The women of the Mazatecas for Freedom collective carried glowing torches along the seashore as they began their march to the federal courthouse in Boca del Río, Veracruz. On September 2, they set up a protest camp in the coastal city to demand an end to the judicial torture the Mexican state has subjected them to for over a decade.

Together with a handful of children and supporters of their cause, they lit torches to show the Mexican state, the judiciary, and local powerbrokers from Eloxochitlán that their fight for freedom is stronger than ever. 

Community organization and collective care have undergirded the long struggle for freedom fought by the Mazatecas for Freedom, a collective of Indigenous women from Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón, Oaxaca, who are relatives of 21 political prisoners released after years of struggle. 

They have been rallying for over a decade against the criminalization of their community. Now, they face intensified persecution and had to move their protest to another state after their cases were assigned to judges in Veracruz.

After securing the release of the last political prisoners from their town in June 2024, the collective announced its intention to fight for the right of return of 14 people displaced from their homes in early 2025. Then, on March 30 of this year, the Oaxacan high court issued over 200 arrest warrants against 56 Mazatec Indigenous people, including some of those previously imprisoned and released.

Eight women, most of them elderly, are now on the list of Eloxochitlán residents facing imprisonment.

The town, whose approximately 4,000 inhabitants grow corn and coffee, has historically been governed through community assembly under usos y costumbres (customary Indigenous practices). Families participating in this autonomous system are face harassment and false accusations for opposing the abuses of former municipal president Manuel Zepeda, who operates a stone and sand mine on the bed and banks of the Xangá Ndá Ge River.

Zepeda’s family has strong ties to the political power structure in Oaxaca, a state in which Indigenous self-government remains strong, despite attempts by political parties and extractive companies to usurp community control.

Zepeda was the first municipal president in Eloxochitlán to have the backing of political parties, unlike previous local leaders whose legitimacy came out of their history of community service. Since the process of criminalization began, his daughter Elisa Zepeda has risen through the ranks of party politics, and now serves as a representative of the Morena Party in Oaxaca’s state congress.

Resisting in community

In November 2021, members of the Mazatecas for Freedom collective were forced to leave homes nestled in the misty coffee plantations of the Sierra Mazateca and move into tents they set up on a sidewalk on Insurgentes Sur Avenue in Mexico City. They camped outside the National Judicial Council buildings to demand the release of eight political prisoners who were snatched from their community. They stayed for more than two years.

Setting up camp on the streets of Mexico’s capital made their struggle visible to hundreds of people who walked past them every day, and it wasn’t long before signs of solidarity began to appear. 

Thanks to the support of local residents in the Pedregales de Coyoacán neighborhood, who were themselves organizing to defend their water and land, the Mazatecas began to feel more at home in Mexico City’s south. They visited the traditional Bola market in the Ajusco neighborhood, an ideal place to buy daily supplies, located the nearest tortilla shop, and formed a friendship with the local water delivery person.

Their knowledge about navigating everyday life gave them tools that enabled them to adapt and sustain their movement. “Skills like the traditional practice of gathering fuel to build a fire are a means of survival,” said Argelia Betanzos, a lawyer from the town who has led legal defense in Eloxochitlán. “We go to a protest camp, set up the stove or bricks, gather the wood, and get to work!”

Among the women with arrest warrants is Betanzos’ mother, Eusebia Zepeda. The retired teacher has been at the center of the Mazatec struggle demanding freedom for her husband, Jaime Betanzos Fuentes. He’s also a retired teacher, a member of the assembly, and a key figure in the community, who was imprisoned for almost a decade on trumped-up charges before being released in 2023.

Their protest camp had deep roots in Indigenous self-government practices, which brought back memories for Eusebia—as she prefers to be called—of her years of study and activism in rural teacher training schools in the 1970s. Now, at 70 years old, she fondly recalls the experiences that shaped her politically—like when she camped out in Tlapacoyan, Veracruz, alongside farmers defending their land from a group of local power brokers attempting to dispossess them.

Once she became a teacher, Eusebia joined the teacher led resistance movement in Oaxaca, which has historically used protest encampments as a way to put political pressure on the state. All these experiences proved helpful to her in Mexico City. 

While judicial workers came and went from the offices where they set up camp, she and her companions kept the fire burning and the coffee hot, and in that way brought the hospitality of the mountains to the heart of the metropolis.

“In Eloxochitlán, every time you arrive at someone’s house, they invite you in for a cup of coffee, and if they don’t have any ready, they say, ‘Wait until the coffee boils,’” said Eusebia. “It doesn’t matter if it’s morning, noon, or later, or if the weather is hot or cold. We drink coffee at all times. That’s life in an Indigenous community.”

Generosity sustained their protest: when the prisoners’ relatives traveled from the community to the encampment, they brought coffee and beans from their harvest.

Students from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National School of Anthropology and History would bring bread, cookies, bags of rice, and other food items they had gathered from their classmates.

Betanzos points out independent media outlets such as Ké Huelga Radio and Radio Zapote played a key role in amplifying the voice of their resistance.

“Since the encampment, our voice has reached another level, it has more validity, and is received differently,” Betanzos said in an interview with Ojalá. “The people who came to the encampment began to listen to us, to get to know us directly, without intermediaries, and not through the narrative of the state, and that made all the difference.”

Language, keeper of Mazatec identity

The voice of the women in resistance in Eloxochitlán, which had been ignored until then, burst into the Spanish-speaking daily life of Mexico City, as the women at the protest deployed their mother tongue as the banner of their struggle.

“We decided to make our language a weapon,” said Betanzos, who estimates 90 percent of Eloxochitlán’s residents speak Mazatec.

In an interview, she talked about the reasons that led them to champion their language. “In your own language, you find your history, your origins, and ways to resist,” she said. “Your own language is a guide for how you are going to feed yourself, how you are going to heal yourself, how you are going to defend yourself.”

The relationship between the Mazatec people and their territory is deep, as demonstrated by the the concept of Íchjín Nguixó, which they use to refer to themselves. It translates into Spanish as “the people of the mountains and the water,” according to Betanzos.

Mazatec women cannot conceive of their existence without both mountains and water. Their relationship with land is a central element in their worldview. Nandá, the word they use to refer to water, has a double meaning that also signifies Mother Creator.

This maternal force is threatened by the semi-industrial extraction of stone from the river, which has increased thanks to Zepeda’s political and economic influence in the region. His wealth has accumulated on the back of destroying the river’s flow and reducing the people’s access to water.

“Mother Earth is upset. The river, mother of all streams and springs, is upset. They’re drying up,” said Martha Betanzos Fuentes. She is Jaime Betanzos’ sister and the mother of former political prisoner Miguel Peralta, who was imprisoned for five years, and who was active in the protest camp in Mexico City. 

Defending their land includes recovering traditional governance, which the community assembly has been working to strengthen for decades. The Zepeda family’s rule hasn’t stopped Mazatec resistance, even though it has used violent tactics and now enjoys the support of the now-dominant political party, Morena.

For two nights in September, nearly 100 people camped outside the federal courthouse in Boca del Río, Veracruz. On September 3, they danced to the beat of cumbias played by Musas Sonideras and the Nawal de Arrabal group, who traveled from Mexico City to support the struggle. 

Judge Mario de la Medina Soto had no choice but to come out and meet the protesters and listen to their demands. With that, the community members returned to Eloxochitlán to await a court ruling they hope will allow the people they love to return to their lands and live in freedom.

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