Hello new followers.

Today's 7.5 earthquake has drawn rare international news attention to Oaxaca. Please allow me to take this moment to tell you about a brutal massacre of 15 people from Sunday night to Monday morning in the town of San Mateo del Mar. https://piedepagina.mx/peleamos-contra-un-monstruo-masacre-de-15-personas-en-oaxaca/?idU=1

As with many intercommunal conflicts in Oaxaca, I prefer to refrain from reporting until I hear from reporters based in the region who know the often complicated backstory details. Sometimes people feared dead escape, hide & re-emerge. I was hoping that would be the case, but no.

The most violent inter-communal conflicts in Oaxaca occur precisely in areas that are resource-rich and/or strategically located. There's often a rift between locals who are willing to work with outside interests and those who prefer community control over ancestral territories.

Authorities responsible for keeping the peace allow these rifts to grow. Sometimes it's via favoritism towards one side or institutional abandonment. Families turn against families as incidents pile up in a climate of impunity, resentments fester & the political becomes personal.

The tensions in San Mateo del Mar have been simmering for a decade, around the time international investment in industrial-scale wind farms came to Oaxaca's Isthmus region, the Pacific Coast side of Mexico's narrow waist. It's home to one of the windiest areas on the planet.

The region, like much of Oaxaca, contains deposits of precious metals, often under the soil of communally-owned indigenous land.

It's also home to the nation's most productive oil refinery and the shortest overland route to the Gulf Coast.

Mexico's president has plans to build a controversial infrastructure project through the region; a dry canal to link Pacific and Gulf Coast ports with a tax-favored free trade industrial corridor in between. Project construction was officially inaugurated earlier this month.

In the words of a townsperson cited in the story linked in the first tweet of this thread: "Behind these attacks is a broad context involving resources, a bicoastal rail corridor, wind farms. We're fighting a monster."