Commanders enter La Realidad for the 25th Anniversary celebration.
January 2, 2019
To the Zapatista National Liberation Army:
To the CIG Support Networks:
To the Resistance and Rebellion Networks:
To the people of Mexico:
To the peoples of the world:
To the communications media:
The peoples, nations and tribes that form the National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Governing Council, proudly greet the 25th anniversary of the armed uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, since on January 1, 1994 our word stopped asking for alms and demanded justice, and to recognizer the rights that we started to exercise since that day, not only in Chiapas, but in all indigenous corners of our country.
That day, a new chapter in our collective life began to be written. With heads held high, we walk picking up the footsteps of our ancestors and sowing those of coming generations, with the conviction of continuing to be peoples, nations and tribes.
With the war unleashed against us, we have seen ourselves reflected in the walk of the indigenous Zapatista communities, knowing that outside there are threats against us and that everything is in the name of wealth for only some. They offer us that we migrate, leaving our territories; they offer us mourning for our deaths in the face of violence, contamination, persecution and prison; they offer us fear and resignation.
The peoples that we in the CNI are know how the bad governments act in the name of those who have more and want everything. We have faced the formation of shock groups, of paramilitaries and now of narco-paramilitaries that the bad government disguises as internal divisions, to say in that way that some want and others do not want to deliver land and natural resources to the owners of money. We know the ways in which the bad government’s “indigenist” institutions deceive our people in order to generate the kind of division that costs the lives of our compañeros and compañeras that opt for dignity, resistance and rebellion.
The INPI and its alleged new “indigenist” policy is no more than the deepening of that offensive against life, with which they want to weaken the struggle for the autonomy of the original peoples who, with their struggle, stop the devastation that they impose from above. The CNI and our compañeros of the Indigenous Governing Council do not believe al overseer of capitalism who claims to govern Mexico, and we will not accept any false consultation like those with which they want to legitimize the robbery of indigenous and campesino territories, our extermination and the sharpening of the war against us. We will not accept our death although they may bring thousands or millions of votes that, according to them, decided it.
With us walk the profound steps, real and not renounceable, that the original peoples have taken in resonance with the walking of the EZLN and the indigenous Zapatista communities. We are communications media, cooperatives, community guards; we are primary, secondary and high schools; we are languages and ancient world views (cosmovisiones); we are betting on a future that those who are in power are not even capable of imagining; we are the ones who will face in every corner the destruction that they proclaim as if it were a “democratic” benefit.
Together with the deepening of the capitalist war we will also deepen our resistance and rebellion. The mining companies with which they contracted, the megaprojects on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the immoral Maya Train project, the devastation and privatization of sowing industrial forest plantations in the Lacandón Jungle and the territorial alienation (for the benefit of) big capital that the Special Economic Zones are will bump heads with the real power, the power of below, the one that doesn’t surrender, doesn’t sell out and doesn’t give up, because to do it is to know we are dead as peoples.
We respectfully greet and send a collective and fraternal embrace to the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee–General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army, to the thousands of milicianos and milicianas and to the support base communities. We warn the bad governments that any aggression against them is also against the CNI- CIG, therefore we make a call to the support networks throughout the country and to the networks of resistance and rebellion in Mexico and in the world to be attentive and organized to act jointly and to construct a world in which we will all be able to live.
Attentively,
January 2019
For the Integral Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never More A Mexico Without Us
Coordination and Follow-Up Commission of the National Indigenous Congress/Indigenous Government Council
Chiapas Support Committee 