Entire communities in southern Mexico have been devastated by drug trafficking. For Indigenous populations, direct victims of this terror, this is nothing new. Between May 6 and 12, it was Tula’s turn, a Nahua town located in the municipality of Chilapa, in central Guerrero. With drones, rifles, and armored vehicles, the Los Ardillos criminal group set fire to houses and the surrounding mountains, forcing residents to flee for their lives.
Jesús Plácido Galindo, leader of the Indigenous and Popular Council of the State of Guerrero–Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ), denounced the actions of the Mexican Army, which had withdrawn from the area just as the attacks began. “It seems as if they are complicit,” he declared at the time. On July 17, Galindo was arrested at a police checkpoint while on his way to a meeting in Acapulco, to which he had been summoned by the Undersecretary of Development for Guerrero, Francisco Rodríguez Cisneros. He never arrived at the meeting.
He was charged with aggravated homicide and transferred to the Altiplano maximum-security prison in the municipality of Almoloya de Juárez, State of Mexico. This prison has housed some of Mexico’s most wanted drug traffickers, such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Rafael Caro Quintero, and Ovidio Guzmán López, to name just a few. His legal defense stated that he was accused of ordering the 2021 murder of José Pablo Bartolo Xanteco, the municipal commissioner of Xicotlán, another community in Chilapa de Álvarez, State of Mexico.
Jesús Plácido Galindo is 41 years old and, since January 2021—the same year as the alleged crime he is accused of—has been part of the Protection Mechanism for Human Rights Defenders. Lawyers from the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Center (CDHM) assert that the arrest of the leader of the CIPOG-EZ, one of the self-defense groups in Guerrero, is riddled with irregularities, as is the crime he is accused of.
“There are two testimonies from people who supposedly saw our colleague Jesús, along with others, participate in the criminal act [on October 30, 2021]. We offered evidence that makes these testimonies implausible; however, the judge did not take them into consideration. It is clear that this matter has political implications,” stated Aron Díaz Salazar, one of the center’s lawyers.
