justicia
CALL TO THE MOBILIZATION IN DEFENSE OF LIFE IN AZQUELTÁN
To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation
To the collectives, organizations, and networks of resistance on all continents
To the civil society in solidarity with the life of our people
From the Autonomous Indigenous Wixárika and Tepehuana Community of San Lorenzo de Azqueltán, municipality of Villa Guerrero, Jalisco, we issue an urgent call, born from the pain, the rage, and the living memory of our brother and agrarian authority Marcos Aguilar Rojas, assassinated on November 26, 2025, and of our compañero Gabriel Aguilar Rojas, gravely injured in the same attack.
Considering:
That our words arise in a dark time. The attack that took Marcos’s life was not an isolated incident: it is the direct consequence of decades of armed aggressions, invasions of our communal lands, paramilitary attacks, threats, and a full structure of complicity and impunity, as demonstrated in the document we have made public.
That the community faces extreme danger today. The caciques and their groups of aggressors —the gunmen of the past and the gunmen of the present— continue to gather, patrol our roads with total impunity, protected by judicial operators, police, and officials who block investigations, cover up crimes, and guarantee the continuation of the attacks.
That the violence is neither new nor isolated: it is a strategy of territorial dispossession, aiming to exterminate the community in order to seize thousands of hectares of communal lands that, since time immemorial, belong to our people.
WE CALL FOR
THE DAYS FOR LIFE IN AZQUELTÁN
to take place from December 6 to 10, with activities in different territories and geographies:
December 6
Press Conference
Guadalajara International Book Fair
Gathering: 12:00 p.m.
December 7
Vigil for Azqueltán
Guadalajara International Book Fair
Gathering: 6:00 p.m., bring candles
December 10
Mobilization in Mexico City
Mobilization in support of the Azqueltán community
Gathering: Torre del Caballito, 11:00 a.m.
December 10
Mobilization in the city of Guadalajara
Gathering: El Santuario, 11:00 a.m.
Call for Global Action
We call on conscious Indigenous peoples, human rights collectives and organizations, and national and international civil society to carry out decentralized actions in their territories, plazas, community centers, universities, embassies, or consulates from December 6 to 10, to amplify our fundamental demands.
Please register the actions to be carried out by writing to: cnicomunicacion@gmail.com
Justice for Marcos and Gabriel.
Punishment for the material and intellectual perpetrators, and guarantees of non-repetition.
Safety for the community of San Lorenzo de Azqueltán, through the permanent presence of federal security forces to prevent new armed attacks.
Urgent titling of the Communal Lands, for the federal government of Mexico to assume its historic responsibility and definitively title the communal lands of San Lorenzo de Azqueltán.
Dismantling of the network of impunity that protects the murderers, invaders, and caciques responsible for dispossession, violence, and death.
Respectfully
December 2025
Because our struggle is for life,
For memory and for the communal land.
Because Marcos lives in every step we take.
Autonomous Indigenous Community of San Lorenzo de Azqueltán
National Indigenous Congress
Report from the First Civil Observation Mission in Eloxochitlán, Oaxaca, identifies crimes against humanity, ethnocide, and ecocide committed against the community
Presented on Saturday, November 29 to the community of Eloxochitlán in Spanish and Enna (the Mazatec language). The report is the result of the Observation Mission carried out in July of this year by an interdisciplinary group.
It concludes that the community is the victim of crimes against humanity which, being systematic and prolonged for a decade, constitute a case of ethnocide aimed at destroying the forms of organization and life of this Mazatec community. The ethnocide of the community of Eloxochitlán seeks to undermine community resistance to extractivist activities that have caused the ecocide of the Xangá Ndá Ge River and the destruction of the community’s right to self-determination:
– In this regard, arbitrary detentions, prolonged pre-trial imprisonment, political criminalization, forced displacement and ethnocide, as well as gender-based violence, were detected.
– Regarding the plundering of the Xangá Ndá Ge River, hydrological alterations, contaminating agents, and desiccation were identified, in addition to damage to flora and fauna.
This compilation of documentation seeks to be taken to international bodies, as it argues that there are no legal conditions in place to guarantee the protection of the community’s rights. Acts of aggression, political persecution and criminalization have resulted in 50 direct victims and at least 500 indirect ones.
The documentation collected identifies governors, agency heads, and magistrates as responsible actors, who—with the backing and complicity of the State—have contributed to the denial of justice, persecution, and fabrication of case files.
Likewise, it states that the Huautla Court bears the greatest responsibility by allowing omissions and practices that favor local strongmen, as it has rejected acts of torture substantiated under the Istanbul Protocol, obstructed legal processes, criminalized community authorities, carried out arbitrary detentions, and manipulated testimonies.
Through a timeline of events, the report describes the process of aggression the Mazatec community has endured, including military intervention, intimidation, torture, dispossession, home raids, threats, and abuses of authority. Many of these forms of violence predate 2014, as multiple formal complaints had been filed since 2011, none of which advanced due to omissions by the Huautla court.
In recent weeks, Oaxaca governor Salomón Jara has labeled Eloxochitlán a “red zone,” attempting to portray it as a violent community—a smear strategy taking advantage of his authority and media reach to support the strongman Manuel Cepeda in the municipal elections of November 23, where he received the second-highest number of votes.
The presentation also served as a space for community reflection, where a message was directed at those who continue to push the narrative of “a conflict between two families,” a simplification of the severe attacks carried out in complicity with the three levels of government. They responded that Eloxochitlán is made up of many families with different surnames, a small town where it is common to share last names.
Many women, as shown in the Radio Zapote broadcast that day, stated their last names. Those who spoke were mothers, wives, and sisters of former political prisoners and persecuted individuals since 2014, who had to leave their homes to dedicate themselves to the struggle for their relatives’ freedom—working the land those relatives once worked to feed their children, sleeping on the streets during sit-ins such as the one maintained for over two years outside the Supreme Court of Justice in Mexico City, while waiting for the justices to take up the case.
The report concludes that, given the incompetence of the Mexican justice system in guaranteeing minimum conditions of safety, justice, and respect for the human rights of the persecuted community of Eloxochitlán, the case must be brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), and calls for precautionary measures for all persons at risk, as well as specific protective measures for indirect victims.
The preparation of this report marks an important precedent in the forms of resistance against State injustices and violations toward Indigenous peoples. The Mazatec women comrades are an example of how to confront impunity and criminalization; their struggle for freedom has been arduous and is not yet over.
As they have done in recent years, the Mazatec women for freedom again extend their invitation to the “Internationalist Faena to End Criminalization,” which will take place from December 3 to 4, 2025, in Mexico City in front of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, and on December 3, 4, and 5 outside UN Women at Calzada General Mariano Escobedo 526, Anzures neighborhood, Miguel Hidalgo.










