Indigenous Chol Maya villagers from Nueva Esperanza hamlet, Tila municipality, blocked a main road through the highlands of Mexico's Chiapas state Nov. 9 to demand justice four months after the murder and disappearance of a community leader. Followers of indigenous organization Laklumal Ixim [5]-Norte Selva said Toni Reynaldo Gutiérrez López was detained by municipal police and paramilitary gunmen in late July—to be found days later dead and with signs of torture on a local ranch. There have been no arrests in the case. Laklumal Ixim in a statement named as responsible a local political boss, Limber Gregorio Gutiérrez Gómez, who they said is a leader of the right-wing paramilitary group Paz y Justicia [6].
The murder followed contested municipal elections in Tila, in which the Mexican Green-Ecological Party (PVEM [7]) took power in a vote assailed as tainted by Laklumal Ixim. The PVEM took 59 of the state's 122 municipalities in the race, in an unlikely alliance [8] with elements of the old political machine of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI [9]) that had ruled Chiapas for decades before being ousted in an upsurge from the left in 2000. Gov. Manuel Velasco Coello [10], in office since 2012, is also from the PVEM. Now reduced to a PRI satellite party [11], the PVEM is seen by Laklumal Ixim as a facade to re-consolidate the old machine under a new name. The organization's statement charged that the PVEM is "generating a climate of terror in Tila." (Chiapas Paralelo [12], Nov. 9; NoticiasNet.mx [13], Excelsior [14], July 27)
