Surviving

As local officials prohibit outsiders from visiting evangelicals in the hamlet – caciques surround arriving pastors and threaten them with jail time and fines – several church families walked more than two kilometers (1.2 miles) out of Los Pozos to talk with Compass in a pine tree-strewn ravine.

“We are asking the authorities that they reconnect the water, because the children are suffering,” the Tzotzil-speaking Santis said through an interpreter. “They’ve gotten sick from lack of bathing because there’s not much water, and they’ve also gotten sick because the water’s dirty – when you drop the bucket down, it stirs up the mud and dirties the water.”

Santis said she was raped by two traditionalist Catholics – Aldelfino Ton Peche and Alejandro Morales Mendez – on May 3, 2005 because she was a Christian. While her husband was out working, she said, they entered her home when she opened the door thinking winds were striking it.

“I was alone and began screaming, but nobody heard me or defended me, and these two men raped me on the floor of my house,” she said. “When this was over, I went to talk to the rural security agent here in the community to ask for help, but I didn’t find him because he was drunk.”

The local security agent’s wife told her to return in two days, Santis said. “So day after tomorrow came, and he didn’t pay me any attention, because he was – how shall I say, in agreement with the rapists. Because I am an evangelical, he defended the rapists.”

She filed a complaint with the state attorney general’s office, where it has sat unattended in an archive for nearly two years, she said.

Maria Elena Gomez Ton, a 27-year-old mother of four also allegedly raped by traditionalist Catholics, told Compass she walks a kilometer and a half three times a day for water. 

“To wash my clothes I have to go far to bring water from an arroyo, or if there’s puddles of water I go there to wash our clothes,” she said.

Evangelical leaders said Los Pozos rulers are diverting federal food aid of a program called SEDESOL from 21 children (up from 16 previously reported), including Gomez Ton’s four little ones ages 10 months, 4, 6 and 8.

“The authorities’ wives say we didn’t show up to collect the food assistance, but this is a lie,” Gomez Ton said. “When we went to pick it up, when the Los Pozos authorities were distributing this food, they told us that they didn’t want to give it to us, and that if we returned we would again not be given our turn. We went home with our children.”  

Cacique Collusion

Los Pozos belongs to the municipality of Huistan, which has its own set of caciques who traditionally have supported the local town bosses. Compass did not question Los Pozos authorities given the jail terms and/or fines they slap on visiting Christians, but Huistan Municipal President Manuel Alvarez Martinez did permit a brief interview.

Alvarez Martinez declined to explain to Compass why the pact to restore water and other services couldn’t be signed soon after the February 28 verbal agreement. Oddly, he said that “at no time” did any authorities threaten the evangelicals with expulsion, even as he noted that this issue was at the heart of the agreement.

“We had a talk with the state government at city hall, with the authorities of Los Pozos and the evangelicals, in which we arrived at an agreement that, for starters, there would be no expulsion,” Alvarez Martinez said. “The only thing lacking is the document. Both parties have to sign, and we the authorities will be present to witness this matter.”