Organized crime and paramilitary rule in Chiapas, México
Zapatistas act in a play that opposes violence in the Dolores Hidalgo base community, Chiapas, 2024. Photo © Francisco Lion.
Opinion • Delmy Tania Cruz Hernández • 16 de mayo, 2025 • Leer en castellano
Residents of highlands, central and border regions of the Mexican state of Chiapas are living under Pax Narca, a kind of “peace” among drug traffickers.
On December 8, 2024, Eduardo Ramirez Aguilar of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), took office as governor of Chiapas. One of his biggest promises has been to achieve “peace” in Chiapas.
In recent years, violence by criminal groups in the southeastern state has increased. Forced displacement, disappearances, and tortured bodies dumped in the middle of the streets have become reality from north to south.
Between 2010 and October 2022, the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba) recorded at least 16,755 people forcibly displaced. Community organizations and the church have shown how, especially between 2018 and 2022, displacement became much more severe, particularly in the Los Altos region. In December 2024, authorities found 31 dismembered bodies buried in 25 clandestine graves in the jungle around the municipality of Palenque.
Federal, state, and municipal governments have failed to act. Instead, they’ve become part of the problem.
As governor, Ramirez Aguilar repeats a narrative about returning peace to Chiapas. His first steps are aimed at promoting the federal security strategy, in which there are “good guys and bad guys.” In this vision, to eradicate drug trafficking and the crimes it provokes, “the good guys”—the armed forces—have to go in to ensure national security. This rhetoric creates a common enemy: “the bad guys,” the drug traffickers.
Paramilitary forces, built up by governments that have promoted low-intensity war in the state over the last four decades, have become key nodes for the establishment of criminal groups that terrorize rural and urban communities.
These structures are visible in the border region with Guatemala. Factions of historic peasant organizations that were paramilitarized now control brothels in the peripheral belt of Comitán and the entrance of Margaritas, where drugs, women, and weapons are trafficked. The logos of the organizations are displayed at the entrance of each bar. Locals are unhappy with the situation on the one hand, but on the other, they see employment opportunities.
“For me to be able to work, well, I have to go and introduce myself to the [paramilitary] organizations,” said Juan, a cab driver from the Cash neighborhood in Comitán, in an interview with Ojalá in February 2025. “They give me the logo, they also make us show up if there is a confrontation between narcos, we know it’s all the same: the organizations and the narcos, they work together to exploit us.”
Zapatista militants in defense of land in the Jacinto Canek base community, Chiapas, 2025. Photo © Francisco Lion.
The pakales and their connections
On December 9, 2024, the Pakal Immediate Reaction Force (FRIP) was created by the state government. It’s an elite force made up of over 500 former members of the Mexican Army, the National Guard, the now-defunct Federal Police, and the Mexican Marines, and is attached to the Peoples’ Security Secretariat (SSP). The FRIP was first deployed to the governor's hometown of Comitán de Domínguez.
On December 15, the militarized force to Comitán, which is the largest city in the Central Border region of Chiapas. It shuttered businesses where drugs were sold, conducted raids in ranches, houses, bars, and warehouses, and arrested 92 police officers for alleged links to organized crime.
The former security chief under Mario Fox, who is Comitán’s mayor, was detained, but no charges were brought against the re-elected mayor. “Everyone knows the real instigator of the violence in Comitán […] is Mario Fox, but he is still untouchable,” said a human rights defender whose name has been changed for security reasons. “What I see is just poor people being detained.”
Every time the FRIP enters a municipality, links between police forces and organized crime have been made patent. In Chiapa de Corzo, 89 police officers were detained and are now under investigation, including the chief of police and the director of mobility. In Frontera Comalapa, the mayor and his closest associates were arrested in the same ranch where five monster trucks were being built.
“The sheer number of armed men at the entrance and exit of every town—what do the young people think, that this is the only way to live? With weapons, with violence, with all of this,” said Mar, a women's rights activist in Frontera Comapala. I interviewed Mar after one of the FRIP’s incursions in Margaritas to ask how women's collectives are experiencing these territorial changes.
The FRIP is known colloquially as the pakales, and is led by the Secretary of People's Security, Óscar Aparicio and the Attorney General of Chiapas, José Luis Llaven. The nomination of both men to positions in government raised alarms on the part of rights groups in the state.
The rights group Frayba has warned that Attorney General Llaven has been involved in “cases of arbitrary detentions, threats, torture and other human rights violations.” He was implicated in the death by torture of Luis Ignacio Lara Vidal in 2005, as well as the detention and torture of members of La Otra Campaña in San Sebastián Bachajón.
In addition, Llaven referred to femicides as “crimes of passion” last month, demonstrating his misogyny and re-victimizing families and loved ones of women who have been killed.
Meanwhile, media outlets have linked Aparicio to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Despite these and other concerns, the federal government has thrown its support behind governor Ramirez Aguilar. On January 8, Secretary of the Interior Rosa Icela Rodríguez, and Secretary of Public Security, Omar García Harfuch, accompanied the governor to the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas in a show of support for his security strategy.
Young Zapatista rappers in the Jacinto Canek base community, Chiapas, 2025. Photo © Francisco Lion.
The new scenario
The new security strategy in Chiapas has led to a scenario in which territorial control is exercised by the FRIP. The military, in addition to fighting crime, controls the highways, provides security for interim mayors appointed by the government, and promotes that it provides security to tourist sites that had become inaccessible, such as Lagos de Colón, in the municipality of Trinitaria and the “Las Nubes” Ecotourism Center in Maravilla Tenejapa.
But the presence of the pakales also imposes terror and anguish on communities. We are exposed to rhetoric that instills fear, we experience security operations without warning and sudden raids on houses, and we’re encouraged to snitch on our community in the interest of “peace.”
“It seems like we’re at war, that war has returned, just like when there were soldiers everywhere, and you lived in fear,” said Rocio, a human rights defender in the state. “I’m not denying that the [security] situation is out of control, but I don’t know if filling the area with soldiers helps.”
Opinions are divided. On the one hand, a return to so-called peace is welcomed. On the other, local rights defenders are concerned it is all a façade to impose one armed force over another.
Creating a war mindset has been easy, as the conditions to do so are ideal in Chiapas. Nor has it been hard to garner support for and legitimize military actions in public spaces, giving soldiers greater power and duties outside their purview.
For three months now, local media have been showing arrests on social media—mostly of young, underemployed Indigenous men—who are incriminated in crimes linked to illicit drugs. But the root cause remains the same: the inequality that prevails in Chiapas. Precarity is criminalized, and the real culprits get off scot free.
Tensions are high, and the mass framing of innocent people continues, as took place in the case of human rights defender Mario Gómez López. And on April 24, security agents entered the community of San Pedro Cotzilnam, arbitrarily detained José Baldemar Sántiz Sántiz and Andrés Manuel Sántiz Gómez, who are part of the support base of the Zapatista resistance movement. Both men were accused of aggravated kidnapping. The raid against them is just one more example of harassment and abuse of power against the Zapatistas, which is part of the low-intensity war that all levels of government have maintained since 1994.
Meanwhile, the push for new extractive projects continues apace. The plan to connect two key points in the state via road has led to a new bid to build the San Cristóbal de las Casas—Palenque highway. The idea was floated by the governor of Chiapas when he was a senator in 2013, and it's now getting a second wind. At the time, it faced opposition from the Movement in Defense of Life and Territory, which continues to organize.
The “transformative humanism” Governor Ramirez Aguilar instills in the pakales is a mask. It’s a way to exercise power while also seeking to cover up the injustice, inequality, and violence the people of Chiapas experience on a daily basis. A civil war is knocking at the door—and the actions implemented since December 2024 prove it.
In Chiapas, peace is armed, and the pakales peddle Pax Narca, which has its own images and even a song that goes “Los pakales just arrived, they’re here to give us peace.” The narrative that militarization is the best path to peace seems to be everywhere, including in song.
