Comandanta Dalia – 6 May 2015
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Good evening compañeros and compañeras, brothers and sisters.
I’m going to explain a little bit of what compañera Comandanta Rosalinda said.
Just as she explained, it is now my turn to talk about how we become authorities. From 1994 on, we knew that we had rights as women. That was when we woke up. This is how little by little we grew to understand the work of the compañeras.
In the communities, in the regions, we began the practice of organizing ourselves to fight for the good of the community, without having to have an education to do so.
In 1994, we realized that as women, as mothers and fathers, we had the courage to send our husbands, our sons, our daughters to fight, and we knew well that to confront the enemy is not easy and one can come back alive or dead. But we never dwelled on those things. We were clear that the women had the responsibility to raise whomever of our sons and daughters were left. This is when we understood that we thought the same way as the compañeros.
Comandanta Rosalinda – 6 May 2015
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Good evening compañeros and compañeras, brothers and sisters.
What compañera Comandanta Miriam just explained is all true. We were poorly treated, humiliated, and unappreciated because we never knew that yes, we did have the right to organize, to participate, to do all types of work; this is because no one had given us an explanation of how we could organize to get out of this exploitation.
At that time we were all in the dark, we didn’t know anything. But during the time of clandestinity, there came a day when some compañeras were recruited, and they went on to recruit other compañeras village by village.
Then came the time to name a compañera to be the local authority for each community. They named me as a local authority of my community. That is when I started going to meetings in order to bring more information back to the community. Later on we held meetings with the compañeras in the village to explain to them how the collective work could be organized, and to also to explain to them that its necessary to have compañeras who are insurgents and milicianas.[i]