Helping Indigenous Communities Protect their Lands

"The 'Mayan Cultures Route' project began in June 2025, damaging the region's mountains, vital aquifers, and wildlife. Authorities approved the Environmental Impact Assessment (MIA) only after construction had already started, exposing a major procedural failure. Furthermore, the public consultation on March 23, 2025, failed to inform communities about the project's route or scope. These actions violate land and territorial rights, specifically the Indigenous right to Free, Prior, Informed, and Culturally Appropriate Consent (FPIC), as guaranteed by ILO Convention 169 and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP)." 

With legal and human rights accompaniment from the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba), the affected communities have publicly denounced these actions and initiated legal challenges to defend their ancestral territory. In response, the local communities have faced severe threats, harassment, and persecution by state authorities and construction corporations, who have deployed private security forces and the military to intimidate communities that stand in defense and resistance.
Standing alongside the communities defending their land and territory, we have conducted field documentation caravans to document the environmental and social devastation. Among our findings: widespread deforestation; critical threats to endemic species; and severe damage to natural springs and water sources that sustain local populations—altering natural drainage basins and triggering risks of both flash floods and severe droughts. In addition, stone and gravel quarrying has caused landslides and flooding in neighboring villages, as well as severe habitat fragmentation that disrupts wildlife migration corridors.

The social and cultural impacts are equally alarming: the unraveling of the community's social and peasant livelihoods. Highway construction has restricted access to communal agricultural lands, undermining the right to food and food sovereignty. Furthermore, reports document the destruction of an archaeological site and the clearing of ancestral trees not accounted for in the Environmental Impact Assessment, desecrating sacred sites and threatening ancestral ways of life bound to the land. To force the project through, authorities and corporate actors have deployed social fragmentation tactics designed to divide communities and undermine grassroots organizing and collective resistance.

Your support makes this work possible: Thanks to your generous donations, we can continue strengthening community-led organizing in defense of land and territorial autonomy, confronting the imposition of this destructive megaproject against Indigenous peoples in Chiapas, and bolstering frontline legal defense and advocacy.
 

Links:

• Sitio especial/ Documentacion sobre los impactos de la autopista

• 260226_pronunciamientocaravana.pdf (PDF)