From 26 to 29 October, San Cristóbal de Las Casas (Chiapas) hosted the fourth meeting of the Platform for Peacebuilding in Mexico. This space brings together thirty Mexican and international organisations, including ICIP, committed to advancing collective responses to the escalating violence in the country.
The annual meeting offered an opportunity to share analysis, local experiences and proposals for action at a particularly complex moment for Chiapas, a state marked by rising violence, the presence of criminal groups and persistent impunity.
A local, national and international perspective
Throughout the meeting, participating organisations combined local perspectives from Chiapas with national and international analyses of the human rights and security situation. In a context still shaken by the killing, one year ago, of human rights defender and priest Marcelo Pérez Pérez, participants reiterated the need to advance justice measures capable of breaking the patterns of impunity.
The international analysis highlighted the weakening of human rights frameworks in the face of authoritarian governments, as well as the growing risks faced by human rights defenders, Indigenous communities and women’s collectives. In response, the organisations in the Platform reaffirmed the importance of building alliances grounded in truth, justice, reparation and the active participation of communities.
Four years of collective work for peace
The Platform was created in 2020 to provide a coordinated response to widespread violence in Mexico and its social and humanitarian consequences. Since then, Chiapas has become a priority area of concern, leading to the first in-person meeting in 2022 and continuing to shape the Platform’s monitoring and advocacy work.
This year’s meeting highlighted the persistence of serious issues affecting the social fabric, including:
- a rise in disappearances, including those of children and adolescents,
- forced displacement due to the presence of armed groups,
- fear of reporting crimes due to the risk of reprisals,
- and an “official peace” narrative that contrasts with the demands for justice expressed by communities, families and victims’ groups.
A commitment to rights-based peace
The organisations in the Platform agree that peace cannot be reduced to the absence of armed clashes, nor to narratives of normality that obscure the structural causes of violence. For this reason, they reaffirmed the need to advance towards a peace rooted in rights, dignity and community participation —not in containment or silence.
The fourth meeting concluded with a renewed commitment to strengthening collective coordination, making community demands visible, and contributing, from different fields, to building a peace that is not imposed but woven collectively through memory, organisation and community life.
