Category: Indigenous

Three Members of CODEDI (Indigenous Rights organization) Killed in Oaxaca

The Following text is a translation of a statement from the Committee for the Defense of Indigenous Rights (CODEDI) following the ambush and killing of three of their members on Monday the 12th of February, 2018.

The organization CODEDI (Committee for the Defense of Indigenous Rights) is an autonomous organization that works for the indigenous communities of the Southern Mountains, Central Valleys and Coast of Oaxaca, in solidarity with all just causes. We currently work with 50 communities, creating the dream of living in autonomy through daily practices, with more than 20 years serving the peoples of Oaxaca. We are part of different alliances in the state, country, and world; alliances based in processes of autonomy and struggle. The leader of our organization is Abraham Ramírez Vázquez, an indigenous leader from Santiago Xanica who was imprisoned from 2004 to 2011 by order of former governor José Murat, the father of the current governor.

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Solidarity with Radio Totopo in Oaxaca, Mexico

In Oaxaca, México, Radio Totopo is raising funds to rebuild their community radio station following September’s devastating earthquakes.

Radio Totopo is a community radio that has transmitted from the city of Juchitán in Oaxaca, Mexico for more than 10 years. Totopo’s work in the community has earned it the respect and backing of local residents, who recognize the radio as a space that uses their diidxazá language to reflect their ancestral culture as Binnizá, or Zapotec, people. Totopo has also established itself as a vital cultural and community space that serves as a physical meeting point for community members. There children take academic classes; a gallery space features paintings and photographs, documentary screenings, concerts, and the sale of traditional food; and the Popular Assembly of the Juchiteco People holds regular meetings.

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Oaxaca: Geopolitics and the Earthquake

“The heart aches, but it is of utmost importance that in the face of this tragedy we do not cease to observe the geopolitical context of the Ithmus region.”

By: Griselda Sánchez
Photos by: Marisol Balbuena Delgado y brigada médica y solidaria.

The people of Oaxaca have had a difficult week. First came President Enrique Peña Nieto’s visit to the capital on Thursday, September 7th for the inauguration of a Cultural and Convention Center, on the occasion of the 24th Conference of the Mexican Business Council for Foreign Trade, Investment and Technology (COMCE). It was evident that the conference was the main motive for Peña’s presence at the event, since he was joined by Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, the Mexican Secretary of Economy, and Valentín Diez Morodo, the President of COMCE, as well as businessmen from important national and international companies; ambassadors and their commercial counselors from the diplomatic corps; the secretaries of the federal government, and the Director of Trade Negotiations of the World Trade Organization.

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On 8th anniversary Xayakalan inspires defense of land and life

“We want to tell the world that we’re resisting, come what may.”

x carolina

Under heavy rains, two busloads of people and dozens of others traveling in cars or public transportation came together in the community of Xayakalan in Ostula, Michoacán, on June 29, 2017. There, the compañeras welcomed us with steaming coffee, tortillas and a delicious stew.

The purpose of the trip?  The celebration of the eighth anniversary of one of the most amazing things that’s happened in Mexico in many years ––the recovery of 3000 acres of land stolen from Ostula half a century ago, and the construction of a community where resistance is part of its identity.

A bit of history

In a brief history of the defense of the lands of Santa María Ostula and the founding of Xayakalan, the lawyer Carlos Gonzalez told us that for centuries, including the entire twentieth century, the community had constant border conflicts. When a presidential decree issued in 1963 certified that the communal lands rightfully belonged to Ostula, small landowners in La Placita took advantage of errors in the decree to take over thousands of acres. In 2008, they won a court case that took land away from Ostula precisely in the area where they’d obtained concessions from the transnational mining company Termium.   Continue reading “On 8th anniversary Xayakalan inspires defense of land and life”

Letter from Kurdish Women’s Movement to Spokeswoman of Indigenous Governing Council

For María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, representative of the indigenous people of Mexico and the National Indigenous Congress #CNI.

Posted by  Centro de Medios Libres 
Translated by El Enemigo Común

First of all, we want to send our deepest respect and revolutionary greetings to our Mexican sister, from the mountains of Kurdistan to the Sierra Madre mountain range beyond the oceans. Despite the rivers, mountains, deserts, valleys, canyons and seas that separate us, we are indigenous sisters and brothers, no matter what part of the world we are in.

With you, we share our struggle, our resistance against occupation and colonialism, and our dream of a free life, and in this sense, we who belong to the Kurdish Liberation Movement declare that we consider the struggle for self-determination, self-administration and self-defense of the indigenous peoples of Mexico organized in the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) as our own struggle, and we support you on the basis of principles of revolutionary solidarity.

Indigenous peoples are the veins through which the most important social and cultural values of humanity have been transmitted, from the first moments of socialization until our times. Without a doubt, no people is superior to another, but at a time when capitalist modernity is trying to destroy every communal value, indigenous peoples are the safeguard of the social fabric of all humanity. Thousands of years of collective memory resurge in our songs, our rituals, our prayers, our tattoos, our dances and our traditions. And so the struggle for our own identity against the efforts of capitalist modernity to erase the roots and the memory of our peoples becomes the most meaningful of all forms of resistance.

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