On the occasion of October 12, Day of Indigenous Resistance, we want to celebrate the struggle that we as native people have undertaken to defend our territory in different ways against the onslaught of businessmen and governments that want to make Juanacatlan an extension of the industrial corridors and the big city. Since 2019, we, the inhabitants who say NO to this way of life, have been not only opposing megaprojects such as the thermoelectric plant and the gas pipeline, but also trying to organize ourselves in the face of any threat that we glimpse, traveling through our territory to know and recognize it, registering the damages and identifying the perpetrators.
Likewise, we have been trying to rebuild our own identity by re-interpreting our present, reconstructing our past as indigenous coca peoples, that is to say, native peoples who have prevailed since before the arrival of the Spaniards and their conquest, at least 1300 years ago in this place that we inhabit next to the millenary Chiconahua River and its great waterfall.
The construction of our identity, keeping in mind our origins as a people and its continuity, we have been doing it from a space of encounter that is the Indigenous Council of Xonacatlan, the name of this town before the colonization. This Council was born because we understood that a people cannot exist without the territory and its memory, and from experience we knew that it is impossible to continue without defending ourselves.
We established as our principles the custody of our memory, history and culture, to encourage and defend our identity as native people; the defense of the territory against dispossession, solidarity and horizontality among those who participate, because we understand that the voice of all is fundamental, as well as to advance and build without hierarchies, without political parties or particular interests.
To name ourselves as an original, native or indigenous people is to choose one side of our history, it is to choose between the inheritance of the ancestral ways of our peoples or the ways inherited by the colonizers; it is to name ourselves in favor of the land and the cornfield instead of industry, in favor of the forest instead of the subdivisions, in favor of wildlife instead of the exploitation of our territory, in favor of the preservation of our waters for our people instead of water as a commodity.
It is important that we celebrate life and the small achievements in the defense of our territory that, however small they may be, give us encouragement and tools to continue in this work. The publication of the Local Ecological Management Program (the POEL), a process that a good part of this Council appropriated, declares that Juanacatlán is free of industry, free of megaprojects, free of mining and material banks. This document in itself does not solve our problems but it is an important tool to put a definitive stop to the thermoelectric plant and other uses of the gas pipeline, but the struggle and organization must continue to make it valid and not just a dead letter.
Juanacatlán is an indigenous and peasant town!
Juanacatlán is a town free of megaprojects!
Long live our river and our people!
Juanacatlán, Jalisco October 16, 2022
INDIGENOUS COUNCIL OF XONACALTAN