THE SOUND OF SILENCE
-REUTERS- Commission
In the remote region of the Montañas Baja in Guerrero, southern Mexico, lives a part of the Nahuas indigenous communities. A people of weavers living from handicrafts and agriculture, in villages with dusty streets and tin roofs.
16 Nahuas communities scattered between two municipalities: Chilapa and José Joaquín de Herrera, where territorial conflicts between drug traffickers have been raging since the 1980s. To protect themselves, these communities had to rely on their own community police: armed bodies, legal since 2011, under the law of "habits and customs". The turning point came in February 2020, when several communities threatened to arm their children in order to attract the attention of the media, which until then had been unresponsive to their repeated calls for help.A notable desperation that, beyond underlining the limits of traditional journalism, illustrates precarious living conditions. Insecurity has caused the closure of health centers, the desertion of schools and daily confrontations that have caused a chain of extermination against the Nahua communities, which in the last five years have counted 48 homicides, all of them unpunished. Entire families displaced by violence and ghost towns where the wind breeze merges with silence. A reflection of the social tear, trapped in drug trafficking, institutional corruption and social impotence. Like the weeds that are pulled from the earth, these communities persist in surviving despite the aridity in which they have been abandoned.
