JOINT PRONOUNCEMENT FROM THE CNI AND THE EZLN FOR THE FREEDOM

Listen here: [podcast]https://radiozapatista.org/Audios/dia8_pronunciamiento_cni_ezln.mp3[/podcast]

OF OUR MAPUCHE SISTER MACHI FRANCISCA LINCOLAO HUIRCAPAN

To the Mapuche People:
To the Chilean People:
To the International Sixth:
To the Media:

We peoples, nations, and tribes of the National Indigenous Congress send a fraternal greeting of solidarity to Machi Francisca Lincolao Huircapan, of the Mapuche People, in Chile, imprisoned since March 30, 2016. We know that compañera Machi Francisca is on a hunger strike to demand the justice that the bad government of Chile has denied her by keeping her imprisoned for the crime of continuing to defend the natural resources, sacred places, and cultural rights of her people. They are letting her health deteriorate to the point that it threatens the life of the compañera, whose state of health is summarily delicate.

We denounce the fact that while the Chilean government represses Machi Francisca, they blatantly protect transnational capitalists and bosses such as the landlord Alejandro Taldriz, with his illegal logging that the corrupt state works to protect.

The National Indigenous Congress and the EZLN demand:

1. The immediate release of compañera Machi Francisca Lincolao Huircapan.

2. An end to the repression against the dignified Mapuche people and the revocation of the racist and repressive Anti-terrorist Law that is meant to criminalize the territorial defense of the Chilean Originary Peoples.

3. Absolute respect for the Mapuche territory.

January 2017

For the Full Reconstitution of our Peoples
Never again a Mexico without us

NATIONAL INDIGENOUS CONGRESS
ZAPATISTA ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION

(Em português aqui.)

AND THE EARTH TREMBLED! A REPORT FROM THE EPICENTER…

Listen here: [podcast]https://radiozapatista.org/Audios/palabrasdespedidacni.mp3[/podcast]

To the Originary Peoples of Mexico:
To Civil Society of Mexico and the World:
To the National and International Sixth:
To the Free Media:

Brothers and Sisters:

This is the time of the originary peoples, the time for us to replant and rebuild ourselves. It is time to go on the offensive and this is the agreement that we have laid out for how to do so, from our perspective as individuals, as communities, as originary peoples, and as the National Indigenous Congress [CNI]. It is time for dignity to govern this country and this world and for democracy, liberty, and justice to flourish in its step.

We are announcing here that during the second phase of the Fifth National Indigenous Congress we meticulously analyzed the results of the consultation process that we held among our peoples during the months of October, November, and December of 2016. In that process, we issued agreements from communal, ejidal, collective, municipal, inter-municipal and regional assemblies in all of the ways, forms, and languages that represent our peoples in the geography of this country, once again bringing us to understand and confront, with dignity and rebellion, the situation that we face in our country and the world.

We appreciate the messages of support, hope, and solidarity that came from intellectuals, collectives, and peoples in response to our proposal entitled “Let the Earth Tremble at its Core,” which we made public during the first phase of the Fifth National Indigenous Congress. We also acknowledge the critical voices, many of them making fundamentally racist arguments, that expressed indignant and contemptuous rage at the idea that an indigenous woman would aspire not only to contend for presidential election, but would propose to truly change, from below, this broken country.

To all of them, we say that the earth indeed has trembled, and we along with her, and that we intend to shake the conscience of the entire nation, and that, in fact, we intend for indignation, resistance and rebellion to be present as an option on the electoral ballots of 2018. But we also say that it is not at all our intention to compete with the political parties or with the political class who still owe this country so much. They owe us for every death, disappearance, and imprisonment, and every dispossession, repression, and discrimination. Do not mistake our intentions. We do not plan to compete against them, because we are not the same as they are. Unlike them, we are not filled with lies and perverse words. We are instead the collective word of below and to the left, that which shakes the world and makes it tremble with epicenters of autonomy, and which makes us so proudly different from them that:

1. While the country is submerged in fear and terror born from the thousands of dead and disappeared, in the municipalities of the mountains and the coast of Guerrero our peoples have created conditions of real security and justice. In Santa María Ostula, Michoacán, the Nahua people have united with other indigenous communities to ensure that security remains in the hands of the people. The epicenter of the resistance there is the communal assembly of Ostula, the guarantor of the ethic of a movement that has already permeated the municipalities of Aquila, Coahuayana, Chinicuila, and Coalcomán. In the Purépecha plateau, the community of Cherán has demonstrated that by organizing to eliminate the politicians from their bad government structure and by exercising their own forms of security and government they could not only construct justice, but also, as in other geographies across this country, they showed that only from below, from rebellion, can a new social pact be constructed that is autonomous and just. And we have not and will not stop constructing from below the truth and justice denied to the 43 disappeared students from the teacher’s college of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, the 3 student compañeros who were murdered, and their compañeros who were injured, all by the Mexican narco-government and its repressive forces. Meanwhile, all levels of the bad governments criminalize social struggle and resistance and rebellion, persecuting, accusing, disappearing, imprisoning, and murdering the men and women who struggle for just causes.
2. While destruction reaches every corner of the country, knowing no limits and distancing people from their land and from that which is sacred, the Wixárika people, together with the committees in defense of life and water from the Potosino altiplano, have shown that they can defend a territory and their environment and can create an equilibrium based in an identification with nature, with a sacred vision that recreates, every day, the ancestral links with life, land, the sun, and the ancestors, reaching across 7 municipalities in the sacred ceremonial territory of Wirikuta in San Luis Potosí.
3. While the bad governments deform State policies on education, placing education at the service of capitalist corporations such that it ceases to be a right, the originary peoples create primary schools, secondary schools, high schools and universities with their own educational systems, based in the protection of our mother earth, in defense of territory, in production, in the sciences, in the arts, and in our languages. Despite the fact that the majority of these processes grow without the support of any level of the bad government, these institutions are meant to serve everyone.
4. Meanwhile, the paid media – spokespeople for those who prostitute every one of the words that they circulate and fool the people in the country and the city so that they don’t wake from their slumber – criminalize those who think and defend what is theirs, making them out to be delinquents, vandals, and misfits, while those who benefit from ignorance and alienation are the ones with high social status. Those who oppress, repress, exploit and dispossess are always made out to be the good guys, the ones who deserve to be respected and allowed to govern so that they can serve themselves. While all of this is happening, the communities have made their own media, creating ideas in different ways so that conscience cannot be overshadowed by the lies that the capitalists impose, and instead using them to strengthen organization from below, where every true word is born.
5. While the representative “democracy” of the political parties has been converted into a parody of the popular will, where votes are bought and sold like any other commodity and poverty is used to manipulate people so that the capitalists can maintain the division between the people of the countryside and the city, the originary peoples continue to care for and strengthen their forms of consensus and to cultivate assemblies as organs of government where through the voice of everyone together profoundly democratic agreements are made, across entire regions, through assemblies that articulate with agreements of other assemblies, which themselves emerge from the profound will of each family.
6. While the governments impose their decisions to benefit the few, supplanting the popular will of the people and criminalizing and repressing whoever opposes their projects of death which they impose at the cost of the blood of our peoples—such as the New Airport of Mexico City, pretending to consult them while actually imposing death—we originary peoples have consistent ways and forms for free, prior and informed consent, however small or large that may be.
7. While the bad governments hand energy sovereignty over to foreign interests through privatization, and the high cost of gasoline reveals the face of capitalism which in fact only opens a road toward inequality and the rebellious response of the indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of Mexico, the powerful can neither hide nor silence this rebellion. We peoples unite and fight to stop the destruction of our territories through fracking, wind farms, mining, oil wells, and gas and oil pipelines in the states of Veracruz, Sonora, Sinaloa, Baja California, Morelos, Oaxaca, Yucatán and the entire national territory.
8. While the bad governments impose their toxic and genetically modified food on consumers across the countryside and in the cities, the Mayan people continue their indefatigable struggle to stop the planting of genetically modified seed on the Yucatan peninsula and across the country in order to conserve the ancestral genetic wealth that also symbolizes our life and collective organization and is the basis for our spirituality.
9. While the political class only destroys and makes empty promises, we peoples build, not only in order to govern but also in order to exist with autonomy and self-determination.

Our resistances and rebellions constitute the power of below. We don’t offer empty promises or actions, but rather real processes for radical transformation where everyone participates and which are tangible in the diverse and enormous indigenous geographies of this nation. This is why, as the National Indigenous Congress, which brings together 43 peoples of this country in this Fifth Congress, WE AGREE to name an Indigenous Governing Council with men and women representatives from each one of the peoples, tribes, and nations that make up the CNI. This council proposes to govern this country. It will have an indigenous woman from the CNI as its spokesperson, which is to say a woman who has indigenous blood and who knows her culture, and this indigenous woman spokesperson from the CNI will be an independent candidate for the presidency of Mexico in the 2018 elections.

That is why we, the CNI, as the Home for All Indigenous Peoples, are also the principles that configure the ethic of our struggle. In these principles there is room for all of the originary peoples of this country. Those principles that house the Indigenous Governing Council are:

To obey, not command

To represent, not supplant

To serve others, not serve oneself

To convince, not defeat

To go below, not above

To propose, not impose

To construct, not destroy

This is what we have invented and reinvented, not simply because we want to, but because it is the only way that we have to continue existing – by following new paths forged from the collective memory of our own forms of organization and that are the product of resistance and rebellion, in order to confront, every day, the war that has not ended and yet has not been able to do away with us. Using these forms it has not only been possible for us to build a path toward the full reconstitution of our peoples, but also toward new civilizational forms. In other words, it has been possible to build collective hope that is transformed into communities, municipalities, regions, states, and which is able to respond precisely to the real problems that the country is facing, far away from the political class and their corruption.

From this Fifth National Indigenous Congress, we call on the originary peoples of this country, the collectives of the Sixth, the workers, the coalitions and committees who struggle in the countryside and the city, the students, intellectuals, the artists, and scientists, the elements of civil society that are not organized, as well as all good-hearted people to close ranks and go on the offensive. We call on you to dismantle the power of above and to reconstitute ourselves now from below and to the left, not only as peoples but as a country. We make a call to come together in a single organization where dignity will be our final word and our first action. We call on all of you to organize with us to stop this war, and to not be afraid to build ourselves and sow our seeds on the ruins left by capitalism.

This is what humanity and our mother earth demand of us. It is the time for rebellious dignity. We will make this a material reality by convoking a constituent assembly of the Indigenous Governing Council for Mexico in the month of May 2017. From there we will build bridges toward the compañeros and compañeras of civil society, the media, and the originary peoples in order to make the earth tremble at its core, to overcome fear and recuperate what belongs to humanity, what belongs to the earth and what belongs to the peoples. We do this so that we can recuperate the territories that have been invaded or destroyed, so that the disappeared of this country can be returned, so that all political prisoners are freed, so that there can be truth and justice for all of those who have been murdered, so that there can be dignity for the countryside and the city. That is, have no doubt, we are going for everything, because we know this might be the last opportunity we have as originary peoples and as Mexican society to peacefully and radically change our forms of government, making dignity the epicenter of a new world.

From Oventik, Zapatista Territory, Chiapas, Mexico

Never Again a Mexico Without Us

National Indigenous Congress

Zapatista Army for National Liberation

DESPITE AGGRESSIONS, THE CONSULTATION CONTINUES
JOINT COMMUNIQUE BY THE NATIONAL INDIGENOUS CONGRESS AND THE ZAPATISTA ARMY FOR NATIONAL LIBERATION.

December 2, 2016.

TO THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO:
TO THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD:
TO THE FREE MEDIA:

The steps taken by our peoples are great, steps wise when taken in collectivity, and the National Indigenous Congress turns with attentive ears to listen to each other, to the thoughts of we who are the word and the agreements of the 5th CNI. We continue in permanent assembly, traveling to all corners of our country, Mexico.

Our permanent assembly arises from and convenes among the peoples, nations, and tribes of all the languages spoken by the National Indigenous Congress; in large and small assemblies; in meetings of communal councils, in deep reflections by dispersed families; in regional forums and ceremonial spaces. In our collective words, we continue to conclude that it is the time of our peoples, time for the earth to tremble at its core.

The fears of the powerful, the extractive companies, the military, and the narcoparamilitaries are so great that our consultation is being attacked and harassed in the places where our peoples are meeting to discuss and decide the steps to take as the CNI. For that reason, we denounce the following:

(Continuar leyendo…)

Joint Communique from the CNI and the EZLN in Solidarity with the Indigenous Community of Santa María Ostula, Michoacán

November 4, 2016

To the Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, Michoacán:
To the peoples of the world:
To national and international civil society:
To the independent media:

The peoples, nations, and tribes who make up the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation manifest our profound condemnation of the actions carried out in unison by the bad governments and criminal groups against the Nahua indigenous community of Santa María Ostula, municipality of Aquila, Michoacán, in an attempt to crush their dignified and historic struggle.

These governments were not only complicit in the attack against Cemeí Verdía on May 25, 2015, but in fact freed those directly responsible, Juan Hernández Ramírez (then municipal president of Aquila) and José Antioco Calvillo. They [the government] imprisoned Cemeí Verdía on false charges and murdered the young boy Hidelberto Reyes García.

The bad governments now intend to arrest commander Germán Ramírez, fabricating criminal charges against those who struggle to defend the land and their families. At the same time, we see the regrouping of members of the Knights Templar cartel who are already reorganized and heavily armed in the eastern part of the municipality of Aquila.

(Continuar leyendo…)

To the Yaqui Tribe,
To the peoples and governments of the world,

As the originary peoples who make up the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista communities, we send our simple words in solidarity with the Yaqui Tribe, its traditional government, and its troops. We are with you in these difficult moments after the confrontations this past October 21 in Lomas de Bácum.

We condemn the conflict and discord that are planted and promoted in the communities by the bad governments and their overseers, national and international corporations, who want to take control over the gas, water, and minerals of the Yaqui territory. To this end, the powerful sow division as a tool to impose death and destruction in our territories. For them, we are merely a path to more power and more money.

As the peoples, nations, and tribes of the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista peoples, we salute the Yaqui Tribe’s defense of their territory. We call for unity in the face of a common enemy which aims to take everything that we as peoples have and which makes possible our collective organization, our history, our language, and our life.

In the various geographies of resistance of the originary peoples of this country, the bad governments are using our own people to generate violence among us in order to guarantee their ability to impose extractive projects of death, structural reforms, the destruction of communitarian organization, and terror among those who struggle. For those who struggle, in contrast to the capitalists, the life and future of the people is everything.

We call on national and international civil society, on the originary peoples, on the national and international Sixth, and on the free media to be attentive and demand the respect deserved by the indigenous peoples in their autonomous organization and self-determination.

October 2016

For the Full Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never Again a Mexico Without Us

National Indigenous Congress
Zapatista Army for National Liberation

Source: Enlace Zapatista

MAY THE EARTH TREMBLE AT ITS CORE

To the people of the world:
To the free media:
To the National and International Sixth:

Convened for the commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the National Indigenous Congress and the living resistance of the originary peoples, nations, and tribes of this country called Mexico, of the languages of Amuzgo, Binni-zaá, Chinanteco, Chol, Chontal de Oaxaca, Coca, Náyeri, Cuicateco, Kumiai, Lacandón, Matlazinca, Maya, Mayo, Mazahua, Mazateco, Mixe, Mixteco, Nahua, Ñahñu, Ñathô, Popoluca, Purépecha, Rarámuri, Tlapaneco, Tojolabal, Totonaco, Triqui, Tzeltal, Tsotsil, Wixárika, Yaqui, Zoque, Chontal de Tabasco, as well as our Aymara, Catalán, Mam, Nasa, Quiché and Tacaná brothers and sisters, we firmly pronounce that our struggle is below and to the left, that we are anticapitalist and that the time of the people has come—the time to make this country pulse with the ancestral heartbeat of our mother earth.

It is in this spirit that we met to celebrate life in the Fifth National Indigenous Congress, which took place on October 9-14, 2016, in CIDECI-UNITIERRA, Chiapas. There we once again recognized the intensification of the dispossession and repression that have not stopped in the 524 years since the powerful began a war aimed at exterminating those who are of the earth; as their children we have not allowed for their destruction and death, meant to serve capitalist ambition which knows no end other than destruction itself. That resistance, the struggle to continue constructing life, today takes the form of words, learning, and agreements. On a daily basis we build ourselves and our communities in resistance in order to stave off the storm and the capitalist attack which never lets up. It becomes more aggressive everyday such that today it has become a civilizational threat, not only for indigenous peoples and campesinos but also for the people of the cities who themselves must create dignified and rebellious forms of resistance in order to avoid murder, dispossession, contamination, sickness, slavery, kidnapping or disappearance. Within our community assemblies we have decided, exercised, and constructed our destiny since time immemorial. Our forms of organization and the defense of our collective life is only possible through rebellion against the bad government, their businesses, and their organized crime.

We denounce the following:

(Continuar leyendo…)

To the peoples of the world:
To the alternative, free, autonomous, or whatever-you-call-it media:
To the National and International Sixth:

War and Resistance Dispatch #44

And what about the other 43? And the ones that follow?

This country has not been the same since the bad government committed one of its most heinous crimes in disappearing 43 young indigenous students of the teaching college Raúl Isidro Burgos in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, two years ago. This event forced us to acknowledge the profound darkness in which we find ourselves today, stirring our individual and collective hearts and spirit. The rage, pain, and hope embodied in the families and compañeros of the 43 illuminate that darkness and shine on the faces of millions of people of every geography below in Mexico and around the world, as well as among a conscientious international civil society in solidarity.

As originary barrios, tribes, nations, and peoples, we begin from the collective heart that we are and turn our gaze into words.

From the geographies and calendars below that reflect the resistances, rebellions, and autonomies of those of us who make up the National Indigenous Congress; from the places and paths from where we as originary peoples see and understand the world: from the ancient geographies within which we have never ceased to see, understand, and resist this same violent war that the powerful wage against all of us who suffer and resist with all of our individual or collective being: we use our gaze and our words to take as our own the faces of the 43 disappeared which travel through every corner of the country in search of truth and justice, faces that are reflected in millions of others and that show us, in the dark of night, the way of the sacred, because pain and hope are sacred. That collective face multiplies and focuses its gaze on the geographies of resistance and rebellion.

From the Geographies of Below

The disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa lives on in impunity. To search for truth from within the putrefaction of power is to search within the worst of this country, in the cynicism and perversion of the political class. The political class not only continues to pretend to keep up the search for the disappeared compañeros, but, in the face of growing evidence pointing to the culpability of the terrorist narco-state, it actually rewards those in charge of lying and distorting the truth. This is what they did in moving Tomás Zerón [ex-head of the Attorney General’s Criminal Investigation Agency]—the person responsible for planting false evidence to back up his historical lie about the Cocula garbage dumpi—to Technical Secretary of the National Security Council. It is one more confirmation of the criminal nature of the bad government.

On top of lies, deceit, and impunity, the bad government heaps abuses and injustices against those who have shown solidarity with and support for the struggle of the families and compañeros of the 43. This includes Luis Fernando Sotelo Sambrano, a young person who has always been supportive of originary peoples’ struggles, including that of Cherán, of the Yaqui Tribe, of indigenous prisoners, and of the Zapatista communities. He has been sentenced by a judge to 33 years and 5 months for the sextuple crime of being young, poor, a student, in solidarity, rebellious, and a person of integrity.
This is what we see from those in power above: those who murder are covered for by lies and rewarded with protection; those who protest injustice receive beatings and imprisonment.

_*_

When we look toward:

The south: the peoples’ struggle in defense of their territories against political bosses and large companies is dissolved by the struggle for security and justice against organized crime cartels whose intimate relationship with the entire political class is the only certainty that we as a people have about any state body.

The formation of shock troops that attack citizen protests have permeated towns and villages, and the government purposely generates conflicts that destroy the internal fabric of a community. That is, the government tries to create mirrors of its own war by sowing conflict in the communities and betting on the destruction of the most sensitive parts of the social fabric. There is nothing more dangerous and explosive for this nation than this practice.

The west: the struggles for land, security, and justice occur in the midst of administrative management for the drug cartels, disguised by the state as crime-fighting initiatives or development policies. On the other hand, the peoples who have resisted and even combatted criminal activity through organization from below have to struggle against constant attempts by the bad government to reestablish territorial control by organized crime cartels—and their respective preferred political parties.

The autonomous organization of the communities and their unwavering struggles for sacred sites and ancestral lands do not cease. The defense of our Mother Earth is not negotiable. We are watching the struggle of the Wixárika community of Wauta-San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán for the recovery of almost ten thousand hectares bordering the town of Huajimic, Nayarit. There, despite the fact that the community has established their rights in agrarian courts, the judicial authorities have been remiss. The bad governments use the false official geographies that divide the states as a pretext to incentivize the displacement of indigenous peoples. To the Wixárika people, with regard to their rebellion and autonomy, we say: we are with you.

The north: where the struggles for recognition of territorial rights continue against threats by mining companies, agrarian displacement, the theft of natural resources, and the subjugation of resistance by narco-paramilitaries, the originary peoples continue to make and remake themselves every day.

Among the originary peoples of the tribes of the north, the Sioux nation weaves its own geographies that go beyond the false official geographies that locate them in another country; for us, we are all children of the same mother. They are resisting the invasion of their sacred lands, cemeteries, and ceremonial sites by an oil pipeline under contruction by the company Energy Transfer Partners. That company intends to transport oil obtained through fracking in the Bakken region in North Dakota through their territories. This struggle has generated solidarity and unity among the originary peoples of the north. To them we say that their rage is ours, and as the National Indigenous Congress, we raise our voice with them and will continue to do so. Their dignified struggle is also ours.

The peninsula: The Mayan peoples resist the attempt to disappear them by decree, defending their territories against attack by tourism and real estate interests. A proliferation of hired hitmen operate in impunity to displace the indigenous peoples. The agroindustry of genetically modified organisms threatens the existence of the Mayan peoples, and those magnates, with vile dishonesty, take over agrarian territories, cultural and archeological sites, and even indigenous identity itself, trying to convert a vital people into a commercial fetish. The communities who struggle against the high electricity costs are persecuted and criminalized.

The center [of the country]: Infrastructure projects including highways, gas pipelines, oil pipelines, and residential developments are being imposed through violent means and human rights are increasingly vague and removed in the law applied. Powerful groups use strategies of criminalization, cooptation, and division, all of them close—in corrupt and obscene ways—to that criminal who thinks he governs this country: Enrique Peña Nieto.

In the east of the country, violence, fracking, mining, migrant trafficking, corruption, and government madness are the currents that run against the struggle of the peoples, all playing out in the midst of entire regions taken over by violent criminal groups controlled from the highest levels of government.

From Dialogue to Betrayal

Just as the teachers in struggle have done, we as originary peoples have sought dialogue with the bad government regarding our urgent demands for respect of our territories, the return of the disappeared, the freeing of prisoners, justice for those killed, the removal of the police or military from our lands, and our own security and justice, but the government has refused. Instead, it has arrested our spokespeople all over the country; the army has fired on children in Ostula; bulldozers have destroyed the homes of those who resist in Xochicuautla, and federal police have shot at the dignified community accompanying the teachers in Nochixtlán. The bad governments pretend to dialogue; they simulated interest in agreements with the Wixárika people for years in order to pacify the territory while they planned a violent reordering of the region.

Later the government talks like nothing has happened and offers its willingness to make concessions, as long as both parties come to an agreement. Then the government cedes one small part of what it has just destroyed, frees one prisoner, pays damages to the family of one murder victim, and pretends to look for the disappeared. In exchange it asks the originary peoples to cede their collective patrimony—their dignity, their autonomous organization, and their territory.

In various geographies across our country we are holding referendums where we say that we don’t want their mines, their oil pipelines, their GMOs, their dams, and we demand that they consult the people. But the bad government always responds by pretending “to consult as to how to consult on whether to or not to consult on the form of the consultation” (or something like that), what is really a calculated simulation, the erasure of our voice, the manipulation and cooptation of our people, as well as threats and repression. And so it goes until they say it’s done; they proclaim that we agreed to their death projects or that we were divided and they must thus attend to all points of view.

Meanwhile, as they try to keep us quiet with their deceitful consultation agenda and while the NGOs that are “experts” in “consultation” fatten their wallets, they race ahead to concretize—before the supposed consultation has even begun—the theft of the water from the Yaqui River, the destruction of Wirikuta through mining concessions, the construction of oil pipelines that invade the entire Isthmus, and the GMOs imposed in the Riviera Maya.

Our geographies are the paths of the world; this is where we will meet and recognize each other, because we know that the struggle is not just today nor is it just for today. We do not struggle for power or the folklore offered by deceitful campaigns, but rather to weave and reweave what we are, what we were, and what we will be as originary peoples.

The face of the 43 missing and the tenacity of their families and compañeros are the other 43 dispatches on war and resistance. To them we add the pain, rage, and resistance of the originary peoples and the rebellions of millions all over Mexico and around the world.

On top of that we add the dispatches of war and resistance from the other who is persecuted and stigmatized, women who have been abused, disappeared, and murdered, children made into commodities, young people criminalized, nature disgraced, humanity in pain.

We reiterate today, alongside that humanity, along with this earth that we are, that truth and justice are an inalienable demand and that punishment for the culpable—all of those responsible—will be born from the struggle from below. Now more than ever, as originary peoples of the National Indigenous Congress, we know that in this struggle there is no room to give up, sell out, or give in.

Truth and Justice for Ayotzinapa!

Free Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano!

Free all of the political prisoners!

For the holistic reconstitution of our peoples.

Never Again a Mexico Without Us.

National Indigenous Congress

Zapatista Army for National Liberation

Mexico, September 2016

1. This October marks 20 years of uninterrupted work by the National Indigenous Congress [CNI], a space of unity, reflection, and organization for the indigenous peoples of Mexico. The National Indigenous Congress has worked for the full reconstitution of our peoples and the construction of a society where all cultures, all colors, and all of the peoples of Mexico fit.
2. Throughout these years, and with increased strength since the release of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle by the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, we have forged in word and action our contributions to the struggles of resistance and rebellion throughout the national geography. We not only sustain our decision to continue our existence, but we honor this decision with all our strength and with our fists in the air. We honor it by weaving together profound and collective agreements that can be seen in our care of the earth, in our languages, in our traditions, and in our collective governments in their many different names and forms. The flame of our autonomy lives inside these things, and it illuminates the collective heart of our peoples, barrios, nations, and tribes. These are deep agreements that we work on every day so that each one gives rise to the complex territories that together constitute our autonomy and self-determination.
3. While we weave life, capitalism designs and lays out over us its own territories of death in every corner of our suffering Mexico. Supposed mining territories, cartel activity by organized crime, agroindustry, political party territories, urban zoning rights, and conservation programs are all imposed on our lands and in none of them—no matter what name they are given by the system or its obedient governments—do the indigenous peoples fit.
4. The capitalists began and continue to expand a bloody war of conquest to take over what has always been ours. They appear behind any number of masks in this constant war of extermination: the businessman, the politician, the police, the soldier, or the hitman. And as always, the dead, the disappeared, and the imprisoned come from us, as well as the stolen and destroyed lands. Any collective, autonomous, and rebellious hope is persecuted.
5. We have resisted this capitalist onslaught against our peoples. From the devastation wrought on us we have dreamed and built new worlds. From our grief and mourning for our murdered compañeros we as peoples have recreated new forms of resistance and rebellion that allow us to halt this devastation and walk the only path possible for those below and to the left: to construct and exercise the justice denied us by the powerful who purport to govern us.
6. It is urgent that we bring our flames of resistance, autonomy, and rebellion together. These flames illuminate every originary people who weave new worlds that are truly from below, where love and the ancestral commitment to our mother—the earth—are born.

(Continuar leyendo…)

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A los pueblos del mundo
A la Sexta Nacional e Internacional
A los medios libres de comunicación.

Los pueblos, naciones, barrios y tribus que conformamos el Congreso Nacional Indígena, repudiamos enérgicamente el hostigamiento que está sufriendo la comunidad Chol del ejido Tila, en el estado de Chiapas, resaltando la provocación ocurrida mediante el operativo orquestado entre fuerzas militares  y policiacas alrededor de las 18:20 horas del día 2 de agosto de 2016, cuyo objetivo era el de intimidar a los compañeros que se encontraban cercamos a las ruinas en las que se encuentran las instalaciones que había construido ilegalmente el Ayuntamiento Municipal.

A bordo de tres vehículos militares y acompañados de partidistas y miembros del Ayuntamiento, los malos gobiernos pretenden influir el miedo para que el digno pueblo de Tila siga construyendo su autonomía desde la libre determinación y desde abajo, donde han refundado su autogobierno con apego a la defensa de la tierra.

Advertimos que los partidistas y el Ayuntamiento han fomentado la rearticulación y fortalecimiento del grupo paramilitar de Paz y Justicia, lo que acompañado de las incursiones militares en días recientes, dan cuenta de la guerra contrainsurgente que persiste en la zona en contra de los pueblos originarios de Chiapas que deciden organizarse y no permitir mas despojo por los malos gobiernos.

Responsabilizamos a los tres niveles del mal gobierno de cualquier agresión que puedan sufrir nuestr@s herman@s de Tila, cuya autonomía y territorio se encuentran plenamente respaldados agrariamente y por sus derechos ancestrales como pueblo originario.

Al pueblo Chol de Tila, le decimos que no está solo, que en el Congreso Nacional Indígena sabemos de su importante lucha y que en todo momento estaremos con ustedes.

Por la Reconstitución Integral De Nuestros Pueblos
Nunca Mas Un México Sin Nosotros
Agosto de 2016
Congreso Nacional Indígena

FROM WITHIN THE STORM

Joint Communique from the National Indigenous Congress and the EZLN on the cowardly police attack against the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers and the indigenous community of Nochixtlán, Oaxaca.

June 20, 2016

To the People of Mexico:

To the peoples of the World:

Faced with the cowardly repressive attack suffered by the teachers and the community in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca—in which the Mexican state reminds us that this is a war on all—the peoples, nations, and tribes who make up the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation say to the dignified teachers that they are not alone, that we know that reason and truth are on their side, that the collective dignity from which they speak their resistance is unbreakable, and that this the principal weapon of those of us below.

We condemn the escalation of repression with which the neoliberal capitalist reform, supposedly about “education,” is being imposed across the entire country and principally in the states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Michoacán. With threats, persecutions, beatings, unjust imprisonments and now murders they try to break the dignity of the teachers in rebellion.

We call on our peoples and on civil society in general to be with the teachers who resist at all times, to recognize ourselves in them. The violence used to dispossess them of their basic work benefits with the goal of privatizing education is a reflection of the violence with which the originary peoples and rural and urban peoples are dispossessed.

Those who delight in power decided that education, health, indigenous and campesino territories, and even peace and security are a commodity for whoever can pay for them, that rights are not rights but rather products and services to be snatched away, and they dispossess, destroy, and negotiate according to what big capital dictates. And they intend to impose this aberration through bloody means, murdering and disappearing our compañer@s, sending our spokespeople to high security prisons, making shameless torture into government marketing, and with the help of the paid press, criminalizing the bravest part of Mexican society, that is, those who struggle, who do not give in, who do not sell out, and who do not give up.

We demand a halt to the repression against the teachers in struggle and the immediate and unconditional liberation of ALL political prisoners.

We invite all of the peoples of the countryside and cities to be attentive and in solidarity with the teachers’ struggle, to organize autonomously in order to remain informed and alert in the face of the storm that is upon all of us, knowing that a storm, in addition to its turmoil and chaos, also makes the ground fertile where a new world is always born.

From the mountains, countryside, valleys, canyons, and barrios of the originary peoples, nations, and tribes of Mexico.

Never Again a Mexico Without Us!
National Indigenous Congress
Zapatista Army for National Liberation
Mexico, June 20, 2016