Armed Attack Against the Autonomous Purépecha Community of Cherán K’eri

Statement from the autonomous Purépecha community of Cherán K’eri, Michoacán, following an armed attack against the community.

Since the early morning of July 2, 2025, the community of Cherán K’eri has been under armed attack by unknown subjects seeking to enter the areas of Rancho del Pino and Cerrito del Aire. In response, our Community Round (autonomous security force established by our system of self-government) has resisted the aggression, activating the barricades to protect the population. At the moment, one person has been reported killed and another injured, both members of the Community Round. This fact fills us with indignation, sadness, and rage.

This attack is not an isolated act. It is part of an escalation of violence that has intensified in the state of Michoacán, where organized crime fights over territory with total impunity, seriously affecting rural and Indigenous communities. In recent weeks, the aggressions have intensified in different regions of the state, including the Purépecha Plateau, where communities like Nahuatzen, Arantepacua, Capácuaro, and Santa Fe de la Laguna have also been the target of threats, armed incursions, and territorial dispossession.

Cherán has faced different aggressions since 2011 when we expelled from our community political parties, illegal loggers, and organized crime; those who plundered our forests and assassinated our people with the complicity of the state and federal governments. During fourteen years of struggle, we have constructed a legally and constitutionally recognized system of Indigenous self-government, based in our assemblies, our bonfires, and our forms of community justice and organization.

Today’s attack seeks to strike directly at the heart of our autonomy and all the communities that struggle to defend life.

We denounce these acts of violence which seek to instill fear, fragment the community, and disarticulate processes of territorial defense that we have sustained with so much effort. It is not a coincidence that we are attacked when we defend our forest, water, and life. The extractivist, criminal, and political interests converge to attack the people who are not willing to submit.

We reject whatever attempt of armed incursion into our community from organized crime, loggers, or any other actor, protected by impunity, seeking to dismantle our forms of community life. We demand complete respect for our right to self-government, self-determination, and community security.

We hold the Mexican State responsible, and in particular the federal and state governments, for their omission, complicity, and silence in the face of this new aggression. Where are the mechanisms of protection for Indigenous peoples? Where are the real commitments to peace?

While the federal government celebrates the justice plan for Indigenous peoples that they constructed without us—a plan that doesn’t respond to the realities in our territories—violence is imposed in our communities. While they announce constitutional reforms related to justice and security, we continue unprotected, exposed to death, dispossession, and impunity. What kind of justice are we talking about if our own forms of organization and defense are not guaranteed nor respected?

We call on the media, social organizations, human rights defenders, and civil society in general to remain alert, to actively show solidarity, to disseminate information about and reject what is occurring in Cherán. Let us not allow indifference to silence our voice, nor cover up the violence that we, the original peoples, are experiencing.

We deserve to live in peace.

Our territories are not war zones.

Not one step back in defense of our autonomy!

For life, dignity, and the memory of those who have fallen in defense of territory.

Cherán K’eri, P‘urhépecha Community in Resistance

July 2, 2025

Photo: Mario Marlo