This post contains excerpts of an article originally published by Truthout.
Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón, a Mazatec Indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico, has been defending its river from gravel and sand dredgers for over a decade.
As a well-organized and determined force, the community has endured unprecedented repression, including criminalization, torture, displacement, imprisonment, and violence.
Now, the community faces a new attack — 200 trumped-up charges against 56 residents, among them teachers, farmers, mothers, and the elderly. The trumped-up charges are meant to relate to a conflict in the region in 2014.
Their battle is part of the expanding global catastrophe of gravel and sand mining, which has become the world’s largest extractive industry, feeding an often-parasitic real estate market.
In Mexico, such extraction is usually done illegally, with no environmental considerations or tax payment.
Rivers are a key site for gravel and sand mining, and are already in severe danger due to the climate crisis.
In 2023, the world’s rivers had their driest year in three decades, and only 14 percent of rivers with fish populations have escaped major damage from pollution, climate change, and over-fishing, according to a 2021 study.
Eloxochitlán is a mountainous region drenched in rain and greenery.
Its nights are rich with noise — not of cars or sirens, but crickets, night birds, and other animals.
Corn, coffee, and fruit are farmed, and almost the entire community speaks Mazatec, with only some people speaking Spanish.
The Mazatec people have lived in northern Oaxaca and parts of Veracruz and Puebla states for around 1,200 years.
Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón, consisting of various barrios or neighborhoods, is named after the renowned revolutionary and anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón and comes under Indigenous customary law (usos y costumbres) — meaning it is self-governing according to local traditions, a right recognized by Mexican law.
A Disposable River
The extraction of gravel and sand from the community’s river, Xangá Ndá Ge, is gradual, and would go under the radar if it weren’t for concerned locals.
The community, through organizations including Mazatec Women for Freedom and Political Prisoners of Eloxochitlán, has accused a local figure, Manuel Zepeda, of extracting gravel from the river since 2011, with the help of around 20 laborers, paid just 200 pesos a day (US$10) in cash.
Jaime Betanzos, a former teacher, was imprisoned for nine years without trial for resisting the extraction, and still isn’t able to leave Oaxaca state due to an injunction.
During a visit to the river, he explained that extraction has left large tree roots exposed, as the water level is a few meters lower than it should be.
That, he told Truthout and other journalists, is “better for dredgers, because it’s easier for them to extract the rocks.
They see the river as their enemy, as disposable … nature as something that is in the way … and they are using their machines to redesign the course of the river.”
The Xangá Ndá Ge river is part of the Petlapa river, in turn part of the Papaloapan River Basin — one of the most important in the country for its water flow (an average of around 47 billion cubic meters per year), integration of land and wetland systems, and ecologically and economically vital wildlife.
As we walked along the river floor — something we would not have been able to do before the extraction began — Betanzos pointed out how aquatic plants that should be there were gone and hence are no longer able to sustain the riverbanks.
He said that the horsetail plant, a vital medicinal resource for the community, is also declining due to the extraction.
The repression is proportional to the battle the community has waged to defend the land, freedom, and the river.
“The river is gradually dying in order to provide for a company.
The mining is altering the climatic cycle of the community.
There isn’t the normal amount of humidity, and so the fruit trees; mamey, mango, and peach spoil, and the beans we plant go to waste.
The river does typically flood each year, but without causing any damage.
Now, as the walls aren’t as strong, a flood will lead to damage,” he said.
How to Stop Miners
“Water is life, without it we can’t do anything … so we have to respect it. So long as we are alive, we’re going to struggle, we’re going to defend the river,” Carmela Monfil Nieto told Truthout.
Her father, like Jaime Betanzos, was imprisoned for nine years.
He is also one of the 56 people facing the new trumped-up charges.
Monfil, a member of Mazatec Women for Freedom, said her father was involved in a range of committees as a representative.
“He doesn’t speak Spanish, but he always says what’s in his heart, supports others, teaches them, and that’s what [the dredgers] don’t like,” she said.
The community’s resistance formally began in 2014, when the Community Assembly of Eloxochitlán declared itself against extraction of gravel and sand from the river.
Since then, they have held countless assemblies, run legal battles, organized joint petitions with human rights groups, gone on weeks-long hunger strikes, and more.
They recently held a 24-hour, 18-day-long protest from May 20 outside the Judiciary of Mexico, and on June 24 they protested outside the local court in Huautla de Jiménez in defense of Maribel Betanzos Fuentes, another of the 56 community defenders facing prosecution.
The legal battles have been difficult.
“They (dredgers) pay the judges, the magistrates, and it’s clear the last thing the justice system is concerned about is justice,” said Argelia Betanzos, a lawyer from the Mazatec community, at a press conference.
In response, Betanzos added, the community called for an observation mission of human rights observers and journalists to visit Eloxochitlán and confirm what was happening.
Truthout participated in that mission.
“We are defending this treasure (the river) in our town as though it were gold,” Eusebia Zepeda Cortes told Truthout.
She too has five of the 200 trumped-up charges against her.
“I’m a member of the community assembly, defending the autonomy of the people and the mountains and river.
We denounce what they (the dredgers) are doing, and that makes them very angry,” she said.
“We have to act before it gets so big that we can’t do anything,” Argelia Betanzos said during the observation mission.
The Price of Resistance
The community has paid a high price for its resistance, suffering detentions, forced displacement, torture, and more.
The impact of such repression has gone beyond the immediate victims and is generating a climate of fear and fragmenting the community.
Eusebia Zepeda said they have been told not to hold assemblies or they’ll lose their access to corn, along with retiree and single-mother programs.
The dredgers, connected to allegedly corrupt local and state officials, “want to break up the community so they can have power over it,” she said.
Argelia Betanzos described how the illegal dredgers have gone beyond destroying the river to also attacking the community’s usos y costumbres, setting up colonial power structures and processes in their place.
Only with the bravery of the people will the mining stop, will there be peace, will it be possible to restore the river.
In April, a Mazateca photojournalist from the region, David Peralta, was forcibly displaced after he accused an employee of the dredgers of trying to run him over with a truck while he was taking photos of extraction sites.
His brother, Miguel Peralta, had already been imprisoned for five years, with an initial 50-year sentence, then absolved of all accusations in 2019.
Three others who had been imprisoned for 10 years without trial — akin to torture, Mazatec Women for Freedom says — were released this time last year, and a further 14 people have been forcibly displaced from the community due to persecution.
Now the community has declared a “state of alert” as the criminalization and harassment has increased.
The recent 200 charges against 56 people were made public in early June, despite a judge having already rejected the accusations.
“It’s a strategy of judicial terror that aims to uproot the community and subject it to the plundering of its natural resources,” stated Mazatec Women for Freedom.
“I was beaten in prison. There was a lot of food, but it was rotten, and I was worried about my wife and daughter because I was the main provider in the household.
It was a nightmare that never ends. You’re traumatized, stop sleeping, and freedom became very important in my life,” Fernando Gavito said, describing his 10 years as a political prisoner. He was finally released a year ago.
Carmela Monfil Nieto said when her father was imprisoned, she, her sister, and mother farmed the corn.
Now, he still has to sign in at the courts every two weeks as part of his provisional release, and is among the 56 people facing the new slate of charges.
“They can re-arrest him at any time and living with that is hell.
After he got out of jail, he liked to walk everywhere, he was very active, but now he’s scared to go out.”
Another woman, who said she couldn’t risk being named, told Truthout that her husband wasn’t planting because he could be attacked by security or hoodlums, and Argelia Betanzos described a “desperate situation” and a “crisis point” where people with trumped-up charges, such as teachers or vendors, have stopped working.
“The message is the community won’t have the freedom to defend the land and nature. The repression is proportional to the battle the community has waged to defend the land, freedom, and the river,” Argelia Betanzos said during the observation mission.
Gravel and Sand Mining Is Growing Exponentially
Globally, 50 billion metric tons of sand and gravel are mined each year, to be used mostly for construction.
Demand for these materials has grown rapidly over the past 50 years, and now surpasses supply (which then impacts prices and profits).
The impacts of such mining include decreased water quality, river bank erosion, instability, river shrinkage, sinking deltas (which in turn can lead to loss of agricultural land, houses, and infrastructure like roads), changes in biodiversity, increased tidal incursion, decreased access to water tables, and altered flood regimes.
Meanwhile, the construction and building industries benefiting from such mining account for a significant proportion of global CO2 emissions, and researchers note a general lack of incentives among governments everywhere to reuse materials in that industry instead of extracting aggregate resources.
In Mexico, 317 million cubic meters of gravel and sand are extracted legally per year, but 80 percent of extraction is by companies without permits who don’t pay taxes.
Environmental impact statements, resolutions from the environment ministry, and a permit from Conagua (the national water-administration body) are the few requirements for extraction permission.
But Conagua only has 176 inspectors to check for permits, and those inspectors can be bribed or threatened, while illegal miners are often protected by corrupt local officials.
Even then, of the 1,427 inspections by Conagua of river extraction sites between 2010 and 2023, only 193 were to standard — the others didn’t have impact statements, had since changed the legal soil category, or had other irregularities.
Of the 25 million pesos in fines that Conagua levied for irregularities over 10 years, only 2.2 million were paid.
Further, a study by environmental organization CartoCritica found that river-based aggregate mining in Mexico has increased 13-fold in area from 2013 to 2023, driven by a real estate boom and industrial growth (which particularly caters to U.S. and other transnationals).
CartoCritica argues that private companies take advantage of the lack of action by authorities, either extracting without permission or well above the allowed amounts, reporting, “we’ve found rivers that are dredged to the point of death, sacrifice zones … where rivers have become open-pit mines.”
Over 70 percent of Mexico’s rivers are contaminated, leading to a loss of 80 percent of freshwater invertebrate species over the past 40 years.
The community in Eloxochitlán is currently on high alert, as one of the 56 with trumped-up charges, Olga Maribel Betanzos, is having her case reviewed by a local judge this week.
That outcome could set a precedent for all the other cases. The community is demanding all charges be dropped and an end to the persecution.
“Only with the bravery of the people will the mining stop, will there be peace, will it be possible to restore the river,” Jaime Betanzos concluded.
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