“Global Corporate Capitalism, Planetary Patriarchy, Autonomies in Revolt.”
CIDECI-UNITIERRA / CARACOL JACINTO CANEK May 7, 2023.
To the General Command of the EZLN:
To the National Indigenous Congress:
To the Indigenous Council of Government:
To the national and international organizations that struggle and resist:
To the free, alternative, independent media or whatever they are called:
To the peoples of Mexico and the world:
From the Heart of the land where dignified rage was born, grew and reproduces itself, the rebellious peoples of the geographies of the South Southeast who walk the caravan El Sur Resiste 2023, Binnizá, Ayuuk, Nahua, Nuntajiyi (Nuntajuyi), Maya, Chol, Zoque, Tzeltal peoples, Tojolabal, Tsotsil and mestizos, convened by various organizations of this geography and by the National Indigenous Congress, we traveled through the territories affected by the interconnected military megaprojects, the ill-named Mayan Train and the Interoceanic Corridor. We arrived at the Zapatista territory of CIDECI-UNITIERRA / Caracol Jacinto Canek in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, where we met with many other peoples and organizations of the original peoples and urban areas of the south southeast of the country and many other regions of our Mother Earth to share the pains, hopes and strategies of articulation, learn from the struggles of other geographies and continue weaving solidarity networks of resistance and planetary rebellion.
From April 25 to May 4, the members of the Caravan El Sur Resiste traveled through communities and towns in eight states of the Mexican Republic; Starting from the community of El Progreso, municipality of Pijijiapan, with a stopover in Tonalá, we traveled along the coast of Chiapas and crossed the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, from the Binniza community in resistance of Puente Madera, municipality of San Blas Atempa, passing through the rebel camp “Tierra y Libertad” in the Aayuuk community of Mogoñe Viejo, municipality of San Juan Guichicovi, both communities in the state of Oaxaca, and arriving at the Nahua community of Oteapan in southern Veracruz. From there, we set out for the Mayan territories of the Yucatan peninsula, crossing the State of Tabasco through Villahermosa and the coastal community of El Bosque, devoured by the sea due to global warming, arriving in Candelaria, Campeche, and following the route to the community of Zakí, today called Valladolid in Yucatan and the community of Noj Kaaj Santa Cruz, today Felipe Carrillo Puerto in Quintana Roo, returning through Xpujil again in Campeche territory to return to Chiapas and meet the Zoque, Chol, Tsotsil, Tojolabal and Tzeltal peoples, with a stop in Palenque, crossing the region of Los Altos to reach our final destination, Jovel, today San Cristobal de las Casas.
Throughout this journey, our hearts, feelings and thoughts were open to listening and observing the multiple pains and destruction caused by the voracity of the great world capitalism that we felt in our own body through the constant harassment of our caravan by the police and military bodies of the Mexican State.
In these times of global geopolitical rearrangements where the great capitals of the Western and Asian blocs accelerate the process of this new stage of colonization war, disputing the territories of our planet, destroying Mother Nature, dispossessing, exploiting and expelling the peoples and murdering and disappearing those who oppose them, we note the complicity of the states and organized crime in its various forms, all of them bloodthirsty.
We affirm that we are facing the greatest expression of the patriarchal power system inherited from thousands of years ago and installed in our lands more than 500 years ago with the genocidal European invasion. We witness its devastating effects on our territories but we also feel with great strength the resistance of our peoples, who have safeguarded our very existence as native peoples.
In this global readjustment, the Mexican Southeast and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec play a strategic role in the interests of global corporations to unite by land in just 200 kilometers the Pacific Ocean with the Atlantic Ocean and facilitate the transport of goods, hydrocarbons and other subsoil resources. The inter-oceanic corridor has been a place of transit since ancestral times of the commercial routes of the peoples, but in times of the colony and the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, as well as during the governments of the XX and XXI century have tried to appropriate it without success, this by the historical resistance of the peoples of the region.
This government that calls itself the government of the fourth transformation is no different, since it contemplates the modernization of the ports of Coatzacoalcos and Salina Cruz, the construction of a highway and the modernization of the railroad for cargo trains that will not only connect the two ports but also the train that they call the Mayan train in the Yucatan Peninsula.
That is why we say that the Interoceanic Corridor, the Train wrongly called Maya and the Morelos Integral Project in the center of the country are part of an interconnection and energy supply network for the corporations that will operate in the south of the country and Central America, most of them of private and foreign capital.
A high tension line will be installed and the expansion of the isthmus gas pipeline that will be connected to the new maritime pipeline that will bring fracking gas from Texas to our lands. This project will be built along the coast of Veracruz, in the vicinity of the reef system, from Tuxpan to Coatzacoalcos and with another maritime branch to the new Dos Bocas refinery, also part of this megaproject.
This infrastructure reflects the deepening of a model, based on the extraction of fossil hydrocarbons, which during the 20th century accelerated, in a way never seen before, the indicators of pollution and global warming, reinforced by supposedly clean energies in the hands of large foreign capital that does not represent any fair energy transition for the people.
Indeed, the project does not only contemplate the construction of these infrastructures but also the opening of new territories for the extraction of hydrocarbons, mining and the implementation of industrial and wind farms as well as the construction of new urban centers for semi-enslaved national workers, but mostly migrants who by order of the master of the North will be detained at the height of the Isthmus making this territory a new wall of human containment.
In the Mayan territories of the Yucatan Peninsula and the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, a new territorial reordering is being gestated to put it at the service of the great capitals of the tourist and industrial developments.
The Caravan witnessed the devastation of the jungle to make way for the railroad tracks, hundreds of kilometers and millions of trees cut down where the deer and jaguar used to walk. The flows of the sacred water are being modified with catastrophic consequences for the people they will name in the future as natural disasters.
In Mayan territories that were victims at the beginning of the 20th century of the Genocide promoted by the State during the Mayan Social War, today the train and the megaprojects that are illegally imposed are part of the new genocidal practices.
The construction of this train is accompanied by the installation of 21 stations and tourist development zones, wind and photovoltaic parks, thermoelectric plants, breweries, pig farms, palm, soybean and other monoculture crops, as well as large real estate developments, hotel complexes, shopping centers, casinos, restaurants and everything necessary for the large masses of tourists that are expected to arrive to the peninsula, causing dispossession, voracious extractivism and the destruction of the Mayan peoples’ way of life.
Both in the peninsula and in the Isthmus, through disinformation and false promises of well-being linked to the deceptive management of concepts such as progress and development where social programs have played a fundamental role, for fear of violence, separation from the community and the possible loss of social programs many people remain silent and do not organize, even knowing and seeing the growing violence and the destruction of the territories.
But the evils that come with these mega-projects of death are more evident every day. All these infrastructures represent the dispossession of our territories for the benefit of big capital as part of a project operated by the Mexican armed forces, army, navy and national guard in coordination with the police and migratory bodies and in collusion with organized crime cartels and the consequent expansion of capitalist and patriarchal criminal economies.
We heard and witnessed that the first of the dispossessions is that of ancestry and communality, because when we are stripped of our sense of belonging to mother earth we stop feeling her, listening to her and feeling her pains. First they strip us of our memory and our spirituality in order to strip us of our way of life, of our roots and of the earth, because those who no longer see in it a mother, but a commodity that can be bought and sold, get rid of it without thinking about what those who only want to exploit it will do to it, uproot its trees and poison it without caring about the destruction of our communities and our ceremonial centers, the contamination of the air, the land and the waters, springs, rivers, lagoons, seas and the cenotes that are the waters of the bowels of our mother.
We saw how the sea is literally and tragically swallowing the community of El Bosque in Tabasco, as a consequence of climate change caused by planetary mega-pollution, particularly by the energy model based on hydrocarbon extraction, which this government and big capital are reinforcing.
We also note the terrible increase of a culture of violence that has permeated all of society, from the communities to the neighborhoods of the cities, with drug trafficking, extortion, and the charging of “derecho de piso”, particularly affecting the youth, women, migrants, and environmental and human rights defenders.
More and more young people from indigenous communities and poor neighborhoods of the cities fall victim to drug trafficking networks, as one of the few “alternatives” for improvement in the midst of this disaster, they self-destruct their brains with cheap drugs such as crystal meth, become hired killers and end up murdered.
In particular, we note the increase in gender violence, from family violence to femicides, with the terrifying figure of 13 women murdered daily in our country, and a clear increase in repression against those who oppose megaprojects, defend the territory and denounce impunity and chains of complicity, repression that ranges from threats, forced displacement, imprisonment, disappearances and murders.
We identify the racist policies, the strategy of persecution and stigmatization of the National Institute of Migration against our migrant brothers and sisters who denied entry into the country to our comrades from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
We have verified the systematic violation of the rights of indigenous peoples and particularly the right to self-determination and autonomy, the exercise of which is essential to rebuild from our ancestral cultural roots a free and dignified life based on communality through decision-making in assemblies, with full respect for women, other women, youth, children and the elderly, and in harmony with nature.
We note the pressure from all government agencies, beginning with the agrarian attorney general’s office, to make the agrarian nuclei and indigenous communities pass to full ownership and thus put an end to the social ownership of the land, which represents the strength of our struggles.
But in contrast to all these calamities, the Caravan also allowed us to travel through hope and life, to meet the countryside and its native seeds that are being protected by peasant hands. We felt the joy of rebellious music that excites the hearts and inspires resistance. We enjoyed the art as a front of struggle that with its colors, sounds and noise allows us to continue in the joyful rebellion.
The Caravan allowed us to meet with the jungle that resists. Where the trees are cut down, life springs up again. We listened to the birds and their messages, drank the crystal clear water from the wells and breathed the clean air of rural life. We met people and communities that organize themselves, resist and do not allow the dispossession or even the entry of companies into their territories. They are also taking steps to recover ways of life that build autonomies that offer hope for humanity. On the other hand, we find rebellious cities that build collectivity and autonomy in the midst of urban monsters where love for the land and territory flourishes once again.
We offer to mother earth, we invoke the spirit of fire, water and air, recognizing that the long struggles are sustained by the spirituality linked to the territory and our ancestry. Knowing that we do not seek a final victory but that we fight just as our grandfathers and grandmothers did and before them, our ancestors and as our children and grandchildren will continue to do. As we reaffirmed in the 10 working groups of the South/Southeast meeting on May 5, we are building other possible worlds by celebrating what we are harvesting and recognizing that our strength comes from memory and wisdom as peoples who struggle. We have reflected that we resist by embracing the values of a full and dignified life close to the land, such as the cultivation of our food, traditional medicine and the protection of our peoples through community guards.
We recognized that even in the midst of all the destruction of the capitalists there are many achievements that we are reaping: The first and most important is that after 500 years of attempts to exterminate us here we are still here, the organization from the community against dispossession, likewise the lands recovered in different towns, the struggle of women for the recognition and exercise of their rights, the struggle for water, the release of political prisoners, the relocation of the train stations in Merida and Campeche, the establishment of zones free of extractive projects, the preservation of languages and traditional festivals and the construction of autonomies.
After the caravan and our internal meeting we gathered 940 people from 40 native peoples of the world, from 27 states of the Republic, from 30 countries and from 10 autonomous regions in the International Meeting “Global Corporate Capitalism, Planetary Patriarchy, Autonomies in Rebellion”. We listened to the words of 5 speakers to analyze and study the geopolitical situation of the world, of Mexico, specifically of the south southeast and the global south. We also listened to the sharing of experiences of struggle of all these regions as well as proposals to continue the construction of autonomy.
The sisters and brothers of Abya Yala from Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, shared with us the situation they have to face and we noted that this predatory capitalist system is acting in the same way in all geographies where people still protect natural and cultural assets and life itself. But we also noted the joy, the strength and the living organization of the organized peoples.
Denouncements:
We denounce the violent eviction of the Tierra y Libertad encampment as well as the imprisonment of 6 compañer@s perpetrated by the navy and state police on April 28, one day after the passage of our caravan. We demand that the government of Oaxaca and the federal government immediately cease harassment against defenders of land and territory, particularly in the case of the Tierra y Libertad encampment in the Isthmus, and that the arrest warrants against 17 members of the community of Puente Madera, San Blas Atempa be dropped, as well as the acquittal of the comrade David Salazar, who has been indicted.
We repudiate the racist and rights-violating immigration policy of this government that prevented the entry of the daughter of comrade Berta Cáceres, prohibiting her from flying to Mexico City with all her papers in order, and the harassment of 7 Central American comrades at the border post in Tapachula, Chiapas.
We demand the revocation of the illegal assembly of March 5, 2023 in the ejido Nicolás Bravo, where they illegally approved the stop of the so-called Mayan train in favor of the Azcarraga group, owners of Televisa, which will damage more than 100 Mayan ceremonial centers.
We demand the cancellation of the eviction order of the community of Emiliano Zapata III municipality of Candelaria Campeche promoted by the alleged owner Fernando Oropeza Arispe and ordered by a civil judge of first instance of the state of Campeche. Likewise, the cancellation of the arrest warrants for the compañeros of the community.
Immediate cancellation of the work on the so-called Mayan train, especially the illegal construction of section 7, the installation of the military casino and the tourist development in the community of Xpujil, since in spite of the definitive suspension granted by a federal judge, SEDENA continues its construction in contempt of the federal order.
Cessation of pressure from the Agrarian Procurator’s Office on communities and ejidos to convert socially owned lands to full ownership, thereby destroying the collective lands of the country’s indigenous communities.
Urgent and immediate relocation of the El Bosque community in the municipality of Centla, Tabasco, who are displaced environmental victims of global warming produced by the voracious extractivist system that continues to depredate and deforest the territories.
We demand the immediate release of all political prisoners in this country, political prisoners in solidarity with the voice of Amate, Fidencio Aldama, the prisoners of Eloxochitlan de Flores Magón, Oaxaca, all those unjustly imprisoned for defending water and territories, and the comrade Manuel Gómez Vázquez, support base of the EZLN, and the revocation of the 50-year sentence against Miguel Ángel Peralta Betanzos, persecuted political prisoner of Eloxochitlan.
We firmly accompany and join the demand of the families of the victims of feminicidal violence in Mexico to achieve truth, justice, reparation and non-repetition, not only for the violated women but particularly for the children (daughters, sons, sisters and brothers), collateral victims of this infamous violence in this country that insists on sowing fear, death and impunity. Neither forgiveness nor oblivion! Punishment for the guilty! (facebook: @FeminicidiosCrimenesdelesahumanidad, @FatimaVariniaEnTuHonorYRecuerdo, @JusticiaParaLupitaBastida)
In the case of the ejido of Tila, Chiapas, we demand the execution of the RAN ruling favorable to the recovery of the 130 hectares taken from them by the municipality.
We demand the presentation alive for the thousands of disappeared people in the country, of the community member Antonio Díaz Valencia and the lawyer Ricardo Lagunes Gasca who were disappeared due to a conflict between the community of Aquila, Michoacán and the Canadian mining company Ternium.
Justice for the 43 normalistas disappeared in Ayotzinapan, because they were taken alive, we want them alive!
We affirm loud and clear and from our hearts that fight and organize, that we will continue to meet and articulate with other struggles around the world.
Neither the National Guard, nor the navy, nor the army will stop us!
While you destroy, we build.
Caravan and International Gathering El Sur Resists