INDIGENOUS REGIONAL MOVEMENT IN DEFENSE AND RESPECT FOR LIFE
FIRST REGIONAL ASSEMBLY FOR THE DEFENSE OF TERRITORY AND THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLES OF THE SIERRA OF SANTA MARTA
Soteapan, Veracruz, August 27, 2017
COMUNICADO
The Popoluca, Nahua and Mestizo peoples of the Sierra of Santa Marta, met today, August 27, 2017 in the municipal capital of Soteapan, with the participation of around 400 people from 50 communities belonging to the municipalities of Hueyapan de Ocampo, Soteapan, Tatahuicapan, Mecayapan and Pajapan, besides visitors from the municipalities of Chinameca, Cosoleacaque, Coatzacoalcos, Acayucan, Chinameca, Minatitlan, Zaragoza, AguaDulce, Las Choapas and Sayula del Sur of Veracruz, from Xalapa and from a representation of the Zoque people of Northern Chiapas, in the struggle against fracking.
With the coordination of our Popoluca and Nahua council members of the Indigenous Government Council, named at the national level by members of the National Indigenous Congress, we hold our first regional assembly for making agreements in the follow-up to the process initiated years ago for the defense of our rights and our territories facing the onslaught of big transnational capital backed by corrupt and mafia-like politicians that characterize the political class and the governments of our country.
With their energy reform and other structural reforms, with the violence at the hand of organized crime that they have sown throughout the country and our region, they are violating all our rights and wanting to dispossess and destroy our territories: among other things, we refer to their refusal to recognize access to electric energy as a human right, their intent to dispossess and contaminate our territories and our waters with wind farm businesses, with mining activity, with conventional exploitation of oil and natural gas and through the deadly technology of fracking.
Today we make internal agreements for continuing with our struggle; we declare that we will continue with firmness our civilian resistance movement against the high cost of electricity and we demand that the CFE fulfill the agreements signed at the regional and national level.
We will also continue strengthening our movement for territorial defense and will demand the recognition of our community assembly minutes that constitute actions of self-consultation as indigenous peoples. We will not permit other supposed consultations impelled by the bad governments and their dependencies.
In coordination with many other movements at the national level, we will not permit the entry of wind farm and extractive companies in our territories nor will we offer our territories to big foreign capital as the bad governments seek to do with their Special Economic Zone Law; nor will we permit the privatization of water.
With the National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Government Council for Mexico, we will assert our right to self-determination and we will reconstruct our autonomy that the bad governments have stolen from us for decades; in other words, we will reconstruct our ability to govern ourselves in order to implement a good system of life for our peoples.
We also denounce the murders of human rights defenders and the criminalization of the social struggle and we demand the appearance with life of all the disappeared and the freedom of all political prisoners.
WE WON’T STOP!
NOW IS THE HOUR OF THE FLOURISHING OF THE PEOPLES!
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Originally Published in Spanish by Pozol Colectivo
Tuesday, August 29, 2017
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 