Lee Cuesta exposes religious intolerance in southern Mexico

Issues like amnesty and immigration overshadow the truth about religious intolerance and persecution against evangelicals in southern Mexico, which remains unknown by most Americans. Lee Cuesta has written extensively on this human rights topic, while the Zapatista movement in Chiapas captures headlines instead.

While Cuesta and his family worked and lived outside of Mexico City, he became aware of the religious intolerance in the southern state of Chiapas. Cuesta traveled to Chiapas to observe the conditions, and to meet with pastor and lawyer Abdías Tovilla Jaime. He is director, legal consultant and founder of CEDECH, the State Committee of Chiapas for Evangelical Defense, located in the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico.

Tovilla began this ministry as a volunteer in response to the needs of persecuted believers. “Christian brothers arrived (in San Cristóbal) who’d been beaten,” he recalls. “They’d say, ‘Pastor, help us;’ so I had to do something, even though how to defend human rights was not something I learned in seminary.” In 1992, the National Presbyterian Church of Mexico made CEDECH one of its official ministries, with the slogan “For an integral, Christian liberty” (“Por una libertad cristiana integral”).

As a result of this experience, Cuesta’s three-part series exposing the religious persecution against evangelicals in Chiapas was first published by World Pulse. This series, including photographs, was subsequently reprinted in Indian Life, an international newspaper based in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

In turn, this series – along with his other articles that preceded it – formed the foundation for his book. The Canadian publication that reprinted his series, Indian Life, said of his book: “Like a story lifted off the page of today’s newspaper.”

Cuesta’s first article on the troubling situation in Chiapas reported two events in which approximately 350 evangelical Christians of the Tzotzil ethnic group “were brutally beaten, put in jail and expelled from their communities of origin, taking away all their belongings and burning some of the houses,” quoting one Mexican leader. All this occurred in spite of a religious freedom law, adopted in 1992, which ostensibly guaranteed that each individual shall “not be the object of discrimination, compulsion or hostility as a result of his religious beliefs.”

In his second article about this issue, Cuesta pointed out that “Mexico’s preoccupation with the Zapatista guerrilla army, both by politicians and the media, has overshadowed the other side of the Chiapas crisis: the 20,000 to 30,000 believers in Chiapas exiled ‘for professing the Protestant religion.’ ”

As a result of the persecution in the Chiapas highlands, several refugee settlements have sprung up around the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Cuesta acquired firsthand experience by traveling to both San Cristóbal de Las Casas and Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, where he conducted on-site investigation and interviews, including a trip to San Juan Chamula, the renowned “headquarters” of such persecution.

Cuesta’s book is entitled Once: Once, with ISBN 0-7414-0650-0. It constitutes excellent material for reading groups in local churches, as well as a significant addition to church libraries. In addition, he is available to speak at churches – including reading groups – concerning the up-to-date situation in Chiapas, among other topics. He may be contacted via e-mail at info@leecuesta.com.

Besides the reports described above, Cuesta wrote many articles in Spanish that were published in Prisma, Desafío Transcultural, and the Mexican Presbyterian magazine, El Faro. One of these articles – “Las Seis Marcas Distintivas del Discipulado Verdadero y Práctico” – was subsequently adapted for the international magazine Apuntes Pastorales, and then reprinted again in Consejero Bíblico.