Mexico has a ‘policy of denial’ about the thousands of evangelical Christians forced out of their homes because of their beliefs, according to a Mexican human rights activist reported in early December.
Pedro Faro Navarro, director of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Centre, accused the government of ‘making up the figures’ of people forcibly displaced because they have left the ‘traditionalist’ Church, which blends aspects of indigenous paganism and popular Catholicism.
No records
He said that the scale of the problem is hard to gauge. ‘Unfortunately, there are no records that we can use to officially count the number of cases because the Mexican state has never recognised the problem of forced internal displacement’, he said.
According to the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights, a non-governmental organisation, more than 287,000 cases of forced internal displacement took place in the last five years. But the UN-accredited National Human Rights Commission puts the figure at around 35,000.
Faro disputes both figures. ‘There are some who speak of more than a million people’, he said.
No schools or medicine
In 2015, 12 evangelical Christian families were allowed to return home five years after they were forced out by village elders. But many other families remain isolated, without access to schools or medical facilities.
Thirty families from the Tuxpan de Bolaños community in western Mexico were forced out of their homes in January 2016 because, they say, they were attracting other villagers to evangelical Christianity, posing a threat to their ancestral traditions. They were forced out in the middle of the night and were given temporary shelter in warehouses in a town a three-hour drive through the mountains.
Moved three times
Eleven months on, the families have been moved three times. They live under threat of moving again because their landlord is about to sell the warehouses. The families live, sleep, cook and eat in two rooms.
Víctor de la Cruz González, a primary school teacher, was working away from home when his wife Rosa and their two children, aged three and nine, were displaced. He continues to work in the village, but his family is not welcome back. Rosa said: ‘My husband comes to see us when he has money… I went back once and people threw stones at the house we were sleeping in. They left holes in the roof and door.’
The pressures faced by evangelical Christians are most common in indigenous communities because of the perception that they are disrupting cultural life. ‘They have searched for a dialogue for many years, but core beliefs end up dominating the matter. It’s very difficult because each case must be examined within its cultural complexity’, he said.
Expecting an escalation
Faro added that he expects the displacement problem to escalate because the state does not take action against the perpetrators. ‘The states in the north are most problematic, but no part of the country is free of this crisis’, he said.
‘There is no national law regarding forced internal displacement because the state does not want to acknowledge there is a problem’, Faro said.
‘Accepting that it exists means having to confront it’, he added, but he said that the Mexican government would not intervene because it was trying to encourage foreign investment in territories ‘where there are indigenous villages that are practically for sale’.
Evangelical families’ isolation is compounded by the traditional Day of the Dead and Halloween. Both are widely celebrated in schools, but evangelical Christian families have said that their children were forced to take part in the celebrations against their will. In June, more than 100 Protestants were asked by the local authority to leave their village for not taking part in local festivals.
In 2009, one Protestant family was told that they could not bury their child in a local graveyard because they had left the ‘traditionalist’ Church. They were subjected to the illegal confiscation of their properties, physical violence and denial of health services. The village authorities then forbade commercial transactions with them. With little political will to intervene and traditionalists and evangelicals at a stalemate, Faro sees no sign of imminent improvement. Without renewed efforts at dialogue between the two parties, he said evangelicals’ marginalisation will only worsen.
