Oil Destroyed Our Town. Cartels Are Finishing the Job.

When I was a child, my mother would take me to bathe in a spring near my village. By the water there were palm trees, and in them papanes, birds found in the lush forests of the gulf coast in the Mexican state of Veracruz, where I live. They would break into song as we’d approach the spring, and other animals would flee.

My town, Escolín, is an Indigenous community that sits between Papantla, a tourist city named for the birds, and Poza Rica, an oil town whose name means “rich well.” Many of the wells that supply oil to Poza Rica are near Escolín. When the sun goes down, nearby gas flares paint the night red.

I was born under these blood-tinted skies; they always seemed natural to me. But I’ve wondered what my forebears must have thought the first time the night sky turned red, when commercial oil extraction began in the area over a century ago. Maybe that hell was coming out of the earth.

In the decades that followed, the region was invaded. Peasants had gained rights to use land as members of ejidos, or communal farms, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920. But amid growing interest in the area’s oil deposits, Pemex, the state-owned oil and gas company, snatched much of the territory by expropriating swaths of forest under federal law.

Outsiders did other things to extinguish our relationship with our land, too. Government-run schools stigmatized the Totonac language, encouraging us to speak Spanish instead. Christian missionaries quashed our traditional beliefs, suggesting that the earth was a resource to be exploited. All that remained of our cosmogony were stories: tales told to scare children but plundered of the deep beliefs that gave meaning to our ties with the earth.

All the while, heavy machinery made its way through the mountains, razing vanilla plants and orange groves. Pemex began sending more and more workers to develop new wells. By night, flames would pulse between the trees.

We stopped being surprised. The message from the government seemed to be: This is the modern world. Get used to it.

In 2017 a pipeline exploded just outside Escolín. We woke up to the sound and rose to the glow of the forest on fire. When it happened again in 2022, Pemex personnel reportedly told inhabitants to leave the town. “It’s possible that there will be more explosions,” they stated, according to the National Indigenous Congress, “and we don’t take responsibility for the lives of any residents” who chose to remain.

The earth wasn’t just weeping fire, gas and oil; it was leaking poison. Prolonged exposure to hydrocarbons has been linked to respiratory issues, birth defects and higher rates of cancer. In the town of Emiliano Zapata, one of the most polluted communities in Totonacapan, where two of the area’s streams are black with toxic sludge and the streets reek of oil and gas, residents fear for their health.

I began organizing my community in 2013, after a federal energy reform opened the oil industry to private investment, accelerating foreign companies’ entry into the region. Working with other activists, I became involved in the fight for Indigenous sovereignty — a multipronged struggle against environmental destruction, economic marginalization and organized crime.

I saw how, in areas where Pemex had a bigger presence, cartel cells appeared, and people were murdered and disappeared almost at random. Violence took hold in Totonacapan years before, as the state went to war with the cartels and the cartels went to war with one another, leaving innocent civilians caught in the crossfire. But this was different.

Cartels have profited enormously from fuel theft across Mexico. In areas like Papantla, which are dense with oil wells and refineries, cartels come to tap Pemex-owned pipelines and resell the fuel on the black market, a practice so common, it has its own slang term: huachicol. In my town, we felt the difference as organized crime moved in to make a profit off the contraband fuel.

Cartel safe houses appeared in the mountains — operation centers with telecommunication antennas and advanced infrastructure. Armed men in civilian clothes patrolled roads leading to oil wells. Businesses closed.

More lifeless bodies began to appear near the highway that connects Papantla and Poza Rica — especially by the section known as the Devil’s Curve, only half a mile from Escolín. In the fall of 2016 authorities found the corpses of two priests who were dragged out of a church at gunpoint the day before. Violence does not discriminate.

In the late 2010s, a collective of family members of the disappeared contacted residents in Escolín. The relatives wanted to search for their loved ones under the earth of our town. I began accompanying them, this group of more than 200 parents searching for their lost children.

I became close friends with a man named Magdaleno Pérez Santes, whose daughter, Diana Paloma, disappeared not far from my home in 2019. Then, on a Sunday in the spring, Maleno, as he was known to us, was detained by the municipal police before a scheduled effort to locate her. Upon his release a day later, he showed signs of having been brutally beaten. He died of his injuries shortly after that.

The search collective has located numerous extermination sites in Totonacapan — places used by the cartels to incinerate the remains of their victims. One day I took an Indigenous ritualist to one of these sites. It was a ranch in the middle of the jungle known as La Gallera, where a large pile of human ash and skeletal remains had been found inside a bread oven.

When he arrived, he spoke of how the mothers of the disappeared had cursed the forest because they saw it as the place where their children were taken to be tortured, burned and erased from the world. As he performed a ritual to purify the space, he remarked that the land was both a victim and a survivor of this violence.

Today, across Totonacapan, oil has become synonymous with ecological destruction, cartel violence and political disenfranchisement. The government promotes Mexico’s Indigenous population for tourist or public relations purposes but has not done enough to help those of us whose hometowns are flooded with oil or besieged by organized crime. In a bid to revitalize Pemex, which is deeply in debt, President Claudia Sheinbaum is looking to expand the use of fracking, a highly destructive practice that involves fracturing bedrock deep in the earth, in areas like mine.

Against all odds, people in my town and other Indigenous communities across Mexico continue moving, walking the paths of resistance that our ancestors opened with great effort. I still find cause for hope when I see women organizing together, communities defending their territory, parents searching for their children. We have no choice but to fight, because it is a fight for our survival. But it is not easy.

Eventually, the spring where I used to bathe dried up. Small pipelines had been installed around the town, draining water away from us.

Those springs had been our sources of water for generations, and some people in Escolín tapped the pipes to steal back what had been theirs. The water that came out was different: It was tinted yellow and smelled of gas. Some hired a truck to deliver clean water, for fear of contamination. Many of us, though, had no choice. We drank the foul liquid anyway.

Omar Lázaro García is an environmental and human rights activist from Escolín, Mexico, and a member of Mexico’s National Indigenous Congress.

Manuel Bayo Gisbert is a Mexican photographer documenting human rights violations in Mexico.

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