Interview • Lucia Linsalata and Verónica Barreda • May 4, 2023 • Leer en español

The municipality of Juan C. Bonilla extends along the foothills of the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes, near the city of Puebla, Mexico. Over the last decade its residents have been subjected to the plunder and destruction of their territories dressed up as “development projects.”

The people of Juan C. Bonilla have watched as bottling company Bonafont steals their clean water with permission from the government. They have also seen the imposition of a gas pipeline across their lands as part of the Morelos Integral Project.

But they haven’t stood still in the face of these attacks, rather, they’ve resisted at every turn. The creation and maintenance of a community radio station, Radio Zacatepec stands out among countless ways in which they’ve defended their territory and struggled for life and dignity.

In August 2019, residents of the community of Santa María Zacatepec launched legal proceedings and negotiations to block the installation of toxic wastewater discharge pipelines from the Textile City industrial complex into the Metlapanapa river.

Two months later, at the end of October 2019, during preparations for the celebration of All Saints’ Day, Puebla state police and the National Guard arrived en masse to their territory to protect the construction site. In what followed, the armed forces deployed repressive violence against the community.

Women and elders who had joined a human barricade against the construction were brutally beaten. The wastewater pipeline was pushed through without transparency—even using false information—despite its many potential risks to the health of the community.

In response to this attack, local residents removed the mayor, Joel Lozano, for his role in breaking the community agreement to reject the installation of the project. Lozano greenlit the incursion of construction machinery in October. A process to elect new authorities under usos y costumbres (customary Indigenous practices) was launched, and a sit-in in defense of life was set up at Bonafont’s operation, with the goal of stopping the construction work from advancing in the territory.

To this day, the people who have mobilized in Juan C. Bonilla haven't seen justice for the police and military brutality unleashed against them.

Far from justice, a campaign of criminalization plagued with illegalities and contradictions has been waged against Miguel López Vega and Alejandro Torres Chocolatl. Both men are traditional Indigenous authorities and involved in community media.

López Vega was born and raised in Juan C. Bonilla. He’s a Zapatista defender of life and water, and is now trapped in a system of criminalization operated by the judicial system in Puebla. He was arrested on January 24, 2020 by members of the state Attorney General, on charges of opposition to the execution of public infrastructure projects and attacks on public roadways and transportation.

A powerful campaign of national and international mobilization and solidarity, combined with a process of gathering legal resources, led to his release six days after his arrest. 

In January 2020, a hearing was held in which two of the charges against him were dropped due to the inability to prove his involvement in the events. The accusation related to attacks on public roadways remained unchanged.

Three years later, López Vega was again indicted on the two charges that had previously been dismissed. The judicial order that set him free was arbitrarily overturned by the Oral Court of Criminal Enforcement in San Andres Cholula. López Vega was summoned for a new trial on March 29, 2023. 

Thanks to an extensive national and international solidarity campaign, the Water and Sanitation Commission of Puebla State unexpectedly informed the judiciary at this hearing that it was granting "pardon" to López Vega for the three offenses it accused him of. However, the Public Prosecutor's Office requested a review of the decision and asked for a new hearing to be held on April 26.

At the most hearing, the charges of obstructing public infrastructure projects and attacking transportation were again dismissed. But the charge of attacking public roadways was upheld, and he was ordered to appear monthly before judicial authorities for a period of six months.

What is happening to López Vega is a portrait of how the Mexican justice system is used as a factory of political persecution: it accuses, recants, accuses again, on and on and on. 

Days before his most recent hearing, we sat down with López Vega in the community of Santa María Zacatepec, to listen to him in order to be able to share his voice. Our conversation has been translated and lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

Lucia Linsalata and Verónica Barreda Muñoz: Miguel, we’d like to begin by asking you to tell us who you are and what you’re fighting for.

Miguel López Vega: My name is Miguel López Vega. I am from a Popoloca family from the Tehuacán area. My mother and father migrated to Zacatepec, they initially had five children and later they had another Originalthree. I am one of those last three, I was born here in Zacatepec.

I consider myself someone who was born in a comunidad originaria, an Indigenous community. I identify with my community and I feel a very strong attachment to nature, having played in the river since I was a child. 

My friends and I would gather plums and apricots, we would catch chapulines (grasshoppers), we had all sorts of games that connected us with nature. I had a beautiful relationship with the territory during my childhood, which allowed me to develop a deep attachment to it.

What I love the most is what I saw and smelled back when the river wasn’t polluted. That is why I defend it. It is terrible that there is no longer anywhere natural for the children, or for those yet to come, to play.

Those of us who are currently living in this territory have made a commitment to take care of it so that there is a future, a natural environment, and so that others have what we had. 

The land and the water are not ours, we live in and are in relation with nature for a short time, but neither belong to us. This is why we fight.

LL and VB: Tell us about the persecution you’ve faced? In what ways have the defenders of the Metlapanapa river and the water of the Cholulteca peoples been harassed and criminalized?

MLV: I was arrested on January 23, 2020, a few months after the murder of our brother Samir [Flores, aland defender, communicator and activist from the state of Morelos]. 

I was only in jail for six days, the organization of the people, mainly the compañeras, prevented me from being imprisoned any longer. It was the organization, the pueblos, whose outrage at the actions of the authorities and institutions like the State Water Commission got me out of jail. It wasn’t because of the federal or the state governments.

That was three years ago. On March 29, 2023, they again told me I would be tried for crimes for which I had already been acquitted. 

We began to tell our compañeros, compañeras, organizations, and many more people that what the government is doing is a very serious violation of human rights, of collective rights, of Original Peoples, of the social struggle.

They thought that by imprisoning one person, things would calm down, but the opposite happened. Their actions didn’t deter us, rather we realized that organized, united peoples can achieve many things. And indeed, we did achieve many things.

But the state plays its cards well. One of its cards is to imprison people, to violate their rights, to instill fear, and to disparage people. They are not acting arbitrarily towards the community, they have clear objectives. They also have a strong organization, they have the money and the laws that they made and that they enforce.

Following our struggle for water, the government started to distribute flyers in the communities; on social media, several videos started circulating, claiming that we had been asking the mayors for money in exchange for not blocking roads. 

When the sinkhole opened up, they said that we had been carrying out acts of extortion, as if we were organized crime. [On May 21, 2021, two months after the Bonafont plant takeover, a 15-meter wide swath of ground collapsed in a crop field in Santa María Zacatepec; in less than a month, it had extended to 126 meters across. The National Polytechnic Institute said the sinkhole may have been caused by erosion in the subsoil, natural subterranean currents and the overexploitation of groundwater].

Then they published a full-color magazine with a smear campaign against us. They use tactics including persecution, imprisonment, and death. None of us have been disappeared, but they have murdered, they have imprisoned, they have tried to discredit us, to frighten us, to silence us.

To give one example, one of the best tools we have here is the radio. We communicate and organize through radio. So what do they say? “Take their radio away!”

Twice now they have seized our equipment. They have arrived armed, they’ve taken away our transmitter because they don’t want us to be talking. They want us to be afraid and divided.

LL and VB: Has there been any changes in how persecution and the dismantling of struggles occurs between the National Action Party [PAN]  state government and that of the 4T (Fourth Transformation), or between the federal government under Enrique Peña Nieto and that of Andrés Manuel López Obrador [AMLO]?

MLV: Everything is the same and now it is even more difficult, because beforehand, some groups and families were completely against those power structures and bad governments, but now they’ve taken López Obrador’s side.

As far as we are concerned, the national guard, the army and the marines are all the same thing.

When they installed the gas pipelines here, the Mexican Army and the federal police guarded the area so that companies such as Elecnor and Abengoa could keep working. The Mexican Army looks after the interests of foreign companies. That’s how it was with the Institutional Revolutionary Party [PRI] and the PAN and it is still like that with Andrés Manuel López Obrador [AMLO].

For us there is no change. It is a system, and it is clear to us, as Zapatistas, as Indigenous peoples, as a movement, that president AMLO is only one piece of the puzzle. He gives orders, but he obeys other interests, mainly economic ones.

Candidates are still elected by dedazo, they are handpicked by the president. Here in the community, out of the blue you’ll meet a man named Juan, Antonio, or Julio Huerta it will be like, who the hell is he? 

Well, they’re going to impose him as a candidate, and you don’t even know who he is. The PRI used to do that. They haven’t changed their ways, they keep using the same strategies, the same methods to subjugate communities.

LL and VB: What would a form of government that does not subjugate communities look like to you? 

MLV: Look, within the National Indigenous Congress [CNI], we have principles: to govern by obeying; to build, not destroy; to obey, not command; to propose, not impose; and for representation from below.

These are our governing principles. When we asked ourselves: “Are we a pueblo originario? Are we Original Peoples?” our answer was “Yes, we are.” 

What is the best thing we can do for our pueblos? It is to decide for ourselves. No one should come from outside and tell us how we should govern ourselves, how we should live, how we should use our water, or how we should regulate our own actions.

That is what self-determination means to us: collectively decide our own form of government.

For example, when we fought against Bonafont, we said “there is one law here and it is a law of the peoples.”

What is the law of the peoples? We will not allow Bonafont to extract one more drop of water to profit from life, from water. We reached that decision together, it became a law of the peoples and that law became a decree, as if it were the Plan de Ayala. We imagined ourselves back in the Revolution, asking: What is the will of the people?

Then we wrote it down: that no company, no industry may come to plunder, to contaminate our water. Bonafont shall not extract one more drop of water, and if it does, it shall be punished by the Original Peoples. This is a collective decision that comes out of our assembly, a law of us, the Original Peoples. According to that law we are the ones in charge, we are the ones who decide, because this land is ours.

Their laws are the ones they have always won with: the law of the state, where they get to decide what to do, and how and when to do it.

LL and VB: Thank you very much, Miguel. It has been so enlightening to speak with you. May the struggle of Original Peoples for self-determination live on and flourish!