Santa María Ostula: from violence and dispossession to the defense of the territory

Pedro Mercado, a 23-year-old member of the indigenous Nahua community in Ostula, like many youth in his community, is heir to the struggles of his territory. Throughout his young life, he has witnessed attacks against his community. Forty people have been murdered and five others have disappeared. But through those years, he has also witnessed the resilience and strength of his people in defending their territory.

Their territory is constantly being eyed for several development aggressions and other illicit activities. It is rich in iron and other minerals attracting legal and illegal miners. It is part of the drug trafficking routes between Mexico and Colombia. Its rich biodiversity, beaches and precious woods lure tourism developers, ranchers and illegal loggers. Then there is the organized crime that thrives in this part of Mexico.

Pedro is currently a member of the Communal Council, one of the main decision-making bodies of the community; the other is the General Assembly, where most of the 11,500 people living in the community participate. He represents Ostula in national and international forums, in liaison with other communities and social organizations and, of course, in community communication.

The long road of the Ostula struggle

The struggle for land is an ongoing process in Mexico. There are many experiences of peasant communities, indigenous or not, that demonstrate the need to address the demands for land and guarantees for agrarian work. For Indigenous Peoples, the overlapping and contradictory framework of agrarian law and their collective right to their lands, territories and natural resources is a major point of contention. In addition, the irresponsibility, corruption and economic interests of the governments emanating from the Mexican Revolution led to the use of the agrarian distribution policy as a palliative for the communities and in many cases as a mechanism for division and control. The case of the Nahua community of Santa María Ostula exemplifies the persistence of this pattern. Their land struggle started with what has been considered an error of measurement by the institutions. But for many, it has been known to be a mechanism of dispossession and justification for violence that persisted for generations.

In the mid-1950s, the community requested the official titling of its territory and registration as an agrarian community under the communal land regime. The Mexican government took as a basis the primordial titles of the eighteenth century and carried out measurements and maps that left out, "by mistake", a considerable strip of land.

In 1964, the year in which the community received the property titles endorsed by the Secretary of Agrarian Reform, they realized that a little more than two kilometers of land extending from the coast to the mountainous zone, which has a total of 1,250 hectares, were left out. The mestizo inhabitants and cattle ranchers of the neighboring town called La Placita de Morelos benefited significantly from this supposed mistake. Since then, a conflict between them had ensued.

According to testimonies of the communal authorities of Ostula from that time, "was done this way because the small landowners of the Placita got the engineers who came to measure drunk, gave them money and women and told them that they could not leave so much land to some Indians".

As the decades passed, the animosity between populations translated into many episodes of racism against the people of Ostula at the hands of those who coveted part of their territory. They were not allowed to go to the Placita in their traditional clothes or speak Nahuatl, nor were they allowed to walk on the sidewalks.

It must be recognized that the essence of the struggle that the Ostula community is experiencing is for their collective right to the territory to be recognized as established by international law. The legal fight they have undertaken aims for the agrarian courts to recognize the extension that belongs to the agrarian community and that has been illegally taken away. The community deserves legal certainty regarding the ownership of its territory. It is an earned right that should not be subject to the discretion of judges, but rather under the principles of conventionality that transcend the framework of what is established in Agrarian Law.

A new enemy takes shape

Since the late 1990s and the beginning of the new century, the disputed lands, known as the Canaguancera, were used to unload hundreds (perhaps thousands) of boats from Colombia transporting cocaine to the United States. It was the Milenio cartel that managed to consolidate a transnational phase of the transportation of this drug in the region and thereafter, criminal organizations known as the Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar repeated the pattern.

Between 2003 and 2004, the Commissariat of Communal Property of Ostula, a local government body in charge of agrarian affairs, began to raise concerns in the community's General Assembly about the Canaguancera's property and the invasion of some people from La Placita of some pieces of land where they had even begun to build. The community investigated and realized that the disputed land had already been demarcated and lots were being sold to small landowners, under the promise of accommodating tourism development in the area.

Those who claimed ownership of these lands through the use of false documents over the Nahua community were also those who held political power in the region. Belonging to the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), that totally controlled the political system in Mexico for more than 70 years, they were mayors and operators, in addition to being, simultaneously, part of the Knights Templar cartel. It was these people who sued the community and opened a lawsuit against them to steal, legally, the land of the community, that is still in force today. The year 2024 will complete 20 years of irregularities and injustices.

The continuing challenge 

Just as Pedro grew with all this path of struggle, defense and reconstitution of the social fabric, the community continues to flourish demonstrating its will to defend life above any economic interest and against criminal organizations.

During the 20 years of agrarian lawsuit and struggle in defense of the land, the community made a fundamental determination that marked a before and after: on June 29, 2009, after a series of discussions at the communal level and several legal rulings against them, Ostula recovered the disputed land and founded there a town called Xayakalan. Today, instead of unloading boats full of cocaine, there is a school, a community meeting center, hundreds of families live there, papaya, hibiscus, corn and sesame are grown, and one of the most beautiful beaches in the region is kept clean for the community's use. But interest from the government and business actors and other outsiders remain present. The community’s struggle to defend their land and their culture continues. A new generation of people is leading the community, women and men who know their history and have been part of it, but who with the freshness of youth can inject new energy into a place that is a mirror of what the country is like and what it could be like if life projects were defended.

##

*IPRI’s Legal Defense and Sanctuary Fund assisted Pedro Mercado’s request for temporary sanctuary and psychosocial support.