ICC Note:

Thousands of families in Mexico are being displaced due to their evangelical Christian faith. The government has developed a “policy of denial” towards the very harsh treatment of individuals being forced to leave their homes to, often times, live in warehouses. In addition, these families remain isolated without access to schools or medical facilities, and with the constant fear of being forced to move again. 

12/06/2016 Mexico (World Watch Monitor) – Mexico has a “policy of denial” about the thousands of evangelical Christians forced out of their homes because of their beliefs, according to a Mexican human rights activist.

Pedro Faro Navarro, director of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Centre, accused the government of “making up the figures” of people forcibly displaced because they have left the ‘traditionalist’ Church, which blends aspects of indigenous paganism and popular Catholicism.

He said that the scale of the problem is hard to gauge. “Unfortunately, there are no records that we can use to officially count the number of cases because the Mexican state has never recognised the problem of forced internal displacement,” he said.

According to the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights, a non-governmental organisation, more than 287,000 cases of forced internal displacement took place in the last five years. But the UN-accredited National Human Rights Commission puts the figure at around 35,000.

Faro disputes both figures. “There are some who speak of more than a million people,” he said. “For the time being, what we know for definite is that the lowest number is always the official one.” Many families have to leave their homes and nobody comes to count them, he added.

In 2015, World Watch Monitor reported that 12 evangelical Christian families were allowed to return home five years after they were forced out by village elders. But many other families remain isolated, without access to schools or medical facilities.

Thirty people from the Tuxpan de Bolaños community in western Mexico were forced out of their homes in January 2016 because, they say, they were attracting other villagers to evangelical Christianity, posing a threat to their ancestral traditions.

They were forced out in the middle of the night and were given temporary shelter in warehouses in the town of Bolaños, 30 miles away and a three-hour drive through the mountains.

Eleven months on, the families remain in Bolaños, having been moved three times. They live under threat of moving again because their landlord is about to sell the warehouses. The families live, sleep, cook and eat in two rooms.

Víctor de la Cruz González, a primary school teacher, was working away from home when his wife, Rosa, and two children, aged three and nine, were displaced. He continues to work in the village but his family is not welcome back. Rosa said: “My husband comes to see us when he has money… I went back [to Tuxpan de Bolaños] once and people threw stones at the house we were sleeping in. They left holes in the roof and door.”

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