STATEMENT OF THE THIRD NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF THE NATIONAL INDIGENOUS CONGRESS, THE INDIGENOUS GOVERNMENT COUNCIL AND THE EZLN
To the peoples of the world
To the organizations and collectives in resistance and rebellion
To the networks of resistance and rebellion
To the national and international Sixth
To the communications media
Almost 100 years after the assassination of General Emiliano Zapata, the Ayuuk, Binizza, Chinanteco, Chol, Chontal, Guarijío, Maya, Mayo, Mazahua, Mazateco, Mixteco, Nahua, Nayeri, Otomí, Popoluca, Purépecha, Raramuri, Tepehuano, Tlapaneco, Tojolabal, Totonaco, Tzeltal, Tsotsil, Wixárika, Yaqui, Zoque and Quichua (Ecuador) peoples being together to celebrate the Third National Assembly of the National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Government Council, we are in pain and rage faced with the war against our peoples, the murder of Compañero Samir, dead for defending the land and his people. From our national assembly we send a combative embrace in solidarity with his family and the community of Amilcingo, Morelos. We send a solidarity embrace from the CNI-CIG and the EZLN, where the compañero will always be a lighted candle.
The neoliberal regime killed Samir; we don’t know if it was the government, the impresarios, their criminal cartels, or if it was the three together. The offerings that AMLO made, not to those below, but rather to the owners of money and power, the veiled threats against those who defend life, laid the foundation for the basis of the murderous assassination. It is, in the case of the new head of the federal executive, the promise of delivering to the entrepreneurs and the top military men what neoliberal capitalism and its bad governments that come and go have not been able to take away from us. He offers the entrepreneurs putting land at their disposal with the supposed new Agrarian Development Law, to finish dismantling collective property and collective organization, calling shameless robbery and destruction “development,” militarily threatening our peoples with his National Guard and reconfiguring our country.
What those above call “transformations” have always meant to our peoples that we put up the deaths in function of the interests of the oligarchies and of those who have the power, which are each time smaller and larger, who don’t stop living from the oppression, exploitation and destruction as always.
The so-called “Fourth Transformation” follows the same path as its 3 predecessors, although with more brutality and cynicism, if possible.
In the War of Independence it was the local exploiters, the children of the European invaders, who took power and distributed our lands, trying to make the existence of our peoples invisible on the basis of the liberal discourse that is the discourse of Power until this very day.
In the Reform our communal lands, sacred to us, were proscribed to deliver them to the same looters, the Reform laws and the subsequent laws about uncultivated lands and colonization promoted the growth of the big haciendas under the regime of Porfirio Díaz. [1]
During the Mexican Revolution, while political power was distributed above, those of us below defended and watered the land with our blood. While Madero and Carranza were betraying and assassinating Zapata, our peoples were demanding a radical and profound social and agrarian transformation that never came.
Thus, in each “transformation” the exploitation, dispossession, discrimination and contempt against our peoples increased and recurred.
We have no doubt that this new stage of government deepens neoliberalism and the forced integration of our country into the imperial orbit of the United States, therefore, it has faithfully committed to give continuity to the macroeconomic policies of the previous governments, establishing an austerity and fiscal restrictions that have not been seen since the government of Miguel de la Madrid: guarantying the autonomy of the Bank of Mexico, respect for foreign investments and the promotion of free trade. It goes against us and against our territories; it goes in favor of extermination of our peoples in every corner, and for that it tends a war that we suffer today with mourning and courage. We see ourselves in this general assembly and in the conjunct of our sorrows we see that it’s a war made of many wars functioning together, as if it were one.
Today it is Francisco I. Madero, who betrayed Zapata, the greatest inspirer of the discourse of the new federal executive, admirer of liberal and neoliberal development that is exterminating our peoples.
In reality, the self-named “Fourth Transformation” started with Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, deepened with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, his war of conquest continued with Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, Vicente Fox Quezada, Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and Enrique Peña Nieto; and now it continues with the term of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Movement of National Regeneration Party. For the original peoples the only “true change” is the increase in lies, deceptions, persecutions, threats, incarcerations, dispossession, murders, ridicule and contempt, human exploitation and the destruction of nature; in sum: the annihilation of collective life that we are.
What those who orchestrate the destruction of the world need is what the peoples have, and we are going to defend it from their capitalist transformation with our resistance and rebellion, although, as we are seeing, we face the military scheme of domination and repression that capital has as a standard, and that the same applies to police bodies, the military, shock groups, drug cartels and paramilitaries.
The bad federal government stands upon the ravages left by decades of neoliberalism, deepening the contempt and racism in order to be able to dispossess the original peoples. It looks for indifference and directs itself to such indifference to ask if you are in agreement or not with the destruction that is seen as “progress.” In other words, its supposed consultas are no more than the harvest of hatred and fear left by neoliberal capitalism. That harvest is called “democracy.”
Faced with all the projects aimed at the dispossession and destruction of our territories and cultures, we state that the citizen and popular consultas, and even those that are organized under the protection of Convention 169 of the ILO, have as the purpose validating said megaprojects and dress them up with a false legitimacy. We denounce that the consultas that the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples currently organize around the 2018-2024 Nacional Development Plan, the Maya Train or the Trans-Isthmus Corridor are a simulation for its validation. Our peoples, in the exercise of their fundamental rights of autonomy and territory say NO to the policies and the megaprojects of dispossession, death and destruction, as well as the consultas that the bad governments organizes to obtain the consent of our pueblos to said policies and said megaprojects.
The neoliberal government that Andrés Manuel López Obrador heads has its sights set on our peoples and territories, where, with the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples, a network of cooptation and disorganization is extended, which opens the path to a war that has an industrial name, made of projects and violence, which, together with the other wars and war networks, spread a dark web of death on the country’s original peoples of the country.
The Morelos Integral Project, for example, consists of 2 thermoelectric plants, gas pipelines and aqueducts that seek to dispossess the indigenous Nahua peoples of the Popocatépetl Volcano of the states of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala of land, water, security, health, identity and campesino life. The force of the State and of the Elecnor, Enagas, Abengoa, Bonatti, CFE, Nissan, Burlington, Saint Gobain, Continental, Bridgestone and many more companies, has imposed this project by means of public state, federal and army violence, infusing terror in the pueblos through torture, threats, incarceration, legal persecution, closing community radio stations, and now the murder of our brother Samir Flores Soberanes.
The neoliberals, first with the criminals Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto and now with Andrés Manuel López Obrador, they seek to finish off the resistance of the peoples that with right and reason con say NO to the Morelos Integral Project. However, the racism sown by capitalist contempt, disinformation and forgetfulness, criminalize us again. AMLO said in 2014 and 2018 that he would be with the peoples against the thermoelectric plant in Huexca. Now he calls us left radicals and conservatives point out that the money invested in the project is the major reason for not stopping the death that it announces, regardless of the pain and rage of our peoples.Today, the lie that they call the “consulta” is craftily named “democracy,” done within a framework of violence, disinformation and disparagement, without regard to the risk that the Morelos Gas Pipeline implies in the danger zone of the sacred Popocatépetl Volcano, no matter that they will finish off the water for irrigation of the Ayala ejidos and contaminate the Cuautla River. In other words, life has no value when it’s about big capital.
In Mayan towns of the states of Chiapas, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo, the sacred sites are being snatched from the communities to increase the profits of transnational tourist companies; making a war in which the same train that will transport the fruits of the transgenic agro-industry, will take the meat from the huge pig farms that destroy the sacred waters of the cenotes; the same one that will serve to connect the special economic zones of Puerto Progreso and Campeche on the peninsula, where they also impose wind farms. Also, in the indigenous territories of Tabasco and Chiapas this war becomes a network with repressive military and paramilitary los groups. Later, it becomes a single war with megaprojects deployed in the territory of the original peoples of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
While orchestrating the capitalist transformation against the Maya peoples, the land is being stolen from the peoples, bought for a few pesos and destroyed by exploitation and transgenic contamination in the whole region, strongly affected by agrochemicals.
In the native peoples that inhabit the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the bad capitalist government announces the imposition of the project coveted by big international capital for the transit of its merchandise and the looting of natural and cultural wealth from the south–southeast, where a large number of original peoples live, as well the principal jungles, forests, rivers and the largest area of biodiversity in the country.
The bad capitalist government uses the previous governments’ forms of imposition to impose this mega-project of death that seeks to reactivate the ports of Salina Cruz and Coatzacoalcos, connecting them by means of a high-speed cargo train for the transport of merchandise from the big capitalists that control the world. It is a “transformed” neo-Porfirismo [2] clothed as “progressive.”
It aims to convert the Isthmus into a containment wall for Central American and national migration to the United States, hiring migrants for precarious and low-wage jobs through the installation of maquila industries (sweat shops), automotive factories, forest exploitation (logging), energy megaprojects, like the wind corridors, hydroelectric dams, as well as the exploitation of hydrocarbons by both conventional methods and fracking, mining exploitation and the transport of merchandise throughout the trans-Isthmus strip.
This project does not benefit the peoples or the country, nor will it transport our local products; rather it’s about the delivery of our territories and our life to international capitalism, led by the United States, from which networks of wars emerge for which there are no walls or containments.
The “Fourth Transformation” version of Trump’s wall is nothing but a multiplication of walls constructed from the border with Guatemala and Belize to the Mexican Isthmus. These walls are built with materials that are the product of the destruction of nature and of the original peoples, and their “glue” is the dispossession, exploitation, contempt and repression.
In the center of the country, industrial developments and agrarian and real estate speculation accompany the savage expansion of Mexico City, which are leading to the destruction and dispossession of a wide zone. With the work in Texcoco for the NAICM, [3] more than 100 hills were destroyed to extract materials with which they intended to kill the lake, thereby provoking the affectation of water sources for the whole region. As an alternative of the new government, the airport on the Santa Lucia Military Base, is accompanied by the same dispossession to the surrounding towns, which they intent to submerge in the misfortune that afflicts us because of big capital.
With concern we observe, on the one hand, that the PINFRA company continues its work on the Mexico Tuxpan-Peñón Texcoco super highway, on land of the Nexquipayac ejido, while several companies intend to continue different work on the NAICM in Texcoco and currently carry out work that is not properly explained; on the other hand, the federal government promises the administration and profits from the new airport in Santa Lucia to the military. Those are the fees in exchange for protecting the power of big capital against the peoples that pueblos organize to stop the war in every corner of the country, always betting on life. That’s why the CNI- CIG, will continue fighting for the cancellation of the NAICM project whether they intend to continue it in Texcoco or in Santa Lucia, as is the decision of the federal executive.
In that sense and in the exercise of our territorial rights and autonomy we say that these megaprojects will meet head-on with the will of our peoples.
The bad capitalist government of López Obrador sharpens the war against the women of our country because, with its redoubled support for the powerful, it leads to an increase in femicides, trafficking in women, torture and exploitation. That’s why we, the National Indigenous Congress, the Indigenous Government Council and the EZLN, think that if we organize the women that struggle in our rural and urban towns, we will undermine that war of capital until it falls.
Below, in all the geographies that are the original peoples, we continue sowing autonomy, we construct and deploy the power of below in what are also networks of networks, but of resistance and rebellion, which are also the mirrors not only of the peoples that we the CNI–CIG and the EZLN are, but also many others that sow hope and of which this, our third national assembly, is the mirror.
Consequently, from here, we denounce the open war against the dignified struggle of the indigenous Nahua community of Santa María Ostula, Michoacán, utilizing the bad government’s repressive force at all three levels, as well as organized crime groups, the same a it deploys throughout the country’s territory as an instrument of death against our peoples and as justification for militarization and the creation of the National Guard.
We stand for the full respect for the autonomy of the Tila ejido in the state of Chiapas and we condemn the threats of dispossession and repression made by the spurious ejido commissioner with the support of the bad governments for the formation of shock groups against our compañeros who have given an example of dignity and organization. At the same time, by agreement of our national assembly, we continue demanding the live presentation of our compañero Sergio Rivera Hernández who was disappeared since August 23, 2018 because of his struggle against the Autlán mining company in the Sierra Negra of Puebla. We demand the cancellation of the Coyolapa-Atzala hydroelectric project and the mining exploitation in the Sierra Negra.
We demand the live presentation of the los 43 Ayotzinapa students and justice for the murdered compañeros.
We demand the cancellation of the mining concessions throughout national territory, which imply destruction in the state of Oaxaca, Sierra Sur, in Chontal territory on the part of the Salamera Company, in the Chimalapas region, where the same Canadian company currently seeks to widen its concessions, in the Wirikuta desert, San Luis Potosí and throughout the country.
We call for redoubling efforts for the freedom of our compañero Fidencio Aldama Pérez, of the Yaqui town of Loma de Bácum, Sonora; and of our compañeros Pedro Sánchez Berriozábal, Rómulo Arias Mireles and Teófilo Pérez González of the Nahua community of San Pedro Tlanixco, in the State of Mexico, as well as all the political prisoners in Mexico.
We demand that they cease the harassment and threats from the three levels of bad government that want to impose the Morelos Integral Project at all costs against our brothers and sisters of the community of Amilcingo, Morelos, from which the light that is our brother Samir shines.
We demand the cancellation of the projected wind park known as Gunaa Sicarú, of the French company EDF, on more than 4,000 hectares belonging to the communal lands of the Binnizá community of Unión Hidalgo and we reject the consulta that the government seeks to carry out in order top obtain the community’s “consent.” At the same time we demand the immediate cancellation of the prospecting studies that speleologists belonging to PESH (Huautla Speleological System) carry out in caves and caverns of the Mazateco town of Huautla without authorization.
We call to the original peoples, to the networks and organizations that have supported the CIG-CNI, as well as the collectives and organizations of workers, students, women, campesinos and youth that struggle against neoliberal capitalism, to grow our resistances and rebellions and to participate in the National Assembly among the peoples of the National Indigenous Congress and the organizations, networks and collectives that in Mexico and the world struggle and organize, and also to the event with the motive of the 100th anniversary of the assassination of General Emiliano Zapata Salazar, on April 9 and 10, 2019 in the state of Morelos, where we will say clearly again:
¡SAMIR VIVE, VIVE, LA LUCHA SIGUE, SIGUE!
Attentively,
From the Third National Assembly of the National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Government Council
March 2019
For the Integral Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never More A Mexico Without Us
National Indigenous Congress
Indigenous Government Council
Zapatista National Liberation Army
[1] Porfirio Díaz was president of Mexico from 1884-1911.
[2] A reference to the policies of the Porfirio Díaz regime
[3] NAICM – Nuevo Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de México (New Mexico City International Airport)
—————————————————
Originally Published in Spanish by Enlace Zapatista
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 
Pingback: CHIAPAS SUPPORT COMMITTEE UPDATE | Blog of Zapatista Support Group Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand