The Chamula Cartel and Its Most Sinister Business: the Sexual Exploitation of Tzotzil Women

The Chamula Cartel’s modus operandi is designed so that Tzotzil women continue to comply with its demands 

I am a witness to a rape. I cannot call it anything else: on the computer screen there is a girl who isn’t past 16 years old and who is crying against the attacks of a man who is three times her weight and, probably, her age.

It is an 18-minute and 36-second video titled “Rica indita bachillerato” (Sexy indigenous high school girl) and is part of an anthology, “Las mejores chamulitas 2024,” which is sold on a USB flash drive for 150 pesos in the vicinity of the Merposur Market in San Cristóbal de las Casas, 15 minutes by car from the neighboring town of San Juan Chamula –in the highlands of Chiapas–, where girls and boys are affectionately called chamulitas and chamulitos.

She has no escape: that beast abuses her on a mattress on the floor that has more stains than springs. On the left, a blue wall eaten away by humidity can be seen, and on the right, the rapist’s accomplice who films everything with trembling hands.

The cameraman takes care of the beast’s identity and films him only from behind; he films her from the front and in close-ups. The only part of the girl’s body covered is half of her face. From her eyes to her hair, a long black skirt covers her. At one point, the camera records a white and red shawl on the ground, thrown next to a flowery huipil and shoes. The clothing is typical of a young Tzotzil woman, an indigenous group located in central and northern Chiapas.

The sale of these videos is not visible, but it isn’t hidden either. All you have to do is ask the salesmen of pirated films to gain access to dozens of volumes of “ethnoporn,” the name that the academic community has given to this type of pornography – which is sexual exploitation of indigenous women. Sometimes, they promote the new volumes with degrading or repugnant titles. In other cases, the attraction is photos of young adults or minors. There are those who offer that these are consensual recordings and those who promise that they are forced, the only thing that remains is that these are women, poor and indigenous.

The buyers are men who aren’t only excited by the pain of others, but by the vulnerability of women and adolescents. It gives them pleasure that they have come to these dirty rooms and mattresses out of necessity, so they gladly pay to witness the punishment. They are all clients – whether they know it or not – of a violent criminal organization that monopolizes and monetizes with the sale of ethnoporn in the Mexican southeast: the Chamula Cartel, the first and only indigenous cartel in Mexico.

Chiapas was an untamed territory for the Gulf Cartel

​At some point between 1999 and 2000, the head of the Gulf Cartel, the fearsome Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, got it into his head that to become the most notable criminal in Mexico he had to control the two border states on both sides of the country: Tamaulipas in the northeast and Chiapas in the southwest. In this way, he would have the keys that open the doors to North America and Central America.

Tamaulipas was already a stronghold for Matamoros-born Cárdenas Guillén and his paramilitary guard Los Zetas, but Chiapas was an untamed territory. At the end of the 20th century, its border with Guatemala had turned it into an important state for trafficking and growing marijuana, but no criminal group controlled it completely.

Perhaps the Sinaloa Cartel had made a timid advance in Chiapas – which was established in 1993, when El Chapo Guzmán used the municipality of Ciudad Cuauhtémoc as a hiding place to flee to Guatemala, where he was apprehended for the first time – but the national and international attention attracted by the armed uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation the following year complicated the total domination of any cartel.

Cárdenas Guillén took advantage of that vacuum and sent Los Zetas to conquer the southern border. Characters like El Amarillo became famous for setting up with fire and blood in municipalities like Comitán and San Cristóbal de las Casas, where they opened and exploited new illegal businesses, in addition to drugs: fuel theft, trafficking of undocumented migrants, sexual exploitation and the incipient extortion of businesses. The gold mine rediscovered by the Tamaulipas native marked the return of the Sinaloans, who also wanted to take advantage of the state.

But Los Zetas, who believed themselves eternal, suffered important losses that would push them to a rapid extinction in just a decade. This instability caused the Zetas of the south to look for a new criminal refuge, offering themselves to the highest bidder as experts in inflicting the worst pains. A Sinaloa Cartel dissident took them in. 

With that top-level support, they went out to find their social base. It wouldn’t be difficult to find new recruits in the country’s poorest state. In the territory of the aggrieved, revenge is the law. And among those forgotten by the State, the guerrillas and the old chieftains found their people: the displaced, those who had nothing to lose.

Some were banished due to agrarian conflicts, others due to political disputes, but many more were religious displaced persons, that is, Tzotzils who grew up in families with indigenous worldviews, but who had recently become evangelicals, a Protestant movement that is gaining more and more followers in Chiapas. This new religion prevented them from participating in traditional ceremonies or paying ancestral tributes, which earned them expulsion from their communities of origin.

Exiled, they settled in the poor neighborhoods of northern San Cristóbal de las Casas and in the misery belts of San Juan Chamula. They had no land, community, roots, work or future… except the horizon offered by those old Zetas who spoke to them of an unstable and fleeting life, but with power and money.

And since there is nothing more pressing for an expelled person than to feel part of something, they agreed to join this new criminal family. Thus the Chamula Cartel was born.

The illicit businesses that support the first indigenous cartel

The Chamula Cartel is a rarity on the criminal map of Mexico. It preserves the indigenous pride of the south and mixes it with the narco culture of the north. They are made up of hallucinations—those euphoric on drugs, according to the Association of Spanish Language Academies—who speak Tzotzil, buchonas in huipils, and hitmen who have exchanged their pite-covered boots for leather sandals. Their idol is the Malverde narco saint who wears cotton pants.

In the Chiapas Highlands area, they are distinguished by a particular triad: a radio to communicate with their companions, a bandolier over their chest to keep their weapon, and a motorcycle to flee at full speed, although they don’t need it because the municipal police watch their steps and protect them from the Army and the Navy.

Except for these characteristics, the troops that make up the Chamula Cartel are very similar to those of the rest of the armed forces in Mexico: they are young, violent, consumed by crack—the cheapest and most addictive form of cocaine—and with delusions of power. Cannon fodder for the true leaders of organized crime.

The federal government didn’t recognize the existence of the first indigenous cartel until 2021, when at a press conference led by then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, former Undersecretary of Public Security, Ricardo Mejía, gave details of the murder of Gregorio Pérez, an indigenous prosecutor from Chiapas. “The mastermind is under arrest,” said the official. “He is a member of a criminal group known as the Chamula Cartel.”

An academic living in San Cristóbal de las Casas whose name I cannot mention, says in an interview that “life is worth very little to them and, therefore, it’s worth little to everyone. Here in Chamula, San Cristóbal, Comitán, they kill you for five thousand pesos. And you don’t have to be involved in shady things. They kill you because you didn’t pay the right of way, because you looked at the neighbor in a bad way, because you didn’t buy them a beer.” They traffic drugs, kidnap migrants, resell contraband merchandise, but extortion is their economic livelihood. They charge, says my source, even for breathing.

The money is collected from market vendors, street vendors, families who get a new car, students who graduate. And in a region where religious fervor is everything, Candles, incense and even sacred books are subject to a criminal tax. But one business stands out among all. It’s not the most lucrative, but it is the most strategic: ethnoporn. The cartel’s pornography.

The trap that young Tzotzils fall into in exchange for drugs

For “ethnoporn” to work, says my source, you need vulnerable adolescents and young adults as a social base. Women willing to be recorded so that their videos circulate in the markets and men see another use for the existence of the Chamula Cartel. And that willingness is doubled with drugs.

“It is a way of working that is already very clear: they look for young Tzotzils in need and offer them doses of crack. The more common it is, the better, because it hooks you faster. At first, everything is free. Then, they sell it and raise the price so that they can’t pay for it and offer them a trade: the drug in exchange for you letting them record you,” says the teacher, who fears that some of her students have fallen into that trap.

This modus operandi is done with minors, as young as 13 years old and even with older adults. Once that girl is co-opted, she can be recorded in many more videos. And to get out of this dirty business, they often have to hand over another victim: a neighbor, friend, sister. Sometimes, even their mothers or daughters.

The videos are recorded in hotels in Chiapas that are under the power of the Chamula Cartel. The cameramen, guarded by a pack of motorcyclists, can easily get in there. If there is no one to record, the cartel has a plan B, the rooms have hidden cameras that record everything: from passionate couples to clueless tourists.

“It’s not a million-dollar business, but it is important, because it maintains the social base: the Tzotzil women – who are increasingly drug users – have a support for their addiction and the men see these videos as another service from the cartel, a kind of ‘gift’ that justifies its existence,” says my source.

Then, he hands me a cellophane wrapper. Inside there is a USB that was for sale in the tourist area of ​​San Cristóbal de las Casas. The one I will later see on my computer. “This is what I am talking to you about,” he says. “I took off the cover because it’s horrible, but this is ‘ethnoporn.’ I warn you: this is horrible to look at.”

‘Ethnoporn’ has spread like a virus in southern Mexico

The device my source gave me traveled from Chiapas to the nation’s capital and then from my desk to the offices of the Criminal Investigation Agency of the Attorney General’s Office in the Lomas de Sotelo neighborhood of Mexico City. I imagine it will then go to some warehouse where hard drives, computers, cell phones and other electronic devices containing terrible crimes, ranging from financial fraud to child pornography, are stored.

The agent who receives me is a veteran who has seen the worst of human beings on her computer screen and still retains the rage of a novice. Like me, she feels disgust when she plays the video I gave her, although it is not the first. ‘Ethnoporn’ has spread like a virus to other states in the south of the country.

Like everyone who works in this bunker, the researcher asks for anonymity in exchange for speaking briefly with a journalist, and I will paraphrase her words: I will investigate but I cannot promise you much because this could have been recorded yesterday, this year or a decade ago and no one’s full face is visible. I appreciate her frankness. “The victims of ‘ethnoporn’ are the perfect victims. Even if a federal agent finds out who that poor girl is, they will most likely not be able to get into San Juan Chamula. The cartel’s control is total, absolute. No one passes without their authorization.

The power of the Chamula Cartel has made access to the region a challenge for the authorities 

“And if you could get there, do you really think you would be able to get a complaint? This is not only shrouded in crime, addiction and violence. There is another very powerful component for rural and small communities, like those in Chiapas: the shame of appearing in those videos that are sold in the market of your own town,” says my contact.

The Chamula Cartel follows to a tee a phrase attributed to the writer Oscar Wilde, who said: “everything in life is sex, except sex, which is power over the other person.”

Source: Milenio