Otomí women in the INPI building
By: Sara Frabes
Last March 6 and 7, 2021 diverse indigenous women coming from different Native peoples of Mexico met in the building that previously served as the National Institute of Indigenous Pueblos (INPI), to hold the 3rd National Meeting of the Women of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI, its initials in Spanish).
The Otomí indigenous community residing in Mexico City has been occupying the space since October 12, 2020 due to the lack of response from the government to attend to their demands for housing.
In the meeting, the women worked around three months of analysis and debates that they called: Women and Territory; Women, Resistances and Autonomy; Alternatives to the Patriarchal System.
They took their measures for containing the propagation of Covid-19 and that’s how they worked for two days. Among the agreements they reached, they indicated that they joined the actions of the Otomí women who were tired of knocking on the doors of the rotating governments, “especially the current one so deceitful and lying,” they said in their statement.
In the same way, they spoke out “against the war against our brothers and sisters of the EZLN (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) and of those who murder the defenders of Mother Earth.”
They denounced that, in all regions of the country, the powerful ones of the patriarchal capitalist system are trampling on the rights and conquests of the Native peoples. “More and more women are experiencing worse living conditions. But we also see that, at the international level, the peoples of the world are experiencing the same situations of greater dispossession, greater destruction, greater exploitation and greater repression,” the indigenous women asserted.
They warned that what the planet is experiencing is a war of extermination on a global scale; therefore, they announced that: “together with our Zapatista compañeros and compañeras, we are seeing the importance of linking ourselves with all the peoples of the world from below and in struggle, particularly with women. To learn, to talk about the owners of the companies that come to destroy us,” said the indigenous women about the upcoming tour that the EZLN and members of the CNI will make to Europe.
“Our response is collectivity and community, from the smallest corner to the whole planet,” they said.
————————————————————————
Originally Published in Spanish by Avispa Midia
Monday, March 8, 2021
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 