EZLN support for the Ayotzinapa students. Photo: Saúl Kak
THE GOVERNMENT REWARDS THOSE RESPONSIBLE and THOSE THAT LIE and IT PURSUES THOSE THAT SEEK TRUTH and JUSTICE
[Admin: the recent joint comunicado from the EZLN and the CNI has not been posted in English on Enlace Zapatista, so we translated a very good article about it. A link to the Spanish is below and we’ll post the English translation when it becomes available.]
By: Isaín Mandujano
The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) and the National Indigenous (CNI) announced today that two years after “the bad government committed one of its worst crimes” by disappearing 43 young indigenous students from the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers College in Ayotzinapa,” it rewards those responsible for lying and trying to distort the truth even more and it pursues and incarcerates those who seek truth and justice.
In a joint comunicado, [1] the EZLN and the CNI remembered that this act only confirmed the profound darkness in which we find ourselves in the country, and it stirred the heart and the individual and collective spirit illuminating the night with rage, with pain and with the hope that the family members and compañeros of the 43 now embody, “and that shines in the face of millions of people in all the geographies of Mexico and of the world of below, and of international civil society in solidarity and aware.”
“The disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students remains unpunished, and seeking the truth in the midst of the power’s decay is to delve into the worst of this country, into the cynicism and perversion of the political class, which not only continues pretending to look for the disappeared compañeros, but that before the growing evidence that shows the culpability of the terrorist narco-state, rewards those responsible for lying and trying to distort the truth even more ‒as is the change of Tomás Zerón, the one responsible for planting alleged proof of their historic lie in the Cocula garbage dump, to Technical Secretary of the National Security Council‒ giving one more account of the bad government’s criminal nature,” both organizations of an indigenous profile pointed out.
They add that to the lie, the simulation and the impunity, the bad government adds outrages and injustices against those who have been in solidarity and demonstrated in support of the struggle of the family member compañeros of the 43, like the youth Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano [2], always in solidarity with the struggles of the original peoples –like those in Cherán, the Yaqui tribe, the indigenous prisoners, the Zapatista communities-, who a judge has sentenced to 33 years and 5 months in prison for the sextuple crime of being young, being a student, being poor, being in solidarity, being rebellious and being consistent.
“We see that when we look at who above is the Power: at who murders, covers up and lies, rewards and protects; at who is indignant and protests against injustice, coups and prison,” they point out.
The EZLN and the CNI refer to the long struggles that exist in the south, the west, the north, the Peninsula, the Center and the east of the country, where the struggle is against political bosses, against the dispossession of territory, against the big transnational mining companies, against shock troops, against the onslaught that threatens to extinguish the peoples of Mexico in resistance.
They explained that just like the teachers have done in their struggle, the original peoples pueblos have sought dialogues and answers from the bad government to their urgent demands with respect to the territories, about the presentation of the disappeared, about the liberation of prisoners, about justice for the murders, about getting the police or the soldiers out of our lands or about our demands for security and justice.
But the government always denies that they even detain the spokespersons all over the country, the Army shoots at children in Ostula, machines destroy houses of those who resist in Xochicuautla, the federal police shoot at the dignified people that accompany the teachers in Nochixtlán. “The bad governments make like they dialogue and simulate for years agreements with the Wixárika [3] people to attain the peaceful restitution of their territory, while they configure a violent reordering of the region.”
And the government talks as if nothing had happened and offers a willingness to yield, always so that both parties agree. The government yields a part of what it just destroyed; it releases a prisoner, indemnifies the family of the one they murdered and feigns looking for the disappeared. And in exchange it asks the peoples to cede their collective patrimony, which is their dignity, their autonomous organization and their territory.
That in various geographies of the country they are resorting to consultations when they say no to their mines, their wind farms, their GMOs, their dams and demand that they must ask the peoples, “but the bad government always answers feigning that: “it consults how to consult, whether it consults or not and the form of the consultation” (or something like that), which is full of simulation, supplanting of our word, manipulation and cooptation of our people and of threats and repression.”
“The faces of the 43 absent and the tenacity of their families and compañeros, are the 43 other parties of war and resistance. To them are added the pains, the rages, the resistances of the original peoples and the rebelliousness of millions all over Mexico and the world,” the EZLN and the CNI said.
And for all that, the parties remain at war and the other’s resistance persecuted and stigmatized, women raped, disappeared and murdered, infancy converted into merchandise, youth criminalized, labor exploited, the rebel persecuted, nature dishonored and humanity in pain.
“With all that humanity, with this land that we are, we reiterate today that truth and justice are an inalienable demand and that punishment of the guilty ones, all the guilty, will be born from the struggle from below, where, now more than ever and as original peoples pueblos of the National Indigenous Congress, we know that it’s not appropriate to surrender, sell out, or give in,” says the writing.
[1] The joint comunicado is entitled Parte de guerra y de Resistencia #44.
Para leer en español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/09/22/parte-de-guerra-y-de-resistencia-44/
[2] Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano – A young man that participated in the 3rd day of global action for Ayotzinapa. Police arrested him in the vicinity of a bus stop that was burned during the protest.
[3] Wixárika – Native Mexicans, also known as Huicholes.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 