Alfredo Cisneros: Fifth Mexican Environmentalist Assassinated in 2023

Alfredo Cisneros Madrigal, indigenous leader and defender of the Purepecha forests, was murdered in the Mexican state of Michoacán on the night of February 21 by an alleged armed commando who arrived at his home.

The Supreme Indigenous Council of Michoacán (CSIM), stated that the community leader was a tireless defender of the Purepecha forests. He had recently denounced the illegal logging of its pine forest areas for the change of land use and planting of avocado trees before the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources.

According to the CSIM, in the last two decades in Michoacán, there have been around 60 murders or disappearances of social activists, forest defenders, indigenous authorities, and environmentalists.

On Monday, communal authorities from 70 towns blocked six highways in the Purepecha region to demand justice for the disappeared and murdered forest defenders and for the establishment of a P’urhépecha Justice Plan.

So far, the State Prosecutor’s Office has not determined the motive for the crime, nor the identity of the perpetrators, and is keeping several lines of investigation open.

This is the fifth murder of a land and environmental defender in Mexico in 2023 and comes less than a week after the death of Abisaí Pérez, who was a graduate of Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México and who denounced the ecocide of the Emisor Oriente Tunnel project in the Valley of Mexico. Meanwhile, environmental defenders Ricardo Lagunes and the community leader Antonio Díaz, also from the state of Michoacán, are still missing.

Originally published in Spanish on February 23 in La Izquierda Diario México.

Translation by Kimberly Ann

Environment

Mexico

The Peruvian Uprising: Massive Protests Demand the Fall of the Coup Regime and a Constituent Assembly

Peru has erupted in a massive uprising demanding that President Dina Boluarte resign, that the current Congress be shut down, and that a new constitution be established. The protests are the culmination of years of political oppression of the country’s indigenous communities, drastic poverty rates and precarity for Peru’s workers and poor, and a political regime that continues the legacy of Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship.

Socialists in Brazil Call for a National Strike against the Attacks of the Far Right and Anti-Worker Policies

On January 8, thousands of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro stormed the three branches of Brazil’s government to demand the military institute a coup against president Lula da Silva. While the government makes deals with the Right and uses these events to consolidate support, workers and the oppressed must use their own methods to confront the Right.

Latin America