Engaged Anthropology Grant: Claudia Chávez Argüelles

In 2014, I collaborated with Maya survivors of the Acteal Massacre and their lawyers to prepare an expert testimony on the massacre’s psychosocial effects and collective impacts. Survivors presented this testimony to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2015 to support survivors’ struggle to have the Mexican state formally recognized as responsible for the massacre. The project “¡La Lucha Sigue!” was conceived as a way to return to that work and, together with survivors, human rights advocates, and local scholars, evaluate what this legal strategy had achieved and what new openings for restorative justice might be emerging.

The original plan was to organize roundtable discussions and workshops in Acteal and San Cristóbal de Las Casas. These meetings would bring together members of Las Abejas de Acteal, lawyers from the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba), and local allies to reflect on two main questions: how the judicialization of politics was reshaping Indigenous rights in the practice, and how human rights advocacy intersected—sometimes tensely—with Indigenous-led struggles for justice and memory. I spent half of the summer of 2019 in Chiapas organizing these encounters. However, Las Abejas were then fully engaged in preparing a mega-rally to press the IACHR to issue its long-awaited merits report in the Acteal case. Their agenda was saturated, and it was not possible to hold the structured workshops I originally envisioned. Instead, the project shifted into a series of more informal and analytically rich conversations with members of Las Abejas and Frayba. These discussions revealed the internal debates that the IACHR petition had generated: some members favored entering negotiations with the state to obtain reparations, while others insisted they would “never speculate with the blood of their martyrs.”

My plan was to return in the summer of 2020 to build on these insights and convene the formal roundtables. The COVID-19 pandemic made travel impossible and, given that most members of Las Abejas lack internet access, organizing online workshops was neither feasible nor appropriate. Although the project was initially expected to be completed by 2021, the combination of the pandemic and the evolving political context made it clear that a slower, more flexible process was necessary. During this period, I remained in close contact with Las Abejas and Frayba, following developments in the case and continuing one-on-one and small-group conversations on subsequent visits.

As of 2025, the IACHR has still not issued its merits report in the Acteal case. This prolonged silence has generated profound disappointment and frustration among both Frayba and Las Abejas. The expert opinion, which we understood as a potential turning point in the case, has not yet yielded the outcomes that these organizations have been demanding: a merits report in which the IACHR classifies the Acteal massacre as a state crime and crime against humanity attributable to the Mexican state, recognizes the counterinsurgency strategy that enabled it, orders investigation and punishment of the material and intellectual authors, and sets out concrete measures for integral reparation and guarantees of non-repetition. This disappointment, however, has also pushed survivors and advocates to think more critically about the limits of legal strategies and to foreground the non-state frameworks of justice they have been building for decades—through embodied memory, public denunciation, and alliances with other victims of state violence. Over the following years, I continued to meet with members of Las Abejas and Frayba to reflect on these shifts. These conversations gradually reoriented the project from a narrow evaluation of legal outcomes to a broader exploration of Las Abejas’ “Otra Justicia” (Other Justice): a decolonial and embodied form of justice that exist beyond state legal frameworks. Rather than a departure from the original project, this was an adaptation that emerged organically from the actors’ own concerns and from the changing legal-political landscape.

This long groundwork culminated in the summer of 2025, when we were finally able to hold a public roundtable titled “Otra Justicia in the Face of State Impunity” at Museo Jtatik Samuel Ruiz in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, on June 17. The event brought together survivors and members of Las Abejas, Frayba lawyers, local organizations, scholars, and a wider public interested in the topic. The discussion was lively and generative, highlighting not only the frustrations with the stalled IACHR process, but also the rich repertoire of Otra Justicia practices that Las Abejas have developed, including commemorative ceremonies, pilgrimages, symbolic acts of condemnation, and an insistence on truth-telling rooted in a collective and embodied memory. The roundtable sparked enthusiastic engagement and has already opened pathways for new collaborations with these actors. Importantly, it took place amid the escalating crisis provoked by Mexico’s 2024 judicial reform, which has dismantled judicial independence and further undermined confidence in state institutions. In this context, the forms of justice articulated by Las Abejas—grounded in community, memory, and accountability—appear not as “supplements” to legal justice, but as increasingly indispensable frameworks in their own right.

Although the project did not follow its initially planned timeline, the intervening years of informal discussions, follow-up visits, and collective reflection were crucial. They built the trust, interest, and shared agenda that made the 2025 roundtable both possible and meaningful. “¡La Lucha Sigue!” has thus become less about a single event and more about an evolving process that connects past collaborative work on the expert opinion with the present urgency of imagining restorative justice beyond the courts.