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A very special day
Women at the International Zapatista Gathering of Women that Struggle in the Caracol of Morelia, Chiapas, Mexico.
By: Gustavo Esteva
It was a very special day. They made it special.
There was the usual: the display of flowers, supplements and special programs, promises of change, the language of quotas, commercial banality… But the call for a women’s strike, which in Spain involved 6 million of them and extended everywhere, was a clear symptom of a point of flexion in the celebration of International Women’s Day. Its explicit, anticapitalist and anti-patriarchal message reflected the form in which women have been recuperating the historic meaning and radical nature of March 8.
It’s not a swallow, but rather the arrival of summer. It’s not an event, but rather a process. As Magdalena León, an Ecuadorian economist, remarked with vigor: “so far in this century feminist thought and action have accumulated novel experiences, searches, organizational fabric, ways of interpreting reality, resistances, proposals integral to ‘changing the world.’” They have made clear to what extent many discourses and postures that propose the inclusion of women without altering structural conditions can be used as “a guaranty of continuity and armoring the system.” The reach and complexity of the celebration “doesn’t stop being in dispute, but now with a clear hegemony of anticapitalist and anti-patriarchal feminism.” (https://www.alainet.org/es/articulo/ 191507).
“We must talk about feminisms in the plural,” observes Veronica Gago, a well-known Argentine author, very active in #Ni una menos (Not one less). Although feminist struggles are global, those of Latin America have gained prominence for the weight of “Villero feminism, community feminism, indigenous feminism and popular feminism,” terms that have “their own history, their genealogy and that share a link with social conflict.” “It’s not a strictly analytical, academic or institutional feminism.” In the current conjuncture, what has emerged is “a radical feminism that takes into account the dimension of struggles and rebellion, by framing the debate about women’s bodies and abortion and, at the same time, connecting these debates within the field of work and making life in general more precarious (insecure). One of the most important contributions of popular feminism is its discourse about the way in which insecurity affects life in social, political and economic terms, and the importance of this discussion in each territory.”
It was really remarkable. Marches everywhere, original and creative initiatives, the entire world shaken by the decision of women to put an up to here with the wave of violence and discrimination that they are suffering and to take a step forward, firm and determined, in their struggle forever. In Mexico, the struggle acquires a special meaning. Seven out of every 12 femicides that are committed each day in Latin America Latina take place in Mexico. The aggression is brutal and is accompanied by all forms of violence and exclusion.
One hundred years of feminist struggle have generated all sorts of changes in the laws and in reality, but the oppression is maintained. The woman receives less than the man in all categories. And it’s clear, now more than ever, that in capitalist society the woman will always be the second sex; that their struggle for liberation is the struggle to get rid of a regime that is the ultimate, the most violent, the most racist, the most sexist expression of ancestral patriarchy.
It was everywhere… but only in Chiapas was an international gathering held. Convoked by the Zapatistas, more than 2 thousand women, from 38 countries and from all over the Republic met in the Whirlwind of Our Words Caracol, in Morelia. It was the gathering of women that struggle.
Insurgent Captain Erika read what they conceived collectively in the inauguration of the gathering (encuentro), which quickly came into effervescence. The work groups, the rituals, the reflection and the fiesta multiplied. The tone was clear. It was time to say enough! and to resume the tradition of struggle. Someone remembered March 8, 1857, when 120 women died due to police repression of their march, which a couple of years later would flow into the first women’s union in the United States. They also mentioned the march of women socialists in New York in 1909 and especially that of March 8, 1917 in Petrograd, then the capital of Russia, in a mobilization that was the signal and starting point of the revolution.
It will be a long time before we know in detail what happened between March 8 and 11 in the Caracol of Morelia, how the whirlwind of words became the hurricane, how the light that was turned on in the Caracol will light all the corners of the world. For now we only know about the agreement. It’s about “living, and how for us (women) living is struggling, because we agree to struggle each one according to her way, her place and her Time.”
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, March 12, 2018
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2018/03/12/opinion/018a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Zapatista Captain calls on women to “struggle together against the patriarchal capitalist system”
The Women’s Gathering in Chiapas. Photo: Gaby Coutiño
By: Isaín Mandujano
TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Chiapas (apro) – Today, the Zapatista Captain Erika welcomed thousands of women that arrived from all the Caracols, as well as from other states and countries, and urged them to compete to see who is “the best (más chingona), prettiest or most revolutionary,” where nobody wins, or, “to agree to fight together, as different as we are, against the patriarchal capitalist system that is what is doing violence to us and murdering us.”
The masked woman, who sometimes worked as a servant in the city, where she suffered scorn and discrimination for being indigenous to later enroll in the ranks of the Zapatista movement, told attendees at the First International Political, Artistic, Sports and Cultural Gathering, of Women that Struggle what they have had to contend with, even among the ranks of the EZLN to gain the respect of the men.
Erika dedicated the event and sent words of solidarity to the family of Eloísa Vega Castro, the activist of the network of support for the Indigenous Government Council (CIG, its initials in Spanish), who died in the accident involving the independent presidential aspirant María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, last February 14 in Baja California.
“We waited until today to salute the memory of Eloísa, so that our embrace would be the biggest and would manage to reach far, to the other side of Mexico. And this embrace and this salute are large because you are all Zapatistas and from all the Zapatistas on this March 8, for that woman that struggled and now we miss: Eloísa Vega Castro. Our regrets go out to her family,” Erika said.
No man was permitted access to this event. The only men that are there are the Zapatista men that now do the jobs that women often do, like making food for all the attendees.
She also said that for these three days there would be uniformed Zapatistas women making rounds in the event. “Our work is going to be taking care of this place so that it’s only women and not let any man get in because we know that they are tricky.”
Then she told how difficult it has been to be in the struggle, since before the armed uprising and the 24 years of struggle they have already waged. She also told how before (the uprising) they had seen “little boys and girls, young people, adults and the elderly dying of curable diseases due to a lack of medical attention, good nutrition and education. But they also died because they were women and they died more.”
She shared that after working as a servant in the city, she knew that there was an organization that was fighting in the Lacandón Jungle, and that was how she began to participate as a support base, when she went out at night to study and returned at dawn, because at that time nobody knew about the struggle that the Zapatistas were making “because it was all clandestine.”
“But also I was born and grew up after the start of the War,” Erika said.
“I was born and grew up with military patrols surrounding our communities and roads, listening to the soldiers saying insults to the women just because they were armed men and we were are women,” she indicated.
She also remembered that they organized themselves as Zapatista women to struggle, because while they didn’t have education, they did have a lot of rage, “a lot of courage from all the insults they gave to us.”
According to her, she experienced the scorn, humiliation, mocking, violence, beatings and deaths because of being a woman, because of being indigenous, because of being poor and now because of being Zapatista.
And it wasn’t always a man who was exploiting her, robbing her, humiliating her, beating her, scorning her or killing her. There were also many times women that did it and still do it to other women.
That’s why, she added, they invited “everyone to talk to each other, to listen to each other and to stop gazing at each other and to celebrate.”
And in the context of this event, she said, you have two options: “We can choose to compete to see who is the best, who has the best word, who is the most revolutionary, who is most thoughtful, who is most radical, who is most well behaved, who is most liberated, who is the prettiest, who is the best, who dances the best, who paints the best, who sings well, who is more woman, who wins at sports and who struggles the most.”
Or, she said, “you can also all listen and speak with respect as women of struggle that give each other dance, music, film, video, painting, poetry, theater, sculpture, fun, knowledge, and that way feed your struggles that all of us have where we are.”
In other words, you have two paths: “We can compete among ourselves and at the end of the gathering, when we go back to our worlds, we’re going to realize that nobody won, or we can agree to struggle together, as different as we are, against the patriarchal capitalist system, which is doing violence to us and murdering us.”
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Originally Published in Spanish by Proceso
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
The First International Gathering of Women that Struggle is ready
Zapatista Women’s Gathering begins in the Caracol of Morelia.
By: Isaín Mandujano
TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Chiapas (apro) – Thousands of indigenous women from all the Zapatista Caracols, as well as from 27 states of the country and 34 countries of the world began to arrive this Thursday at the Caracol of Morelia, to participate in the “First International Political, Artistic, Sports and Cultural Gathering of Women that Struggle” to be held for International Women’s Day, March 8 to 10.
Everyone convoked by the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee-General Command (CCRI-CG) of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) “and in the name of the Zapatista girls, young women, adult and elderly women, alive and dead, council members, junta members, women promoters, milicianas, insurgents and bases of support,” they started to arrive today with their backpacks and will leave on Sunday, March 11.
Last December, in a communiqué signed by Comandantas Jessica, Esmeralda, Lucía, Zenaida and a girl named Defensa Zapatista, the EZLN called for this gathering to be held with “women that struggle, resist and rebel against the machista and patriarchal capitalist system.”
The convocation added: “We know well that the bad system not only exploits us, represses us, robs us and despises us as human beings, it also exploits, represses, robs and despises us again as women.”
And now, it continued: “we know because it’s worse, because now, all over the world they kill us. And the murderers, who are always the macho-faced system, don’t care if they kill us, because the police, the judges, the communications media, the bad governments, all those that are up above are what they are at the expense of our pains, they cover them up, hide them and even award them. But we are not afraid as it wants, or if we are, we control it, and we don’t surrender, and we don’t sell out and we don’t give up.”
Men were not invited to this event, the only ones that will be able to participate are the masked Zapatistas, but they will do everything that’s necessary so that the attendees at the event can play, chat, sing, dance, speak poems, and any form of art and culture that they have for sharing without shame.
“They -the Zapatista men- will be in charge of the cooking and cleaning and of whatever is needed,” as well as of vigilance on the outskirts.
At the end of January, the report was of about one thousand women coming from 27 states of the countries and 34 countries of the world, among them Germany, Andorra, Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Ecuador, El Salvador, Estado Español, United States, France, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, England, Italy, Mapuche Nation, Cree and Ojibwa Nation, Navajo Nation, Sweden, Nicaragua, Basque Country, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Switzerland, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
There were also more than 200 proposals registered for the in political, artistic and sports participations in different disciplines: music, dance, theater, circus, clown, poetry, story telling, book presentations, drawing, photography, cinema, football and volleyball.
According to the organizers, the women are expected to participate in workshops about gender violence, yoga for children, stencil, genetic clay, feminist manifestos, cooperative games, evaluation and use of menstrual blood, gender, theater, dance and painting as a means of healing, sensitization, agro-ecology, corrective violations, cloth sanitary napkins, production of personal hygiene articles, decolonizing hips.
There will also be workshops about the body and creative resistances, murals, women of color feminism, deconstructing genders, cyber-feminism, body work, workshop on self-massage, Reiki, abstract-figurative art, free writing, engraving, painting, creation of books starting from personal experiences, abortion, bio-construction, dance therapy, macrobiotic cooking, print making, humor and gender, aroma touch, reflexology.
There will also be talks about feminine lineage, the woman’s body, forms of resistance, human rights defense and promotion of culture, anti-machismo education, the experience of surviving violence, the women’s struggle in France and Italy, abortion, menstruation and deconstruction of the use of roles.
They will also analyze themes like femicides, the experience with struggle of the Mapuche people, machismo in the communications media, lesbian existence in times of patriarchy, feminism in Cuba, romantic love and the eroticization of gender violence, sexual violence in the Colombian armed conflict, violence towards the woman, racism, the anti-mining struggle, eco-feminism, indigenous and black feminisms, feminist economy and sustainability, as well as feminist human security.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Tillerson, Militarization and oil II
Women in Venezuela are equal under law. There is also a law to protect them from gender-based violence.
By: Carlos Fazio /II
If preparation for the violent plunder of Venezuela’s oil and other mining-energy, aquifer and biodiversity riches was one of the main hidden objectives of Rex Tillerson’s tour through various countries in Latin America, the other was to continue with the militarization of the subcontinent under the facade of the war on drugs and terrorism and the clandestine policies of regime change.
The “American War Machine,” as Peter Dale Scott calls it, answers to the “Deep State,” that is, to a secret parallel government organized by the military, police and intelligence apparatuses, financed by the criminal economy and integrated into the Wall Street financial and banking system, which is in charge of formulating and instrumenting the White House foreign policy and its open or secret operations for the benefit of the giants of the oil sector, like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Not in vain, the Donald Trump cabinet is in the hands of a troika of generals: James Mattis (Defense), H. R. McMaster (National Security Advisor) and John Kelly (White House Chief of Staff).
Since the epoch of John F. Kennedy, and more profusely starting with the Clinton administration, high-ranking military and intelligence officials have become “partners” of industrial corporations, and through the lucrative business of war helped to extend the market system and open new “economic borders” to large manufacturers of arms and of security and technology sales, like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, United Technologies and Booz Allen Hamilton Inc.
The problem with those corporations is that they need to feed themselves every day with new wars; that’s why they have to invent them. And that is also why all the wars are based on the deception and the manipulation of the masses –like the non-existent chemical weapons of mass destruction of Saddam Hussein in Iraq− and/or the systematic deceit through the mass media and the “internal archives” of the government of the United States (US).
A new factor exists in the conjuncture: the national security strategy of the Trump administration, announced on December 18, 2017, places fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) as the essential decisive element to ensure the economic vitality of the US, its military strength and its geopolitical weight. Militarization of energy policy will be the axis of Trump’s national security policy, not only for obtaining “energy independence,” but also for confronting the “rival powers” (China and Russia) that challenge US supremacy and for achieving “total energy domination.”
The “results” of the Tillerson tour through the region respond to that dynamic. In the opening of markets variable, the most visible achievements occurred in Argentina, where the Macri government announced the creation of a rapid deployment force integrated by the armed forces for combating terrorism and drug trafficking (the return of the military to internal security functions) under the advice of the Southern Command, and the installation of a DEA “task force” in Misiones, which could configure a covert military base at a strategic site: the triple border with Paraguay and Brazil, in whose subsoil the Guaraní Aquifer is found, the second largest reservoir of sweet water in the world. In addition to that, briefly, we would add the creation of “intelligence fusion centers” among the Argentine armed and security forces with the DEA, the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Southern Command, like those that already exist in Colombia and Mexico.
Before Tillerson’s tour, the purchase of a sophisticated package of missiles and torpedoes made in the United States for the Mexican Navy had been announced, for 98.4 million dollars! The construction of a military barracks in Chicomuselo, Chiapas, was also reported, in a zone where the EZLN has a presence, to “care for the security of the southern border,” and the expansion of the naval base in Matamoros, Tamaulipas. Last January, the Mexican Navy participated in the Maritime Security Multinational Meeting in Miami, where it signed a letter of intent for joint protection of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and of part of Central America and the Caribbean with the navies of Colombia and the US.
In the second variable: preparations for a direct or covert military intervention within the framework of the Trump administration’s “regime change” policies in Cuba and Venezuela, the advances are notorious; particularly as to the military ring around Venezuela. The Pentagon has achieved the installation of new military enclaves and the mobilization of troops and mercenaries on Colombia’s border zone with Venezuela, especially in the regions of Tumaco, Cúcuta and the Catatumbo of Northern Santander, which in a pincer operation are added US rapid deployment forces stationed in Aruba, Curacao and Honduras. The military encirclement policy is complemented with “humanitarian aid exercises” in Panama and the recent participation of Brazil and Peru in Operation United America under the Pentagon’s command. By way of a parallel, Tillerson himself encouraged an eventual dissidence within the bosom of the Venezuelan armed forces, which might culminate with a military State coup against President Nicolás Maduro.
In that context, the interests of the US arms and oil industries merge with those of the clandestine power parallel to the White House −that “Deep State” where the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA and private companies like Booz Allen− interact and approach the possibility of an outcome like Iraq, Libya or Syria in Venezuela. If Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were the planners of that secret circle during the Bush administration and took us to war in Iraq, Generals Mattis, H. R. McMaster and John Kelly could be the ones responsible for turning the heart of South America into a new Vietnam.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, February 26, 2018
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2018/02/26/politica/021a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Tillerson, Militarization and oil I
A demonstration in support of President Nicolas Maduro.
[Admin: This is the first of two articles (so far) about US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s Latin American tour.]
By: Carlos Fazio
In the context of a geopolitical dispute with extra-continental capitalist competitors (China, Russia, the European Union) that challenge the hegemony of the US empire in its traditional zone of influence, the recent tour of Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, through Mexico, Argentina, Peru, Colombia and Jamaica [1] had a clear expansionist projection based on two principal axes: security and energy.
As a member of the transnational capitalist class, Tillerson, a former executive director of the United States private oil company Exxon-Mobil, the fourth largest oil company in the world behind the state-owned Aramco (Saudi Arabia), NIOC (Iran) and CNPC (China), wielded a “primitive mercantilist” approach (Jorge Eduardo Navarrete said it), as anachronistic as the Monroe Doctrine in which he based his speech at the University of Texas, in Austin, one day before his arrival in Mexico.
The “Tillerson model” of hemispheric relations embodies the traditional war diplomacy of Washington, now accentuated due to the structural crisis and crisis of legitimacy of the world capitalist system, characterized by William I. Robinson as the fusion of reactionary political power in the State, ultra-rightist, authoritarian and new fascist forces in civil society, and transnational corporate capital. A triangulation of interests that, under the Trump administration, is shaping a “global police State” of a new fascist cut.
In that context, the factions of big capital most prone to 21st century fascism are located in the speculative financial sector, the military-industrial-security-media complex and in the extractive industries, interlaced with high tech/digital capital.
Given the magnitude of the crisis of capitalism, its global reach, the social deterioration and the degree of ecological degradation that it generates, in order to contain the real or potential protests and/or rebellions, the dominant plutocracy has been promoting diverse systems of mass social control, repression and wars (open or clandestine), which are also used as tools for obtaining profits and to continue accumulating capital in the face of stagnation. Robinson calls it “militarized accumulation” or “accumulation by repression.”
Such categorization alludes to the Achilles heel of capitalism: over-accumulation, the growing gap between what is produced and what the market can absorb. If the capitalists cannot sell their products, they don’t make a profit. Given the enormous concentration of wealth –with its correlative levels of social polarization and unprecedented global inequality−, the transnational capitalist class needs to find profitable productive outlets for discharging enormous quantities of accumulated surpluses.
That’s why the energy and extractive complexes resort to the intensification and deepening of neoliberalism via the privatization of highway, seaport, airport and railroad infrastructure, and of oil pipelines, gas pipelines and electricity (for example, Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission in the case of Mexico); as well as the super-exploitation of labor and lack of job security (subcontracting, outsourcing), and policies of total deregulation and greater subsidies to transnational capital.
Said policies of relocation of capital, re-industrialization and accumulation by dispossession or the plunder of territories and raw materials in dependent economies, have been occurring in Mexico, Central and South America through soft coups, the de facto imposition of a permanent state of emergency and the establishment of police states, whose supports are the militarization of civil society and different modalities of endless tactical wars, camouflaged as anti-drug wars or wars against “internal enemies” −the Mapuches under the (dis) government of Mauricio Macri−, with advanced armaments systems driven by artificial intelligence, including sophisticated monitoring, tracking, security and surveillance systemeIn that context it should be noted that in his speech at the University of Texas, Tillerson placed energy, particularly hydrocarbons (oil, gas and unconventional oils), as a nodal point of the renewed hemispheric strategy of the Trump administration. He put as the “model” the energy strength of North America; the opening (privatization) of the energy markets in Mexico, and the role of the United States as the provider of natural gas for new generators of electricity in the region.
In fact, Mexico –which since 2007 with the Merida Initiative heads the list of covert aid for military intelligence from the Pentagon and the CIA, after Afghanistan− is on the way to becoming an export platform for oil, natural gas and gasoline produced in the Permian Basin and Louisiana, towards the Asian market (Japan, China, India, South Korea and Taiwan), via the ports of Manzanillo and the Coatzacoalcos/Salina Cruz axis on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, which will take advantage of the infrastructure installed by Pemex, which will give the energy corporations the advantages of less time and lower transportation costs than if they did it through the Panama Canal.
Given that hydrocarbons are a central component of the militarized neocolonial and “energy security” strategy of Donald Trump and the corporations of that sector –in key with the conservative restoration and the defense of its hegemony−, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA, the fifth largest oil company in the world) was another central objective of Tillerson’s tour. That is why he instructed the collaborationist henchmen governments of Enrique Peña Nieto, Mauricio Macri, Pedro Kuczynski and Juan Manuel Santos about the new modalities that they will have to undertake faced with the intensification of the military, economic and financial circle against the constitutional government of Nicolas Maduro, including an eventual oil embargo as the new precipitator of a “humanitarian crisis” that would justify a multilateral military intervention.
[1] The Tillerson tour took place during the first week of February 2018.
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, February 12, 2018
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2018/02/12/opinion/021a1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
The Mayor of Oxchuc is removed and new municipal council elected
A protest sign in Oxchuc political conflict in which the Spanish words read: “Peace and Justice Social Movement María Gloria Sanchez OUT!!!”
By: Isaín Mandujano
TUXTLA GUTIÉRREZ, Chiapas (proceso.com.mx) – The State Congress took away her constitutional protection (immunity from prosecution) and removed María Gloria Sánchez Gómez from her elected position as mayor of Oxchuc, and also removed her entire county council; therefore, by means of a plebiscite the traditional authorities of that municipality today elected three men and three women to form the new municipal government council.
On Sunday afternoon, the Permanent Commission of the State Congress swore in the new Oxchuc municipal council made up of Petrona Sántiz Gómez, Soila López Gómez, Lilia Gómez López, Juan Sántiz Rodríguez, Manuel Gómez Rodríguez and Oscar Gómez López.
Last Friday, the Attorney General of the State of Chiapas (FGE, its initials in Spanish) asked the state Congress to remove the legal immunity from prosecution from the mayor and municipal council so that she can be investigated and called in to give a statement about the ambush that her adversaries suffered on last January 23, when they were attacked with firearms and three of them died. [1] Seventeen people were also injured in that armed attack.
Four days after that ambush, the FGE arrested Amílcar “N”, César “N” and Mario “N”, accused of being implicated in the crimes of homicide, attempted homicide, attacks against the peace and bodily and patrimonial integrity of the collectivity of the State. They were linked to the mayor and that was why the FGE asked the Congress to remove the legal protection from María Gloria Sánchez so that she could be called upon to give her statement about those violent incidents.
The Permanent Commission was erected as a jury of origin and approved to remove legal protection from the mayor after listening to her in a hearing.
The two local deputies, Santiago López and Fidel Álvarez, traveled to Oxchuc to be witnesses to the vote where, with the staff of command in hand, around 100 of the 115 communities, decided to elect their new authorities.
Through the process of uses and customs they elected Petrona Sántiz Gómez, Soila López Gómez, Lilia Gómez López, Juan Sántiz Rodríguez, Manuel Gómez Rodríguez and Oscar Gómez López as members of the new municipal council.
There are still eight months left of María Gloria Sánchez Gómez’s term of office, but she has not been able to govern from the municipal capital since 2015 when she was elected. [2] It is rumored that the now former mayor will go to court to challenge this process of removing her immunity from prosecution.
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[1] For more on the armed attack, see: https://chiapas-support.org/2018/01/30/3-dead-in-oxchuc-chiapas-violence/
[2] That conflict turned deadly violent early in 2016. For more information, see: https://chiapas-support.org/2016/01/13/66-police-injured-in-oxchuc-chiapas-confrontation/
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Originally Published in Spanish by Proceso
Sunday, February 18, 2017
Re-Published with English Interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
María de Jesús Patricio and the CIG: what was achieved
Marichuy in Totonacapan, Veracruz
By: R. Aída Hernández Castillo*
On February 19 the time period for registration of independent candidates to the Presidency of the Republic ended. Only three “independent” candidates attained registration, all three with daily expenses equal or greater than those of the partisan candidates. María de Jesús Patricio, spokesperson of the Indigenous Government Council (CIG), did not achieve getting one percent of the signatures from the eligible voters of 17 states as is required for her to be an independent candidate. From the beginning we knew that it was a very unequal contest in a field deeply marked by the inequalities that characterize our country. While Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, El Bronco, spent 58,000 pesos per day and counted on the institutional apparatus of Nuevo León’s state government for gathering signatures, María de Jesús Patricio spent 860 pesos, which she shared with the council members that traveled with her. They confronted technological barriers in the whole process: the need for a modern cellular device that would allow downloading the application for gathering signatures, the Internet connectivity required, and money for the mobility of assistants; each one of those steps represented a struggle against the inequalities and exclusions that Marichuy and the CIG are denouncing.
I have to recognize that as a member of the Time Has Come for the Strengthening of the Peoples Association, which supports her registration, I feel frustrated for not having achieved overcoming all those barriers and not having been able to do more to move the consciences of this country around the urgency for deep changes. This feeling is more acute because on February 19 I am in Ahome, Yoreme territory, where organized crime violence in collusion with the security forces has converted the state of Sinaloa into a big common grave. The testimonies of mothers of the disappeared reminds us once again that we are in a time of national emergency, which is not resolved with “trainings” or “institutional modernizations.” We require a profound change that none of the candidates that will appear on the electoral ballots is disposed to make.
The country is plagued with anonymous places like Ayotzinapa where the security forces colluded with organized crime are perpetrating a genocide of youth before our very eyes and with the complicity of our silence. The Conalep students massacred in Juan José Ríos for failing to comply with the curfew established by organized crime that controls Mexico’s largest ejido; the young Yoreme student of the Sinaloa Intercultural University, whose body appeared in a clandestine grave in Capomos; the 117 bodies found by The Searchers, mothers of the disappeared that with picks and shovels search for their “treasures,” don’t seem to be favored now with marches or protests. We have become accustomed to this politics of death.
In contrast, María de Jesús Patricio tours the country talking about promoting a politics of life. When despair invades me for not having attained the 866,000 signatures required, I think about what has been achieved. In her visits to 126 localities in 27 states of the Mexican Republic, María de Jesús and the compañeros of the Indigenous Government Council carried a message of respect for life and articulated organizational efforts in defense of Mother Earth and against these development policies that are killing everyone, some faster than others.
On her tours she visited peoples in resistance throughout the country, communities and struggles ignored by the other candidates. She met with organizations of the Totonac peoples that are opposed to the gas fracking megaprojects in Veracruz; in Texcoco with the peoples of the Valley of Mexico that struggle against the construction of the new airport that will affect not only their agricultural lands, but also the water tables that give water to Mexico City; in Neza city her voice joined organizations that denounce the femicides and the multiple violence against women; and, in Chiapas she denounced the paramilitary violence that attempts against indigenous autonomy. The principal objective of her campaign has been, and will continue being, articulating our struggles and constructing life alternatives from below, starting with respect for Mother Earth and for the dignity of the peoples.
Her call has been to defend life and territory from the death policies, and to re-take the communitarian values and experiences of resistance of the indigenous peoples. In her speech in Totonacapan she said: “The capitalists want to make us believe that our territory is thousands of oil wells, dozens of mining concessions, the murdered women, and the disappeared. But we know it’s not, as well as violence, deforestation, the high rates for electricity and water, the control of water by regional caciques and the extractive megaprojects do not define the indigenous territory of Veracruz either. Our territories are the original languages, ancestral cultures, our resistances, the community organization that invites us to not sell out, to not surrender and to not give up, to not forget about what we inherited from our ancestors to protect, which invites us to organize and to govern ourselves exercising what we decide collectively.”
It’s not important that the rules imposed from above don’t allow her to be on the electoral ballot, her call to not give up, to continue organizing and defending life and territory still stands. We continue re-articulating ourselves in this new stage of resistance. We continue.
*Researcher at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Wednesday, February 21, 2018
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2018/02/21/opinion/021a2pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Marichuy: If I don’t attain the candidacy, the struggle will continue
Marichuy speaks at rally to collect signatures.
By: Blanche Petrich
María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, who aspires to an independent candidacy to the Presidency, and five council women from different ethnicities on the Indigenous Government Council-National Indigenous Congress recognized that if at the end of the deadline the National Electoral Institute (INE, its initials in Spanish) established –which expires on Monday the 19th of this month– they don’t gather enough signatures for their candidate to appear on the electoral ballot, “the campaign around the proposal for reconstructing a Mexico with hope for those below will continue.”
Marichuy asserted that: “whether or not the signatures are completed, we have fulfilled our objective. Now we have a commitment. It’s up to us to decide, to think, to design a new country with our thoughts, our ways and adapted to the new times.”
In a public act that was organized around the tent on the esplanade of the Palace of Fine Arts to collect signatures in favor of the traditional Náhuatl doctor, the intellectuals Pablo González Casanova, Juan Villoro and Gilberto López y Rivas, who with dozens more made up the civil association The Time Has Come for the Flourishing of the Peoples, warned that the way in which the law is conceived for the inscription of independent candidates for this year’s elections, with a requirement of 800,000 digital signatures as a minimum for the presidential election, supposed a “discriminatory” design against millions of Indigenous that live in remote zones without access to cellular and Internet networks.
As of the latest count, Marichuy had a little more than 210,000 signatures and now only one week remains to collect the more that 800,000 signatures of support that the INE requires.
On “what’s relative” about this deadline, the writer Villoro quoted José Alfredo Jiménez, who in his popular song says that: “you don’t have to get there first, but you have to know how to get there.” And he said that this Marichuy campaign has essentially been different from all the others. “The other independent candidacies were a Plan B of the political class so that in essence nothing changes, whoever wins. Those candidates are like all the others. And the INE has not rejected signatures from us, as it has done to many others, because we don’t cheat.”
The Chontal Reyna Cruz, from the highlands of Oaxaca, alluded to this difference: “In this campaign we don’t give caps or bags of food, we give our word. And we don’t promise anything, we just share our injustices and suffering.” For example, those about their land, “where the rich take land away from us. They come and they don’t ask: what do you want to give us? They don’t even greet us and they take what they want. But now we know that, although we wear huaraches, we Indians are able to defend our rights.”
Lupita Vázquez Luna is one of the children that were not murdered in Acteal. From that massacre emerged the leadership of this young woman, who warned: “We are no longer willing to be humiliated, that they take from us what is ours, starting with our language.” Over the months spent in search of the vote for Marichuy, the roads traveled and the experiences heard, she concluded: “The Indigenous Government Council is not going to end. Quite the opposite! We have become very aware and the seed is already sown.”
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Monday, February 12, 2018
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2018/02/12/politica/006n1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Highway accident of Marichuy and her team in BCS; 1 dead and at least 8 injured
The Nissan CZV Van in which the indigenous pre-candidate to the Presidency and various council members were traveling turned over at kilometer 102 of the Trans-peninsular Highway of Baja California Sur, characterized by the danger that it represents for those who are not familiar with it. Photo La Jornada
By: Antonio Heras and Raymundo León
Mulegé, Baja California Sur (BCS)
One of the three vehicles on the caravan of María de Jesús Patricio, spokesperson for the Indigenous Government Council (CIG, its initials in Spanish) and an aspirant to be an independent candidate to the Presidency of the Republic, suffered an accident yesterday afternoon at kilometer 102 of the Trans-peninsular Highway, at a spot in the municipality of Mulegé. One person died and eight were injured, among them Marichuy.
Raúl Cepeda, a Red Cross aid worker in Vizcaíno, reported that the person who died responds to the name of Eloísa. Marichuy suffered a fractured left arm and council member Francisco Grado broke his hip.
The other injured have been identified as council member Lucero Islava, Juana Villa Poblano, Lorena Moreno, Ramona Avilés and Antonio Ciego.
Cepeda explained that the accident occurred around 4:30 pm, when the Nissan CZV Van left the highway and turned over on the San Ignacio-Vizcaíno stretch, in the state’s northern part.
The Trans-peninsular Highway is in pitiful condition, besides the fact that it is very narrow, because of which it is a risky road for anyone that does not usually travel on it.
Eleven members of the CIG were traveling in the unit del CIG; they were from the coordination of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and from the networks of support for the CIG in Baja California Sur.
The injured were moved to a Social Security clinic in Vizcaíno, where they received first aid. Minutes later, Marichuy was taken to a hospital in Guerrero Negro.
At night, all the injured were taken in an air ambulance to La Paz. The state of health of Francisco Grado, who belongs to the Cochimí ethnicity, one of the original peoples of Baja California, was reported as stable and out of danger.
Condolences from the President
On his Twitter account, President Enrique Peña Nieto lamented the accident that María de Jesús Patricio Martínez and her companions suffered.
The president published two messages in which he also points out that the Navy Secretariat is supporting to lend medical attention and land and air transportation to those affected. “I send my most sincere condolences to the family of the person that lost her life in this incident and I wish the injured a speedy recovery,” he wrote.
Meanwhile, the Secretary of Governance, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, reported that the blows that Marichuy suffered do not put her life at risk. On his Twitter account, the official wrote: La@SEGOB_mx will remain attentive to her evolution and the doctors will give the corresponding reports.”
The presidential pre-candidate of the Todos por México Coalition, José Antonio Meade, also published on that social network: “I lament the highway accident that the caravan of María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, suffered. My prayers go out to her and all of her team. We are attentive.” @JoseAMeadeK.
Ricardo Anaya, pre-candidate of the Por México al Frente alliance, published: “I lament the accident that María de Jesús Patricio and the members of her team suffered. I express my solidarity to Marichuy and all her compañeros.
Later that night, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of the Together We’ll Make History Coalition, published on Twitter: “I lament the accident that María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, Marichuy, and her companions suffered. I express my condolences to the family members of the person that lost her life and I wish those who were injured a speedy recovery.”
(With information from Notimex)
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Originally Published in Spanish by La Jornada
Thursday, February 15, 2018
http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2018/02/15/politica/013n1pol
Re-Published with English interpretation by the Chiapas Support Committee
Chiapas Support Committee 