Communiqué from the Communal Assembly of Puente Madera
Three years ago, the usual troublemakers of the municipality of San Blas Atempa, who retreated that 2017, when they managed to impose the military electrical substation on our common lands of El Pitayal, went out again. That Sunday of 2021, the day in which even the dead of our community decided in that fake assembly to hand over our lands to foreign interests. Three years ago the cacique of our community, Antonino Morales Toledo, believed that we would accept the surrender of our territory without opposition.
On March 14, 2021, women and men -young, adults and elders- of the Binnizá agency of Puente Madera, we undertook and constituted our struggle and movement in defense of our territory. Struggle for the lands of Common Use of the El Pitayal mountain. Three years ago we began our opposition to the promises of development offered by the State, and promoted in our region by the aforementioned cacique. Development that was personified under the pompous and innovative name of Polo de Desarrollo para el Bienestar (PODEBI) ( Development Poles for Well-Being) or in less flowery terms, Cluster or Industrial Park.
From the moment we learned of the installation of this PODEBI on Common Use lands, we knew that it would only bring negative economic, social and environmental consequences for our whole area. As farmers in Puente Madera, from the first moment we knew that this cluster will deprive us of water resources, will explode urbanization processes inside and outside the community, and will promote the contamination of land, water and air. Thus, we know that the destruction of a fragment of El Pitayal will bring about the gradual loss of our identity and ways of life as the Binnizá men and women that we are.
At the beginning we conceived of this as a struggle that was only ours as Puente Madera, due to the installation of PODEBI on our lands. Throughout these three years of confrontation, we have come to realize that what we are facing is something much bigger. We know that the industrialization of our lands is only a small fragment of a vast project that foresees the initial installation of 10 primary PODEBIS, to which another 28 secondary and marginal ones will be added in the long run, if not more. During this period we realized that this megaproject involves economic and political actors that operate and migrate from different scales and territories.
In these three years of resistance we have seen that the State and Capital have no limits and will not relent with this megaproject which in sum implies the surrender of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to North American economic interests, to make our region their backyard for diverse activities of an economic and political model of pillaging, plundering and domination.
Well, now we address you to tell you a little about our feelings, after this previous reading, at this moment, after three years of mobilizations, legal actions, press conferences, meetings, forums and other activities. Throughout this time, we have become aware of the strategies used by the State to attack our struggle.
From the false assembly of March 14, 2021, to the use of the Indigenous Consultation as a mechanism to bring in people and as a measure to embellish a project of death; to the disciplinary measures applied against the community, such as denying us electricity in the clinic, to disregarding our community authorities; to the co-optation and purchase of 5 inhabitants of our community who have served as puppets of the cacique Antonino Morales Toledo.
As you also know from the communiqués and statements that we have issued from 2021 to the present. That the hunt for and prosecution of 18 comrades of this agency has intensified every day, as have the death threats against the comrades of the APIIDTT. Persecution that our comrade David Hernandez Salazar has suffered first hand, which caused him to be arrested in the early hours of January 17, 2023 and sentenced to 46 years in prison on February 7 of this year.
Throughout these three months of the year 2024, we have realized that the enemy, now with the face of the Secretary of the Navy (SEMAR), is ready to make military incursions in El Pitayal and in our community. This would mean a conflict of blood and fire, which would involve deaths, detentions and harm to the people who bravely defend themselves against the repression for their freedom, peace and tranquility in Puente Madera.
Because of this threat, we have gone to each neighborhood and colony of Puente Madera to talk with the men and women, with the intention of knowing their position and reading of this current scenario that announces a military incursion into the community and with it, an imminent confrontation. But above all we have gone to listen to the feelings of each and every one of the inhabitants of our town, to take a joint, consensual and clear position on what we are going to do, how and why?
In this journey that we undertook against the megaproject Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, we are thankful for the solidarity and presence of all the communities, organizations, collectives and individuals who have been by our side during these three years of struggle.
However, we believe, know and confirm that there is a broad sector in the region, state and country that have left us alone! their complicity! In other words, their partial or absolute silence is something that will be marked at a time when the region should have been jointly defended.
We saw the absolute silence of those promoters of culture and Isthmian identity, defenders of the customs and traditions of the region. Of those who fill newspapers, magazines and forums under the slogan of activists defending the rights of indigenous peoples. Their complicity of looking the other way from those who speak of assemblies, communal ways and other epistemologies. From old as well as recent universities that speak of resistance and preservation of our identity through collectivities.
We also noticed how they promoted campaigns and forums claiming the type of Isthmus they wanted, as a measure so that our resistance would be seen as something isolated from their work as true activists and defenders of the Isthmus territory. Where is the Isthmus they wanted? Where is the Isthmus that Resists? Throughout these three years the only thing they have done is to promote speeches that in no way affect the monster that has come to this region. They have reached the point of saying that we only want the spotlight and attention for confronting one of the pieces of one of the geostrategic megaprojects of the North American empire promoted by the 4th Transformation. In this absurdity of allegations, do they really believe that we are asking for this megaproject?
We have been left alone throughout these three years of fighting the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. A megaproject that at this moment we should be facing as an entire region, state and country, since what the CIIT manages to achieve in the Isthmus region will immediately and gradually affect the entire region, state, country, and world, by converting our territories into economic zones of intense accumulation and dispossession. This will allow them to secure control over everything that can be distributed, assigned or possessed: lands, waters, beaches, forests, jungles, roads, communication and transportation systems, etc. In addition to imposing and maintaining one or several orders of these elements that lead to territorial integration and cohesion according to the specific objective of this Large Scale Global Work.
This is why as the Community Assembly of Puente Madera we have decided, through dialogue and listening within our community, that if we are not going to face this megaproject together as Binnizá, Ikoots, Ayuujk, Chontales and all the other peoples and people who inhabit this region, then we are not willing to risk the deaths, the prisoners and all the other damages to the community fabric of our community and to the physical and emotional security of those of us who live in Puente Madera.
What we now announce and want to share is that we will continue to strengthen ourselves as a community, we will not assume the costs of something that is not only ours, but of all the communities and people who inhabit the municipality of San Blas Atempa, and who with their silence have been complicit in the dispossession.
This announcement does not mean that we are giving up, much less that we are giving in. If the communities and organizations that make up this region are willing to defend these lands that our grandmothers and grandfathers walked, the roads, trees, plants, the traced routes. If they are willing to meet among peoples to share the making of the territory, a single house, to continue learning that what we inhabit is not only nature and that the Isthmus is full of other beings that cross from time to time on the roads, the cornfields, the caves, the water, the sea to make their voice present.
Rest assured that we are ready to be on the front line of combat against the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. That is to say, if they are interconnecting the world for dispossession and capital accumulation, we must interconnect our worlds for resistance. We need to be together, and together the communities of this region and the solidarities of diverse geographies to stop this monster that offers us development and progress in exchange for our lives and identity.
Because if we do not face it together there will be NO LANDSCAPE AFTER TRANSFORMATION.
DOWN THE INTEROCEANIC CORRIDOR
DOWN WITH THE TRAIN STATION
DOWN WITH THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF THE ISTHMUS OF TEHUANTEPEC
STOP THE DISPOSSESSION AND PLUNDERING OF THE TERRITORIES IN THE REGION
STOP THE PERSECUTION AND HARASSMENT OF THE COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY PODEBI
STOP THE SURRENDER OF THE ISTHMUS OF TEHUANTEPEC TO THE GEOPOLITICAL INTERESTS OF THE NORTH AMERICAN EMPIRE.
SET FIRE TO MULTINATIONAL COMPANIES AND THE WHOLE PROCESS OF CAPITALIST RELOCATION TO OUR TERRITORIES.
CANCELLATION OF THE ARREST WARRANTS IN PUENTE MADERA
REVOCATION OF THE SENTENCE AGAINST DAVID HERNÁNDEZ SALAZAR
STOP THE PERSECUTION AGAINST THE MEMBERS OF APIIDTT
OUR DREAMS DO NOT FIT IN YOUR DEVELOPMENT, NOR IN YOUR PROGRESS, MUCH LESS IN YOUR BALLOT BOXES.
From the region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca de Flores Magón.
Community Assembly of Puente Madera
Assembly of the Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus in Defense of Land and Territory – APIIDTT
source: schoolsforchiapas.org