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By Chris Covert
A member of Javier Sicilia's Movment for Peace Justce and Dignity was shot to death Friday in Santa Maria Ostula in MIchoacan, according to Mexican news accounts.
Leiva Pedro Dominguez was part of the indigenous movement in the Aquila municipality that recovered and maintained by community policing 300,000 hectares of land in 2009 which had been previously granted other landowners in La Placita.
Pedro Dominguez was expected to be at the Castle of Chapultepec in Mexico City along with approximately 30 other peace activists who are to meet with president Felipe Calderon Hinojosa to discuss drug and other violence plaguing Mexico.
Like Calderon Hinojosa, Pedro Dominguez was from Michoacan.
Reports are Pedro Dominguez was shot by members of a paramilitary group allegedly hired by deposed landowners. The violence in the area between landowners and the indigenous community has been ongoing since at least 1971, but only recently flared up after the lands were recovered in July of 2009.
Pedro Dominguez's organization in Santa Maria Ostula in a statement on the murder said that since 2009, 27 individuals have been murdered and four were missing.
Pedro Dominguez was a Nahuatl, one of several Indian tribes directly descended from the Aztecs. His group was also one of the few indigenous groups with the legal right to carry firearms to defend and police their land, including AK-47 assault rifles. In Mexico, the average Mexican is not permitted a weapon larger than .22 caliber, or a shotgun, and it cannot be carried outside of a domicile. Often Mexican security forces will open fire on anyone carrying large caliber weapons.
The conflict between Pedro Dominguez's indigenous community and paramilitary groups in the area sound very much like events that proceeded the Chiapas Conflict of 1994, where small groups from both sides carried firearms. Also, indigenous groups supported or allied to the Ejercito Zapatista Liberacion Nacional (EZLN) attempted to create autonomous municipalities not under the direct control of Chiapas state and the national governments. Many, though not all, of those autonomous municipalities were dismantled after it was determined that EZLN acted illegally and without sanction by the Chiapas state chamber of deputies, as agreed in the peace accords that ended the hot part of the Chiapas conflict.
The difference is that the paramilitary groups in Chiapas during the 1990s were allegedly armed by elements within the Mexican Army. Those groups were armed to provide a counter to the already armed and hostile EZLN groups and their supporters. In the case of Michoacan, however, paramilitary groups are apparently armed and controlled by private interests.
In both cases, you will find Javier Sicilia. In 1994, Sicilia was part of the Catholic church team that helped negotiate a ceasefire between EZLN armed guerillas and the Mexican Army. Sicilia's activities within the Basic Ecclesiatical Communities movement and with individuals in the Mexican Catholic Church associated with Liberation Theology has forever imprinted a communist ideology over both conflicts.
The Chiapas conflict was a reopening of old wounds between Mexico and indigenous groups seeking to maintain community lands, and between the Mexican political establishment in the form of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and communist groups throughout Mexico during the Dirty War 1968-1982.