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Autonomy Indigenous Land Defense

Indigenous Nahua Community Removes Politician, Forms Self-Government to Defend its River

On January 19, the Indigenous Nahua community of Zacatepec, Puebla, removed its mayor and replaced him with a Council of Elders in response to his failure to stop a toxic drainage system that is part of the Mexican government’s neoliberal Morelos Integral Project. Shortly thereafter, on January 24, Miguel López Vega, the community’s representative to the National Indigenous Congress and its Indigenous Governing Council, was detained moments after delivering official notice of this action to the state government, setting off protests and highway blockades that won his release five days later. The following day, January 30, the municipal government temporarily suspended construction of the drainage system.

Text and photos by Daliri Oropeza, Pie de Página
Translated by Scott Campbell

While forming lines, residents of the Nahua community of Santa María Zacatepec look at one another. They smile. They check who is in each line, which one is the longest.

Facing the threat of a toxic drainage system emptying into the Metlapanapa River, they have decided to practice self-determination and choose their own government according to their own internal system.

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Prisoners Repression Solidarity

Summary review of SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox

Albert Woodfox: Solitary: Unbroken by four decades in solitary confinement. My story of transformation and hope. New York City: Grove Press. 2019.

Summary review by Carolina Saldaña (A brief synopsis of the full Spanish language article)

Albert Woodfox got out of prison on February 19, 2016, after spending 43 years in isolation, that is to say, in solitary confinement.  Robert Hillary King had been released on February 8, 2001, and Herman Wallace on October 1, 2013, three days before he died of cancer. They are known as the “Angola 3” for organizing a chapter of the Black Panthers in a prison widely recognized as the most violent in the country on a former slave plantation in Angola, Louisiana, which continued to function in much the same way.

In this autobiographical work, Albert Woodfox tells us of his childhood and youth in the Black community of Tremé in New Orleans, his incarceration in Angola and other prisons, his dawning consciousness, and the work of the Angola 3. He writes about what they achieved in conditions of torture and white supremacy as well as the support they received from the New Orleans Panthers and others. At every step of the way, he reflects on his anxieties, hits and misses, and what he learned.

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Categories
Indigenous Patriarchy

Life, Respect and Word: Chronicle of the Second Zapatista Gathering of Women Who Struggle

From Radio Zapatista and translated by Scott Campbell. Additional photos, along with audios, can be found with the original text.

Text, audios and photos by all of us.

We dreamed “that the patriarchy burned” and that it was possible to inhabit spaces free of cruelty. For a long time, we graffitied it, theorized it, protested for it, and proposed it. We then came to shout this dream in a territory free of femicides. Here we cried it and wailed it. Here we sang it, danced it, cared for it in this valley of organization and work. From December 26 – 29, 2019, the Zapatista women sheltered us in their collective and rebellious lap to clothe us in dignity inside the seedbed carrying the name of Commander Ramona, who died 14 years ago. Walking in her footprints, in those of Susana and of all the founding mothers of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, we arrived at this gathering that never should have been. Violence against women, the topic of discussion at this international gathering, should have decreased if the systemic conditions of parity and equity we enacted as a result of feminist debates were enough. But they aren’t. These autonomous and self-managed Zapatista rebel islands, that have multiplied in the past year, resist within a rough sea of generalized violence that led to 38,000 murders in 2019 in a Mexico that doesn’t work. That same violence impacts billions of people, particularly women, boys and girls, as explained by the some 4,000 women who came from 49 countries that also don’t work.

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Media Solidarity

Medical Support for “Chavira” of Radio Fogata in Cherán, Michoacan

DONATE HERE

Salvador Huároco Román – “Chavira” is a community member from Cherán, Michoacán. He has been a militant in the social movement in Cherán, participating in the assemblies, as an authority in the communal government, and as an DJ on Radio Fogata since its inception! As an authority in the first communal government he also supported the Cherán TV project very much.

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Autonomy Indigenous

Neoliberalism is a system of power and money.

By: Simón Sedillo

Neoliberalism is a system of political economy. A system of political economy is a system of government and a system of economics working together. Simply put, political economies are systems of power and money. Neoliberalism is a system of power and money.

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