Chiapas Support Committee
Home of the Compañero Manuel blog on zapatistas & mexico
EZLN and CNI-CIG denounce the kidnapping and murder of 2 CNI members
COMMUNIQUE FROM THE CNI-CIG AND THE EZLN ON THE COWARDLY KIDNAPPING AND MURDER OF COMPAÑEROS FROM THE EMILIANO ZAPATA POPULAR INDIGENOUS COUNCIL OF GUERRERO
The National Indigenous Congress [CNI], the Indigenous Governing Council [CIG], and the Zapatista National Liberation Army [EZLN] condemn with pain and rage the kidnapping and murders of José Lucio Bartolo Faustino, CIG council member from the Nahua indigenous community of Xicotlán, and Modesto Verales Sebastián, National Indigenous Congress delegate from the Nahua indigenous community of Buenavista. Both were part of the Emiliano Zapata Popular Indigenous Council of Guerrero [CIPOG-EZ], which is a member organization of the CNI-CIG. Narco-paramilitary groups who operate in the municipality of Chilapa de Álvarez and who are protected by the Mexican Army as well as by municipal and state police carried out this crime.
At 3pm yesterday, May 4, our compañeros were attending a meeting with other members of the CIPOG-EZ in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. On their way back to their communities they were kidnapped and murdered by these narco-paramilitary groups that operate with total complicity and protection from all three levels of the bad government, which pretend to address the indigenous communities’ demands for security and justice. The indigenous communities have repeatedly denounced to the federal government the impunity with which the criminal Celso Ortega wages violence against them. It is important to mention that our murdered compañeros and their communities have for years been organizing their own Community Police in order to resist the violence, extortion, and poppy cultivation imposed by two criminal groups in the area, Los Ardillos and Los Rojos. These two groups control municipal presidencies across the region and are protected by the Mexican army and the municipal and state police. At one point they even managed to get one of their leaders named president of the Guerrero State Congress.
We hold all three levels of bad government responsible for this cowardly crime, as they have been complicit in repressing our peoples’ organization in defense of their territories. We also hold the bad government responsible for the safety and security of our brothers and sisters of the CIPOG-EZ.
As the National Indigenous Congress-Indigenous Governing Council and the Zapatista National Liberation Army, we send our collective embrace and solidarity to the family members and compañeros of José Lucio Bartolo Faustino and Modesto Verales Sebastián, and we share with them our commitment to continue this path of autonomy and dignity for which our fallen compañeros provide a light and an example.
We denounce the intensification of neoliberal repression against the original peoples, nations, and tribes who do not consent to these death projects in Guerrero and in all of Mexico, nor to the violence which is used to impose these projects and to repress, kidnap, disappear, and murder those of us who have decided to sow a new world from the indigenous geographies that we are.
We demand justice for our compañeros.
Attentively
May 2019
For the Full Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never Again a Mexico Without Us
National Indigenous Congress
Indigenous Governing Council
Zapatista National Liberation Army
Frayba denounces militarization in Zapatista Territory
THE MEXICAN STATE INCREASES THE MILITARIZATION IN ZAPATISTA TERRITORY
Zapatistas gather in La Realidad to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Uprising.
Five years after the unpunished extrajudicial execution of José Luis Solís López, teacher Galeano, during an attack on the autonomous Zapatista project, in the community of La Realidad, the Mexican State reaffirms its bet for war in a region where the Original Peoples construct a Dignified Life.
Since December 2018, the Mexican State increased the militarization in territories of the Original Peoples Bases of Support of the EZLN (Bases de Apoyo del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, BAEZLN) especially in the Lacandón Jungle region, as part of the continuation of the counterinsurgency strategy for eroding autonomous projects in Chiapas, Mexico.
The Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba), through the documentation that the Civilian Observation Brigades (BriCOs) carry out, documented that since the end of 2018, the number of Mexican Army incursions into the seat of the Good Government Junta (JBG) Towards Hope, in the Caracol of La Realidad (Official municipio of Las Margaritas) doubled. The BriCos observed 19 land patrols, (with soldiers armed with machine guns) and 5 flyovers from helicopters, from January to April 2019. The regularization of the flyovers of the communities and the increase of military movements in the last month is worrisome.
The military incursions constitute acts of intimidation and harassment against the Original Zapatista Peoples in resistance, signify an attack on their right to autonomy and represent a risk to the life, integrity and security of the entire population: “We observed that many times the military vehicles pass through the communities at high speed, without any concern for people, children or animals on the road.”
In the first four months of this year, the Frayba documented two acts of espionage against the BriCos, in the international observation camp located in La Realidad. This action harms the personal integrity and security of those who carry out the monitoring of human rights violations in the region and whose work is based on the Declaration On the Right and the Duty of Individuals, Groups and Institutions to Promote and Protect the Human Rights and the Universally Recognized Fundamental Freedoms of the United Nations Organization.
The Frayba confirms with data the BriCos collected the denunciation that the Zapatista National Liberation Army (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) published in its communiqué last April 10: “In our mountains and valleys the presence of military, police, paramilitary, and spies, ears and informants has increased. The flyovers of military planes and helicopters, as well as artillery vehicles have reappeared.”
The militarization that persists in the new federal government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and state government of Rutilio Escandón Cadenas attempts against the life of the communities of Original Peoples that, in Chiapas, defend their right to autonomy, self-determination and territory.
It’s appropriate to remember that on May 2, 2014, during the same action in which José Luis Solís López was extra-judicially executed, members of the Independent Central of Agricultural Workers and Campesinos-Historical destroyed the autonomous school and clinic, as well as threaten to dismantle the Caracol “Mother of the Caracoles of the Sea of Our Dreams. The act was a pretext so that the National Defense Ministry could intensify the militarization, which the Frayba pointed to as an act of intimidation, instead of seeking justice and the means for solving the conflict in a civil and peaceful manner.
Therefore, we make a call to national and international solidarity to strengthen the path of peace and respect for human rights given the risk of a new military offensive against Zapatista territories.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Frayba Communication
Thursday, May 2, 2019
https://frayba.org.mx/estado-mexicano-incrementa-militarizacion-a-territorios-zapatistas/
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Social control, the 21st Century thinking
Oakland police clash with Occupy Oakland.
By: Raúl Zibechi
When the social control that states and corporations exercise becomes a mesh so fine that it traps and subjects all manifestations of daily life, is it important who governs? The concept of government (state national, federal or municipal institutions) is absolutely insufficient for understanding what’s happening day-to-day in our societies.
Last week in Bogotá, I listened in amazement to stories about the level that application of the Police Code is reaching. A young 22-year old man, a worker and university student, was punished with a fine of $280 dollars (more than $5,000 Mexican pesos) for buying an empanada on the street. The vendor also was fined.
In just two years of the code going into effect 400,000 fines were imposed, for everyday situations like running in a bus station, buying from street venders or defending someone who suffer a police fine, or for “obstructing” police work.
The Police Code was approved in 2017, while peace was being negotiated with the FARC. The objective is evident: plugging the pores through which the popular and youth culture breathes, since habits such as drinking in the plazas, juggling, circus attitudes towards the police, among many others, are punished. For those below, the new code implements the “permanent state of emergency” that Walter Benjamin talked about, which makes up part of the everyday life of oppressed peoples.
In China the State’s control of society is much stricter. The system of “social credit” grants or takes away points from people that, for example, smoke in prohibited places, and get on those that have condescending attitudes. All behaviors of people enter the point system, even some intimate ones, like the consumption of “erotic” films or books, or speaking rudely with anyone.
The control modes combine video surveillance cameras (China has almost half of the existing ones in the world) with artificial intelligence and facial recognition. In that way, the State is able to know how many trips you have made in a taxi and to where, what you buy, your medical bills and even your “generosities” with others, as highlighted in the Le Monde Diplomatique report entitled “Good Chinese and bad Chinese” (January edition).
As an example of the scores that are imposed on citizens, the monthly report emphasizes: one point for helping an elderly person get to a hospital; minus five points and a fine for throwing garbage in the river. But for placing a sticker against the government, they take away 50 points and a thousand mil yuan fine. As in good authoritarian regimes, everything comes mixed: the punishment of dissidents with the aid of others and bad habits.
But that’s where the real problems begin. Those who behave well receive gifts on Chinese New Year’s Day or have the ability to obtain credit for trips or studies. Those with few points can’t apply for certain jobs, take vacations, get on fast trains for a year, reserve a room in a hotel or enroll their child in a good school.
Black lists go hand in hand with public humiliations, since the data are published on web pages, but in some towns “the bad scores and the name of their holders are repeated through a loudspeaker on Friday night,” in a way that the system converts your neighbors into sentinels, according to Le Monde Diplomatique.
The Amnesty International researcher for China, Patrick Poon, considers that the system of giving rewards and punishments is a “large-scale social control practice that legitimizes the hierarchical classification of citizens” (https://bit.ly/2G1diaz).
When important political events take place, like the National Popular Assembly, the regime imposes “forced vacations” on the dissidents, obliging them to leave the city, accompanied by police agents, to be lodged in remote hotels and tourist complexes with all expenses paid (https://bit.ly/2Z3cRp4).
There are many more examples of social control. Reality is getting closer and closer to the concept of the “totalitarian democracy,” of the Portuguese writer João Bernardo. In his forthcoming book in Spanish, he discusses the tight relationship between entrepreneurial and governmental authoritarianism, since workers spend a good part of their life submitted to the strict discipline prevailing during work hours.
He wonders what democracy means, in our societies where the omnipotent power of the corporations prevails. “The neoliberal society reached a point in which it’s very difficult to apply the old definitions of the rule of law that until recently distinguished democracies from the regimes where political arbitrariness prevails,” Bernardo continues. The task of tracing the paths for changing the world in the face of these systemic mutations is left to us.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Friday, April 12, 2019
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2019/04/12/opinion/020a2pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
8 more municipalities reject the San Cristóbal-Palenque Highway
Movement for Defense of Life and Territory: Absolute rejection of the superhighway and the mega-projects, rejection of transgenic seeds.
By: Chiapas Paralelo
The Movement in Defense of Life and Territory (Modevite), which is composed of believing people in the parishes of Yajalón, Candelaria, Huixtán, Oxchuc, Ocosingo, Altamirano, Chilón, Sitalá and Chicomuselo, unite in rejection of the construction of the San Cristóbal de las Casas-Palenque Highway, because it signifies a destruction of Mother Earth.
More than 20 days after the Movement in Defense of Life and Territory (Modevite) of San Juan Cancuc stated a series of points in which they expressed their rejection to carrying out the project, 8 more municipalities and 1 locality have currently added on.
The communities that make up the Modevite questioned this project in a communiqué by asking: “who benefits from the megaproject of destruction that is the San Cristóbal-Palenque superhighway?”
Based on the fact that this project would bring about dispossession of indigenous territory and the destruction of Mother Earth, they denounced that the state and federal governments promote deception by conditioning economic resources and government programs upon rejecting [or accepting] this highway.
“We say to the state government, which Rutilio Escandón Cadenas represents, to the federal government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and to the national and transnational corporations that THE LAND IS NOT FOR SALE, IT IS LOVED AND DEFENDED.”
They added that the path of the imposition and the fake consultations destroy the life of the communities, that’s why they don’t want the destruction of Mother Earth for the more than 185 kilometers that the construction requires.
“The plunder is disguised as the construction of a superhighway, saying it will be a benefit to the peoples, but it really has a harmful effect on our brothers and sisters who depend directly on Mother Earth,” they warned.
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Monday, April 29, 2019
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
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In Chiapas, the immigrant wave experiences a Calvary
At the Frontera Hidalgo immigration station, in Chiapas, Central Americans wait to receive a permit to be able to cross Mexican territory without problems in their zeal to enter the Unites States. Photo: Alfredo Domínguez
By: Hermann Bellinghausen
Tapachula, Chiapas
The southern border is a test. It all started last October, when the avalanche of immigrants from Central America towards the north adopted new and more challenging ways of taking the trip to face the ultimate Goliath at our other border. The rapid transformation of this human flow through Mexico has exceeded the [capacity of] civilian organizations that try to support them at the national entry gates. This is the case of the Fray Matias de Cordova Human Rights Center or the Catholic Church’s different migrant houses. It has also put government institutions against the wall, like the National Immigration Institute (Instituto Nacional de Migración, INM) and the Mexican Commission for Aid to Refugees, which are, if possible, even more backlogged.
On the Mexican side of the border the bridge between Ciudad Hidalgo and the Guatemalan Tecún Umán yesterday morning, some 900 people were camped out waiting for some kind of legalization. Although they come from a hot land (most are Hondurans and Salvadorans), the sun is crushing and they all seek the cover of some shade. Entire families, including grandparents, cousins or neighbors form extended families (“travel families”). One such family, which cracks jokes and poses happy and smiling for the camera tells us that they are dedicated “to waiting.” Between anxious displacement and long waits, weeks and months pass. The procedures are so slow and so dispersed throughout Chiapas that they aggravate the Calvary especially for those who request refuge, like the family mentioned, coming from northern Honduras. The children grow, the young women mature, and the pregnant women, well they also mature.
The group’s leader insists on making it clear that they do not intend to stay in Mexico, their goal is to reach the United States. But as the wait can be long, “we would be willing to work for any pay,” he says, surrounded by all his offspring. He points to his seven-year old son: “If we continued in Honduras, he would already be selling drugs and I would be dead.”
In the center of Tapachula, the offices of Fray Matias de Cordova offer a complex panorama. In the street, one hundred people wait to be received; inside, on the wide patio of the human rights organization, it must be double that. The Center’s young director, Brenda Ochoa, comments: “Every day we’re able to attend to some one hundred cases.” The Center offers a legal guide to the asylum procedures, or possibly health care for these tired, malnourished and anguished people. “Desperate,” a woman on the Suchiate River will add later. Besides Central Americans, there is a constant and growing number of Haitians and Congolese not easily distinguishable, which allows the former to pass themselves off as Africans, because they don’t receive the same treatment, but rather worse.
The Mexican population of this border region and the cities on the route to the north along the Chiapas coast are on trial. In Huixtla, the Morena mayor ordered not to receive them or permit them to occupy any space. Between Mapastepec and Pijijiapan just last weekend the INM arrested one hundred lost sheep from the new caravan that is making its way north, and that seemed to have dispersed last night on the outskirts of Tonalá.
Historically, mestizo society in Chiapas has not been characterized by its racial tolerance, but it received the first caravans with solidarity. In just a few months, this opening has deteriorated. In Tapachula, Mapastepec, Tonalá and Acapetahua, they are now feared and rejected. Brenda Ochoa doesn’t hesitate in attribute part of the responsibility for this deterioration to the authorities, because by criminalizing migrants they incite rejection in a local population with xenophobic tendencies. The Fray Matias de Cordova Center, which participates in the Collective for Observation and Monitoring of Human Rights in the Mexican Southeast, reiterates to La Jornada its concerns given the “immigration crisis” that directly impacts this end of the country:
“The lack of comprehensive protection of their rights, the uncertainty and the absence of answers continue.” That edges the people in refugee camps to renew their march “with all the risks and no protection.”
That in these moments there are more than 5,000 immigrants in the region is an estimation that Brenda Ochoa shares with Aline Juárez Nieto, the INM spokesperson who attends to the reporters at the Ciudad Hidalgo immigration station. But there is no official data. According to the Fray Matias, “mass detentions at different points between Ciudad Hidalgo, Tapachula, Huixtla and Mapastepec increase peoples’ fear and reveal the lack of clarity in the immigration policy of the State.” In effect, the police and immigration control posts follow one another along the highway to Arriaga. The Center insists on demanding “structural reorientation of immigration and refugee policy” from the government, given the new crisis that can be expected.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Wednesday, April 24, 2019
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2019/04/24/politica/007n1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Oxchuc elects its municipal president through uses and customs
Residents of Oxchuc municipality elect their authorities
Without parties or ballot boxes
By: Isaín Mandujano
This Saturday, indigenous Tseltals of Oxchuc, elected their new mayor for the next three years under the regimen of a new normative system of uses and customs, by raised hand, after four years of struggle and of having expelled political parties from that municipality.
In “an unprecedented historical process,” as electoral observers present at the event classified it, some 11, 900 leaders, representatives and residents from 115 of the 120 communities and 24 neighborhoods of the municipality met on Saturday, April 13, in the central plaza of Oxchuc and elected Alfredo Santiz Gómez, 42, as the new municipal president.
The bilingual indigenous teacher is a native of Las Palmas community, but now resides in the Televisa neighborhood of the municipal capital of Oxchuc. Hugo Gómez Sántiz, del Barrio San Cristóbalito, came in second.
Of the 10 candidates proposed to occupy the position of mayor, five were men and five were women. At the last minute, one of the male candidates, Feliciano Sántiz Gómez del Barrio Cruziljá, renounced aspiring to that position.
First, the five women were called one-by-one to be voted on with a show of hands but the vote didn’t favor any of them. Most of those present in the plaza were, of course, men.
Although a crowd present in the plaza gave Hugo Gómez Sántiz an ovation, the majority raised their hand so that Alfredo Sántiz Gómez would be the next mayor, the one who substitutes for the current president of the Municipal Government Council, Oscar Gómez López.
The new mayor of Oxchuc, Alfredo Sántiz Gómez.
As soon as he was elected, he proceeded to elect his trustee and the six council members and the alternate for each one of them, and that’s where several women won positions, beginning with the trustee, Rufina Gómez López and her alternate, Carmelina Gómez López.
Each one of the candidates were presented to the crowd three times to ratify or not its support for them.
Electoral observers were present there, as well as officials from the Institute of Elections and Citizen Participation (IEPC), and the National Electoral Institute (INE), representatives of other original peoples from other states in the country that have struggled or are struggling to elect their authorities through the system of uses and customs like the original peoples did before, without the presence of any political party.
The Tzeltal town of Oxchuc began to fight for electing their municipal authorities by raising hands and without (political) parties after Mayor María Gloria Sánchez won in July 2015, who together with her husband, Norberto Sántiz, established a political boss system for more than 15 years in that municipality.
They did not allow María Gloria to take the office of municipal president for a second time. Her husband had also governed twice, and they expected that their successor in 2018 would be their son.
But since 2015, the residents of Oxchuc rebelled; they burned the homes of María Gloria Sánchez and Norberto Sántiz, as well as the homes of their closest collaborators, and expelled them and all the political parties from that municipality. [1]
They blocked the highway and marched to the state capital, and they confronted the state police in January 2018. Civilian armed groups also attacked them, which caused the deaths of Ovidio López, Víctor Sánchez and Francisco Méndez.
They pointed out that a civilian armed group that operated under the command of María Gloria Sánchez and Norberto Sántiz riddled the dead with bullets.
At the same time they initiated a long legal process before the electoral bodies and electoral tribunals, to assert their right as an original people of electing their municipal authorities through the normative system of uses and customs, by raising hands.
This struggle lasted four long years, said Juan Gabriel Méndez López, community lawyer who took the case to the judicial bodies, and who also suffered a bullet wound from an armed group in the attack when three of his compañeros died.
He said that blood had to run and pay for this struggle with their deaths so that the government authorities, the electoral authorities and the electoral tribunals would listen to the demand of the Tseltal people of Oxchuc.
The new mayor, a teacher and father of five children, resident of a neighborhood in the municipal capital, Alfredo Sántiz Gómez, said that his priority is to achieve unity of all the people, achieve peace and harmony, look for all the dissident groups and extend a hand to walk together: “because if there is no unity we will not all be able to work together. That is necessary, he urges the people of Oxchuc.”
He indicated that then he will attend one of the main problems of Oxchuc, which is the lack of water for all of its residents, and he said that his government would be a municipal presidency with open doors for attending to each and every one of his constituents.
The new mayor-elect will take the oath of office in an indigenous ritual on April 21, and it will be the State Congress that officially certifies him as the new municipal president in a solemn session on April 23. [3]
Oxchuc is the first indigenous municipality in Chiapas to elect their municipal authorities this way; the municipalities of Sitalá and Chilón are in the process.
Notes
[1] https://chiapas-support.org/2016/01/13/66-police-injured-in-oxchuc-chiapas-confrontation/
[2] https://chiapas-support.org/2018/01/30/3-dead-in-oxchuc-chiapas-violence/
[3] Both of these requirements were met and Alfredo Santiz Gómez is now officially the mayor of Oxchuc municipality (county).
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Originally Published in Spanish by Chiapas Paralelo
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
The Peoples Front rejects the Huexca thermoelectric plant
The Peoples Front in Defensa of Land and Water Tierra of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala commemorate the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Emiliano Zapata en Chinameca.
By: Hermann Bellinghausen
Chinameca, Morelos
Here, where Emiliano Zapata died 100 years ago, came the communities grouped together in The Peoples Front in Defense of Land and Water of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala. Not only to remember the caudillo, but also to endorse demands and present sorrows: opposition to the Huexca thermoelectric plant and pipeline, and the demand for justice for Samir Flores, leader and spoke person of those opposed to the government project, murdered February 20 in Amilcingo on the eve of the consulta (consultation) on the matter convened by the government. The crime remains unpunished. And the megaproject “won” the consultation.
Teresa Castillo, expressive spokeswoman of the Peoples Front, in front of hundreds of people gathered in a protest act at the ex hacienda of Chinameca, says briefly: “We are against AMLO because he is against us. We wanted to talk to him. He didn’t want to.”
She denounces the persistent disappearances and, in particular, the murder of Samir: “a shame” for the government. She asks the participants to remain in the struggle, “if you love your children”.
How not to associate the deaths by ambush of two Nahua fighters in these same lands with exactly one century of difference? Zapata is the only Mexican hero at the height of the 21st century. Or as Pablo González Casanova, who is among the participants in the protest act, put it today: Emiliano Zapata is still alive in the most literal sense.
Symbols, metaphors, superb biographies and a century of historical and institutional handling, has not been enough to finish him off. The dead of the current struggle are part of what’s his.
Certainty makes the rounds that resistance to the imposition of megaprojects is inherited from the Zapatistas. Land and liberty once again: not only conquer them, but also keep them and, as the people of the regions argue, to prevent that both are destroyed by immense works of interest to capital, not for those who live here around the slopes of the Popocatépetl volcano, which has a rather restless season. That greatly disturbs those who see that the planned gas pipeline could well be deeded by the devil.
The National Indigenous Congress (Congreso Nacional Indígena, CNI) participates with the Peoples Front in the symbolic takeover of the former hacienda where Zapata fell. On the other side of the building, today a museum, the canopy and the installations for an official act that never happened languish. Not here. Instead, María de Jesús Patricio, of the Indigenous Government Council (Concejo Indígena de Gobierno, CIG), shares a message of the subcomandante Moisés, of the EZLN. “We don´t know who kill Samir. We know who pointed it him”, he wrotes. “ There was no ‘right of reply’ for Samir Flores Soberanes, neither for the peoples that today resist” the Morelos Integral Project (Proyecto Integral Morelos, PIM).
Norma Palma, member of the CNI, reads the Chinameca Declaration, fruit of the national meeting held this Tuesday in Amilcingo not far away from here. “The bad governments think that they will be able to finish us off.” She accuses the government of “shameless betrayal” for promoting the PIM. “We thought that the dispossession would stop,” she says; “that the military presence would end.” Instead, the government “promises the facilities to the Earth’s predators” and “guarantees the functioning of the Huexca thermoelectric plant” despite the volcano’s dangers.
The festivity is very big. In addition to the protest, there is a massive convention in Chinameca, surrounded by the noise of the loud roar of dozens of school bands with a swinging drum, metals, and everything that someone who is 15 years old can blow. Baton twirlers, calisthenics dances, allegorical and custom cars, Adelitas, soldaderas (women soldiers) and Juanes mustaches, children in white with cardboard cartridge belts, paper bullets and black mustaches. All this civic splendor for a Mexican whose impact is still valid for these young people who perhaps don’t know it yet. That don’t know how much.
After the ceremony in Chinameca, the Indigenous peoples moved their protest to the impressive plant of discontent, almost completed a few meters from the community of Huexca.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Thursday, April 11, 2019
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2019/04/11/politica/005n1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
CNI-CIG: The Chinameca Declaration
COMMUNIQUÉ FROM THE NATIONAL INDIGENOUS CONGRESS AND THE INDIGENOUS GOVERNMENT COUNCIL; 100 YEARS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION OF GENERAL EMILIANO ZAPATA
To the peoples of Mexico and the World
Today, April 10, 2019, Chinameca and Amilcingo, Morelos, are homes to the National Indigenous Congress, the Indigenous Government Council, together with organizations and collectives that struggle and organize against capitalism. On April 9 and 10 we met in this territory in resistance to recognize each other in the dignity, pain and hope in the face of the cowardly assassination of Compañero Samir Flores, perpetrated by neoliberalism and its overseers. For those who are no longer afraid, it was converted into rage and conviction.
We continue looking and listening to Samir. He walks among us and reminds us that the path is below, that dignity is not for sale and that life is not negotiated. Brother Samir, in our living and struggling peoples you will continue being, because your life is hope for ours.
We also met to commemorate that Compañero General Emiliano Zapata lives and walks with us, warning of the betrayal and lie that is perceived from afar in the announcements about death and war. That same war that killed him 100 years ago and that snatched Samir from us is the one that makes us call to our brother and compañero General Emiliano Zapata, alive and walking as the conscience of the peoples of Morelos, of this country and the world that is trembling.
Here we say again that the struggle for land is also for life, because the defense of what is sacred to the peoples is a principle that we will not renounce. Today, 100 years after the betrayal and the lie ended the life of General Zapata in a cowardly way, that lie and betrayal returned with an alleged face of democracy, but like then, that word when it comes from above only means war, impersonation and deception of the entire nation.
To Compañero General Emiliano Zapata we salute him raising our voice against the megaprojects that invade the land of the communities that we construct below every day while the neoliberal government is determined to convert our world into a cemetery, where the destruction and suffering of all the peoples flourish in indigenous territories.
Given the grave crisis that not only the peoples that we are suffer, but also humanity and the whole world in the war with which the Mexican and foreign companies are invading our lands, our Mother Earth becomes upset with the environmental destruction and with the dismantling of the organization of the peoples. In the meantime those above are tugging on what keeps us alive, which is the ancestral y sacred territory that we protect.
This capitalist government builds highways, canals and railroads, and reorders the country’s territory to deliver everything to them, it makes laws in their favor and in favor of the might of big capital in the world, starting with the government of the United States. With cynicism, that hydra prepares to take away what is ours, using its military or para-military forces, because with war they concentrate power and increase their profits, which are greater if they make them over the dead corpse of our mother that, as we have said 100 years ago with our compañero General Zapata and as thousands of years ago with our ancestors, it is the land, it is alive and it belongs to us.
From Chinameca, a place where the bad governments thought that they could finish with General Zapata’s word, we direct ourselves with respect to the peoples of this country and the peoples of the world to call on them to listen to us and to add the paths that have the same horizon, below and to the left.
Today the struggle of the original peoples becomes strong with the word and organization of women that show the world profound directions, weave paths of freedom with dignity and, without asking permission, open the paths that patriarchal capital denies and destroys.
We recognize the shameless betrayal of the bad federal government and we do not accept its cynical lies, which you discover ahead of those who believed it, ahead of those who thought that with the lie of the so-called “historic election” or “fourth transformation,” or whatever it’s called, the dispossession would stop, the corruption that makes the State a vulgar shoplifter of what belongs to everyone would stop, that it would keep its word to the teachers in struggle, for those who thought that the military nightmare would end, for those who thought that some national sovereignty would be defended.
On the other hand, sending and putting a gun to the head of the peoples, they want to impose on us a capitalist reordering at the service of big US power on the Isthmus, offering the minerals, the water, and the land. It promises the predators of Mother Earth to respect concessions and permits obtained with the filthiest corruption. It offers foreign owners of the tourist economy the dismantling of social property on the Yucatán Peninsula. It guarantees to big capital the operation of the thermoelectric plant in Huexca, Morelos, despite the lives of the peoples of the volcano.
One hundred years after the assassination of compañero General Emiliano Zapata we declare that we are on alert given the urgency with which the companies and the mercenaries who back them up, who are in the government as well as in the organized crime cartels, in a savage and lethal way are appropriating our territories, standing over the destruction they have left not only in our country, but also in the world.
It’s that the neoliberal government, which many thought was of the left, the one that not only declared war on our peoples, but is part of the war against humanity, the one that doesn’t give a respite to life because it wouldn’t represent profits. The war invades every corner and takes many forms in order to suck the last drop of life from Mother Earth, the capitalists are ready to take possession of life, because they know that it’s running out and if life is exhausted, like any merchandise on the market, it leaves greater profits.
Today, sisters and brothers from many countries arrive in crowds seeking refuge from the tragedy in which the power of money converted their home, their communities or their cities. They seek refuge from the wars that made their geographies uninhabitable spaces.
To Compañero General Emiliano Zapata and to Compañero Samir Flores we say to you that your seeds of liberty, democracy and justice, are born and grow in every corner where we name life, where we name them with resistance of the peoples that bet on a new world.
From Chinameca, Morelos, April 10, 2019
For the Integral Reconstitution of Our Peoples
Never More a Mexico without Us
National Indigenous Congress | Indigenous Government Council
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Originally Published in Spanish by the Congreso Nacional Indígena
Thursday, April 11, 2019
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Educational reform and the Fourth Transformation
Teachers have been camped out in front of Congress in protest of the Education Reform.
By: Luis Hernández Navarro
There will be no deep social transformation in Mexico on the margins of the teaching profession. Even less against them. There will be no Fourth Transformation (4T) or a new Mexican school if it is intended to cage the teachers in an exceptional labor regime. Nor if it is intended to maintain the neoliberal educational project, even if it is made up.
With the educational reform of Enrique Peña Nieto, the State broke, unilaterally, the pact that it had for decades with education workers. The reform substantially transformed the nature of teaching. He put the teachers, overnight, into the realm of insecurity and job insecurity. Teaching ceased being a State profession to become a semi-liberal profession, whose performance is subject to the discretion of the authority. On the way, he practically decreed the extinction of normalism [1].
The new education reform is one of the essential aspects of the Pact for Mexico reform. This has been recognized by the PRI, the PAN and educational specialists from the business world. Therefore, they voted enthusiastically in favor of the ruling on the reform in the joint session of the Constitutional Points Commissions and Education in the Chamber of Deputies.
As Pablo Hiriart wrote, not suspicious of sympathizing with Obradorismo: “The educational reform approved yesterday in committees in the Chamber of Deputies is practically the same as the one promulgated in February 2013 by President Peña Nieto, after the Pact for Mexico between all the political parties.”
It is false that the rejection of the democratic teachers of the National Coordination of Education Workers (Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación, CNTE) of the deputies’ opinion is for the control of hiring (jobs). The CNTE has pointed out again and again, at every forum and negotiation in which they have participated, that they do not want the union to control hiring. Despite this, politicians and educational experts linked to the business world reiterate the slander.
In fact, as researcher Aldo Muñoz recalls, “neither before nor after the federalization of 1992 was the National Committee of the SNTE given 50 percent of the lowest positions stipulated in Article 62 of the Federal Law of Workers in Service of the State.”
What the democratic teachers demand is not to be confined to any exceptional labor regimen that treats the labor rights of teachers as second-class rights. It considers unacceptable that income, promotion and recognition are administrative issues under government control, outside of any bilateral control. Not in the third article, nor in any transitory one. Nor does it admit that, although it is recognized in a transitory article that, except for admission, promotion and recognition, labor relations are regulated by section B of the constitutional article 123. For an elementary reason: for purposes of higher law, a transitory law is not above the mother law.
Formally, the education reform of the 4T declares that it seeks to strengthen normalism. It does not do that. The text says: “The state will strengthen public institutions of teacher training, especially normal schools, in the terms provided by law.” The deputies butted horns over the original presidential proposal that establishes the priority attention to these institutions.
Really strengthening normalism implies several things not contemplated in the dictum: giving positions to graduates of the public normales after finishing their studies; that graduates of these institutions have primacy to occupy a job over those coming from other educational centers; and, academic freedom and real autonomy.
Normalism is a State profession, emerged from the obligation of the latter to provide education. It is the way of training the professionals who are required to comply with the constitutional requirements in the matter. The normalistas are evaluated by the educational authorities when they enter the normal, while they are in it and while obtaining their degree and their professional license. The curricula they study are set by the State.
It is absurd that, instead of continuing the route that was followed successfully for many years, they don’t obtain their placement and immediately start working when they receive their professional ID. And that they must compete for a job with professionals who do not have the studies to teach children and young people. It is as if the cadets of the Heroic Military College, upon finishing their studies, instead of entering the service directly with a degree, had to take a new exam, competing with professionals who did not pursue a military career.
The placement of new normalistas in the public system is not administered by the union. It is not the SNTE that gives them a position. The educational authority is the one that assigns them directly as graduates because their services are needed and because they demonstrated, throughout their entire career, that they are qualified to be teachers.
With the new reform [2] it is impossible to establish any agreement between teachers and the State, or that a new Mexican school becomes a reality. To the contrary, as happened in the past six years, in which the legislators of the PRI assumed that “everything was under control” and faced intermittent waves of teacher discontent, what we will see is a permanent disagreement between education workers and the 4T.
[1] Normalism here refers to a system of teachers colleges (normales, in Spanish), such as Ayotzinapa, that educate teachers.
[2] Several days ago, AMLO issued a memorandum to the appropriate government agencies to stop implementing the application of the Education Reform. There is opposition from several sources and the final outcome of this memorandum is not clear.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2019/04/02/opinion/015a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Message from the Zapatista National Liberation Army
MESSAGE FROM THE ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY 100 YEARS AFTER THE ASSASSINATION OF GENERAL EMILIANO ZAPATA
ZAPATISTA NATIONAL LIBERATION ARMY
MEXICO
To the relatives and friends of Samir Flores Soberanes:
To the Amilcingo Resistance Assembly:
To the Peoples’ Front in Defense of Land and Water Morelos-Puebla-Tlaxcala:
To the National Indigenous Congress:
To the Indigenous Government Council:
To the national and international Sixth:
To the Networks of Support for the CIG and Networks in Resistance and Rebellion:
To those who struggle against the capitalist system:
Sisters and brothers:
Compañeros and compañeras:
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés writes you in the name of the Zapatista women, men, children and elderly. The word that we send you is collective and it falls to me, as the EZLN spokesperson, to write it.
For the same reason, from the mountains of the Mexican southeast, the embrace that is not only mine but of all the Tzotzil, Chol, Tojolabal, Zoque, Mam, Mestizo and Tzeltal Zapatista peoples arrives today in the dignified lands of Emiliano Zapata and his successors –as was and is Samir Flores Soberanes, our brother and compañero in the struggle in defense of life.
Receive it, sisters and brothers, because it’s an embrace that we, the Zapatistas of the EZLN give you because we respect and admire you.
We have not been able to be present together with you, which is what we would have wanted. The reason is very simple and has the banner of the bad government: Because in our mountains and valleys the presence of the military, police, paramilitary, and spies, ears and informants has increased. The flyovers of military planes and helicopters, as well as artillery vehicles have reappeared, like in the times of Carlos Salinas de Gortari; of Ernesto Zedillo, political tutor of the current head of the Executive Power; of Vicente Fox after the betrayal of the San Andrés Accords; of the psychopath Felipe Calderón, and the tie and cigar thief Enrique Peña Nieto. The same, but now with more frequency and greater aggressiveness.”
And the patrols and flyovers don’t follow the drug trafficking routes, or those of the overwhelmed caravans of migrant sisters and brothers who flee from a war that refuses to say its name… to enter another that hides behind a talkative and quarrelsome federal executive. No, that death threat travels through the air and land of the indigenous communities that have decided to stay in resistance and rebellion in order to defend the land, because in it is life.
Now, additionally, members of the Federal Army and Air Force go into the mountains and appear in the communities saying that war is coming and that they are just waiting for orders from the “very top.” And some pass themselves off as who they aren’t and never will be, according to them knowing the supposed “military plans” of the EZLN. Perhaps they ignore that the EZLN says what it does and does what it says… or maybe because the plan is to mount a provocation and later blame the EZLN. The same method as Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, and his lackey Esteban Moctezuma Barragán, now in charge of ambushing the democratic teachers.
The reality is that the current bad government is just like the previous ones, only it uses a different justification: today the persecution, harassment, and attacks on our communities are “for the good of all” and are carried out under the flag of the “Fourth Transformation.”
But that’s not really what we wanted to write you about today. After all, any denunciation is quickly discredited by the president’s insistence that it comes from “radicals of the conservative left,” which just means that anyone who hasn’t been paid off and dares to criticize the supreme government doesn’t even qualify as “bourgie.” He’ll either say that or whatever random idea he came up with that morning, later to be celebrated by his followers on social networks (supposedly “modern” only because their fanaticism is digital) who have the same arguments as all those who applaud the excesses of tyrants around the world and who exemplify the words of Emiliano Zapata Salazar: “Ignorance and obscurantism have never produced anything other than flocks of slaves for the tyranny.”
What is currently happening in these Chiapan lands is just more of the same, the same things we have been subjected to over the past 25 years, and we repeat here what we have said before: those who occupy those positions above are all the same, and today we can say this literally—they are the exact same people as always. Reality washes away the makeup they try to use to simulate change.
Sisters and brothers:
Compañeros and compañeras:
We see that your resistance is great. We say this not only because you have resisted precisely as those above celebrate a great betrayal—that which assassinated Emiliano Zapata Salazar yet failed to stop the cause that lives and persists throughout centuries and throughout the territory that we still call Mexico: Zapatismo. We also say this because your resistance, your struggle for life, is inspiring for any honest person in the world. It’s not a play for money, cushy jobs, or gifts. It is for the generations to come—if indeed the arrogance of the Ruler does not triumph and destroy all of our communities.
Thus your struggle not only merits support and admiration, but should be replicated all over the planet where nature and those who inhabit it are destroyed under the flag of “order and progress.” There are times when a cause is materialized in a person—a man, woman, or other—and thus that cause takes on a name, birthplace, family, community, and history. That was the case for Emiliano Zapata Salazar, and it is the case for Samir Flores Soberanes, who they tried to buy off, to force to surrender, and to convince to abandon his ideals. He didn’t, so they killed him. He did not give in, give up, or sell out.
Those who were relieved by his murder and who carried out a supposed “referendum” in mockery of that tragedy thought that everything ended there, that the resistance against that megaproject—criminal like all megaprojects—would be washed away by the tears of those who will miss their brother and compañero.
They were wrong, just as Carranza and Guajardo were wrong when they believed Zapata met his end in Chinameca.
In the same way, the current president is wrong when, in an ostentatious display of ignorance of the history and culture of the country it claims to “rule” (the well-worn book on his bedside table is not Who Governs, but rather Who Rules), it paints Francisco I. Madero and Emiliano Zapata Salazar as friends. Just as Madero wanted to buy Zapata off, the bad government wanted to buy off Samir and the communities in resistance using aid programs and “development” projects and other lies.
Those communities and Samir responded by continuing the work of resistance, something that would have made Emiliano Zapata proud. He used to say that he could not be bought off with gold, and that here in Morelos there are still men—we would add “and women and others”—who have integrity.
The ignorance and arrogance that characterize the current head of the bad government aren’t new, either. Nor is his court of admirers, a bunch of shameless crooks who rewrite history to suite the tyrant’s moods and present him as the culmination of history. They applaud him and repeat, in a display of unrestrained sycophantism, whatever idiocy comes out of his mouth. He issues a decree that neoliberalism has ended and his coterie quickly rearranges facts, statistics, and development projects to hide them behind the scenes of the so-called “Fourth Transformation”—really just the continuation and intensification of the most brutal and bloody epoch of the capitalist system.
What’s more, the gaggle of admirers that the tyrant has convoked is filled with lackeys of all sorts and states of indecency who live, and kill, to meet the real or assumed desires of the acting overseer.
For this reason the president does not need to issue orders to kill, disappear, denigrate, insult, imprison, fire or evict anyone who does not pay him their respects.
All he has to do is announce on stage, in the mainstream media or on social networks that he will exercise what he calls his “right to respond,” and his lackeys see to it that the desires of their lord and master are carried out.
But all tyrants become fearful when the people raise a just and humane cause such as yours (which is also ours). They think that by killing the leadership and most prominent individuals they will also snuff out the cause itself.
We do not know who murdered our compañero Samir, but we do know who singled him out, who, shrieking hysterically, put a target on his back so that mercenaries anxious to please the head of the armed forces would carry out the sentence dictated on that stage-cum-tribunal.
There was no “right to respond” for Samir Flores Soberanes, nor will there be such a right for the peoples resisting the death project that is the “Morelos Integral Project,” a megaproject whose only purpose is profit for big capitalists based in Italy and Spain, the latter of which has been asked to seek forgiveness for the conquest it began 500 years ago and which the bad government [in Mexico] continues today.
You know all of this already, sisters, brothers, compañeros, compañeras. But we repeat it here because of the rage we feel over Samir’s murder and the arrogance of those above who think they “rule” when they do not even govern.
We are enraged by the fact that those below are offered only disdain in the form of hand-outs disguised as aid programs and threats if they do not bow down, while those above, who will tomorrow betray those whom today they fawn over, receive smiles, champagne toasts and soothing declarations.
Compañeros and compañeras:
Sisters and brothers:
We know that this bad government, like previous ones, wants to co-opt the image of Emiliano Zapata Salazar in the hopes that the defense of the earth, which for the original peoples is the name of life itself, will die along with him.
But we also know what is most important, what really counts: we the original peoples will continue to resist and rebel.
It doesn’t matter if they call us “conservatives,” or, as they called the Zapatistas of the Liberation Army of the South 100 years ago, “bandits.”
Like those before it, the current bad government and its “modern” lackeys can call us whatever they want. Our word and our silence are much greater than their hysterical shrieking.
The Zapatista struggle will live on, and the original peoples will live on.
In cities and rural areas across the planet there are groups, collectives, and organizations of women, neighbors, artists, young people, scientists, workers, employees, teachers, students and others [otroas] who are rising up in struggle.
What matters is not their size, but their resolve. Together with them, and with respect and solidarity, it is necessary to build a global network of rebellion and resistance against the war which, if capitalism triumphs, will mean the destruction of the planet.
Bad governments will come and go, but the color of the Earth will live on and with it the colors of those who refuse cynicism and resignation, who do not forget or forgive, and who are keeping count of the insults, injuries, imprisonments, disappearances, deaths, and sentences to oblivion.
In that collective thought and collective heart, the world that today agonizes in death throes will be reborn.
Tyrants of all stripes will be brought down together with the system they serve.
And there will finally be life on Earth; life as it should be—that is to say, free.
Until that time arrives, we will tirelessly carry out every day the struggle embodied in the lives of Emiliano Zapata Salazar and Samir Flores Soberanes.
And in that daily struggle our rallying cry will be made real: Zapata and Samir live! And the struggle continues for…
¡TIERRA Y LIBERTAD! (LAND AND LIBERTY!)
From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast
Subcomandante Insurgente Moisés.
Mexico, April 2019
En español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2019/04/10/comunicado-del-ejercito-zapatista-de-liberacion-nacional-2/
Chiapas Support Committee 