Their only information came from social media platforms that quickly filled with threatening messages. Eventually, soldiers showed up and some 5,000 people fled Tila with what they could carry. It was one of the largest displacements of people in southern Mexico since the 1990s and just the latest example of the security challenges facing Mexico’s next president. Soldiers patrols past closed stores in Tila, Chiapas state, Mexico, Tuesday, June 18, 2024.
Leonel Jiménez, a teacher, spent three days holed up with his mother and 12-year-old brother. Each day he called 911 and received the same answer: They were handling it. Three weeks later they are camped out in a nearby town afraid to return.
For more than 60 years, Tila has been divided between the Indigenous peasant farmers who work the surrounding communal lands and those who live in the town and hold title to their property. The farmers believe the town is also communal land, which is the root of the conflict. Some of the townspeople who fled Tila contend it is the farmers who brought the cartels into the town’s long-running disputes, accusing them of allying with the Jalisco New Generation cartel. The farmers deny having any ties to the cartel.
Elisabeth Vázquez, who runs a small grocery in front of the church and did not flee, has noted a change. “They shoot all over, classes are inconsistent they come and go on motorcycles and we don’t know who they are,” she said. The messages warned that all of Tila was going to burn and audio recordings circulated talking about the powerful .50-caliber guns they would use and saying Jalisco New Generation was joining the fight.