of forcibly
298. enterprises that the cartels are controlling.
299. There have also been, in the way of violence in Chiapas, a few targeted assassinations
300. that are meant to intimidate and deter anyone who might try to speak up about this.
301. And this is why we don't hear very much or very accurate or complete information about
302. it.
303. So last year, a little over a year ago, a prominent indigenous priest, a Tzotzil priest,
304. Father Marcelo, was assassinated in broad daylight outside of a church in San Cristobal, in Chiapas, in a tourist town.
305. And it was finally, late this year, one of the alleged killers was brought to trial and given a 20-year sentence.
306. but it seems to be kind of a symbolic thing because the people who actually ordered the killing,
307. I think it's highly unlikely that they're ever going to be brought to justice,
308. even though there is widespread speculation about who that might be.
309. Last year, also, the state prosecutor for indigenous justice was assassinated,
310. and the president of the Las Alejas Pacifist Organization of Indigenous People in the Highlands
311. was assassinated a few years ago.
312. So these targeted assassinations are meant to silence and cover up
313. the larger patterns of violence occurring in the state.
314. And we want to remind listeners who are listening to American Indian Airwaves,
315. We're speaking with Richard Stuller Shulk, a retired professor of political science at Eastern Michigan University and community activist involved with the School of Chiapas.
316. He just returned from Chiapas, Mexico, and he's speaking on the increased human rights violations of displaced, including indigenous peoples, and the increased cartel violence throughout the region and Mexico's government's response to Trump's agenda in targeting cartel violence.
317. All that and more here on American Indian Airwaves.
318. And now back to the interview.
319. No, Richard, thank you for that.
320. I'm going to mention some names here. Manuel Santis Cruz, Agustin Perez Dominguez, Juan Velasco Aguilar, Agustin Perez Velasco, and Martin Perez Dominguez.
321. in 2022 were arbitrarily detained and criminalized for prosecution of a and put in in prison since
322. 2022 from the state center for social reintegration of convict uh number five uh been sentenced to 25
323. years they were released because of of the human rights group arbitrary detention european
324. delegations has demonstrated that the detentions were arbitrary. Talk about that, these political
325. prisoners, much like Peltier and other political prisoners in this country. In Mexico, there's
326. a slew of them, and these one to six people. Talk about them. I mention their names because
327. because they should be in everybody's consciousness as far as to counter this imprisoned people,
328. regardless of missing, like we have here, the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls
329. and LGBT communities and others here within Mexico is massive.
330. Talk about that, please, to our listeners.
331. Sure. There are definitely parallels to the way indigenous people, native people are treated in the United States.
332. So these five people you mentioned were Tseltau indigenous people.
333. They were community defenders organizing against a superhighway project and militarization in their communities.
334. And they were arrested on trumped-up charges and given exorbitant 25-year sentences.
335. They were arrested with no warrants.
336. They were never informed of the charges or brought before a judge when they were arrested, etc.
337. So highly irregular.
338. It was a way to try to intimidate not only them and their organizing efforts, but really anyone who would try to do something similar.
339. And so you can see some parallels in the U.S. dating back to the early days of the American Indian movement
340. and then Wounded Knee and Leonard Pelletier, who was also just recently released to house arrest
341. long after the injustice had been done against him. So similarly, these five Teltal community
342. defenders in Chiapas were finally released just last month not because the criminal justice system is working but it was really there was a tremendous amount of pressure
343. A joint Mexico-European Union cooperation delegation had just visited and called for
344. their release.
345. And I think the government in Mexico, the federal government, was trying to improve
346. the image of the judiciary since they just ran through a series of judicial reforms and they
347. wanted to claim that somehow the judiciary was operating differently. The president of the
348. new court after these reforms is himself indigenous, although he has close ties to the
349. mega projects and is very much a political animal in line with the government. But this was a kind
350. show release in the same way that their imprisonment was a show imprisonment.
351. It doesn't indicate that there's a sudden turnaround in the culture of impunity,
352. the practice of impunity, people getting away with whatever the powerful want to do in Mexico,
353. and people being arrested, charged, and criminalized.
354. In Chiapas, the human rights groups talk about the factory of crime
355. because the government just fabricates crimes against anyone that they want to remove
356. because they're politically inconvenient.
357. And I think that was the case with these five from San Juan Cancun.
358. Yes, Richard.
359. I like, unfortunately, the notion you brought up, the factory of crime,
360. the factory of liberal policies and the factory of commodification.
361. I mentioned these six individuals.
362. of the heroes, you might say, unsung, but other unsung heroes of the disappeared men, women,
363. and children within that migration pattern from Guatemala and other portions. But talk about the
364. State Center for Social Reintegration Convicts, number five. Is this privatized? Your public
365. group is like the United States. A lot of these prisons are privatized, and they are controlled
366. by just look at as factories of crime, definitely in the States.
367. We're giving an example, the Kanaka Maoli people have a special prison just for them in Arizona.
368. And many other people, the Native people, a lot of the communities for the crime of poverty,
369. they're in prison, you know, whether it be Lakota, whether it be, you know, Canada,
370. whether it be California, whether it be, you know, whatever different back east, you know, with different native people,
371. the crime of poverty and therefore drugs and alcohol are prevalent within this country.
372. But talk about this state center.
373. I thought it was, is it large?
374. Is it part of the prison system?
375. Talk about that for us.
376. Yes, I understand that this is just one of the state prisons,
377. and I don't believe that Mexico has gone into the privatization game for prisons the way the U.S. has,
378. but it might as well be because really people are criminalized, imprisoned,
379. and sometimes even assassinated for opposition to private business interests,
380. mining and other interests that are destroying their communities.
381. So if they organize opposition, then they're imprisoned by the state.
382. So you might call it a kind of public-private partnership, to put it in that language, sadly.
383. But here where I live in Michigan I was recently up at the private immigrant detention facility in Baldwin Michigan in the middle of nowhere in one of the poorest counties in the state
384. and that's owned by one of the two main private prison corporations, the GEO Group,
385. and both those corporations are major Trump supporters, and it's a big business.
386. In the U.S., immigrants are detained.
387. The immigration system takes often many days to notify the family where they are,
388. and by then they've been moved to another one and another one,
389. and they're moved all around and held for a long time in the U.S.
390. because it is a business.
391. So I was surprised to find in Chiapas that migrants who are detained in the U.S.,
392. despite all the rhetoric of the Trump administration,
393. are not so much being massively deported
394. because there's a profit to be made from holding them in the U.S.,
395. and the deportees, at least to Chiapas,
396. are mostly people who are kind of semi-documented.
397. They are people who are in the system.
398. They've been reporting regularly to ICE as they are required to do by law.
399. They're waiting for asylum or waiting for some other claim or petition to be processed.
400. So the immigration system in the U.S. is kind of going for the low-hanging fruit.
401. Many of the migrants from Chiapas to the United States
402. are desperate people who are migrating because economic circumstances under neoliberalism are not great.
403. They're migrating for work.
404. I talked to a specialist in the Tzotzil Highland region who has been doing household surveys and studies of migration,
405. and he estimates that there are about 90,000 Tzotzil indigenous migrants from the three municipalities of the highlands of Chiapas
406. in the United States currently, and that they are generating a phenomenal amount of remittances,
407. money from their hard work in the U.S. that they send back that's keeping the communities afloat,
408. and in some cases actually injecting quite a bit of money.
409. So Chiapas is now, even though it's a poor state and not a large state,
410. it's the number one state in receiving remittances from people working in the U.S.
411. and sending money back, $1 billion of remittances.
412. And for the people, the indigenous people who are involved in this,
413. in migrating for work,
414. they now have to pay escalating amounts of money
415. because of the U.S. border enforcement.
416. So the Cleotes, the smugglers, are charging more.
417. So now the migrants have to pay between $17,000 and $20,000
418. to the coyotes and 5% monthly interest to the moneylenders
419. to be able to make this often dangerous journey.
420. So even though remittances, the money sent back,
421. are down overall in Mexico,
422. they're up in Chiapas because of people's desperation.
423. So people are still, people who have migrated
424. from indigenous communities in the highlands of Chiapas
425. because there's no land and no work,
426. they go to the U.S., and now they're just staying longer and living more miserably
427. in order to save more and send money back to support their families,
428. sacrificing more for their families.
429. So the migration picture, again, is totally different from the way it's portrayed in the United States.
430. Obviously, most of the migrants are not criminals, have no intent to do anything criminal.
431. They are simply trying to work and support their families.
432. Just like many of the cities that were the heart of you might say America North America Detroit and now it a Rust Belt
433. but yet they criminalized the homeless
434. and they criminalized the people that were working in the major industries.
435. They're now defunct because of programs and projects like NAFTA,
436. so on and so forth.
437. Richard, the report from FIBA on CHAPA's and the spiral of armed and criminal violence allowing organized crime to expand its territorial control, the report also looks at the continuing territorial disposition of indigenous communities.
438. and that with this modernization of neoliberal projects,
439. and you mentioned this, and I'm going to go back to it a little bit,
440. megaprojects, the South Oso Projects exist,
441. Puebla-Panama Plan, and the Mesoamerica Project,
442. and we reported here with your help on the militarization
443. and the expansion of these economic zones, you might say,
444. that will displace indigenous people
445. and also increasingly proletarianize the sector of the population
446. that doesn't want to go in that direction.
447. But they go hand in hand with criminalization.
448. This report says,
449. go hand in hand with criminalization of those who fight against these megaprojects.
450. Is that what we're seeing?
451. Yes, I think so.
452. I'll give a couple of specific examples of some megaprojects.
453. There's one that has been misleadingly named the Maya Train.
454. It's supposedly an ecotourism project that goes to connect a superhighway to a train route
455. to bring tourists between the tourist city of San Cristobal in Chiapas
456. up to the Yucatan Peninsula and the Mayan ruins and sites there.
457. And it had a devastating impact on the environment.
458. It displaced people.
459. It tore up communities.
460. And the government organized a sham consultation,
461. bought off some leaders and pretended that it was consulting
462. to get the approval of the indigenous communities
463. when many of the indigenous communities were vehemently opposed
464. and when people organized in opposition,
465. then they are targeted and criminalized.
466. So part of that train has already begun to run.
467. And again, it kind of destroys community and environment
468. and ways of life.
469. More generally, a recent journal article in a criminology journal did a study and quantified the correlation between the violence and displacement and how it goes along with extractivist activities, extracting minerals, extracting oil and hydrocarbons and so forth, and also where indigenous populations are concentrated.
470. So in other words, where indigenous populations and natural resources are concentrated,
471. instead of allowing the indigenous population to live as they choose and do as they choose with the resources and land,
472. they are being violently displaced. That's the correlation that exists. Just in July of this year,
473. indigenous peoples in Chiapas in the northern zone in Chilom
474. organized what they called an international encounter in defense of life,
475. corn, water, territory, and Mother Earth
476. to strategize and share their strategies of resistance against these megaprojects
477. because they referred to them as projects of death,
478. kind of cultural death, ecological death,
479. and death in terms of eliminating the means of self-sufficient survival
480. that have been the basis for the survival of these communities.
481. And we want to remind listeners who are listening to American Indian Airwaves,
482. we're speaking with Richard Stuller Shulk,
483. a retired professor of political science at Eastern Michigan University
484. and community activist involved with the School of Chiapas.
485. He just returned from Chiapas, Mexico,
486. and he's speaking on the increased human rights violations of displaced, including indigenous peoples,
487. and the increased cartel violence throughout the region,
488. and Mexico's government's response to Trump's agenda in targeting cartel violence.
489. All that and more here on American Indian Airwaves.
490. And now back to the interview.
491. Thank you, Richard, for that.
492. The report finally says that, and you kind of go over this, and when I listen to you, and hopefully the listeners listen to you, it's about the complexity, despite the complexities and the violence.
493. I mean, this is not a movie.
494. This is not AI.
495. This is real life.
496. But the path toward the critical point, it says, is to generate conditions for peace
497. so that communities can return to living their daily lives,
498. daily lives of indigenous peoples.
499. And that is as much tied to the land as any culture is throughout the indigenous world that we know of.
500. and they continue to build their life projects based on culture and identity
501. for peace that walks, that moves, that transforms, that spirals,
502. that permeates the most remote corners of the territory.
503. In other words, the harmony and the wealth of the balance with creation of Earth
504. and all the living things within it.
505. now the like you said they create the projects of death and these people and the people the
506. movement here and that's why we talk to you create the projects of life you know talk about the
507. project of life what's the role of the zapatistas their particular statements share with the public
508. what is what is the latest situation concerning the zapatistas and remind everybody zapatista
509. indigenous group and along with creation of a business mexico group the council business council
510. mexico and within that trying to get back and attempting and they're not only trying implementing
511. the culture implementing the for foreseeable future how the role of indigenous culture
512. culture and the philosophies and the politics they're from the philosophies are going the
513. direction of the projects, not of death, but the projects of life.
514. Talk to us about that, Richard.
515. Sure.
516. I think it's good to remember that there is resistance against this project of
517. death and that there's also positive construction of an alternative model based
518. on the concept of life and community.
519. And the Zapatistas have really been an inspiration in that regard So the 1994 uprising led to a wave of what the Zapatistas referred to as land recoveries So taking away land from the big exploiters and
520. those who had put in large-scale agribusiness or cattle ranching and who treated their employees
521. on the agricultural estates very badly and miserably, the Zapatistas pushed out those exploiters.
522. And in recovering that land, they reorganized the use of the land in a much more collective and communal fashion
523. that was more in accord with the indigenous traditions, and it was also, from their point of view, more just, more equitable.
524. And in those recovered lands, those became really kind of the centers of the Zapatista project of autonomy, creating schools and clinics and other spaces for modeling this very different kind of society that would be based on a concept of life.
525. the government and the corporate interests that prefer a model of individual ownership of private property
526. and exploitation of labor power without restriction, they saw all of this as a tremendous threat, of course.
527. And they saw the example as a threat.
528. So they've been trying to exterminate that project and really to threaten the recovered lands ever since the uprising.
529. So even though the original individual wealthy owners of those lands
530. have long since retreated, invested elsewhere, etc.,
531. the government continues to incite other groups of indigenous people
532. to invade the Zapatista land, to engage in violent conflicts
533. with the Zapatistas on the recovered land.
534. And that's been an ongoing challenge.
535. In the last year, in the community of Belen,
536. in the autonomous, the Caracol, the Zapatista-governed region in the jungle, Delores Hidalgo,
537. the government was up to these games and putting up other groups of people
538. to try to violently threaten and displace the Zapatistas.
539. The government has even entered into joint operations
540. where elements of the Mexican federal and state military and police
541. team up with this new rapid response force of the governor, the Pacal,
542. to try to displace Zapatistas in that region from their recovered lands.
543. But the Zapatistas have always been very quick to come up with positive alternatives
544. to these projects of death.
545. So, for example, in the last year and a half or so,
546. So the Zapatistas have been implementing the concept of what they call the commons.
547. So on their recovered land, they said, okay, let's share.
548. This is not going to be our land.
549. It's not going to be individually owned.
550. It's going to be land that poor and indigenous people can work out among themselves through direct dialogue.
551. So kind of cutting the government out of the pattern of counterinsurgency
552. and talking directly to non-Zapatista indigenous groups and saying, you know, let's talk.
553. Let's share the use of this land.
554. And so that in some cases seems to have been successful in defusing those conflicts.
555. On this trip, I visited a community of people who had originally been collaborators of the early Zapatista movement.
556. They now not part of the Zapatista movement in a formal sense but they are sympathizers They have joined the sixth declaration of the Lacan jungle Jungle the kind of loose coalition of supporters of the Zapatista movement
557. They are part of the National Indigenous Congress.
558. And these people had recovered land as part of the wave of land recoveries after the 1994 Zapatista uprising.
559. In this case, they're South Island indigenous people.
560. And on the recovered land, they have their own projects.
561. The women bake bread.
562. They have vegetable projects.
563. They have collectively run cornfields, and then the proceeds, when they're able to sell a little corn, they've been used little by little to buy some cattle.
564. And so it's a thriving community, but they feel constantly under threat from government and other paramilitary and other kind of threatening forces and attackers because their model, this positive model of life, is not to the liking of the powerful.
565. So this is why that indigenous gathering, the International Encounter in Defense of Life, Corn, Water, Territory, and Mother Earth, reflects that very different positive vision of what could be.
566. And it's no accident that the megaprojects of private capital accumulation in Chiapas and elsewhere go hand in hand with the violent attempts to keep people from being self-sufficient and living in community with themselves.
567. The megaprojects and the project of global capital would rather have people be interchangeable cogs, cheap labor in the corporate machine for private profit and wealth.
568. To the west of Chiapas in the state of Oaxaca, another megaproject is the interoceanic corridor or the trans-Ithnian corridor, the isthmus of Tehuantepec that connects the state of Oaxaca to the state of Chiapas.
569. And that's a major undertaking of infrastructure, deep water ports, rail lines to transit.
570. So it would be kind of like the Panama Canal in a way, a way to move goods between the oceans.
571. And there are also enormous wind farms and other projects, energy projects in that area.
572. And part of the strategy of trapping migrants in Chiapas,
573. deporting migrants to Tapachula and southern Chiapas and keeping migrants from returning to their places of origin,
574. is to have that pool of cheap labor that it appears that they're being held in reserve for the mega projects.
575. So that's very different from the community-based, self-sufficient, and kind of community-reinforcing,
576. harmonious, living with nature and living in a self-sufficient way that is represented by the
577. project of life of the Zapatistas and other communities of indigenous people in Chiapas
578. and elsewhere. People forget about the National Indigenous Congress, the march of Zapatistas from
579. Mexico City for the sixth declaration of Lacanzon, and many, many, many activities in which they were
580. greeted with indigenous and the working class people, you might say, of Mexico and the territories,
581. embracing them and looking at the morality of the future and the vision of the future,
582. the project of life and where self-sufficiency and the contradistinction,
583. and juxtaposition, you might say, of capital
584. with the new vision of the future that people are remaking And that what so important Richard talking with you and with Larry about this
585. indigenous people and their allies working in a different direction than AI or working
586. in a different direction than capital, working in a different direction than Musk and all
587. these other elements of control, rather than this is our future.
588. And so I really appreciate you being on the American Indian Airways.
589. I look forward to you in the next time ahead to talk with you about this question of our continent, see what's going on, and further discussions with yourself, Richard Stiller Schultz.
590. I really appreciate our discussions, and thank you very much.
591. The moment of silence is over.
592. And that was Richard Stoller-Schulke, a retired professor of political science at Eastern
593. Michigan University and community activist involved with the School of Chiapas.
594. He just returned from Chiapas, Mexico, and provided us, the listeners, for the hour,
595. an extensive update of the egregious human rights violations perpetrated against indigenous
596. peoples throughout the region.
597. And that concludes our show for today here on American Indian Airwaves.
598. A special thank you to our guest for the hour, Richard Stoller-Schulke.
599. A special thank you to our musical guest, Aragon Starr, Kupa Aina, and the band Blackfire.
600. American Indian Airwaves is mixed and mastered in the studios of Burn Swamp Studios in Signal Hill, California.
601. For Marcus Lopez, I've been your host for the hour, Larry Smith.
602. Until next time.
603. The innocent you can't justify
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