Community member Rubicel walks on raised earth formed by the 2013 oil well explosion in Oxiacaque. Author’s photo.In the Mexican state of Tabasco an environmental catastrophe has slowly been unfolding. Decades of reckless expansion by Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Mexico’s state-owned oil company, has affected all aspects of life and livelihood in the oil-rich region of the Chontalpa. This past spring, I visited the Chontal Mayan communities that live atop Mexico’s most important hydrocarbon reserves, to understand how they have fought against and endured the destruction of their ancestral lands since Pemex first arrived.
The welcoming communities of the Chontalpa shared with me their deep-seated history of nonviolent struggle against the oil behemoth — decades of marches, nonviolent occupation and media messaging. The most recent mobilization was triggered by the massive explosion of well site Pozo 123 in Oxiacaque in October 2013. The force of the blast was so strong that several houses in the area were leveled and fissures ripped through the matted dirt roads. Community based organizing by the Chontal began even as the cratered well site still burned: it was not the first time they would mobilize against Pemex.
As a journalist covering Mexico’s underreported flashpoints, I found that the country’s contemporary context — one with pockets of organized crime, impunity and corruption — clouds the context in which the Chontal are waging their struggle. The memory of the nominally successful mass mobilization in 1996 — the first of its kind in modern-day Tabasco — laid the blueprint for the current phase of the conflict. But I wondered: how can the Chontal communities of Tabasco successfully confront the impunity of the national oil company in the country’s rapidly changing landscape?
