Autonomy and the Forced Displacement of Indigenous Communities in Mexico

Written on 08 August 2025. Posted in News

BY RAMÓN MARTÍNEZ CORIA FOR INDIGENOUS DEBATES

The Mexican government has appropriated anti-neoliberal discourse while simultaneously intensifying militarisation across Indigenous territories. Despite the promotion of legal reforms concerning Indigenous rights, there remains a deliberate refusal to recognise territorial rights in the Constitution. Within this context, Indigenous Peoples are subjected to the advance of organised crime, dispossession, forced displacement, and the systematic violation of their rights. In the face of ethnocide, political negotiation to secure legal guarantees over their ancestral territories has become the cornerstone of Indigenous resistance.

After five centuries, we are living through a change of era in the global geopolitical order. The collapse of the colonial and imperialist hegemony of the Collective West is giving rise to a new multipolar configuration of international relations—economic, political, technological, military, and sociodemographic. Nation-states and their constitutionally sovereign systems have become, in practice, obstacles to the globalist interests of the transnational industrial complexes of the G7. This has led to a shift in their mechanisms of deterrence, intervention, and imposition—now restructured through military and financial means.

The hegemonic worldview embodied in the rhetoric of Protestant liberal democracy—which has monopolised the ethical narrative of universal human rights since 1948—has become increasingly implausible. Multilateral conventions and institutions tasked with arbitrating political and diplomatic relations among states have lost their legitimacy. This crisis was first exposed by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya; later by the Covid-19 pandemic; and now by their criminal silence in the face of the genocide of the Palestinian people perpetrated by Israel. The entire United Nations system, imposed by the victorious powers of the Second World War, is now equally discredited.

The change of regime in Mexico

In this context, the crisis of effectiveness and legitimacy affecting multilateral institutions is also reshaping the semantic and political relationship between states and their peoples. The alignment of constitutional systems with international standards is losing ground as a legal and political paradigm. International diplomatic pressure—whether against authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, or in response to the military interventions of dominant powers—has ceased to carry the symbolic and pragmatic weight it once did.

As a result, globalist, neoliberal, extractivist agendas have entered into open contradiction with sovereign and nationalist forms of state organisation. This tension is evident in matters of jurisdiction and governance: public security, territorial control, the management of strategic resources, and the monopoly on violence as a means of upholding the public interest over private interests. The pressing question is whether we are witnessing the emergence of a new mode of decolonisation—or not.

In Mexico, the 2018 presidential election triggered a paradigm shift at the federal level, allowing for a redistribution of politico-administrative power and, to some extent, of parliamentary influence. This shift displaced local elites who did not align themselves with the sovereigntist discourse of the elected president. By the end of 2024, the election of a new federal Executive from the same political party—alongside an overwhelming majority in both chambers of the National Congress—consolidated the change in regime.

Under the administrations of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, a populist discourse has taken root, positioning itself in opposition to the interventionist political and economic models institutionalised under the Bretton Woods system. However, this so-called “new regime” has overseen a marked escalation in the militarisation of civilian public institutions, while simultaneously discrediting and criminalising the work of civil society actors engaged in defending human rights.

Indigenous Peoples as Collective Subjects of Political and Territorial Rights

Since the Mexican government signed the ILO Convention 169 in 1990, and its ratification by the Senate in 1991, three constitutional reforms have been carried out to align national laws and institutions with these standards: in 1992, 2001 and 2024. Beyond the gradual shifts in parliamentary rhetoric, a new discursive formation has emerged among Indigenous Peoples and their communities around their specific rights—aimed at denouncing violations, demanding enforceability, and promoting dissemination in all their native languages.

While a progressive evolution in the national legal framework on Indigenous rights can be observed, the Mexican State continues to explicitly—and negligently—refuse to grant full constitutional recognition of Indigenous Peoples’ collective territorial rights. This omission is particularly serious given that territorial rights are a fundamental condition for the right to life, as established in the jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In this context, the right to self-determination with autonomy, and the principle of Free, Prior and Informed Consent, remain little more than rhetoric and propaganda.

With nearly 24 per cent of its 125 million inhabitants, Mexico has the largest absolute Indigenous population by self-identification in the Americas. This figure also represents a vast ethno-linguistic mega-diversity that remains deeply rooted in its biocultural territories. However, traditional communities and their territorial heritage find themselves at a crossroads of violence, dispossession, and the systematic violation of rights that threatens their very existence.

At the end of the 20th century, Mexico’s Indigenous population underwent a profound sociodemographic shift, triggering a large migratory diaspora to urban areas, agro-industrial zones, and the United States. Simultaneously, neoliberal extractivist economic policies have widespread violence across their territories, seen as vast reservoirs of strategic resources—hydrological, genetic, mineral and energy-related—constituting a multifactorial cause of their forced displacement.

The Impact of Mexican Indigenous Organisation

The political discourse surrounding Indigenous rights facilitated the emergence of a heterogeneous and unprecedented movement, connecting organisations and communities from all regions of the country. This movement expanded to encompass the broader continental Indigenous movement and catalysed new strategies for dialogic engagement with governments, the creation of cross-border networks, and even the formation of armed self-defence groups. Additionally, the use of digital technologies was strengthened to support coordination, advocacy, and the denunciation of rights violations before the Inter-American Human Rights System.

A new generation of leadership thus emerged, characterised by the widespread inclusion of women within organisational, representative, and authoritative structures. Despite resistance from legislators and officials across the political spectrum, political mobilisation has driven recurring changes in both secondary legislation—which regulates the Federal Constitution—and the state constitutions of the federative entities.

It is impossible to offer a simple account of the struggles for resistance against dispossession, political autonomy, and the recognition of these communities as part of the State’s jurisdiction. Among the most emblematic instances are the formation of the National Indigenous Congress (1993); the armed uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Chiapas (1994); the National Congress of Indigenous Women (1996); and the establishment of the Community Police of San Luis Acatlán alongside the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities in La Montaña de Guerrero (1995–1998).

Equally notable are the creation of the National Front of Indigenous Peoples Displaced by Dams, acknowledged by the Movement Against Dams in Brazil (1997); the Coordinator of Autonomous Organisations of the State of Chiapas (2000); the election of municipal authorities according to customary law in Cherán, Michoacán (2011); and the formation of self-defence groups in Chiapas and Michoacán (2015–2025).

Business Consortiums, Organised Crime and Forced Displacement

Alongside the development of autonomist movements, both public and private, legal and illegal forms of forced displacement due to territorial and biocultural dispossession have intensified. Industrial consortiums and organised crime, in their transnational dimension, act as de facto powers seeking control or co-optation of the State. Their success is therefore directly linked to the levels of corruption and impunity among public officials. In 2024, the Federal Executive ordered its senators to block the general law on forced displacement, which had been approved by the Chamber of Deputies in 2020 in line with international standards.

What is observed in Mexico and across Latin America is a constantly diversifying and deepening spectrum of private interests over Indigenous territories: massive extraction of mineral and energy resources; appropriation and control of water, wind and solar power; infrastructure megaprojects; real estate “developments”; agro-industries and intensive livestock production; biopiracy for cosmetics, processed foods, fertilisers and pharmaceuticals industries; high-impact or elite tourism exploitation; trafficking of drugs, weapons, migrants, archaeological pieces and endemic species.

Even more serious is that displacements caused by dispossession intersect with violence such as extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and involuntary recruitment. Without legal guarantees over their lands and heritage, communities are exposed to all forms of criminality, in a context where the Armed Forces are unable to ensure the integrity of the national territory. Likewise, the Police Forces lack the capacity to guarantee public security or the protection of individuals and communities.

In the Face of Ethnocide, Resistance

Over the past 30 years, civil society organisations and activist scholars have accompanied Indigenous communities displaced or at risk due to violence, insecurity, and human rights violations linked to resource extraction. In contrast, displacements caused by environmental disasters are generally addressed by Civil Protection institutions and do not involve territorial dispossession. We have been able to identify early warning indicators that make prevention possible—provided there is political will from the competent authorities.

Phenomenologically, there is a threshold within communities most deeply rooted in their biocultural knowledge and practices, where ancestral primary production methods persist and their connection to the territory guarantees food and energy autonomy—even under conditions of isolation and subsistence. When external agents with interests in water, biotic, mineral or energy resources arrive, this subtle fabric is structurally broken, causing productive displacement (involuntary resettlements due to infrastructure works and development projects) that disrupts the fundamental reproductive chains of community formation.

When households lose food and energy self-sufficiency, a gradual shift in consumption patterns is triggered, within a context where lack of income drives economic migration, especially among younger adults. Consequently, communities rapidly become impoverished, and their normative systems weaken, facilitating internal divisions that pave the way for de facto dispossession, which is later formalised legally. Ultimately, when communities are forcibly displaced, their ethnolinguistic ethos disappears within a single generation.

Community processes of resistance, defence, and organised struggle against ethnocide require strategic alliances with civil society defenders, social communicators, activist scholars, and multilateral non-governmental supporters. In the context of the violence prevailing in Mexico, political negotiation for legal guarantees over their territories is the cornerstone for preventing the extinction of traditional communities due to dispossession.

Ramón Martínez Coria is an anthropologist and sociologist (National School of Anthropology and History) and president of the organisation Forum for Sustainable Development. He advocates for the rights of Indigenous communities dispossessed and displaced from their territories. Contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Cover photo: Forum for Sustainable Development AC

Tags: Indigenous Debates