P'urhépecha women on the frontlines of security and justice in Michoacán

A protest in the Indigenous community of La Cantera, in the municipality of Tangamandapio, on August 22, 2024, the day after seven members of the communal guard and one civilian were disappeared. Photo © Juan José Estrada Serafín.

Opinion • Rocío Moreno Badajoz, Luis Rivero Borrell Z. and Antonio Fuentes Díaz • September 19, 2024 • Leer en castellano

On August 20, seven members of the Kuaricha—communal guard—and a civilian from the Indidgenous P'urhépecha community of La Cantera, Michoacán were disappeared on the highway to Tangamandapio. The community held protests the following day to demand they be returned alive. On August 22, the Public Security Secretariat announced federal and state forces had begun searching for the disappeared. On August 23, they were rescued alive.

Around the same time, the P'urhépecha town of San Ángel Zurumacapio took up arms. Residents blocked the main access points to their community to fend off violence from organized crime.

This mass disappearance occurred in a context of generalized violence attributed to criminal groups in Michoacán, which has hit community self-governance structures hard. Shadowy power brokers and extortion seekers are pressing them to leave their communal lands and give up their natural resources. 

To date, residents of La Cantera continue to carry out patrols in their municipality. The disappearance of their kuaris was a serious blow to their ability to practice autonomous self-governance. 

The emergence of local self-government

A process in other P'urhépecha towns in Michoacán in 2016, including Pichátaro, San Felipe de los Herreros and Arantepacua, preceded the rise of self-government in La Cantera. Previously, these Indigenous towns were politically and administratively subordinate to mestizo municipal centers, which fostered discrimination and marginalization. 

These and other communities joined together to found the Front for the Autonomy of Indigenous Councils and Communities. Through their organizing, they won the approval of Michoacán’s Organic Municipal Law in 2021, which recognizes the right to self-determination, grants Indigenous communities the ability to administer budgets directly and affirms self-government structures.

In terms of government and public administration, La Cantera had been subordinate to the municipality of Santiago Tangamandapio. Its 5,000 inhabitants have self-governed on a sub-municipal level since 2021.

As in other communities, self-government in La Cantera has taken the form of Communal Councils organized into areas of education, health, environment, public works, sports, drinking water, local administration and honor and justice. The latter is responsible for community security, known as Kuaricha. Kuari, in the P'urhépecha language, means “one who takes care of, protects or covers.” 

To exercise self-government, it was necessary to create communal guards to protect the community. These organizations focus on stopping the violence that has spread as criminal groups have asserted themselves in the region. In their constitution, the Communal Councils explicitly embraced gender equity, which has enabled women to participate in Indigenous self-government systems and the communal guards for the first time. 

Communitarian women at the fore

In 2022, of the 20 Kuarichas operating in various communities, only La Cantera’s was led by a woman: Rosa Guillermina Asencio, who also works as a bilingual teacher. Women’s entry into these organizations, which had been totally male-dominated before, has transformed the understanding and practice of self-defense, security and justice. It has also helped break down patriarchal structures in social and communal systems as well as domestically.

Men in the community resisted when Asencio took charge of the Council of Honor and Justice and the Kuaricha in La Cantera. The four municipal police officers who worked in the town left their posts, taking their weapons with them, because, they said, they were not going to let themselves be bossed around by a woman. 

From the outset, Asencio was clear about the need to ensure gender equity among communal guards. The first security organization that she formed had 10 members, four of them women. Three more women later joined on their own initiative. 

Asencio and the women who joined the communal guards have had to show that they can do the same work as men and have struggled to be seen as equals. As the first women to hold formal positions of authority, they began their duties under the shadow of criticism and skepticism from a sexist community imaginary that demeaned them for having stepped back from domestic duties. 

Their job required daily interaction with men and rumors began to circulate that linked female kuaris to sexual promiscuity. Scrutiny of their bodies and behavior generated tensions with their husbands and many suffered violence as men attempted to force them to return to unpaid domestic labor.

Despite this discrimination, incorporating of kuari women into security structures has enabled them to respond to instances of physical and psychological abuse that previously went unnoticed by municipal authorities and police. They can enter homes and help women who have been victims of domestic violence. 

From the perspective of Asencio, whom we interviewed in March of this year, autonomy entails a daily process of denouncing and eliminating sexual and domestic violence, exposing aggressions within the community, and transforming the Indigenous legal system so that it recognizes and sanctions violence against women.

As other experiences of autonomous self-government have shown, women's political participation and  training in the prevention of crimes against women has encouraged their self-esteem and, according to participants, helped them “gain courage as women.” 

This courage has impacted gender roles within their families. Cecilia, a member of the Kuaricha, told us that it helped her gain freedom and to get her children and husband to help with household chores, which had previously fallen on her alone.

A before and an after

Before Indigenous self-government, there was no public discussion in La Cantera about how to end violence against women, reduce economic inequality or lighten the burden of women’s domestic labor. Municipal police tended to be authoritarian and violent; mistreatment and corruption were commonplace. 

Instead of continuing to put up with police behaviors organized around violating and stigmatizing racialized bodies, the Kuaricha changed the security strategy and now focus on care and the defense of communally held territory and goods. There was a change in how they understand communal justice and in how they address internal conflicts. Broadly speaking, as has happened in other experiences of Indigenous autonomy, the justice system that emerged is transformative or restorative.

Both security and community justice are part of an ethic and epistemology of community care, which contrasts sharply with judicial and security systems based on racism, machismo, impunity and corruption. P'urhépecha self-government in La Cantera is also an effort to redistribute power without political parties and pre-established alliances with powerful economic actors.

Even so, the state refuses to give up its hold on governance. Some municipalities claim that local self-government is unconstitutional and sneer at self-governing towns, arguing that they lack the technical capacity to self-govern. They persist in attempting to impose a colonial and racial order. Criminal actors also carry out a range of attacks in an effort to intimidate communal guards and undermine communal self-governance. 

The community response to the disappearance of their kuaris saw the entire population, including women, participate in self-defense patrols. This demonstrates that the whole community wants to ensure their collective security and safety. It affirms the right to self-governance and to collective action against violence and intimidation. 

This article was written based on interviews carried out as part of the “Sujetos atravesados por la violencia: Seguridad y Justicia Comunitaria” research project, which was financed by the Program to Improve the Conditions of Production of the National Research System, the 7.1 program at Guadalajara University and the Proyecto Violencia Estatal y No Estatal of the Vice-Rectory of Research and Graduate Studies at the Autonomous University of Puebla.