Located in the state of San Luis Potosi, Wirikuta is one of the most biologically rich and diverse deserts in the world. In 1994 it was decreed “a Site of Cultural and Historic Heritage and an Area under Ecological Conservation”; in the year 2000 the protected area was expanded to 140 thousand hectares; and in 2001 it was declared a Sacred Natural Site by UNESCO. There is also a bird sanctuary in Wirikuta. In spite of this, it is currently under siege by First Majestic Silver, a Vancouver-based mining company that paid 3 million dollars to obtain 22 mining concessions in the area.

Those were the concerns expressed in an interview with La Jornada, by representatives of the Wixarika communities who are preparing a series of actions to reject the activities of the mining company. Last Thursday they paid a visit to the Senate to express their opposition.

Despite Wirikuta’s protected status and its designation as a UNESCO Historic and Cultural Heritage Site, the Mexican government granted 22 mining concessions covering 15,631 acres to the Canadian mining company. Seventy percent of these concessions lie within the Wirikuta protected area.

Canadian mining corporations were not necessarily directly responsible for the deaths and acts of intimidation and violence, but some of them were carried out by company security personnel and current or former employees. So it may be the case that the implicated companies are not legally liable, but alongside the local elites and states that license and promote extractive activities, they at the least bear a moral responsibility for creating the situations of conflict in which assassinations and other acts of violence take place.

The Huicholes, who call themselves Wixarika, make pilgrimages to their ceremonial place in the Sierra Madres across the Chihuahua desert to Leunar in Mexico, their sacred mountain where the sun first rose. A Canadian mining company, First Majestic Silver Corporation, plans to exploit and mine this area. The company is planning to use cyanide to mine the sacred region. This disastrous mining will destroy the ecosystem and the sacred places of the Wixarika.

With the right that freedom of expression gives me and the communal statute as a member has given me, I give myself the opportunity to write a personal opinion about the future of the Indigenous Community of San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán and its Annex of Tuxpán, the community that has given me a space in which to live, where to develop myself and that in gratitude I would like to express my sentiments for the space and for Our Mother Earth, Ta Tei Yurienaka.

Mario de la Cruz Carrillo is a native of  Arroyo de Cañaveral, a small community in the Municipality of Nayar in the state of Nayarit. He graduated with a degree in mathematics from the Autonomous University of Nayarit in the Spring of 2023. Mario is very interested in working toward the creation of a curricular mathematics program that can better engage Wixarika youth utilizing innovative pedagogical practices so that students may find both enjoyment and relevance in the subject.