Religious Violence Continues in Chiapas: The Other Rights

Demonstrators in San Cristobal de las Casas entered their seventh day of protest for expulsions and violence done to them by local Catholics in Chiapas since mid January and earlier. Some families have been expelled from communities while others have been detained for failure to participate in Catholic community festivals.

Such violence is not new - we've seen Catholic on Protestant expulsions for twenty years now as well as pro-government Protestant on Catholic violence since the Zapatista revolution started. I once read in well regarded book by an even better regarded author of Mexican history that the local and the sacred had been replaced by the national and the liberal. Horse hockey. Evengelicals and Protestants in Chiapas, Luz del Mundo in Guadalajara, Nueva Jerusalen in Michoacan ... all of these show that the intersection of the sacred and the citizen are alive and well in Mexico and not relegated to a distant mid-nineteenth century past.

At any rate, while Mexico City frets about the rights of gays to marry, fundamental right of association and property are violated every day in the mas alla for religious reasons without much attention from DF. Most certainly the local and the sacred have not been relegated to the dustbin of Mexican history.