María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, aka Marichuy, the CIG’s independent candidate for president of Mexico in the 2018 elections.

By: Gilberto López y Rivas

The civil association “The Time Has Come for the Flourishing of the Peoples” (Llegó la Hora del Florecimiento de los Pueblos) was constituted for the purpose of obtaining and supporting the registration of the spokesperson of the Indigenous Government Council, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez (Marichuy) as an independent candidate to the Presidency of the Republic in next year’s electoral process. In spite of obstacles, sabotage and unequal conditions, characteristics of the structural racism that permeates institutions of the Mexican State, and without having the vast economic resources that the partyocracy and the supposedly independent candidacies have, but, in fact, at the service of the dominant groups, has been collecting citizen support for weeks in an extraordinary effort that faces a technology that is excluding and difficult to access for those who don’t have the economic resources to acquire costly telephone apparatuses. This technology, by the way, is concealed in a false modernity.

This civil association has denounced the cyber attacks in Chiapas during the mega events the EZLN organized in various of their Caracoles, to block access to the Internet and telephone network, which can only be done by State intelligence organs that have the know-how for that; the omissions and commissions of the Nacional Electoral Institute (INE) were revealed as well. Supposedly neutral and efficient, the INE functions, in fact, as a filter and barrier to hinder the entries of assistants, with proven backlogs in capture and stubbornness in achieving that deadlines, even with seven more days, act to favor the officialist (pro-government) aspirants, and, of course, impede that Marichuy appears on the 2018 electoral ballots.

Last November 7, the association denounced that the INE lies to society, violates its own regulations and fails to comply with the law: it showed that the mobile devices have not functioned appropriately, and that the average cost of a telephone is the equivalent of a little more than three minimum salaries, when 81.7 percent of the employed population earns up to three minimum salaries, and, surprise, surprise! It showed that the electoral organ is not protecting the personal data of citizens that lend their support: the registrations remain in the telephones, and to prove it it’s enough to download a program that tracks all the archives of applications, including that of the INE.

Likewise, the audit of income and expenses of the independent candidates establishes an exhaustive and exclusive system of State monitoring based on the same mono-cultural, classist and racist conception that the INE’s “modernity” its late model telephone applications exhibit. It’s about an instrument of control of the dominant system of representation, of the monopoly of power of the political parties that have overturned laws and regulations, to prevent the inscription of a candidacy that questions the order of things and proposes an anticapitalist struggle.

They don’t take into account the community organizational specificities of the indigenous peoples, nor the evident limitation on the economic resources of a pre-candidacy that doesn’t have the backing of state governments, dominant-criminal economic groups and even former presidents, who invest large quantities of money for the purchase of telephones, employ full-time personnel to work as assistants and expensive accounting firms that do the work required for the audit.

The so-called Integral Control System isn’t thinking about a campaign that positions itself against squandering the citizens’ resources and rests on mutual aid and solidarity as fundamental principles of political work. The audit prohibits public collections, for example passing the basket, la classic form the popular movements use to gather economic resources, because the INE claims that the donors are not identified.

Despite all these adversities and a countercurrent, the association has established the delivery, dedication and sacrifices of the thousands of volunteers that in these conditions have given themselves to the task of collecting citizen support. All kinds of activities have been organized in the majority of the country’s states to explain, debate and analyze the proposal of the National Indigenous Congress-Zapatista National Liberation Army that results from the election in 93 regions of the national territory of the members of the Indigenous Government Council (CIG) and the naming of Marichuy as its spokesperson.

The tours of the CIG and its spokesperson have had as their central task the reconstitution and unity of the original peoples versus the capitalist storm. Also, they have been weaving alliances throughout these months with different and numerous union and political organizations that have decided to support the proposal of the CNI-EZLN.

In the dark neoliberal night, the clarion of a struggle that goes beyond 2018 opens; that assumes the challenge of the indigenous world to organize into collectives in all the ambits of the Mexico of below to struggle against the death projects of capitalism.

The members of the civil association The Time Has Come for the Flourishing of the Peoples make the proposal of Marichuy and the CIG their own: “As is the custom in our peoples, surrendering, selling out or giving in is not an option and we redouble efforts to collect the citizen support required to figure as an independent candidate to the Presidency of the Republic on the 2018 electoral ballot, but above all to expand and strengthen the organizational structure of our rages and our pains throughout the country, so that the earth trembles at its core and permits the survival of the original peoples and the reconstruction of a Mexico that those who have the power have intentionally ripped to shreds.”

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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada

Thursday, November 9, 2017

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2017/11/09/opinion/019a1pol

Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee