Clash of local officials, vigilantes leaves 11 dead
LA CONCEPCION, Mexico — The brothers leading the nearly 15-year fight against a Mexico dam project have been hailed as environmental heroes, but after a confused gunfight between their vigilante forces and other townsfolk, they are now in jail facing homicide charges.
Some residents of the communities around the proposed La Parota dam near Acapulco say the Suastegui brothers have been oppressors who used their “community police” vigilante group to attack elected officials who didn’t agree with them.
Those disputes erupted into a Jan. 7 confrontation between villagers in which eight were killed — six villagers and two from the anti-dam police force — followed by a state police raid in which in which three more anti-dam vigilantes died. It is the latest in a series of conflicts that have erupted across parts of southern Mexico where townsfolk, usually fed up with violence and corrupt police, have created their own “community police” forces with no allegiance — and often outright hostility — to elected authorities.
La Concepcion is one of numerous small communities in the mountains east of Acapulco that have been split by federal plans for the vast hydroelectric project. All or parts of two dozen villages would disappear under the reservoir’s waters. But some communities downstream, which won’t be flooded, support the dam, which would bring jobs to the impoverished region.
“The towns are divided by politics because the government divides the people,” said Leandro Elacio, coordinator of the group whose name roughly translates as the Council of Communities Opposed to the La Parota Dam. Elacio claims government aid programs are given to dam supporters and not opponents, and that gravel companies offer local households as little as 1,000 pesos per year for the right to scoop out the bed of the river to use in construction, damaging the environment.
Since 2003, the anti-dam group founded by Vicente and Marco Antonio Suastegui has managed to block the hydroelectric project on the Papagayo, successfully arguing in court that the government had meddled with local assemblies in the 47 towns and hamlets in the watershed that have to vote to approve the project.
The Suasteguis and some of the group’s other leaders have been arrested several times over protests against the project, and assert they were tortured.
Three years ago, the opponents took a step further: They formed a community police force of almost 100 men, claiming their authority from show-of-hands community assemblies that they say has more validity than official elections.