MEXICO CITY (CN) — On Aug. 1, 20-year-old Lorenzo Froylán de la Cruz was forcibly disappeared in his hometown of Santa María Ostula, in the southern Mexican state of Michoacán, where he served on the town’s communal guard. His remains were found 10 days later.
His death was yet another in what water activists denounced as a “war of extermination” against Mexico’s Indigenous peoples and the resources on their ancestral lands at a press conference in Mexico City on Tuesday.
The conference was held to announce the conclusions and plans of action developed at the third biannual National Assembly for Water and Life, which took place on Aug. 12 and 13 in San Gregorio Atlapulco, in the historic Mexico City borough of Xochimilco.
This war “is taking place on our territories, especially ... against the Zapatista communities,” said activist Eduardo García, referring to the insurgents in the southern state of Chiapas who have opposed Mexico’s government since the mid-1990s.
He added that the war is being “developed and systematized” by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador “in order to guarantee and safeguard the interests of big capital and the narco-state.”
López Obrador’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Such disapproval of López Obrador's security policy was expressed by several attendees at the assembly over the weekend. The president has been criticized for his advancement and expansion of a growing wave of militarization in Mexico during the 21st century.
In May, Zapatista communities alerted that “Chiapas is on the verge of civil war” in a statement signed by over 1,300 sympathizers and celebrity leaders, such as Mexican actor Diego Luna and American intellectual Noam Chomsky. The group held that López Obrador is either actively or passively complicit in the conflict.
Over 830 people attended the weekend’s assembly, representing more than 200 grassroots Indigenous and environmental organizations and 21 Mexican states. They contend that Mexico’s worsening water crisis is the result of a rapacious capitalist system backed by lopsided policy and intensifying violence.
“Organized crime and paramilitary groups systematically collaborate with the armed forces, the National Guard and state and municipal police, to the point where we can no longer understand them as distinct phenomena, but rather as codependent pieces,” said García, “[the] muscles and ligaments of the weaponized arm of the capitalist narco-state.”
Started in August 2022, the biannual conference serves a space for people from across Mexico to share stories of what they say is the plundering of humanity’s most vital resource by a capitalist system fueled by racism, violence and greed.
That first assembly came in the wake of a series of events that epitomize why organizers and attendees say they are responding to a war being waged against the people of Mexico and across the globe.
In August 2021, activists in Juan C. Bonilla, Puebla, occupied a bottled water plant operated by Bonafont, a company owned by multinational food conglomerate Danone, known as Dannon in the United States. The plant began bottling in 1996 and reportedly extracted almost half a million gallons a day from the local aquifer.
Residents blamed dwindling water levels in nearby wells and streams, as well as a sinkhole that grew to over 400 feet in diameter in the months before the plant’s occupation, on this extraction.
The occupiers damaged the 426-foot well and turned the plant into a type of cultural center they called Altepelmecalli, which means the People’s House in Nahuatl. In February 2022, they were removed from the plant during a nighttime operation that included the deployment of state police officers, riot police and National Guard soldiers.
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