Zapatista Women’s Gathering begins in the Caracol of Morelia.
By: Isaín Mandujano
TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Chiapas (apro) – Thousands of indigenous women from all the Zapatista Caracols, as well as from 27 states of the country and 34 countries of the world began to arrive this Thursday at the Caracol of Morelia, to participate in the “First International Political, Artistic, Sports and Cultural Gathering of Women that Struggle” to be held for International Women’s Day, March 8 to 10.
Everyone convoked by the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command (CCRI-CG) of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) “and in the name of the Zapatista girls, young women, adult and elderly women, alive and dead, council members, junta members, women promoters, milicianas, insurgents and bases of support,” they started to arrive today with their backpacks and will leave on Sunday, March 11.
Last December, in a communiqué signed by Comandantas Jessica, Esmeralda, Lucía, Zenaida and a girl named Defensa Zapatista, the EZLN called for this gathering to be held with “women that struggle, resist and rebel against the machista and patriarchal capitalist system.”
The convocation added: “We know well that the bad system not only exploits us, represses us, robs us and despises us as human beings, it also exploits, represses, robs and despises us again as women.”
And now, it continued: “we know because it’s worse, because now, all over the world they kill us. And the murderers, who are always the macho-faced system, don’t care if they kill us, because the police, the judges, the communications media, the bad governments, all those that are up above are what they are at the expense of our pains, they cover them up, hide them and even award them. But we are not afraid as it wants, or if we are, we control it, and we don’t surrender, and we don’t sell out and we don’t give up.”
Men were not invited to this event, the only ones that will be able to participate are the masked Zapatistas, but they will do everything that’s necessary so that the attendees at the event can play, chat, sing, dance, speak poems, and any form of art and culture that they have for sharing without shame.
“They -the Zapatista men- will be in charge of the cooking and cleaning and of whatever is needed,” as well as of vigilance on the outskirts.
At the end of January, the report was of about one thousand women coming from 27 states of the countries and 34 countries of the world, among them Germany, Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estado Español, United States, France, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, England, Italy, Mapuche Nation, Cree and Ojibwa Nation, Navajo Nation, Sweden, Nicaragua, Basque Country, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Switzerland, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
There were also more than 200 proposals registered for the in political, artistic and sports participations in different disciplines: music, dance, theater, circus, clown, poetry, story telling, book presentations, drawing, photography, cinema, football and volleyball.
According to the organizers, the women are expected to participate in workshops about gender violence, yoga for children, stencil, genetic clay, feminist manifestos, cooperative games, evaluation and use of menstrual blood, gender, theater, dance and painting as a means of healing, sensitization, agro-ecology, corrective violations, cloth sanitary napkins, production of personal hygiene articles, decolonizing hips.
There will also be workshops about the body and creative resistances, murals, women of color feminism, deconstructing genders, cyber-feminism, body work, workshop on self-massage, Reiki, abstract-figurative art, free writing, engraving, painting, creation of books starting from personal experiences, abortion, bio-construction, dance therapy, macrobiotic cooking, print making, humor and gender, aroma touch, reflexology.
There will also be talks about feminine lineage, the woman’s body, forms of resistance, human rights defense and promotion of culture, anti-machismo education, the experience of surviving violence, the women’s struggle in France and Italy, abortion, menstruation and deconstruction of the use of roles.
They will also analyze themes like femicides, the experience with struggle of the Mapuche people, machismo in the communications media, lesbian existence in times of patriarchy, feminism in Cuba, romantic love and the eroticization of gender violence, sexual violence in the Colombian armed conflict, violence towards the woman, racism, the anti-mining struggle, eco-feminism, indigenous and black feminisms, feminist economy and sustainability, as well as feminist human security.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 
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