El Enemigo Común

Oaxaca de Magón, City of Resistance, July 30, 2010

To the peoples of Oaxaca
To the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca
To the people of Mexico
To the peoples of the world
To the general public

Today, July 30, 2010 at approximately 12:15, just after noon, a group of heavily armed UBISORT men accompanied by state police who were also heavily armed, went into San Juan Copala shooting into the air, striking the women comrades, and then violently occupying the Municipal Government Building.

As has been reported in a number of different news media, the acts of provocation against the autonomous municipality began on Monday, July 26, when UBISORT paramilitaries shot up the community space for two hours, wounding 35 year-old María Rosa Francisco, who has been disappeared since she went out for firewood that day. The paramilitaries shot everything that moved, including dozens of domestic animals.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Land is Not for Sale! A community in resistance to La Parota dam.

Following our last La Parota post on June 29, when Mexican media reported that the project was postponed until 2018, things were looking good for the indigenous and campesino peoples defending the Papagayo River from destruction and their own communities from dislocation. On September 13, 2009, the Mexican government indicated that the project had been canceled, not allocating any funding for it in the proposed 2010 budget. After a seven year struggle, in which more than six resisters had lost their lives, the dam looked dead in the water.

Less than eight months later, however, the government restarted its push to force through the dam. On April 5, Jorge Antonio Mijangos Borja, director of Mexico’s National Water Commission (CONAGUA) announced that “if necessary, the hydroelectric dam La Parota will be built to provide water and electricity to the port of Acapulco.” He also announced plans for five other dams, three on the coast and two in Tierra Caliente.

Read the rest of this entry »

Those attending this protest rally: collectives and individuals from the Other Campaign, anarchist and libertarian collectives and individuals, people committed to justice and therefore outraged at the injustice of this self-styled “leftist” government.

We call on the Head of Government Marcelo Ebrard to stop criminalizing youth who aspire to and struggle for a more just world; they are singled out just because of the way they think, dress and protest. We stand against this bad capital city government which holds hostages such as Víctor Herrera Govea, showing that it is not much different than the PRI or PAN governments when it jails youth who live in this city of “hope”; evicts poor vendors; grabs the lands of the last peasants remaining in the Federal District and of the residents of neighborhoods and towns where the government is carrying out its tourist projects, highways, and metro lines; and looks down on and represses sex workers.

We proclaim that in this “City of Hope” those at the bottom are not able to aspire to live, to work with dignity, to protect the earth, to commemorate struggles and to travel freely without being exploited, looked down on, repressed, evicted and – like Víctor – unjustly imprisoned.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mexico is bleeding. Along with the so-called “war against drug-dealers” we see the whole Mexican territory turn olive green. The militarization is part of the global war driven by the United States, which began with the 9-11 events and created new enemies: terrorism and drug trafficking. Attuned with the Lords of the north, the Mexican government has launched its own war creating a police-ruled state and criminalizing social protest.

The militarization leads to social-control practices which have nothing to envy from those used by the dictatorships of the 70′s: from video cameras to torture chambers, via disappearances and massacres, the regime uses all its resources to establish new conditions for slavery. In addition to the barbarism of the beheaded, the “wrapped” (encobijados), those cooked in soup (“pozoleados”) and other expressions of savagery which the media use to feed the social fear, we find the technology of electronic espionage (phones and internet) as well as the offers for mercenary imports which “will accomplish” the extermination of the criminals. This is how fear and silence appear as the “magical recipes” (extracted from the manuals for psychological warfare) for habituating the media to censoring itself, managing to also desensitize the population towards state and paramilitary-driven violence against social movements.

Read the rest of this entry »

x carolina

––When did you find out you were getting out of prison, don Ignacio?

––We’ve always known we’d get out, from the very first moment.

––Was that due to your trust in the people to free you?

––It had more to do with our rage. A rage we’ve stored up inside us. Maybe at first we felt fear. Anguish, along with troubles, uncertainty, rage, impotence. All that transcends pain. It overcomes suffering. We were never sorry, never repentant. This kind of anger knows no human limits. It builds up inside you and, in a way, helps you avoid physical pain… The rage I’m talking about is recent and has also been with us during years, during centuries, of latent suffering… On the question of whether or not we were going to get out, we knew we would because the struggle was not going to let up. It may have fallen back a little bit out of fear, anxiety. But even though we were separated, with people on the run or in jail, we all thought the same way. We had one thing in mind to begin with. Not to give up. Because our pain was overcome by our rage, our unrest, and the confirmation of what we, as people from the bottom of the heap, have always known.”

Read the rest of this entry »