Radio Zapatista
(Español) “Nuestra propuesta es diferente, es una propuesta colectiva”, Marichuy a su salida del INE
Fotografía: Heriberto Rodríguez
“Ya dimos un primer paso”, afirmó la vocera del Concejo Indígena de Gobierno (CIG) pasado el mediodía de hoy tras su salida de las instalaciones del Instituto Nacional Electoral en la Ciudad de México.
A pesar de algunos obstáculos que Marichuy señaló como “trabas” que demuestran “la estructura diseñada por los de arriba” pudo quedar registrada como aspirante en base a una candidatura independiente para contender en las elecciones presidenciales del próximo año.
Decenas de personas acompañaron el momento en el que una vez más María de Jesús Patricio Martínez reiteró el carácter colectivo de una propuesta que caminará “al estilo de los pueblos” con la responsabilidad que el cargo significa en las comunidades y sin recibir un peso del INE.
También señaló la guerra de exterminio en la que se encuentran los pueblos indígenas y que de nuevo se evidenció tras los recientes terremotos que sacudieron al país: “Porque nos queda claro, sobre todo ahorita en este tiempo que acabamos de pasar de catástrofe, se vio clarito que no les interesa la gente de abajo, que no están con la gente de abajo.” Manifestó que ante el despojo que se vive la llamada es a la organización y el apoyo debe ser de todas y todos para acabar con este sistema capitalista, racista, clasista y patriarcal, no sólo en México, sino en todo el mundo.
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On the Hodor Effect Paralyzing the US
On the Hodor Effect Paralyzing the US
Ana Curcio interviews Alvaro Reyes about Charlottesville, white supremacy, and contemporary challenges for politics in the US
Could you briefly explain the events that took place in Charlottesville and help put them in context?
As some of your readers may know by now, on August 11 and 12, an alliance of some 500 white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in what they called a “Unite the Right” rally. They gathered to protest the planned removal of a monument of Robert E. Lee, the general that led the slave-holding confederate states’ army during the U.S. civil war. “Unite the Right” organizers have since hailed this rally as the largest gathering of white supremacists in decades.
In response, many hundreds of antifascist counter-protesters also converged on the city to repudiate what they rightly denounced as “racist terror.” On the afternoon of the 12th, James A. Fields, a neo-Nazi associated with the white supremacist group “Vanguard America,” attacked the antifascists by plowing his car into the crowd (a tactic that we now know right-wing organizations had been promoting online for the last few months), injuring 35 people and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Fueled by anger over Heyer’s death, people across the country have since demanded that confederate monuments be removed from their cities. On Monday, August 14, here in Durham, North Carolina, protestors took the streets and pulled a statue of a confederate soldier off its pedestal, bringing it crashing to the ground. The very next day, the Baltimore city council voted unanimously to take down all confederate monuments. The demand for the removal of confederate monuments has spread like wild fire across the country and has grown to target a whole array of monuments dedicated to figures involved in slavery, Native American genocide and the massacre of Mexicans in the United States, and even monuments from the more recent past. A substantial movement for example has emerged demanding the removal of the statue honoring Frank Rizzo, the Police Commissioner and Mayor of Philadelphia from the late 1960s to the early 1980s who was notorious for terrorizing Black and Latino Philadelphia with a ‘shoot first ask questions later’ approach throughout his time in office.
It is important, I think, to note that for both the fascist and antifascist forces, the struggle over these monuments is not just about the way that history gets told; it is about two different visions of what we should do regarding the extraordinary level of racism present in the country today. The fascists point to these monuments as a reminder of the white supremacist foundations upon which the United States was built and argue that these foundations fully justify calls for the incarceration of Blacks, the criminalization and deportation of Latino migrants, and the exclusion of Muslims. Meanwhile, the antifascist forces point to these monuments to argue that unless we deal with the foundational nature of white supremacy in this country – a white supremacy, it must be remembered, that served as a direct if rarely mentioned inspiration for Hitlerian fascism – we cannot adequately explain the contemporary growth of racist extremism. In other words, it is as if it’s only at the moment when the global conditions of possibility for that project called the United States are rapidly disappearing that everyone is forced to see that project for what it was.
