MEXICO CITY (AP) — The Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) of Mexico demands that the authorities clarify the murder of one of its collaborators, an environmentalist attacked with an ax in what they consider a “premeditated” act, they denounced Thursday in UAM academic press conference.
Along with the deceased, Álvaro Arvizu, two other members of the Center for Sustainability “Incalli Ixcahuicopa” (Centli) were beaten and tortured, facilities sponsored by said public university for research and environmental education that are in Tlalmanalco, about 50 kilometers east of the Mexican capital and near the Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl volcanoes.
The attack took place on June 13 but Arvizu died last Monday in a hospital as a result of his injuries. The next day a homicide complaint was filed with the Attorney General’s Office, in addition to the one that already existed in the local Attorney’s Office, said Pedro Moctezuma, a UAM professor and founder of Centli.
“We are certain that it was a premeditated and planned attack” not only against the university but also against the local community, Moctezuma said.
The day before, on June 12, another environmentalist, Cuauhtémoc Márquez, was assassinated in the same town in the state of Mexico. The murder took place on the eve of Márquez formalizing a complaint for previous attacks, Moctezuma explained. Márquez did not belong to Centli but did similar work from another group.
The teachers did not rule on Thursday about possible material or intellectual authors of the murder of Arvizu, something they leave to the Prosecutor’s Office, but they did link the crime to the work of monitoring the environment, water and natural resources carried out by the center.
The State of Mexico Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the two homicides but is not linking them to each other and is not considering that they have to do with the activism of the victims, an official from that department told AP who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to make statements.
The state official added that Márquez was shot near his home when they tried to rob him and that the attackers were looking for weapons and money in the Centli.
For the UAM academics, the version of the robbery does not make sense because, although they took some money from a box, they did not steal any of the scientific instruments that were in the place and it was very valuable.
According to Carlos Vargas, one of the directors of Centli who was injured, three unidentified individuals broke into the facility at nightfall, a few days after someone cut the electrical cables, although they had some light thanks to solar panels. Others watched from outside.
“First they martyr us,” Vargas said, referring to what happened to him and Arvizu’s wife, who were tied up and beaten with the blunt parts of an axe. “Once they beat us, they go out to look for their compañero. We heard how they beat our compañero Álvaro for about 20 minutes.”
The complainant pointed out that last year they had received calls asking them to pay extortion, but they were not specific and those who threatened them did not seem to have any information about them. A few months ago, they suffered robberies at night but nothing similar to the violence and viciousness of this latest attack.
The two murdered researchers worked in the educational field and in defense of natural resources and water. Márquez was also a beekeeper and worked on a project against the contamination of landfills, farms and bottling plants, according to a statement from the international environmental organization Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Futures Society, another of the groups that asked the authorities for justice to be done in both cases.
The academics also asked the federal mechanism for the protection of human rights defenders for help for the dozen workers at the research center associated with the UAM who, in a statement, denounced that “as of 2021 the situation of insecurity in Tlalmanalco is increasingly more alarming.”
El Centli “is not going to allow organized crime to take over community by community, municipality by municipality, state by state of our country,” Moctezuma added without giving further details.
He later clarified to AP that the attackers “did ask for weapons” and took one that Arvizu had “to kill gophers —small rodents— that invade the crops of the agroecological headquarters.”
According to a report by the NGO Global Witness from September last year, Mexico was the deadliest country in the world for environmental activists and land defenders in 2021, with 54 murdered. The group recorded the deaths of 200 environmentalists globally. Latin America accounted for more than two-thirds of those murders, often of the bravest and most respected people in their communities.
