Sometimes violent events happen near Cherán, but here in the town center all is calm. We recognize that the government will never be able to provide this sense of security that we’ve built for ourselves. Today, we’re reforesting our territory, we’re doing things that serve our children and the future.
— Ricardo Torres, community member of Cherán
Armed guards stood at every entrance and exit of Cherán, an Indigenous P’urhépecha community within the Mexican state of Michoacán. These watchers were local volunteers who protected their pueblo from unwelcome cartels, politicians, and others deemed dangerous, working to ensure that the violence that shook the town in the late 2000s and early 2010s would never return.
The small urban center of the rural community was surrounded by expansive mountains, which formerly teemed with lush old-growth pine forests. By 2008, however, deforestation rates were accelerating across the region, leaving behind large swaths of dead stumps—scars representing years of people’s struggles against the activities of talamontes (illegal loggers). The loggers and their hired mafia gunmen cleared dozens of hectares per week: first, to sell timber for easy money and, second, to establish lucrative avocado plantations to capitalize on surging global demand. Endless caravans of trucks, stacked high with stolen wood, rumbled through Cherán on a daily basis.
Community members attempted to reason with the loggers. Many local farmers and activists were abused, murdered, or disappeared. Others sought help from the police or military, to no avail. The people of Cherán, finding themselves on their own, had to fight back.
By 2011, about 70 percent of Cherán’s territorial forests had been destroyed. A group of Cherán mothers and grandmothers, tired of feeling powerless, met in secret to form a plan that would protect their life-giving woodlands. Unlike the pockets of young townspeople who had been rising up against the loggers wearing masks, the women wore no face coverings. “They were braver than us,” says Cherán resident Ricardo Torres, “so we started taking our cues from them.”
The town remains a testament to what can happen when people have the courage to imagine and live out what safety means to them.
On April 15, 2011, the señoras took five loggers hostage. Seeing what was happening, community members ran to furiously ring the downtown church bell while others ignited fireworks—making any commotion they could to get the people of Cherán into the streets and actively defending their land.
Townspeople erected makeshift barricades to monitor traffic and, along the roadways, positioned the torched mechanical remains of seized logging trucks. Neighbors lit fogatas (bonfires) on street corners. Traditionally the place where families would meet to share a meal and conversation, people moved their kitchens from inside the home to out in the street so that neighbors—fearful of retribution—could come together to care for one another, keep an eye out, and feel safer.
After the townspeople succeeded in driving out most of the loggers through their actions, they took their struggle to the mayor and police force—considered enablers and colluders by many—who had sprung into action only to demand the release of the hostage loggers. “We had gone to the major political parties, seeing what they could do to help,” Torres says, recalling how politicians were accustomed to visiting Cherán. “But they were only interested in us during election campaigns, for our votes.” Recognizing the futility of appealing to authorities, the townspeople declared that no national political party or politician would ever be welcome in Cherán. All electioneering would be banned, too.
The town’s focus turned to building shared community governance. With the support of scholars from Mexico and abroad, the people of Cherán waged a lengthy legal battle in federal court to have their Indigenous sovereignty recognized and to govern themselves under a customary law system based on ancestral governance models. In doing so, they sought to revive their traditional Indigenous model of governance.
“On November 2, 2011, the Federal Electoral Tribunal, Mexico’s maximum authority on elections, ruled we had the right to choose our own leaders as per our own customs,” Torres says. “They ordered the state congress to reform the law in our favor and the electoral institute to facilitate this change.” The mayor was replaced with a democratically elected, 12-person council. Under this system all prospective councilors must first be endorsed by their respective neighborhood assembly—symbolically called fogata, in honor of the street fires first lit for safety after the expulsion of the loggers. An assembly can include 20, 30, or even 50 families, and it is the forum where neighbors discuss issues, seek consensus, and make decisions.
The assemblies also act as a “first filter,” a screening process for people wanting to access political power. “We select our representatives this way,” Torres says, “because when people are nominated and vetted aloud by those who truly know them, they are evaluated for their past actions—not mere political promises.”
Among its duties, the council controls the community security force, made up of independent volunteers that run the town’s security checkpoints and conduct daily patrols of the forest. Thanks to this protection, García says, Cherán’s residents do not fear being out after dark—as is common in other areas of the state—and they not only have some of their beloved forest still intact, but also continue regenerating it by planting new saplings. “Today, at the edges of where our territory meets those of neighboring communities, there is a defined border: on our side, verdant forest,” Torres says, “and, on the other, industrial avocado plantations.”
In its role as the commercial and academic hub for the nearby villages, Cherán is losing its language. Torres laments that his own and younger generations barely know their ancestral tongue. “I understand it somewhat but cannot speak it—my kids even less so,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean we’re not P’urhépecha, that we don’t think Indigenously.” Little by little, the community’s renewed solidarity and honoring of traditions are getting townspeople of all ages in touch with their roots.
The realities of Cherán’s self-defense and organization have continued to evolve since the residents’ initial coup, and profound challenges have arisen along the way. But the town remains a testament to what can happen when people have the courage to imagine and live out what safety really means to them.
“Historically, our community has had a great ability to organize itself, to practice jaropikua,” Torres says, using a local word that roughly means “mutual aid.” “P’urhépecha is not just a language; it’s a lifestyle, a vision.”
