Mexican Christian families booted out of their homes and forced to live in wine cellar

Seven Christian families were forced to live in a cramped wine cellar after they were evicted from their homes in the western Mexican state of Jalisco because they refused to recant their faith.

The families had to leave their homes on Jan. 26, 2016 after almost 2,000 residents voted to evict them for religious reasons, according to World Watch Monitor. They had been living in various temporary shelters provided by the government since the eviction. Their most recent dwelling place is a wine cellar, which offers extremely limited space for 30 people to cook, eat and sleep.

Rosa Blanca Vázquez de la Rosa recalled the night when she and her two children were forced out of their house and expelled from Tuxpan de Bolaños.

"They put us in the vans and abandoned us right there outside the village, at Las Banderitas crossing, with nothing at all but the clothes we had on when they came," she narrated.

She said that her husband was at work when the indigenous chiefs came to their house. She has tried to visit her village once, but she had to leave almost immediately.

The families had faced threats of eviction from the community for several years. In 2008, Baptist Convention of Guadalajara had successfully fought for the rights of the family to remain in the village, but the council later ruled that they had to leave.

Christian charity Open Doors' Latin America analyst Dennis Petri questioned whether the vote to evict the families was legal.

"The indigenous chiefs claim it was, since they have the authority, as protected by the federal constitution, to govern based on their indigenous uses and customs," he said.

"At the same time, the federal constitution also guarantees freedom of religion and human rights – you can't just force someone out of his home, for whatever reason, including religious reasons. This is what is at stake here: a conflict between contradictory rights that need to be balanced," he continued.

He asserted that the state government does not know how to decide on the case, and it is now just trying to gain time, hoping that the group would give up and move on to somewhere else.

Last month, Pedro Faro Navarro, director of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Centre, accused the government of being in denial regarding the thousands of evangelical Christians that were forced out of their homes due to their beliefs.

The NGO called the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights has reported that there have been over 287,000 cases of forced internal displacement in the last five years. However, the UN-accredited National Human Rights Commission has only recorded around 35,000 cases. Navarro disputed both figures, adding that many families had to leave their homes but nobody came to count them.