Protect land rights and lives of Mayan communities

The Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center is focused on its work of accompanying organizations that have chosen to defend land and territory in terms of their way of life as indigenous people that is selected freely, collectively and autonomously.

This area, located between the city of Ocosingo and Palenque but covering the Lacandon jungle and the border with Guatemala, is threatened by various actors, who seek community division to generate conflicts that appear to be internal and from there to be able to influence both municipal and state authorities as well as local actors with political and economic power. For this reason. Our objective is in general terms, the internal strengthening of the organizational processes found in each area of this vast region, and whose diversity of origins, interests and forms of action challenge us with the need of  construction of multiple mechanisms to apply integral defence in the conditions that favour each site.

For this reason, we directly accompany some cases of human rights violations that are in some way geographically isolated (1), but we try to build a collective with its natural networks, which we call social processes of defense (2). We seek to have these processes inserted with allies in the area, sometimes from other different sectors, such as parishes, which form groups of human rights promoters who meet on different occasions to review cases that occur in the area (3). On other occasions, social processes meet with other civil society organizations, with which they share interests and form a network to work in defense of mother earth and the territory (4). In the same way, they manage to organize with other communities and authorities to form a human rights council, which is made up of delegates from the different communities and has greater organizational strength (5). Last but not least, they link up with agrarian authorities to collectively build legal instruments such as the internal regulations of the ejidos, which give shape and direction to their territorial defense mechanisms with a plan integrated by elements of positive conflict transformation and security in addition to legal tools (6).

All these strategies are developed in connected geographical areas to provide a logic of territorial continuity for peacebuilding, with different modes and mechanisms, depending on what is needed in each community, organization and area where we work. With the objective of sowing hope and contributing to their own paths of justice with peace and dignity.