975004

research-article2020
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20975004Latin American PerspectivesGasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico

Communal Responses to Structural Violence and

Dispossession in Cherán, Mexico
by
Giovanna Gasparello
Translated by
Mariana Ortega-Breña

Mexico is currently subject to generalized violence due to conflicts between drug car-
tels, the state, and resource-extraction companies jostling for territorial and economic
control. In 2011 and in this context, the inhabitants of the indigenous municipality of
Cherán confronted the criminal organization responsible for kidnappings, extortion, and
illegal logging in their communal territory. Study of this conflict and the communal
responses generated in the peace process reveals that the violence was founded on social
inequality and was both cause and effect of the indigenous population’s material and cul-
tural dispossession. The peace formation process involved the valorization of a collective
and territorially rooted identity, the strengthening of security and justice practices based
on the authority of assemblies, and an incipient interest in the construction of economic
alternatives for the local population.

Actualmente, México vive una situación de violencia generalizada debido a los

conflictos entre los cárteles de droga, el Estado y las empresas de extracción de recur-
sos que luchan por el control territorial y económico. En 2011 y en este contexto, los
habitantes del municipio indígena de Cherán se enfrentaron a una organización
criminal responsable de secuestros, extorsiones y tala ilegal en su territorio comunal.
El estudio de este conflicto y las respuestas comunitarias generadas en el proceso de
paz revela que la violencia se fundó sobre la desigualdad social y fue tanto causa como
efecto del despojo material y cultural de la población indígena. El proceso de paz
implicó la valorización de una identidad colectiva y territorialmente arraigada, el
fortalecimiento de las prácticas de seguridad y justicia basadas en la autoridad de las
asambleas, y un interés incipiente en la construcción de alternativas económicas para
la población local.

Keywords: Conflict, Criminal logging, Peace formation, Cherán, Communal govern-

ment

Giovanna Gasparello is an Italian anthropologist who has lived in Mexico since 2003 pursuing
ethnographic research in the indigenous regions of Chiapas, Guerrero, and Michoacán. She has a
Ph.D. in anthropological sciences from the Autonomous Metropolitan University and is a senior
researcher in the Department of Ethnology and Social Anthropology of the National Institute of
Anthropology and History and a member of the Center for Studies on Human Rights at the
Ca’Foscari University of Venice. This article is the product of the project “PEACEAUTONOMY,
Indigenous Autonomy in Mexico: Building Peace in Contexts of Violence” (2016–2017) developed
as part of postdoctoral work at the Center for Anthropological Studies of the College of Michoacán
and was funded by the Mexican government’s Excellence Scholarship for Foreigners. Mariana
Ortega-Breña is a freelance translator based in Mexico City.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 236, Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2021, 42–62
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20975004
https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20975004
© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

42
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  43

April 15, 2011, is a milestone in the recent history of Cherán, a Purépecha

indigenous municipality in the state of Michoacán in western Mexico. On that
day the inhabitants detained several members of the criminal organization
responsible for carrying out kidnappings, extortion, and criminal logging in
their communal territory. A short time later they formed their own communal
police and disowned their municipal president. This was the beginning of a
long process of reappropriation of local power and the reconstruction of the
social fabric that after nearly a decade is yielding important results. The system
of self-government, communal policing, and territorial protection implemented
by the people of Cherán has grown stronger, and there is an incipient thrust to
the local economy. These practices of self-organization have managed to reduce
the multiple forms of violence in the territory.
Cherán’s results are outstanding in the Mexican context, where conflict
among criminal, institutional, and business actors seeking control of territory,
resources, and legal and illegal sectors of the economy has led to a generalized
state of violence that since 2006 (when the Felipe Calderón government declared
“war” on organized crime) has claimed the lives of more than 250,000 people
(INEGI, 2017; SE-SNSP, 2018). On the national level, the internally displaced
number 345,000 (IDMC, 2018), while the number of officially recognized miss-
ing persons is 37,435 (RNPED, 2018). Despite their magnitude, these official
figures are not very representative: more than 93 percent of crimes in Mexico
go unreported or are never investigated (INEGI, 2018). This is also often the
case with violent deaths, which are either not reported as such by the victims’
relatives out of fear or are not registered and investigated because of the ram-
pant corruption and inefficiency of the police and ministerial bodies.
Most intentional homicides perpetrated in Mexico are related to this unac-
knowledged “war”: they occur in confrontations between cartels and between
cartels and the army, the navy, or the police or take the form of executions and
forced disappearances perpetrated by both “law enforcement” and criminal
groups, which often collude in illegal trafficking. That said, the increase in the
homicide rate is only one of the many manifestations of violence that affect
Mexican society: gender, domestic, environmental, racial, and generational,
among others. Some of these represent a “historical accumulation” (Bourgois,
2015), as do the patriarchal bias of social relations and the fierce institutional
racism; in any case, they have become more acute with the increasing neoliber-
alism of policy and the economy, in which the state is losing its legitimacy and
its regulatory power over territories and resources.
The responses of Mexican society to this reality include the creation of vic-
tims’ organizations looking for disappeared relatives in clandestine mass
graves and the financing of businesspeople’s self-defense groups, flows of dis-
placed migrants, and the formation of popular organizations that seek to resist
violence and generate social alternatives based on specific cultures and con-
texts. This paper undertakes a multidimensional analysis of the conflict in
Cherán and the closely tied and varied forms of violence that compose it (crim-
inal violence, dispossession of common goods, and political corruption). I
describe the main community responses to violence involved in the peace for-
mation process: community participation, reconstruction of territory, and com-
munal security. Finally, I analyze the actions directed toward a difficult
44  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

reconciliation: the strengthening of social bonds, quality-of-life improvement,

and the consolidation of norms of coexistence. The key to this exceptional expe-
rience lies in the structural dimension of forms of violence. The event itself
finds its turning point in the incipient responses to inequality that characterize
this locality and the country as a whole.

Conflict and Structural Violence: An Approach

from Peace Studies

The understanding of violence requires an interdisciplinary approach

(Ferrándiz and Feixa, 2004). To enrich the original anthropological perspective
of this research, I have employed theoretical elements from peace studies, a field
focused on interdisciplinary analysis of violence and conflict, the drive toward
peace processes, and education for peace. I have also made use of the multidi-
mensional analysis of violence developed by Galtung (2003) and a framework
for studying conflict in its historical dimension (Lederach, 2009) that distin-
guishes between the episode or manifestation of the conflict and the history of the
conflict (the historical and cultural process that has favored conflicting relation-
ships). The emphasis on historicity avoids the “naturalization” of the effects of
violence (Hernández, 2002), locating directly observed violence in a broader
context of structural, cultural, and symbolic violence (Hébert, 2006).
Anthropology’s contribution to the study of conflict resides mainly in its
ability to analyze processes from macro (global contexts) and micro (the inti-
mate scope of ethnographic work and testimonial record) perspectives, clari-
fying the consequences of everyday violence in terms of social vulnerability
and structural violence (Cajas, 2005; Farmer, 1996). This narrative of the
Cherán conflict contains testimonies, stories, and memories presenting the
subjectivities of those who lived through it: the imprint of pain shapes the
vision of the future and sometimes stops the development of new relation-
ships, but it is often a reminder of what should not be repeated and the frame-
work for promising discourses and social practices. Historically, anthropology
has evidenced the social and cultural nature of conflict and violence. Nowadays
we must aim this tradition toward an anthropology that instead of emphasiz-
ing the rationale for confrontation focuses on local strategies for reformulating
conflict and on culturally and socially diverse subjects in a globalized world
(Canals and Celigueta, 2013).
After more than 15 years of anthropological work and active accompani-
ment of indigenous organizational processes taking place in conflictive con-
texts, my theoretical and political approach has taken on a positive and
proactive perspective. I focus on the achievements and possibilities of vio-
lence deactivation and the construction of peace processes, however limited
and imperfect. This stance resembles that of an incipient field of studies
known as the anthropology of peace (Hébert, 2006), on peace (Canals and
Celigueta, 2013), or for peace (Jiménez, 2012). It is influenced by the inter-
disciplinary nature of peace studies (Galtung, 1998; 2003), which focus on
violent or potentially violent contexts and the actions undertaken to estab-
lish some peace or maintain what peace exists (Hébert, 2006). The goal of
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  45

anthropological studies on peace is the positive transformation of conflicts

based on a reduction of inequality and respect for cultural plurality. The
positive and practical orientation of peace studies propels the anthropology
of peace toward an “epistemology for action” and useful knowledge in the
accompaniment, strengthening, and dissemination of the processes studied
and their achievements.
According to Galtung (1998), conflict is not in itself negative but represents
“crisis and opportunity”: its resolution is a vehicle for positive social change. It
is failure to positively transform conflict that leads to violence. Analytically,
Galtung (2003) addresses three interrelated manifestations of violence: per-
sonal or direct (violent behaviors and acts), structural or indirect (inequality,
which impedes the realization of human potentialities), and cultural or sym-
bolic (aspects of the culture used to justify or legitimize the other types of vio-
lence). My analysis of Cherán’s organizational experience emphasizes the
structural dimension of violence, which is expressed in poverty (deprivation of
basic human needs), repression (deprivation of human rights and freedom),
and alienation (deprivation of political and cultural rights).
Structural violence is determined by inequality, which is related to the eco-
nomic processes of capitalist accumulation. It manifests itself in social exclu-
sion, which implies the lack of access to opportunities, and exploitation,
which leads to inequitable access to material goods (Arzate, 2008). The vio-
lence that is expressed in inequality is characteristic of the process that Harvey
(2004: 16) calls “accumulation by dispossession,” which consists, among
other things, of “a new wave of ‘enclosing the commons’” (natural, social,
and cultural), their intensive exploitation, and export-oriented commodifica-
tion for consumption in the world market. Dispossession, understood in
Marxist terms as an intrinsically violent process that separates people from
their means of subsistence, is both the means and the goal of current pro-
cesses of accumulation (Rodríguez, 2017).
Inequality—understood as the differential distribution of power, cultural
capital, or knowledge, ownership of the means of production, opportunities,
and results—has a biunivocal relationship with processes of dispossession: it is
both the product of the subtraction and destruction of goods, relationships, and
meanings and their precondition. According to Caicedo (2017: 61), “the accu-
mulation of historical disadvantages upon certain subjects (racialization, mar-
ginalization, illegalization, etc.) generates conditions of persistent inequality
that favor other forms of concrete dispossession.”
On the Purépecha Plateau, territorial dispossession is rooted in practices
determined by inequality and structural violence. These include migration,
which generates physical displacement, abandonment of territory, and
changes in modes of production and reproduction (material, social, and sym-
bolic). We must also take in account the poverty and exclusion produced by
the disproportionate impact of capitalism on indigenous and peasant territo-
ries. Two elements that generate the conditions for external actors to pene-
trate and undertake resource exploitation in an already affected and
impoverished territory are the cultural dispossession of territorially rooted
relationships and knowledge (the dilution of which allows for the “concrete”
dispossession of goods and resources) and the conversion of the inhabitants
46  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

of the territory into “active” agents of their dispossession. The research car-
ried out in Cherán reveals more than a mere conflict between outsider “bad
guys” and Cheranenses seeking to stop the illegal logging of communal for-
ests. Illegal logging has been established practice in the community for sev-
eral decades and has increased since the co-opting of local people by criminal
networks involved in global markets and supported by genuine “economies
of violence” (Maldonado, 2017) that reproduce themselves and are a facet of
“criminal capitalism” as described by Estrada and Moreno (2008).

Methodology

I have studied processes of conflict resolution and justice practices in differ-

ent indigenous regions of Mexico for over 10 years (Gasparello, 2005; 2007;
2018). Given the increase in criminal violence, militarization, paramilitariza-
tion, and extractive pressure in these territories, I have sought to understand
what tools indigenous peoples use to face these manifestations of violence and
whether organization and autonomy based on collective participation can rep-
resent effective responses. The case of Cherán, territorially and socially tra-
versed by multiple forms of violence, was emblematic. It allowed me to study
the possibilities and limits of a process of peace formation from below as well
as from different social and cultural structures.
Initially, my research sought to answer two questions: What are the differ-
ent types of violence against which the Cherán movement developed? What
did the Cheranenses do to stop that violence and transform the conflict? I
initially devoted myself to the systematization of newspaper information
related to the development of the conflict and to the study of the literature
produced between 1990 and 2016 on the social, cultural, economic, and polit-
ical reality of the Purépecha Plateau from a historical perspective. Official
data on demographics and crime rates helped explain the violence in both the
national and the state context.
Ethnographic field research evidenced the centrality of the structural dimen-
sion of violence: manifestations such as the looting of the forest and natural
commons, criminal violence, and the deterioration of the political and local-
government system have been clearly determined by a model of neoliberal
accumulation based on exploitation (of labor power, nature, cultural heritage,
etc.) and exclusion on class, gender, and ethnic biases. It was the observed real-
ity that led to my third research question, which relates communal responses
to violence to its structural dimension: Are there elements of community orga-
nization that seek to influence the structural violence produced in local territo-
ries by the global model of capitalist accumulation?
The primary sources of my ethnographic work, carried out during lengthy
stays in Cherán, consisted of informal conversations in daily coexistence with
many Cheranenses and 26 structured and recorded interviews. These are col-
lective interviews with all the councils that make up the communal govern-
ment of Cherán, relatives of the deceased and disappeared before and during
the 2011 uprising, local teachers and school administrators, and people selected
for their specific knowledge (doctors, psychologists, academics, businesspeo-
ple) or leadership.
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  47

Conflict and Violence in Cherán

San Francisco Cherán is a locality of 14,245 inhabitants (INEGI, 2010) in the

heart of the Michoacán Plateau, a mountainous area originally covered by
extensive coniferous forests and inhabited mainly by Purépecha people. To
understand the organizational process it has undergone in the past decade, we
must identify some of the social tensions that characterize the region.
Despite Cheran’s being a rural area, primary-sector activities (agriculture
and forestry) occupy only 35 percent of the population (Ayuntamiento
Constitucional de Cherán, 2016). Trade is an important source of income for
another 35 percent of its inhabitants, and it is estimated that another 20 percent
depend on remittances sent by migrant relatives, which have changed the
working habits of those who remain behind (mostly women and older adults)
and may therefore make heavy and unprofitable work in the fields unneces-
sary. Migration, which dates back to the 1920s, has attained such magnitude
that, according to local authorities, almost a third of Cherán’s population lives
“on the other side”; this practice has changed forms of production and repro-
duction and communal ways of life and is accompanied by singular and diverse
cultural practices.
The Purépecha culture was strongly affected by the integrationist policies
initiated in the 1940s, and in Cherán this has veiled cultural manifestations
such as forms of government, language, dress, or religious practices. However,
“indigenousness” is a resource that has gained great power in Mexico since the
1990s, and it is therefore used in Cherán as an effective instrument in the legal
struggle to change the government structure. In order to strengthen intracom-
munity ties as a tool for cohesion in the face of violence, the current communal
government promotes the reconstitution of a shared indigenous identity
through social and cultural programs.
The Purépecha Plateau has been targeted by important economic inter-
ests. The abandonment of fields due to emigration has nurtured land grab-
bing on the part of entrepreneurs in avocado production, the “green gold”
that grows ideally in a cold, dry climate. This crop has increased by 1,000
percent on the plateau in the past 40 years (García, 2016; Greenpeace, n.d.).
Because of their high value in international markets, the production and
marketing of avocados are part of a criminal economy that demands pay-
ments from farmers for each cultivated hectare, sown plant, and sold kilo
(Martínez and Padgett, 2013). Day laborers employed in harvesting end up
involved in a mechanism of criminal and violent accumulation because
“they are no longer free workers; they pay their fees so as to get some work”
(Joaquín, comunero,1 quoted in Carrasco, 2015: 84).
The plateau borders the Zamoran Bajío, where the agroindustrial produc-
tion of berries for export flourishes. This activity has spread rapidly to the
Purépecha region and has led to the exploitation of indigenous labor and
large flows of transnational capital. Another agroindustrial product, the lem-
ons of the Tierra Caliente region, is linked to logging on the plateau, where
lumber is used to manufacture packing boxes for lemons and avocados. Both
regions register a strong presence of criminal groups dedicated to the extor-
tion of businesses and landowners.
48  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

To the south of Tierra Caliente is the port of Lázaro Cárdenas, one of the most
important in the country and the main destination for shipments of metham-
phetamine ingredients mainly from China; the finished product is manufac-
tured in hidden laboratories in the mountains of Michoacán. Crystal meth is
Mexico’s most lucrative export to the United States. The powerful cartels that
developed in Michoacán at the beginning of the twenty-first century (La Familia
and Los Caballeros Templarios) increased production and turned the traffick-
ing of synthetic drugs into their main activity. This empire is now under the
control of the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel (UnoTV, 2017; Velázquez, 2015).
There is a variegated network of strictly illegal economic activities (drug
trafficking and illegal logging) and legal ones driven by illegal methods (terri-
torial dispossession for agroindustrial use) and of human rights violations
(labor exploitation) made possible by extensive corruption in the political sys-
tem. This clearly expresses the link between “criminal capitalism” (Estrada and
Moreno, 2008) and the violence that simultaneously allows for capitalist accu-
mulation and is produced by it. Lederach’s (2009) analytical model evidences
the fact that conflict in Cherán is made up of at least three interconnected
aspects that have degenerated into violence: the presence of organized crime,
the control of communal territory and forest resources, and political represen-
tation and the municipal government.

Organized Crime

The presence of criminal organizations is the most recent aspect of local con-
flict and has caused substantial direct violence, claiming at least 22 lives in
Cherán: since 2009, 16 community members have been killed and 6 disap-
peared. Since 2006 the group led by Mauricio Cuitláhuac (El Güero), originally
linked to the La Familia cartel and, since 2008, to Los Caballeros Templarios,
has controlled the illegal economy in this area and the Cañada de los Once
Pueblos. The illegal economy was at first articulated around the production
and trafficking of synthetic drugs. The rugged mountains of the plateau still
conceal “kitchens,” improvised laboratories for the production of synthetic
drugs, that are periodically dismantled by the authorities (Excelsior, February
25, 2012; Primeraplana Noticias, November 5, 2016). Another aspect was the clan-
destine criminal and large-scale felling of the pines of the communal territory
of Cherán. The timber was purchased by sawmills and “clean” furniture facto-
ries in large cities such as Monterrey and Guadalajara and by the packing
houses of agricultural products that manufactured boxes.
While the criminal organizations did not always participate directly in eco-
nomic lawful and illicit activities, they often took advantage of them or con-
trolled them via violent protection and extortion. Those who were engaged in
illegal logging (talamontes) were not part of a criminal group but rather local
people who received protection and bought weapons from those who con-
trolled the territory. In turn, locals paid a fee for the right to exploit that terri-
tory. As of 2010, El Güero’s group began “extorting businesses; then they took
several comuneros, comuneras, and businesspeople, let some go free and disap-
peared others. These were kidnappings for money,” says Trinidad, a professor
(interview, Cherán, 2016). For criminal business, the forest and the people
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  49

were equally exploitable resources. From 2008 to 2012, because of insecurity

and the numerous homicides of peasants, ranchers, and resin collectors, pro-
ductive activities in the countryside declined. Gradually, the celebration of
communal feasts, which exposed large numbers of people in public and open
spaces, also ceased.
The effects of criminal violence were apparent in a kind of communal paral-
ysis (CIAS, 2016). Fear caused defensive reactions—according to María (inter-
view, Cherán, 2016), “We neighbors didn’t talk much anymore”—and there
was a powerful sense of humiliation: “They came and looted the stores, we
couldn’t even look at them, or we would just stay in some corner. That was
impotence, not fear,” says Enedino, a member of the Main Council (interview,
Cherán, 2016). This situation recalls Taussig’s (1984) notion of the culture of
terror, which expresses the power of narratives of violence as a tool for domina-
tion, reaffirming submission (lowering of the head, hiding, not going out) and
immobility (impotence).

Control of Territory and Exploitation of Forest Resources

The control of territory and forest resources is related to a more structural

realm, although it is closely connected with the previous matter in that the
dynamics of inequality and dispossession in the use of common resources gave
rise to the development of violent economies and sociabilities. Mexico has two
regimes of landownership, the private and the collective. The latter is, in turn,
divided into ejidal and communal modes, and the communal is the most com-
mon in indigenous regions. In rural areas where collective property prevails,
the political/administrative territorial division overlaps with the agrarian one,
and the municipal authorities are accompanied by the representatives or com-
missioners in charge of territorial control, the management of communal
resources, and the resolution of agrarian conflicts. In Cherán, landownership is
communal; this implies the legal recognition of an ancestral settlement in the
territory, a factor that explains the deep territorial roots of the population and
the forceful territorial defense measures adopted by the community.
Cherán’s territory covers 21,170 hectares, of which more than 75 percent is
forest; here agriculture and use of the forest for timber and other resources
(resin, livestock, plant and mushroom gathering) have historically been the
population’s main activities. Intensive forest exploitation, recently denounced
as an example of Purépecha territorial dispossession, is not a novelty: resin
extraction dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century, and Michoacán
is still Mexico’s main producer (SEMARNAT, 2012 and 2013). Deforestation of
the Plateau by foreign companies began during the second half of the nine-
teenth century because of railroad construction (Pérez, 2016). Fifty percent of
the forest cover has been lost over the past 50 years (Martínez, 2008). The incor-
poration of the Plateau’s economic and social space into the networks of the
capitalist system has meant an acceleration of extraction.
The disarticulation of the peasant system, which intensified at that time
because of programs linked to the Green Revolution, made possible a pro-
ductive reterritorialization based on avocado monoculture and forest exploi-
tation. This increased during the 1980s, when, as Rosalio (interview, Cherán,
50  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

2016) put it, “They bombarded us with professional tools: chainsaws and
trucks.” Many farmers bought these using remittances sent by migrant rela-
tives. Thus began the rise of small, mostly illegal family sawmills (Velázquez
Guerrero, 2013) nurtured by corruption among the communal-property rep-
resentatives (Espín, 1986). For at least 30 years (1980–2010), the private sale
of timber from communal forests was an “easier” source of income than the
sale of corn, wheat, or oats harvested in the area. In 1993 the estimated vol-
ume of clandestine timber extracted from the Purépecha Plateau was 800,000
cubic meters compared with the authorized 30,000 cubic meters (Carrasco,
2015: 66; Márquez, 2006).
Criminal felling (unlike the clandestine logging controlled by criminal orga-
nizations with influence in the area and the means for larger-scale extraction)
increased in 2008 because of the collusion of the municipal authorities, accom-
plices or victims of criminal extractivism, reaching up to 200 trucks loaded with
logs a day. Between 2006 and 2012, 9,069 hectares were deforested in the munic-
ipality of Cherán, 71 percent of the existing forest (España and Champo, 2016:
141). Loggers would spray the ground with fuel and burn the places where
there were no more trees, because when lands are affected by fires the land use
changes from forestry to commercial exploitation. In other municipalities
(Zacapu and, to a greater extent, Uruapan) where land use changed after fires,
avocado orchards were established. The cutting of timber is therefore clearly
linked to the commercial cultivation of avocados, which is currently banned in
the communal territory of Cherán because of the excessive use of water and
agrochemicals that this crop requires when grown in massive quantities
(Consejo de Procuración, 2016).
Water is scarce in all of the Plateau, and there are few springs. One of the
triggers to the popular reaction to criminal logging was the fact that it was tak-
ing place near La Cofradía, the town’s main water source. This aspect of the
conflict encompasses a structural dimension of violence related to the domi-
nant pattern of multidimensional dispossession on behalf of accumulation
(Harvey, 2004; Rodríguez, 2017). It entails both the use of timber and the imple-
mentation of extensive monocultures and exploitation of water resources and
peasant labor. The conflict lies in the historical tension between the use of the
forest and the fields and the criminal exploitation linked to “accumulation for
dispossession” (Rodríguez, 2017). Although the conflict regarding the use of
land and communal resources is old, the connection between extractive inter-
ests and the direct violence of organized crime determined the organized reac-
tion against dispossession.

Control of Political Representation and Administration of Public

Resources

A third source of conflict involves the legitimization of the dispossession of

common goods. Political corruption strengthens criminal economies and vio-
lent actors, and this was fundamental to the 2011 movement’s rejection of polit-
ical parties and the legal actions taken to implement a new system of government
based on usos y costumbres.2 From the Neo-Cardenist movement of 1988 that
propelled changes in local political power until 2008, the Partido de la
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  51

Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution—PRD) had

maintained control of the municipal government. According to Juan, a profes-
sor, “Then power began to corrupt those who are in elected posts, until the time
came when people were no longer happy with the PRD, which is when the
Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party—PRI)
won with Roberto Bautista [2008]” (interview, Cherán, 2016). Corruption is
fundamental to the understanding of the conflict. The economic gains provided
by the corrupt government (either by diverting funds or by being co-opted by
organized crime) led to clashes even within the same party, as was the case with
the PRD the year it lost the presidency. According to Ulrike, a Cherán researcher,
“there is a tradition of ‘bad guys’ who don’t necessarily work with crime but
are corrupt, who have networks among communities, public officials, and
international companies. This historically enabled the existence of illegal saw-
mills. Sometimes the police or comuneros would raid them, but they would
resurface” (interview, Cherán, 2016). Subsequently, the endemic corruption of
the authorities allowed for the arrival of criminal groups that ended up control-
ling the authorities with both perks and threats.
The situation deteriorated in 2008, when the PRD lost the municipal elec-
tions to the PRI. During the first two months of Bautista’s administration, the
municipal police took responsibility for two murders, leading to a social cli-
mate of rejection that was seized upon by a PRD-linked faction led by Leopoldo
Juárez Urbina. It began an open protest in the Cherán main plaza that was
maintained until 2009, when it forced the president to leave the Municipal
Palace. The assassination of Juárez, who had publicly denounced the links
between the PRI government and organized crime, worsened the conflict and
opened the way for intimidation. Thus effective corruption or the possibility of
it under the party system of government and the risk of violence when politics
was in the hands of antagonistic groups paved the way for a council-based
government.

The “Bad Guys” and Structural Violence

The transformation of activities linked to production and social reproduc-

tion in Cherán was linked to a change in land use and the organization of urban
space that led to obvious inequality between the center and the periphery. The
tension between the “urban” and the “rural” had an exclusionary space for
those who did not become city dwellers but did not want to be peasants and
were not receptive to discourses advocating the reconstruction of indigenous
collective identity. In contrast to the prosperous downtown businesses, the
houses on the town’s edges are still made of wood or adobe and located in the
ravines and often lack basic services (Figure 1).
These settlements house the 28 percent of the population classified by the
Ministry of Social Development as living “in extreme poverty” (SEDESOL,
2010). The backward conditions are even more evident in Rancho Casmiro
Leco, also known as El Ceresito. With 600 inhabitants, it is the most isolated
town in the municipality. It was established around the resin extraction busi-
ness, and many of its inhabitants, lacking work opportunities, became loggers
and were co-opted by El Güero’s criminal gang.
52  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Figure 1. Barrio 4 (left) and downtown Cherán (right).

This process is similar to one that took place in the highlands of Chiapas,
where paramilitary groups responsible for cruel massacres proliferated during
the 1990s. According to Aubry and Inda (1997),

Agrarian inertia combined with demographic growth does not result in land
or work or even nonagricultural jobs for young people who are old enough to
be ejido beneficiaries. . . . Forced to live as delinquents, they not only lacked
means of subsistence but also had no reason to attend assemblies and were
therefore excluded from ejido decisions, becoming pariahs. First conclusion:
these criminals are a product of the system and extant economic, agrarian, and
labor options. Suddenly, “paramilitarization” offered them both [economic]
solutions and prestige [given the weapons they carry].

The problem regarding the usufruct of communal land in Cherán is evident

when we consider that the comuneros registered in the census amounted to
only 2,100 and less than half of them were still living. However, I have already
emphasized that agriculture is no longer a priority for much of the population,
especially the youth, partly because of the cancellation of federal agricultural
subsidies that began in the late 1980s and the negative effects the North
American Free Trade Agreement has had on this sector since 1994. According
to several interviewees, “clandestine logging is the only alternative to migra-
tion.” In 1986, Espín (1986: 199) was already claiming that clandestine timber
was “embedded in the circle of poverty.”
The “bad guys” mirror the part of society that became the path toward exclu-
sion, factionalism, and “legal” corruption. Loggers embody the structural con-
tradiction between the system of peasant reproduction and communal land
tenure and the global market that propels all forms of logging. Far from “crim-
inalizing poverty,” the need to expose the structural roots of violence and
exclusion as the main motor behind co-optation by criminal networks also
points to the urgent need to establish institutional responsibility for multidi-
mensional corruption, along with the lack of autonomous development pro-
grams and redistributive policies.
The environmental narrative of Cherán shows the direct violence of dispos-
session as linked to deforestation but veils the structural violence of inequality,
the resolution of which implies an organizational effort that, in 2017, had only
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  53

begun to show results. The challenge is evident: building sustainable economic

alternatives at the local level as a basis for the positive transformation of the
conflict and the containment of violence linked to the criminal economy.

Community Responses to Violence

Since 2008, groups of villagers have attempted various strategies to stop

land grabbing, including digging ditches across roads to prevent truck traffic.
Increasing popular organization has amplified criminal group violence, lead-
ing to threats, kidnappings, and the torture of several people (Ruiz, 2015).
Faced with collusion between local government and criminal interests,
comuneros denounced this situation to the state government, but their com-
plaints went unanswered. Eventually communal anger managed to overcome
political divisions and the distrust produced by terror. The sense of belonging
and being rooted in a land historically controlled communally may have been
the main driver of this belated but effective defense. The event known as “the
uprising,” which began on April 15, 2011, was the moment when Cheranenses
managed to overcome their sense of impotence and stand up to the hired guns
and the loggers. Josefina, a 60-year-old housewife and resistance member who
was among the initiators of the “movement,” described it as follows (interview,
Cherán, 2016):

On Friday, they started ringing the bells of the Calvario church at 5:30 in the
morning, and soon after came the firecrackers. We were ready with stones and
sticks to wait for these people. At 8:00 in the morning we stopped the first truck
[loaded with timber] and stopped five [loggers]. We went to stop another
truck, and then the police of the municipal president came to rescue the people
we had [the criminals being held]. And then they took out big weapons. . . . It
was worth it. The community was waiting for something to happen, some-
thing to be done so the bad guys would leave.

The confrontation and the following months were marked by direct vio-
lence, and reprisals on the part of the armed group claimed the lives of several
comuneros. For several months no commercial shipments were allowed in and
activities in Cherán were suspended, which caused a powerful economic
imbalance. The economic support of the migrant clubs in Illinois, California,
and North Carolina was significant.
In the context of open violence and uncertainty, solidarity developed among
the neighbors on the block, something that interviewees highlight as the move-
ment’s first achievement. Erandi, a lawyer, said, “All of us who lived there but
hardly knew each other began to interact by the bonfires” (interview, Cherán,
2016). According to Isabel, a psychologist, “There was a time when we ran out
of food in the town, so everyone would get what they had at home and share it”
(interview, Cherán, 2016). The reconstruction of interpersonal relationships
allowed for the institution or reconstitution of communal structures of delibera-
tion and government (bonfires, assemblies) and of territorial control and secu-
rity. It was from this organizational substratum that actions directed toward the
transformation of the conflict developed. These actions were community responses
to violence in that they discursively, politically, and concretely mobilized bonds
54  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

of trust and solidarity linked to the sharing of experiences and territory. They
included the individual and collective actions that MacGinty (2014) calls “every-
day peace,” practices that seek to avoid or minimize conflict and promote social
cohesion, and were part of a broader process of “peace formation” (Richmond,
2013). This expression marks a distinction from the institutionalized dynamics
of peacebuilding in referring to processes that arise from local agency and
knowledge and articulate national and international actions with community
and kinship networks.
Positive conflict transformation (Galtung, 1998) has three dimensions: recon-
struction (aimed at direct violence), reconciliation (meant to restore relations
between the parties), and resolution (of structural contradictions). Communal
responses to violence in Cherán were a substantial step forward in the process
of reconstruction.

Conflict Linked to Political Representation: Communal Participation

The response in the case of political representation was the transformation

of the electoral system and the structure of the local government. After a legal
process in November 2011, the indigenous people of Cherán were able to
appoint their authorities according to their usos y costumbres: the party system
of local politics disappeared, and a council structure was promoted in its stead.
Cherán currently has a capillary structure for discussion and decisions that
guides and controls the Communal Government. The uprising led to the crea-
tion of 170 Bonfires (parankuas)—guard posts and meeting points at main street
junctions. Each of its four districts has a neighborhood assembly in which gov-
ernmental proposals advanced by the Major Council are discussed. Members
of the Assembly of bonfire representatives report to the delegates to the district
coordinating council, which is made up of eight councils (Youth, Local
Administration, Civil Affairs, Honor and Justice, Social and Cultural Programs,
Neighborhood Coordination, Communal Goods, Women) and the 12-member
Major Council. Members of the councils are chosen by the neighborhood
assemblies in public elections. This complex structure of government disperses
power and expands opportunities for communal participation: from mere par-
ticipation to membership in a bonfire to holding an official post, people have
many possibilities for inclusion in the public sphere. The mechanism of assem-
bly discussion reduces the risk of arbitrariness and corruption on the part of the
representative authorities.
I use the term “participation” with a certain caution, because this word, in
conjunction with the adjective “citizen,” has become popular in political dis-
courses that seek to compensate for the failings of the neoliberal democratic
model. In the Cherán context, participation is defined as communal: it harks
back to forms of indigenous government and appointment systems that persist
although they are in constant transformation. Participation in these activities is
understood as a service to the community; it does not presuppose specialized
knowledge of politics or administration, and its rotating nature means that all
inhabitants are included in collective responsibilities. In a society in transition
like that of Cherán, the impulse toward participation recovers a communal
sense that integrates it into complex structures of representation and public
management while giving value to the knowledge of young local professionals.
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  55

Figure 2. The Community Watch.

The positive transformation of the conflict linked to political representation

has given the government stability, but the disappearance of the party system
does not mean that militants are absent. The empowerment of assemblies
includes and resizes the disruptive power of factions. Josefina, who was part of
the first Community Goods Council (2012–2015), said: “Let them in [to the
structure]. Let’s see how they react and reflect inside. We are here to see how
they behave” (interview, Cherán, 2016).

Conflict Linked to Organized Crime: Communal Security

One of the central demands of the Cherán uprising was increased security.
From the very first months following the April 2011 mobilization, a Community
Watch—a security corps made up of 60 men and women from the locality
appointed by the bonfire assemblies—was organized (Figure 2).
The Watch immediately replaced the municipal police; two years later (2013),
the state Attorney General’s Office based in Cherán was also closed down
because of the lack of results in the investigation of the murder of seven
comuneros and accusations of collusion with criminal networks. Currently, the
Justice Procurement and Mediation Council performs its functions while seri-
ous crimes are referred to the Public Ministry Agency in Zamora. The Watch
patrols the urban center and the roads, and members are stationed at the bar-
ricades and guard posts established on the two main accessways to Cherán on
the Zamora-Uruapan highway. In 2016, a Volunteer Watch was appointed to
patrol the area every Saturday after 12 p.m., involving the residents of every
neighborhood in security tasks.
56  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

An analysis of the conflict details the violation of the rights to life, freedom, and
security, the right to hold individual and collective property, and the right to rest
and the enjoyment of free time. Communal security, according to all interviewees,
has been the movement’s main tool for the defense of these rights. Signs of peace
include a drastic decline, starting in 2013 (the year in which the communal gov-
ernment was consolidated) of high-impact crimes (murder, kidnapping, and
enforced disappearance), the beginning of reforestation and the recovery of agri-
cultural work, the collective use of public space for parties and children’s leisure
activities, and the development of commercial and recreational activities on the
streets at night. After 11 p.m., Juan explains, “the Watch might run into you and
tell you to ‘get back home, or we’ll pick you up.’ Back then, we did not know who
was going to pick you up and where they were going to take you, and what your
state would be if you later showed up” (interview, Cherán, 2016).
Communal security allows for constant citizen control over the members of
the watch, who are known and recognized by everyone. Likewise, security is
not just the product of the Community Watch but is collectively constructed by
the vigilance of all inhabitants and their willingness to help each other and by
increasing community participation and coordination between citizens and the
authorities, among other factors.

Conflict Linked to the Control of Territory and Resources:

Protection and Reforestation

The Communal Goods Council, a collegial body that replaced the commis-
sioner, “continues to follow the mandate issued by the community: ‘the recon-
stitution of our territory,’ carrying out activities related to the restoration of our
forests such as reforestation, soil works, creating firebreaks, protecting springs”
(Gobierno Comunal, 2016). These activities, which receive support from gov-
ernmental bodies such as the National Forestry Commission, represent the
main concrete action toward the care of the communal territory; to date, 2,500–
3,000 hectares, approximately a third of the territory devastated between 2006
and 2012, have been reforested
During a long journey through communal territory, Luis, a farmer and for-
mer migrant who is a member of the Communal Goods Council, showed me a
field planted with corn in the locality of Rancho Pacua and explained that
“parts that were abandoned due to migration to the United States [in the 1970s]
are nowadays being sown again, with oats and corn. We already see people in
action, up and down, looking for their cattle, clearing their land. There is
already a visible change” (interview, Cherán, 2016). This process has been
favored by increased security in the fields and the woods. At the same time, the
uprising has led to collective reflection on the use of communal resources and
revitalized a positive appreciation of peasant identity and rural activities.

Uncertain Steps Toward Reconciliation

As far as reconciliation is concerned, the wounds in the social fabric created

by violence, both before and after the uprising, must be healed through a process
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  57

that addresses the fact that many of the violent actors are local residents. Irineo,
a member of the Justice Procurement and Mediation Council, explains the dis-
tinctions that Cheranense common sense has applied to the “bad guys”: “Some
did it consciously, others found themselves involved, others joined [the crimi-
nals] because they were deceived, and others because they had no income”
(interview, Cherán, 2016). According to Juan, the families of those who were
involved with organized crime “were not excluded; some of them currently
participate in the activities, in the assemblies. People know where they are and
who they are. We’re all watching them. . . . Our families are so extensive that
everyone is related and that is why there cannot be a complete rupture” (inter-
view, Cherán, 2016).
Justice and conflict resolution carried out by the Justice Procurement and
Mediation Council are central to the reconciliation process. The council is
composed of eight people nominated by the bonfire assemblies and appointed
by the neighborhood assemblies. Its work is divided into four areas: criminal,
familial, civil, and civil protection and roads. According to Rubén, who is in
charge of the civil area, “mediation involves speaking to people’s consciences,
and they are invited to understand; those who have committed an error are
told to accept it publicly and commit to not doing it again. Our system is not
punitive because, for starters, we do not even have a formal jail” (interview,
Cherán, 2016).
The council deals with nonserious crimes such as “drunkenness, aggression,
disturbance of public order, possession of mild narcotics” (Consejo de
Procuración, 2012). The penalties include 24–32 hours in a cell and several days
of community work or small fines. Community work entails “cleaning of pub-
lic areas or avenues; maintaining the sports unit and the barricades [check-
points at the two main entrances into town]—this so that the watch can observe
their behavior. When they have finished, a certificate of compliance is issued,”
explains Juanita, a psychologist and head of the familial area (interview,
Cherán, 2016). As in other experiences of indigenous justice (Gasparello, 2018),
this is a restorative practice that privileges conciliation over punishment.
Community ties play a preponderant role in both the punishment and the rein-
corporation of those who have acknowledged their mistakes.
The council is particularly sensitive with regard to managing conflict
linked to criminal logging. I have already mentioned that the common nar-
rative between the authorities and comuneros establishes a difference
between “bad guys” and the majority of Cheranenses. However, almost all
interviewees acknowledge that this particular crime is rooted in exclusion
and inequality: “It is understood that generating resources is quite difficult,
and many people were looking for economic means to survive; many peo-
ple were on the other side, and it was because of work issues,” said Irineo,
in charge of the criminal area (interview, Cherán, 2016). According to Rubén
“the Ceresito people were initially employed to cut timber; then they sold
them weapons and trucks and they began to cut more, but the bosses
charged them for the right to log” (interview, Cherán, 2016). In this context,
the council employs a flexible approach in reprimanding logging: “We seek
conciliation. If they reoffend, then they are definitely against the commu-
nity” (Irineo, interview, Cherán, 2016). An understanding of the structural
58  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

nature of violence guides and gives meaning to the new system of media-
tion and justice that is being built in Cherán.
The members of the council, who are at the forefront of the daily peace for-
mation process, have expressed the urgent need to include the inhabitants of El
Ceresito in the public policies of Cherán while promoting viable economic
alternatives for this population as a key element for conflict transformation.
Regarding the social context of those who live in El Ceresito, Irineo commented:
“We all know the conditions in which the people there live or survive. We have
marginalized them, and that is why the reconciliation process has been slow”
(interview, Cherán, 2016).

Communal Enterprises and the Search

for Sustainable Alternatives

The protection of territory and the reconstruction of communal bonds are

perforce related to the valorization of the territory itself (reforestation), the
improvement of the quality of life (public works and services that take advan-
tage of common goods), and economic activities based on the sustainable use
of territory via various communal enterprises. These actions are part of the
resolution of the structural conditions underlying the conflict (Galtung, 1998).
In 2016, around 200 people were employed in reforestation and another 120 in
the communal nursery. Both activities depend on government subsidies
granted by the National Forestry Commission and therefore are not self-sus-
taining. However, the transparent administration of public programs for the
actual benefit of the population (such as job creation) is perceived by
Cheranenses as a great advance of the communal government.
The other communal enterprises are a resin-production enterprise that in
2018 included about 150 producers and a communal sawmill that mainly deals
in downed or diseased timber (Gobierno Comunal, 2017) and employs 20
workers. Both projects are incipient, since forested areas with commercial
potential are currently scarce. Along with reforestation for conservation, the
Communal Goods Council is promoting commercial forest plantations (for
timber or resin) with funds from a private initiative (Ejido Verde A.C.) that
employs around 200 workers.
The Zero Trash program, begun in 2016 with the support of the recycling
company Ciclo de Vida, separates waste and undertakes differentiated collec-
tion, aiming to create a cooperative dedicated to recycling and compost pro-
duction. In 2017, the Nana Echeri Recycling Center had 10 workers. This
program speaks of an ability to address the challenges of urbanization and the
consequent production of waste, articulating the need for sustainable manage-
ment with the construction of economic alternatives. The same rationale under-
lies the communal company Agua Purificada Kukundicata. Faced with the
inadequacy of a water system that employs wells, the communal government
used government and civil association funds to build a rainwater collector that
uses the crater of a small volcano, Kukundicata, with a capacity of 20,000 cubic
meters. The water is distributed via aqueduct, and some of it is purified and
packaged for sale in jugs and bottles.
 Gasparello / Communal Responses to Violence In Mexico  59

Conclusions

An analysis of the Cherán conflict allows us to address the structural nature

of the violence and its roots in social inequality. At the same time, tensions
linked to migration, urbanization, and organized crime penetration constitute
the cultural and symbolic space in which discourses and violent practices are
strengthened. The inequality produced by these processes deepens the condi-
tions and effects of the material and cultural dispossession of those who live in
spaces dominated by “economies of violence.” In this context, the process of
social reconstruction in Cherán has led to a wide range of responses to violence
and actions for the transformation of the conflict. Like the interconnected
dimensions of violence (Galtung, 2003), peace formation has various aspects: it
unites the reconstruction of security and territorial control structures with the
promotion of cultural and recreational activities that endorse coexistence and
the strengthening of norms and practices of mediation and penalties that
respond to the direction of assemblies.
The strengthening of a territorialized collective identity—that is, one
anchored to a territory that is inhabited in symbolic, historical, and produc-
tive terms—is a powerful tool that enables the generation of protection
mechanisms internal to the society to stop the dispossession of natural com-
mon goods. In this sense, the drive toward sustainable forestry and agricul-
tural production is an important signal of the “reconstitution of the territory”
(the motto of the communal government) and its strengthening as a space
that is lived in, signified, and appropriated both productively and cultur-
ally.
This “peace formation from below” (Canals and Celigueta, 2013;
Richmond, 2013) is not entirely replicable across contexts, but there are at
least two elements that could be applied in other conflict scenarios: the
strengthening of local networks of trust and the incentive of collective par-
ticipation in decision making and the choice of reconciliation rather than
punishment in the area of justice, which facilitates the positive resolution of
conflicts with structural roots.
The fact that neighboring municipalities such as Nahuatzen and Urapicho
have sought to reproduce the model of municipal government and commu-
nal security points to the need to expand areas of communal control by creat-
ing “safe regions”; replicability is generated from attempts to adapt examples
to other contexts. Initiatives such as the communal enterprises show an
incipient interest in the construction of economic alternatives for the local
population. These actions, however, have not yet matured enough to con-
front the problems of exclusion and structural violence that affect the inhab-
itants of Cherán and the entire Plateau. The analysis presented here, along
with the acknowledgment of progress in relation to the reconstruction of the
social fabric and the surrounding environment, shows that, in order to
achieve decisive resolution of its structural causes, the transformation of
conflict in Cherán will require the construction of an inclusive form of local
economic sustainability that will establish the foundations of a peace process
based on social justice.
60  LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Notes

1. Translator’s note: In Mexico, a comunero/a is someone with property rights within a legally
acknowledged agrarian community, including use of the land and its produce and profits and the
ability to transfer those rights.
2. Translator’s note: usos y costumbres (uses and customs) is a legal term for indigenous custom-
ary law in Latin America that harks back to Spanish colonial times; it implies the recognition of
local forms of rulership, self-governance, and justice with varying degrees of formality.

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