Madrid, Spain

“Tell us your story, your rage, your rebellion. We come to listen and learn from your story. In each resistance there is a cry for life. 500 years later, the communities come to listen to you,” was the message from Squadron 421, in the name of the Zapatista support bases of Chiapas, Mexico, in a large rally in the Plaza de Colón, from the capital of the Spanish State, within the framework of the 500 years of the conquest of Tenochtitlán, Aztec territory.

After a march from Puerta del Sol to Plaza Colón, the Zapatistas gave thanks that they have been received, housed, fed, cared for, and especially they added: “that despite their differences were able to agree,” to carry out the march and rally.

“We are Zapatistas, from a geography called Mexico. The government doesn’t recognize de that geography, to the state we are extemporaneous,” the EZLN’s support bases recalled, alluding to the way in which the Mexican government tends to catalog people who are not registered right after being born, but rather due to economic, social, geographic and bureaucratic issues do it after some time.

“But we have not come here to complain,” the Zapatistas clarified, and indicated that Squadron 401 precedes a larger group of Zapatistas (the Zapatista Airborne Company) that will separate into smaller groups and tour the European continent, also baptized by them as Slumil K´Ajxemk´Op. Members of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), the Indigenous Government Council (CIG) and representatives of the Peoples Front in Defense of Land and Water of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala will arrive, along with indigenous peoples.

“We don’t bring any recipe, visions or strategies, we come to listen to you. As Zapatistas we have a cause, a motive, a goal: Life,” the indigenous people who rose up in arms in 1994 expressed.

The message to the struggles that the Zapatistas described as diverse was not to stop, but to be more profound and radical, faced with something that prevents us from living; in other words, capitalism, they said.

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Originally Published in Spanish by Pozol Colectivo

Friday, August 13, 2021

https://pozol.org/?p=19413

Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee