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  • Indigenous peoples in Mexico

    Indigenous peoples in Mexico

    There are 16,933,283 indigenous persons in Mexico, representing 15.1 per cent of the total Mexicans. Mexico has adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and is a declared pluricultural nation since 1992. Yet, the country’s indigenous population are still facing a number of challenges.

The Indigenous World 2024: Mexico

Written on . Posted in Mexico

According to data from the 2020 Population and Housing Census, produced by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), 23.2 million people aged three years and older self-identify as Indigenous in Mexico, equivalent to 19.4% of the country's total population; 51.4% (11.9 million) of these are women and 48.6% (11.3 million) are men. Of the 23.2 million people who self-identify as Indigenous, 7.1 million (30.8%) speak an Indigenous language and 16.1 million (69.2%) do not. The 2020 Census also recorded that 6.1% of the country’s total population speaks one of the country’s 68 native languages, which can be broken down into at least 364 variants.

This is equivalent to 7.36 million people, being 51.4% (3.78 million) women, and 48.6% (3.58 million) men. Of these, 6.4 million also speak Spanish and 866,000 do not, with just four of the country's 32 states (Oaxaca, Chiapas, Yucatán and Guerrero) accounting for 50.5% of the total number of Indigenous language speakers. In addition, the 2020 Census indicated that 11.8 million Mexicans live in Indigenous households, 5.7 million of them men and 6.1 million women, with an average of 4.1 people per household.[1]

This article is part of the 38th edition of The Indigenous World, a yearly overview produced by IWGIA that serves to document and report on the developments Indigenous Peoples have experienced. The photo above is of an Indigenous man harvesting quinoa in Sunimarka, Peru. This photo was taken by Pablo Lasansky, and is the cover of The Indigenous World 2024 where this article is featured. Find The Indigenous World 2024 in full here

Indigenous Peoples and territorial rights in Mexico

Mexico's Indigenous Peoples have inhabited territories of great biological and cultural diversity since time immemorial, characterized by the presence of mineral, biological, water, forest and wind resources, to name but a few. Over this time, they have accumulated knowledge about their natural environment, including on the care, conservation and use of natural resources for survival,[2] enabling us to refer to an “ecology of knowledge”. In this sense, beyond the capitalist perspective in which nature becomes valuable only when it is exploited,[3] nature is of value in and of itself to Indigenous Peoples, for what it represents for life. It also has a symbolic cultural value due to the collective representations on the territory, in terms of the symbols that these peoples have configured over time and expressed through cultural practices, myths, links with nature, collective memory, ethnic belonging, language, symbolic boundaries, sacred places and place names, among other aspects.[4]

There is therefore a need to recognize the epistemic diversity of the natural environment given that Indigenous Peoples’ worldviews and knowledge of nature are relevant and go beyond the global capitalist system.[5] In August 2023, the President of Mexico signed a decree to protect, preserve and safeguard the sacred sites and pilgrimage routes of the Wixárika, Náayeri, O'dam or Au'dam and Mexikan Indigenous Peoples (Table 1), as they have been threatened by the presence of transnational companies.

In fact, the territories occupied by Mexico's Indigenous Peoples have long suffered from an overexploitation of natural resources associated with the presence of transnational companies, including forestry companies, which has harmed its forested areas through an excessive felling of trees. Environmental damage has also been caused by the extraction of mineral resources on the part of large companies, such as those from Canada,[6] which act under a capitalist logic whereby the value of nature is created via its appropriation and exploitation for the purposes of capital production.[7] The cases of logging and mining in the Sierra Tarahumara of Chihuahua are two examples of this environmental damage.[8]

Table 1. Decree in favour of the sacred sites and pilgrimage routes of Indigenous Peoples (August 2023)[9]

Date

Indigenous peoples benefited

Legal instrument/other

Text

9 August

Wixárika, Náayeri, O'dam or Au'dam and Mexikan

Decree recognizing, protecting, preserving and safeguarding sacred places and sites and pilgrimage routes

“Indigenous Peoples establish links and relationships with their deities and ancestors through rituals and ceremonies, based on their religious beliefs and worldviews, and which represent cultural, historical, spiritual, architectural and other values intrinsic to their identities (...).”

“(...) sacred places may include one or more sacred sites”; and pilgrimage route are “the road or path along which Indigenous Peoples travel to access their sacred places and sites in order to carry out the ceremonies and rituals associated with them, and which have been established ancestrally.”

22 August

Wixárika, Náayeri, O'dam or Au'dam and Mexikan

Creation of the Presidential Commission

This will monitor compliance with the decree.

Another case is the Sierra Norte de Puebla, where Azamar Alonso[10] has identified hydrocarbon exploration, hydroelectric dams, mining and other extraction or energy generation processes, such as the Cuyoaco solar power plant. Notwithstanding the undoubted economic growth this generates, this growth is taking place under conditions of inequality for Indigenous Peoples, since “neither the benefits nor the burdens are shared equally; in this case the rural or Indigenous population that rents, sells or has its territories expropriated whenever there is natural wealth of some kind either receives no compensation or only [unjust] compensation”.[11]

Given the recurrent violations of the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their lands and territories, some Indigenous organizations are now focusing on their defence. Such organizations include the Tosepan Titaniske Cooperative Society, which involves the Nahua and Totonaca, as well as the communities of Cherán, Nuevo San Juan, Uruapan and Donaciano Ojeda, of the Purépecha and Mazahua peoples respectively.[12] The environmental leaders that are emerging in the context of these social movements have also been threatened and, in some cases, murdered because of their struggle for territory,[13] as a result of conflicts or clashes of interests over territory or the negative impacts on the environment and the consequences for local populations.[14]

Data from Global Witness[15] reveals that, of the more than 1,500 environmentalists and land defenders murdered in Latin America, one-third have occurred in Mexico as a result of conflicts, confrontations or executions carried out by the public security forces.[16] In the Sierra Norte de Puebla, there have thus been deaths among people who “were defending their territory and opposing these activities, most of whom were being harassed by public security agencies”.[17]

Indigenous territorial defence movements are on the rise as the rights of Indigenous Peoples are increasingly violated, as confirmed by the significant impacts recorded (Table 2) in Indigenous areas. This is despite the fact that national and international legal frameworks set out the right of the Indigenous population to take responsibility for and use their territories, as established in Article 32 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (Table 3).

Table 2. Significant impact standard and right to consultation

Thesis 2a. XXVII/2016 (10a.). A series of generic situations considered to have a significant impact on Indigenous groups have been identified, including, but not limited to, the following: 1) Loss of traditional territories and land; 2) Eviction from their lands; 3) Possible resettlement; 4) Depletion of resources necessary for physical and cultural subsistence; 5) Destruction and contamination of the traditional environment; 6) Social and community breakdown; and 7) Negative health and nutritional impacts, among others.[18]

Thesis 2a./J. 11/2023 (11a). Second Chamber. Right to prior consultation. The duty to carry this out is triggered by the mere possibility that a State decision may affect or have a direct or differentiated effect on Indigenous Peoples and communities, without the need to prove the damage and its significant impact.[19]

Table 3. UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) (Article 32)[20]

1. Indigenous peoples have the right to determine and develop priorities and strategies for the development or use of their lands or territories and other resources.

2. States shall consult and cooperate in good faith with the Indigenous Peoples concerned through their own representative institutions in order to obtain their free and informed consent prior to the approval of any project affecting their lands or territories and other resources, particularly in connection with the development, utilization or exploitation of mineral, water or other resources.

3. States shall provide effective mechanisms for just and fair redress for any such activities, and appropriate measures shall be taken to mitigate adverse environmental, economic, social, cultural or spiritual impact.[21]

In practice, however, the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their lands and territories are not respected; there is a prevailing overexploitation of natural resources in the country and this has resulted in environmental damage. Climate change and global warming  are the current results of a long history of exploiting nature and of the migrations and movements that go with it. Natural resources are also under threat and, consequently, so is humanity, and the responsibility for this deterioration falls on the transnational corporations and the hegemonic groups that support them[22] who, in addition, are violating the rights of future generations.[23]

In 2023, in response to this litany of damage, the World Bank proposed providing funding to train young Indigenous leaders to be able to face up to climate change. This initiative is being undertaken in coordination with the Indigenous Fund for Latin America and the Caribbean [Fondo Indígena de América Latina y el Caribe] and is a step in the right direction in terms of influencing Latin America’s environmental problems. Despite this action, however, other actions of greater import are still necessary to ensure that this problem can be reversed by preventing the dispossession and overexploitation of Indigenous Peoples’ territories and mitigating the damage generated by global and neoliberal development projects that only exacerbate the prevailing inequalities in Mexico.

One area of progress in halting these activities was the reform of the Mining Law in May 2023, which sets out measures to protect the territories of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples. The following table shows the articles of this legal instrument relevant to this population:

Table 4. Comprehensive reform of the Mining Law, 8 May 2023[24]

Article 6. In the case of lots located on the territories of Indigenous or Afro-Mexican peoples or communities, in order to grant a mining concession or assignment, the Ministry shall request that the competent authority carry out free, prior, informed, culturally appropriate and good faith consultations in order to obtain the consent of said peoples and communities, under the terms of the applicable regulations, and shall participate in said process within the scope of its powers. The consultation shall be carried out prior to the granting of the concession title and simultaneously with the process required for the environmental impact assessment, a consultation in which information from the social impact study will be provided.

Article 10. With the exception of lithium and other minerals declared as strategic by the State, under the terms of Articles 27 and 28 of the Constitution, the exploitation of the minerals or substances referred to in Article 4, as well as of the salt mines formed directly by marine waters from present-day seas, whether superficial or underground, natural or artificial, and of the salts and by-products thereof, may be carried out through mining concessions granted by the Ministry to ejidos and agrarian communities, Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples and the communities referred to in Article 2 recognized as such by the constitutions and laws of the Federal Entities, as well as to persons of Mexican nationality who can prove they have the technical, legal, economic and administrative capacity indicated in this law and in the applicable regulations.

Article 14. No concession may be granted for areas of land included in, located in or covered by:

IX. Protected natural areas;

Article 39. In the activities of exploration, exploitation, benefit and use of minerals or substances, the concession holders or assignees must preserve, restore and improve the environment, prevent and control the contamination of air, water, soil and subsoil, and respect the rights of Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities, in accordance with the provisions applicable to the matter.

Article 55.

II. Failure to execute or verify the works provided for by this law under the terms and conditions set forth therein and its regulations;

VII. Carrying out the works provided for by this law without prior authorization from the competent authorities as regards environmental, water, Indigenous or Afro-Mexican consultation or any other authorization, permit or concession required at the federal, local or municipal level.

This article concludes with the words of the representative of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico regarding forced displacement in Mexico due to loss of land and other property:

In addition to criminal prosecution of the violent perpetrators of forced internal displacement, housing, land and property restitution, and reparations for the underlying violations, are essential to achieving lasting solutions. Culturally relevant housing, land and property rights must be guaranteed that are adequate to the needs of internally displaced persons, particularly those belonging to Indigenous Peoples and communities. It should be recalled that international law recognizes the territorial rights of Indigenous Peoples, who face an aggravated situation due to displacement, as they have a special bond with the lands, territories and resources they have traditionally owned.[25]

 

 

Dr. Carolina Sánchez García. Director of the University Programme for the Study of Cultural Diversity and Interculturality.

 

This article is part of the 38th edition of The Indigenous World, a yearly overview produced by IWGIA that serves to document and report on the developments Indigenous Peoples have experienced. The photo above is of an Indigenous man harvesting quinoa in Sunimarka, Peru. This photo was taken by Pablo Lasansky, and is the cover of The Indigenous World 2024 where this article is featured. Find The Indigenous World 2024 in full here

 

Notes and references

[1] Press release INEGI No. 430/22. Estadísticas a propósito del Día Internacional de los Pueblos Indígenas. INEGI, 8 August 2022. https://www.inegi.org.mx/contenidos/saladeprensa/aproposito/2022/EAP_PueblosInd22.pdf

[2] Sánchez, Carolina. “La población indígena mexicana y los recursos hídricos, frente al cambio climático”. Revista de la Universidad de Salamanca.

[3] Corral, Pablo. “Ecologías decoloniales e historias ambientales mulatas, criollas, mestizas, créoles”, Class 6 of the Socioenvironmental Epistemologies course. Narratives for re-existences in the global south, given on 2 October 2023, (CLACSO, 2023). YouTube.

[4] Barabas Reyna, Alicia. Diálogos con el territorio. Simbolizaciones sobre el espacio en las culturas indígenas de México. Mexico: INAH, Vol. II, 2003.

[5] Castro Gómez, Santiago and Grosfoguel, Ramón. El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Siglo del Hombre Editores, 2007. http://observatorioedhemfoc.hospedagemdesites.ws/observatorio/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/El-giro-decolonial-1.pdf

[6] Sariego Rodríguez, José Luis. “De minas, mineros, territorios y protestas sociales en México: los nuevos retos de la globalización”. Cahiers des Amériques latines, 60-61 (2009). https://journals.openedition.org/cal/1435

[7] Corral, Pablo. “Ecologías decoloniales e historias ambientales mulatas, criollas, mestizas, créoles”, Class 6 of the Socioenvironmental Epistemologies course. Narratives for re-existences in the global south, given on 2 October 2023, (CLACSO, 2023). YouTube.

[8] Martínez Ramírez, María Isabel. “El otro del otro. Entre dos narrativas sobre la explotación forestal de la Sierra Tarahumara, Chihuahua, México”. Revista de El Colegio de San Luis, IX, No. 19 (2019): 125-150.

[9] Torres Cisneros, Gustavo. “Decreto que reconoce y protege los lugares sagrados de los Pueblos Wixárika, Náayeri, O’dam o Au’dam y Mexican”. México Indígena. Nueva época, 1, No. 1 (2023): 10-11. https://www.gob.mx/cms/uploads/attachment/file/857255/Revista-Mexico-Indigena-N-01-2023.pdf

[10] Azamar Alonso, Aleida. ”La fuerza del Estado mediante el extractivismo el mal llamado desarrollo: amenaza a las comunidades indígenas de Puebla”. Disputa por los bienes naturales: militarización y fuerzas armadas en México. coord. Aleida Azamar Alonso (CDMX: Autonomous Metropolitan University-Xochimilco and Terracota, 2023): 124. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373717648_Disputa_por_los_bienes_naturales_Militarizacion_y_fuerzas_armadas_en_Mexico

[11] Azamar Alonso, Aleida. ”La fuerza del Estado mediante el extractivismo y el mal llamado desarrollo: amenaza a las comunidades indígenas de Puebla. Disputa por los bienes naturales: militarización y fuerzas armadas en México, coord. Aleida Azamar Alonso (CDMX: Autonomous Metropolitan University-Xochimilco and Terracotta, 2023): 118.

[12] Consumo Sensible, “Cuatro comunidades indígenas que defienden los recursos naturales en México”. SUUM, Consumo Sensible, 10 September 2019. https://suum.mx/4-comunidades- indigenas-que-defienden-los-recursos-naturales-en-mexico/

[13] Mora, Mariana. “Asesinatos y violencia (neo)colonial contra líderes indígenas en defensa de su territorio en México. Dossier: Violencias contra líderes y lideresas defensores del territorio y el ambiente en América Latina”. LASA FORUM, 50 (2019): 26-30. https://forum.lasaweb.org/files/vol50-issue4/LASAForum-vol50-issue4.pdf

[14] Dichdji, Ayelen y Zarrilli, Adrián. “Grandes transformaciones materiales y narrativas decoloniales. Los conflictos ambientales en Suramérica (1990-2019)” Class 8 of the Socioenvironmental Epistemologies course. Narratives for re-existences in the global south, given on 2 October 2023, (CLACSO, 2023).

[15] Global Witness, “Siempre en pie”. Global Witness, 13 September 2023. https://www.globalwitness.org/es/standing-firm-es/

[16] Azamar Alonso, Aleida. ”La fuerza del Estado mediante el extractivismo el mal llamado desarrollo: amenaza a las comunidades indígenas de Puebla”. Disputa por los bienes naturales: militarización y fuerzas armadas en México, coord. Aleida Azamar Alonso (CDMX: Autonomous Metropolitan University-Xochimilco and Terracota, 2023): 115.

[17] Azamar Alonso, Aleida. ”La fuerza del Estado mediante el extractivismo el mal llamado desarrollo: amenaza a las comunidades indígenas de Puebla”. Disputa por los bienes naturales: militarización y fuerzas armadas en México, coord. Aleida Azamar Alonso (CDMX: Autonomous Metropolitan University-Xochimilco and Terracota, 2023): 114.

[18] United Nations. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). March 2008, Art.32.

[19] Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources. “El Derecho a la Consulta, previa, libre e informada en materia ambiental”. SEMARNAT, September 2023. https://dsiappsdev.semarnat.gob.mx/datos/portal/escazu/42._Consulta_Indigena_Escazu_26sep23.pdf, p.9

[20] United Nations. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). March 2008, Art.32.

[21] Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, “El Derecho a la Consulta, previa, libre e informada en materia ambiental”. SEMARNAT, September 2023.

[22] Molinero Guerbeau, Yoan and Avallone, Gennaro. “La ecología-mundo capitalista: dualismo naturaleza-humanidad, trabajo barato, colonias”. Class 11 of the Socioenvironmental Epistemologies course. Narratives for re-existences in the global south, given on 2 October 2023, (CLACSO, 2023).

[23] Dichdji, Ayelen y Zarrilli, Adrían. “Grandes transformaciones materiales y narrativas decoloniales. Los conflictos ambientales en Suramérica (1990-2019)” Class 8 of the Socioenvironmental Epistemologies course. Narratives for re-existences in the global south, given on 2 October 2023, (CLACSO, 2023).

[24] Official Gazette of the Federation, May 2023.

[25] ONU. “Conferencia magistral de Guillermo Fernández-Maldonado. ‘El desplazamiento forzado en México’”. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 16 January 2023. https://hchr.org.mx/discursos_cartas/conferencia-magistral-de-guillermo-fernandez-maldonado-el-desplazamiento-forzado-en-mexico/

Tags: Land rights, Business and Human Rights , Climate, Biodiversity

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