INVITATION TO THE
FIFTH NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE NATIONAL INDIGENOUS CONGRESS

The indigenous peoples, nations, tribes and neighborhoods that make up the National Indigenous Congress, the Indigenous Governing Council, and the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, in the face of the disease which affects our Mother Earth and is expressed as a serious pandemic and which has dealt a blow to the life and economy of our communities and the entire world, hear ourselves in the voice of the originary peoples who cry out from the geographies where they resist and struggle against the capitalist war that tries to take over indigenous and rural territories. This war is waged through aggressive extractivist policies across the whole national territory as well as through megaprojects of death: the Interoceanic Highway in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, the Integral Project for Morelos in the states of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala, the Mayan Train in the states of the Mexican Southeast, and the Mexico City International Airport in the center of the country. It operates through the implementation of a combination of policies and mechanisms for the continuation of “free trade” subordinated to the United States and Canada, policies which are also aimed at containing migration. It seeks to stop or debilitate the organization and resistance of our peoples by supplanting our traditional authorities and holding staged indigenous consultations.

These policies and megaprojects are driven by the neoliberal government of the Fourth Transformation[1] in the service of global capital and against the autonomous organization of our peoples. All the above is being achieved through the militarization of the country (through creation and deployment of the National Guard and the militarization of the entire national territory), the complicity of the criminal cartel-states, the creation of programs that try to rupture communal organization, as is the case with Sembrando Vida[2], and the passage of laws favorable to large transnational business consortia, such as the Federal Law for the Promotion and Protection of Native Corn.

The CNI and CIG together with the Zapatista communities, acting as a congress when we are together and a network when we are apart, are that collective word that we make our own: we weave ourselves together in and through this word, determined that our resistance grow as large as the capitalist threat to life.

For our peoples there is no option to give in, give up, or sell out, when it’s Mother Earth and life itself that the governments, businesses, militaries and drug cartels want to take as spoils of war.

WHEREAS:

  1. There is an intensification of the repression, threats, formation of shock troops and criminalization of communities that resist the Integrated Project for Morelos, which the bad federal government decided to impose illegally with the use of its armed shock troops called the National Guard; nevertheless, the heroic legacy of Samir Flores Soberanes is kept alive by the sisters and brothers of the Popular Front in Defense of Land and Water in Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcala, who don’t give in, give up, or sell out.
  2. The war is escalating against the autonomous and originary communities of the CNI in the state of Chiapas. Meanwhile the governments guarantee impunity for the paramilitary groups they finance and which attack the towns and their sister communities day and night.
  3. The bad federal government, together with its armed forces, is spreading fear and terror in shameless alliance with shadowy economic interests that intend to take over the territories of indigenous peoples and peasants. It cynically violates laws, court rulings, and court-ordered suspensions in order to impose its megaprojects that hand over the national territory to transnational economic interests.
  4. Resistance and rebellion are growing in the geographies of the originary peoples as dispossession and violent repression grow, perpetrated by the bad government at all levels together with paramilitary and narco-paramilitary groups that make possible their extractive and polluting projects. In the big cities, too, our peoples are resisting as demonstrated by the Otomí community in Mexico City.
  5. As originary peoples, from the struggles that we are, we see that sparks of hope are igniting against this war which is the same around the world, and from distant geographies we turn toward each other, toward the struggle for life, which forms a language through which we recognize one another.
  6. The EZLN has issued a convocation to begin a world tour in April of 2021, starting in Europe, and the CNI is invited to form a delegation to accompany this journey and bring our collective word.

WE INVITE the delegates and councilmembers of the CNI-CIG to the:
FIFTH NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE NATIONAL INDIGENOUS CONGRESS AND THE INDIGENOUS GOVERNING COUNCIL

To take place in

LA QUINTA PIEDRA, RECUPERATED TERRITORY OF THE NAHUA COMMUNITY OF THE TEPOZTLÁN EJIDO, MORELOS

23-24 JANUARY, 2021

 With the following program:

23 January:

Inauguration

Working groups:

  • Assessment of the dispossession and the capitalist war being waged against our peoples
  • Proposal for the participation of a delegation from the CNI-CIG in the Zapatista world tour

24 January:

Open Plenary:

  • Conclusion of working groups
  • Agreements and resolutions
  • Public communiqué
  • Closing

Note 1: Given the current health circumstances we invite each town, community or indigenous organization, whichever applies, to nominate one or two delegates, with the goal of having an assembly that is widely representative while being smaller in numbers. Those who attend should comply with the measures of wearing a face mask, maintaining a safe distance and frequently washing their hands and face as well as any measures implemented during the meeting.

Note 2: Persons who are not delegates or councilmembers of the CNI/CIG will only be allowed to attend the assembly with an express invitation from the Coordinating and Monitoring Commission.

Sincerely,
December, 2020
For the Full Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never Again a Mexico Without Us
National Indigenous Congress-Indigenous Governing Council
Zapatista Army for National Liberation

 

[1] The López Obrador campaign deemed its governing project the “Fourth Transformation” (4T), supposedly on par with historic events such as Mexican Independence (1810), a period of reform in the mid-19th century, and the Mexican Revolution (1910).

[2] Sembrando Vida (Sowing the Seeds of Life) is a government program developed under the López Obrador administration that claims to create jobs in local communities through the planting of trees.