Global Exchange Mexico News
August 2025
Global Exchange’s Peace and Justice program with Mexico has been deeply rooted since 1994 and is growing again now in 2025. As part of our mission of cross-border collaboration, we are sending this English-language newsletter that features selected articles, action alerts, video reports, analysis, social movement news, and volunteer opportunities. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome. Feel free to contact us at: Mexico@globalexchange.org
This issue focuses on Chiapas, specifically addressing recent attacks on the leadership of the Fray Bartolomé Human Rights Center.
The Fray Bartolomé Human Rights Center is Once Again Under Attack
Update and Action Request
Last July 22, in the middle of the night, the home of Dora Roblero, the newly appointed Director of the Fray Bartolomé Human Rights Center (Frayba) in San Cristóbal de las Casas, was targeted and invaded.
This chilling attack on the new leader of the state’s pre-eminent human rights group is anything but an isolated incident. The break-in comes in the context of surging violence and intimidation from criminal and paramilitary actors whose activities Frayba has been documenting for over a decade.
Please sign this petition to Mexico’s President, Cabinet officers, and heads of agencies in charge of security policy, urging them to respond to the deepening threats and violence facing the communities and human rights defenders of Chiapas.
Please also feel free to share and distribute this petition. It is being circulated by our longtime partners, the National Network of Civil Human Rights Organizations, “All Rights for All,” a coalition of 87 human rights organizations from 23 Mexican states.
What is Frayba? How we know them and why we respect their work
Some background on Frayba and the Zapatista uprising
Pattern of unchecked abuse and government indifference; why we support Frayba today
What is Frayba? How we know them and why we respect their work
The vital work of Frayba began in 1989 when the center was founded by the late Catholic Bishop Don Samuel Ruíz, whose parishioners affectionately called him “Don Sam.” Deeply influenced by the theory and practice of Liberation Theology, Don Samuel professed a revolutionary interpretation of scripture that redefined the essence of Christian life as one of alliance and solidarity with the poor and powerless.
Don Samuel’s approach during his forty years as Bishop (1959–1999) was to actively listen and engage with the realities of his parishioners’ lives.
Under Don Samuel’s leadership in the late 1980s, Frayba began investigating local problems and defending people and communities in need. They helped people falsely jailed, tortured, and even murdered, often for political reasons. They helped Indigenous communities fighting incursions and violent land seizures.
Starting in the 1960s, Don Samuel had insisted that his priests learn local Indigenous languages, and he trained hundreds of Indigenous deacons and catechists who spent years crisscrossing remote canyons, towns, and villages throughout the Lacandon rainforest. Unlike countless generations of their colonial predecessors, these “religious workers” came not to proselytize, but to listen—listen to understand and serve the needs and aspirations of the communities they were part of. This approach, which he called “evangelization by the poor,” led to deep and previously unknown levels of trust and community engagement. As word of these visionary practices spread, “Don Sam” attracted some of Mexico’s brightest minds and most intelligent hearts to the Diocese of San Cristóbal, the leadership of Frayba, and a small but growing contingent of civil society organizations dedicated to community empowerment and transformational development.
This tireless organizing over decades played an important role in fomenting and giving both resilience and a safe communications channel to communities that would later form the living backbone of what the world would come to know as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).
Zapatista Uprising
The EZLN is the group that successfully organized something of a military miracle on January 1, 1994, when thousands of lightly armed, bandana-wearing rural Indigenous men and women swept down overnight—many on foot—from their homes in the highlands. They swiftly captured four municipal capitals and by the end of New Year’s Day were in control of an area approximately the size of El Salvador. That was just the beginning.
The shocked reaction to the uprising was dramatically compounded by its timing on the day the bitterly controversial NAFTA accords went into effect. NAFTA, designed by and for “North American elites,” was negotiated between Mexico’s (Harvard-educated) president, Salinas de Gortari, and American (Yale-educated) President George H.W. Bush and subsequently embraced, ratified, and signed by President (“I feel your pain,” but also Yale-educated) Bill Clinton.
Now, the uprising by some of Mexico’s most marginalized people put their whole bipartisan “neo-liberal” project at risk of being exposed as the dangerous fraud—“It will improve the quality of life in all three member countries”—that it always was.
Then came the communiqués—and a mysterious, powerful, and even lyrical voice from the Lacandon Forest in Mexico’s extreme southeast corner that framed the uprising as an Indigenous-led “rebellion against extinction” and called on the rest of Mexico to join them in rebelling.
The response across Mexico was electric and immediate. Even as the Mexican Army closed in on and began slaughtering retreating rebels, people talked, organized, and on January 12 more than 100,000 Mexicans poured into Mexico City’s Zócalo to demand an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations.
Behind the scenes, Don Samuel Ruíz and his brilliant team sought to convince the authorities to avert the kind of full-scale genocide committed in neighboring Guatemala just a decade before. Don Samuel was painfully aware of what happened just across the border when Guatemalan military rulers unleashed the army on Indigenous rebels, killing and displacing hundreds of thousands of people and—just between 1981 and 1983—obliterating 440 Mayan villages.
In the face of growing public pressure across Mexico and around the world, the Salinas de Gortari government declared a ceasefire and halted its deadly advance into rebel communities. But the conflict was by no means over. The Army kept its troops in forward positions—establishing a multi-year siege that controlled access to Indigenous communities—rebel, “Zapatista,” and even unaligned—forcing residents to routinely submit to inspection at military checkpoints where they could be harassed, summarily detained, or worse.
In the tumultuous months and years that followed, millions of Mexicans mobilized, demonstrated, and sent donations to support the bold and articulate rebels in Chiapas. The rebel Zapatista communities invited like-minded organizers from around Mexico to a series of huge gatherings in their remote territories—where big ideas and dreams for Mexico’s liberation were hatched and took flight throughout the 1990s. But the Army didn’t go away, and in response, Frayba organized a remarkably ambitious, successful, and sustained non-violent community defense project that maintained a permanent (rotating) presence of volunteer “peace campers” in nearly 50 remote communities 24/7/365 for eight years. Their job was to accompany the communities and report on any abuses from Army occupiers. Maintaining the training and flow of thousands of these willing volunteers was a massive undertaking that was supported by organizations across Mexico and beyond.
In its early years, Global Exchange’s Mexico Program played a humble support role in this vast collective accompaniment—by recruiting, preparing, and housing a small but steady flow of Peace Camp volunteers throughout all the years of military occupation.
Pattern of Unchecked Abuse and Government Indifference; Why We Support Frayba Now
A lot has changed in Mexico in the last 25 years, in ways big and small, but some things have remained the same—such as the Fray Bartolomé Human Rights Center’s defense of threatened Indigenous communities. That is why Frayba was attacked in the 1990s and why it is under attack now. But the context is different.
Today’s attacks no longer come at the hands of the occupying Federal Army and the irregular (PRI-affiliated) paramilitary organizations aligned with them. Rather, most of the 16,755 cases of recent displacement documented by Frayba have been at the hands of competing crime syndicates such as the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, as well as a proliferation of smaller criminal actors trying to gain traction in these rural zones. Adding to this toxic volatility are new paramilitary actors such as the Pakales, who have intimidated dissidents and broken up protests.
It is extremely important that the government take these concerns seriously. They need to respond, investigate, and act on behalf of these communities that are unable to defend themselves against criminals with sophisticated arms. For years, Global Exchange has heard from human rights activists across Mexico who are deeply concerned that the government is not giving sufficient attention to threats like the ones still growing in Chiapas.
Thanks, and until next time.
P.S. The struggle for human rights in Chiapas is part of a broader movement.
Frayba’s call for protection is urgent, but it is not isolated. The struggle for peace and justice in Cherán and Ostula is also ongoing—and deeply connected to a larger system of militarization, state violence, and resource extraction that crosses borders.
Add your name in support of Cherán’s demands for safety, peace, and justice as outlined in their public statements. Sign here.
Support legislation like the ARMAS Act to stop the flow of U.S. weapons fueling violence in places like Chiapas, Cherán, and Ostula.
Take action for Frayba today—sign the petition demanding protection for Dora Roblero and the Frayba team.
Frayba Petition.
Together, these actions are part of one fight: for dignity, self-determination, and justice across the Americas.
