Who ordered the murder of Father Marcelo Pérez in San Cristóbal de las Casas? Nobody knows. Federal and state authorities have not even outlined the lines of investigation into the crime that has shaken the Catholic Church, human rights defenders, activists and the people of Chiapas. Who ordered him killed? They already have an alleged perpetrator, detained in the same city of Chiapas days after executing him, but it is strange that, after such a high-impact attack, the person responsible remained in the same city where he committed it. The possibility of him being a scapegoat to relieve social pressure cannot be ruled out.
Pérez knew for a long time that his life was in danger. “In Simojovel they put a price on my life,” he declared in August to The Herald of Chiapasreferring without specifying the confrontation he had with The Herrerasa criminal group that became empowered when its founder, Austreberto Herrera, was appointed municipal judge in Pantheló – a neighboring municipality of Simojovel – in 2002, and grew to confront community police and defenders of indigenous communities – like the father – during the government of his protégé Manuel Velasco, today a green senator. Was it them?
“If it wasn’t them, it is easy to accommodate the version, (because) The Herreras They had him publicly threatened,” said a deep expert on the reality of Chiapas. “But, unfortunately, in each region of Chiapas there are already criminal ecosystems where the actors only change their name and affiliation, although the mode of operation is the same.” Pérez was executed by two people who were traveling on a motorcycle, in that city where the group of The Scootersbecause they use the scooter as part of their modus operandi and benefit from indigenous economies. The Scooters They are tsotsiles, like the priest, which would not be an impediment to murdering him. Is this another line of research?
The murder of the priest Pérez once again placed Chiapas at the center of the hell of national violence, but the decomposition in the entity began in 2021. In September of that year it was published in this space that Chiapas was the last state in civil war. The Zetas They had already consolidated their human trafficking business after taking a little of the territory from the Sinaloa Carteland at that moment the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The correlation of forces had changed because the potential value of the land had risen from practically nothing to billions of pesos.
The narcoeconomic revolution was detonated with the construction of the Mayan Train, which by changing the status quo that existed for decades, criminal stability was altered and the fight between criminal organizations became atomized, which changed the daily environment in the state. The construction of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec accelerated the control that a criminal organization that responded to the interests of the Sinaloa Cartel. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had not calculated that this would happen, but it happened and he never had a strategy to prevent it.
In June of last year, one of the consequences of that abandonment was aired here, while López Obrador said that there was tranquility and peace, which was a blatant lie. A war was already being fought there and its epicenter was Frontera Comalapa, adjacent to Guatemala, which for years was controlled by the Sinaloa Cartelwhere Joaquín’s faction El Chapo Guzmán dominated everything, in both countries, paying 50 thousand dollars a month to Guatemalan generals to provide protection to the planes that unloaded cocaine on the clandestine runways in Huehuetenango and Quiché, to cross them into Mexico. Guzmán was already operating on the southern border when The Zetas They began to move to that area, diversifying their criminal business.
The Zetas They had been severely hit in the drug trafficking part of Felipe Calderón’s government, but they kept their other illicit businesses buoyant, building training bases with the support of former Guatemalan soldiers who had belonged to the Kaibiles. Some of these centers were uncovered when work on the Mayan Train began, and it was one of the reasons why the president involved the Army in the construction. He Sinaloa Cartelwith El Chapo Guzmán, was losing power, especially when his operator, Gilberto Rivera Amarillas, Uncle Gilwas arrested in 2016 at the La Aurora airport in Guatemala, when he was about to take a plane to Mexico City, and extradited a year later to the United States.
His capture caused a change in the correlation of criminal forces on the southern Mexican border, which began to emerge with the capture of Guatemalan Colonel Otto Fernando Godoy Cordón, who in April 2023 detailed the same in the Court of the Southern District of California. modus operandi that I had El Chapo Guzmán, but now with him Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The emergence of this criminal group in that region in the last third of Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year term caused an escalation of violence for control of the territory, which was seen shortly after in Chiapas when confronting, first, Los Chapitossons of Guzmán, and then to Ramón Gilberto Rivera, son of Unclewho allied with the Guatemalans.
The participation of Guatemalans in the command structure is recent. A report from the Secretariat of National Defense found in the Macaw Leaks by The Sinaloa Sun showed that until June 2022 four cells of the Sinaloa Cartel They operated in the state. What it did not show was the collision with the Jalisco New Generation Cartelnor the way in which the old associates of the Sinaloans in Chiapas were weaving criminal relations with the Guatemalan drug traffickers, who are beginning to take an important role in the Chiapas war.
By then, the situation in Chiapas was highly volatile and uncertain about what would come next. López Obrador is gone and Governor Rutilio Escandón lives in hiding. Chiapas did not deserve such frivolous or incompetent leaders as López Obrador and Escandón, who left a waste.
