CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Spiritual Descendants of Pancho Villa’s Revolutionary War With DuPont Spin-offs in Dinamita, Durango

Catholic bishop Raúl Vera celebrating mass at Camp El Siete in December 2023. Photo: Paulina Rocío del Moral González.

The struggle of the United Front of Pueblos of La Laguna in Defense of Life, Land, and Water in Durango – birth state of the legendary revolutionary, Pancho Villa– against the transnational corporation Chemours, a spin-off of DuPont de Nemours, since 2017, has reached a climax due to thuggish armed repression organized by economic, political, municipal and state authorities, aided by the Army and the National Guard, against 28 farmers, of both sexes, and factory workers jailed in March and one woman jailed in April, on trumped up charges. This is the second major armed repression; the first occurred on March 9, 2018, also with the use of extreme violence by state and municipal police of Durango at the time, against men, women, children and elders in the ejido El Siete, in Dinamita, Durango.

The United Front of Pueblos of La Laguna in Defense of Life, Land and Water is a peoples’ organization which combines 23 ejidos and rural communities[1] of Gómez Palacio[2] in the Lagunera Region of Durango since 2017, and whose main battle has been to defend their homes, families and land against the pollution from the installation of a sodium cyanide industrial megaplant in the Ejido El Siete, Dinamita, Durango, and in addition, as it has developed, to take on other agrarian and labor causes.

From 2017 to the present the legitimate environmental cause the United Front raises has generated support from diverse environmental organizations from the Lagunera Ecological Region as this ecological region is known, including populations in Durango and Coahuila linked by the rivers Nazas and Aguanaval, associations for civil rights, as environmentalists and organizations for campesino struggles from other parts of the country, and including the emeritus bishop of Saltillo, José Raúl Vera López, known for his activism for social causes, have united in its collective struggle against the contamination of the extraction zone of Dinamita, Durango and its rural surroundings. And the reason is simple – to fight for the United Front’s cause is to fight – as it’s name says, in defense of the life, land, and water of the Lagunera District of Durango and Coahuila.

On the afternoon of March 18 this movement against the environmental contamination of Dinamita and its surrounding region was violently suppressed, this time by all three levels of government, by means of the fabrication of crimes, by different orders, with the aid of the Durango prosecutor’s office, the chambers of commerce, and the clear collusion between the PRI governor, Esteban Villegas Villarreal, and the president of Gómez Palacio, Betzabé Martínez Arango, a chapulina[3] of the Morena Party.

In an operation involving 80 official vehicles, and the use of abusive force by municipal and state police, even with the unjustified participation of the Army and National Guard, 28 rural citizen workers committed to the defense of their human rights, farming, civil and environmental rights were attacked for demonstrating against Sotomex, a trucking firm that transports explosives, since March 17, for the unjustified firing of four workers, and imprisoned, without justifiable indictments, in el Cereso (Centro de Rehabilitación Social) Number 1 in Durango.

A few days later, on March 21, three more campesinos were arrested in Ejido Noé on the trumped up charge of stealing nuts –their properties invaded by Alfredo Becerra, previous tenant of the property, who had been ejected for nonpayment– being sent to jail in Durango on March 23rd. One of them, Javier Mendoza Martínez, a 65-year-old diabetic, with hypertension and compromised vision, died in custody due to negligence and under suspicious circumstances on April 12, 2026, without any proper notice to his family. It was only thanks to communication from families of other prisoners that the family of Mendoza Martínez could recover his body for funeral rights with the recommendation by prison authorities not to open the coffin. It should be noted that some 20 of the detained are senior citizens with health problems. Bernardino “Nino” Ochoa, a spokesman for the United Front, wasn’t arrested but appears to have disappeared and there is no news of his whereabouts.

This sequence of coordinated actions culminated in a slanderous declaration issued by the very same Secretary of Security and Citizen Protection of México, Omar García Harfuch, in La Mañanera, the presidential news bulletin, on April 14, when, in presenting the results of his National Security Strategy, he inexcusably included in a list of “alleged extortionists” [sic] the rural settlers arrested in Dinamita, Durango, a village with a population of less than a thousand persons.

Meanwhile, in April, police harassment continued with roadblocks in the access roads to the towns of Dinamita, El Siete, Abisinia, and others, trying to intimidate the residents to break their political participation, in open violation of their constitutional rights to free demonstrations and defense of their territory. This obviously coordinated action shows the complicity of the governor of Durango, the mayor of Gómez Palacio, the security apparatuses of the three levels of government, in collusion with agribusinessmen and industrialists in the zone. The list of accountable agencies would include Semarnat (Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources), a federal agency, then under PRI administration, which had started the problem by issuing an unfounded environmental opinion in 2017.

At dawn on the 25th of April, Teresita de Jesús Ochoa Hernández, daughter of former spokesman for the Frente Unido, Bernardino Ochoa, was seized, without a warrant, by the Gómez Palacio police, and taken to the Durango jail, where she remains a prisoner. The crime authorities impute to Teresita is the destruction of a barbed wire fence and a subsequent fire, which was typified as damage by fire due to activities that happened in 2023 on a piece of land in Tlahualilo, a town in Lerdo, in other words, in a distant locale, in no way linked with the territory in dispute. Rubén Favela, her defense attorney, points out that there are no legal grounds for her arrest, that her preventative imprisonment is excessive and her detention doesn’t merit the intervention of the National Guard. Other members of the Nino Ochoa family were detained while at church in Dinamita, not even participating in the demonstration.

Despite continual marches of the families and little children of the political prisoners and sit-ins in front of Gómez Palacio City Hall, the Morena Party mayor, Betzabé Martínez Arango, could not care less; on the contrary, she sends patrols to watch over the marchers and to intimidate them with uniformed policemen who record them on their cellphones. The judicial action of moving the political prisoners to the Cereso (jail) in the city of Durango, the state capital, instead of confining them in the Cereso of Gómez Palacio, is part of a strategy to wear down the movement. In spite of this, the settlers have gathered collections and contributions to help the families of political prisoners with their travel expenses to the state capital, three hours from Gómez Palacio.

Frente Unido asking for the liberation of 28 political prisoners in March, 2026. Photo: Paulina Rocío del Moral González.

Hipólito Trujillo Silva, member of the CNTE (National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers), and of the United Front, has taken on the spokesman duties for the movement to liberate the political prisoners, joined by the women and senior citizens of the above-mentioned rural communities. The United Front has posted on its webpage a history of the movement and has received messages of solidarity from diverse city and country organizations both in the region and nationally. You can follow the movement at this link.

Seeking new possibilities for political advocacy, on Monday, April 27th, a commission of activists from the United Front traveled to México City for an interview with the Ministry of the Interior, and on the next day, they were in negotiations with the secretary general of government for the state of Durango. At this time, the dialogue remains open yet the 28 (minus one deceased) people in jail have not been released.

Background of Dupont in Dinamita, Durango, México

From the time of the authoritarian reign of Porfirio Diaz (1884-1910), the region of Dinamita, Durango, has been the focus of international capitalist interest, particularly in the chemical explosives industry. First, it was a group of Paris bankers who obtained from the Mexican Minister of Finance, José Yves Limantour (1893-1911) the monopoly for the exploitation of dynamite in exchange for consolidating the Mexican foreign debt, excluding the trust of the Alfred Nobel, who had patented dynamite in 1867, to establish nitroglycerine –invented by Ascanio Sobrero in 1847— using diatomaceous earth. Thus, a group of entrepreneurs connected to Diaz, Brittingham-Terrazas-Creel went into business with the French Central Dynamite Society, the first and largest business of its generation in Latin America, whose French capital was 3,400,000 gold pesos, an astronomical figure for the era, and together founded the National Mexican Dynamite and Explosives Company. Juan Brittingham was originally from the US and is........

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