Banishings, extermination attempts, slavery, deprivation of water …
The Yaquis, an indigenous people of northeastern Mexico, have for centuries faced attacks on their territory and culture like few others in the history of Mexico.
Settled today in a small strip of the state of Sonora (northwest), to which they have been reduced after numerous conflicts, this town arrives today before what promises to be a new chapter for his community, a more successful one.
The government of the president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) appears before the Yaqui community this Tuesday to apologize on behalf of the State for the abuses they have experienced over the centuries.
“We want to do justice to the Yaqui people, to the Yaqui peoples, who are the most affected by repression in the history of Mexico,” said the president.
The indomitable indigenous
The Yaquis were the headache of the co Spanish conquerors, and they continued to be for the various governments of Mexico, even well into the twentieth century.
It is a tribe settled along the Yaqui River, in the state of Sonora, that today has a depleted population of about 30. 000 inhabitants.
In its eight towns -Loma de Guamúchil , Loma de Bácum, Tórim, Vicam (the capital), Pótam, Ráhum, Huirivis and Belem- follow their autonomous, traditional way of life, with a government that combines civil authority and traditional authority of the council of elders.
“The river is the blessing and curse of the Yaquis”, says the writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II.
And it is that the history of the Yaquis is closely determined by the defense of the plots of agriculture that are linked to the Yaqui River.
Almost a century later After the Mexica (also known as Aztecs) had fallen to the Spanish in Mexico City, the Yaquis had their first contacts with the Spanish, around 1607.
It was not something friendly, says the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) in an article on the history of the Yaquis. The tribe faced the colonizers and the indigenous were victorious, preserving their land intact along the coast of the current state of Sonora.
For 1610 accepted the presence of Jesuit missionaries , who were able to establish a relationship with the colonizers that gradually expanded, mainly in evangelization, without losing the possession of their lands.
But the relative peace ended in the next century.
Pressured for several years for the dominion of the farmland on the banks of the Yaqui River, in 1741 took place the armed uprising led by the indigenous Ignacio Muni, Calixto, Baltazar and Esteban , explains the INP I.
The indigenous people obtained the signature of a treaty that recognized their right to preserve their customs and government , as well as the full possession of their lands and weapons.
But after the expulsion in 1741 of the Jesuits, the Franciscans arrived in the Yaqui territory and it was then that the action of the viceregal and Mexican governments for the dispossession of the lands was accelerated.
Traded as slaves
For more than a century, since the Independence of Mexico in 1821 until the governments after the Mexican Revolution (1930), the Yaquis faced the armies of Mexico.
The armed uprisings, such as the one led by Juan Banderas (Ignacio Jusacamea) who proclaimed the independence of the Indian Confederation of Sonora, they marked the Yaqui population.
According to the INPI, in 1868 occurred the “almost total extermination of Yaquis” and their indigenous neighbors, the Mayos.
“The guerrilla struggles followed one another with the change of different leaders who were executed by the army. This period is known as the Yaqui Wars and constituted for the group a process of demographic decline, loss of their territory and political imbalances ”, he explains.
During the military regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876 – 2011) , thousands of Yaquis were captured and sold as slaves to the plantations of the peninsula from Yucatán, at the other end of Mexico.
More than 25. 000 people, including women and children, died at that time.
It is known that the Yaquis that l They managed to escape from the plantations and returned to their land on foot, in a trip of more than 3. 000 kilometers.
Others managed to flee to Arizona, where the US government currently recognizes a territorial reserve for them and where the Yaqui language, Cahita, can still be heard.
They also participated in the Mexican Revolution, under the promise of land and autonomy made by the insurgent leader Álvaro Obregón, which was not fulfilled.
It was with the arrival of the president Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 – 1940) that the Yaquis obtained the official recognition of almost 500. 000 hectares of land, much less than what they came to possess, but finally with full rights.
But with the construction of the Angostura dam (1941) and that of the Oviachic (1945), “The Yaquis lost the indispensable resource of water, for which they had to migrate en masse to the urban centers of the state” of Sonora, explains the INPI.
Since then, the Yaquis have taken up the war for water in this semi-arid region, rich in agricultural land, but in great need of water.
Today’s Yaquis
Yaquis speak the Cahite language, which also has words borrowed from Spanish and Nahuatl, the indigenous language of the center of the country.
Many speak a Spanish, mainly in the capital of the community, Vicam, where today there is more population of Yoris (non-indigenous) than Yaquis.
However, this is where community decisions are made and where dialogue with the authorities occurs civilians of Sonora and the country.
Along Of the eight towns settled near the Yaqui River, their main economic activity is wheat and cotton agriculture, in addition to the fact that livestock has prospered by the 15. 000 hectares of grazing land they own.
Many emigrate to the US during harvest seasons, but Yaquis return to their communities every year.
In dialogue with BBC Mundo during the conflict over the Independencia aqueduct in 2015, the Yaqui leader Tomás Rojo said that his people would fight their last battle for water: “Taking away the water would condemn our existence in the short and medium term (…) If we think badly, we see an extermination policy against us. ”
“ The history of our people it has always been the fight for land and water. It was the water that brought us to those territories, the one that made us flourish there and has always kept us in those lands, ”he said.
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