Category: Land Defense

Interventions by the United States in Mexico and Central America: The continuation of the war economy

The Northern Command (NORTHCOM) is responsible for the internal defense of the United States, and covers Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and parts of the Caribbean.

By Santiago Navarro F. of Avispa Midia
Translated by El Enemigo Común

While the leaders of the Southern and Northern Command of the United States carried out a tour of strategic locations in Honduras, Mexico, and Guatemala early in 2017, the recently elected president of the United States, Donald Trump, threatened Enrique Peña Nieto, president of Mexico, over a possible military intervention in the event that the drug trafficking situation remained unresolved.

The Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) is one of six Unified Combat Commands of the U.S. Department of Defense, and is responsible for U.S. military operations as well as cooperation and the creation of military ties in a region that includes 31 countries and 10 territories in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

The Northern Command (NORTHCOM) is responsible for the internal defense of the United States, and covers Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and parts of the Caribbean, including Cuba.

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Indigenous Communities in Oaxaca Resist Megaprojects

“The struggle isn’t for a piece of land, it is the struggle for the life of the native people who have every right to decide how they want to live.”

By Renata Bessi and Santiago Navarro F for Avispa Midia
Translated by Xiadani Yaremi Gutiérrez for It’s Going Down

The Chinantec people, inhabitants of the Cajonos River basin in the north of the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, are carrying out an organizational process throughout their entire territory, the Chinantla, against economic projects that seek to commodify nature as a whole. They are megaprojects such as mining, hydroelectric dams, highways, conservation projects, and, more recently, hydrocarbons. It is not a coincidence Chinantla is considered a priority of economic interest for the Mexican government. It houses the third largest tropical rainforest in Mexico. After the Lacandona jungle in Chiapas, and the Chimalapas in Oaxaca, it is the best preserved and one of the richest in biodiversity.

“The Chinantla is a priority area for exploitation because of its wealth, its diversity. It’s part of a strategic Mesoamerican plan that comprises all that is Veracruz, the Chinantla zone, Chiapas and Central America in the so-called Plan Mérida and Mesoamerica Project. The objective of the Mexican government and businesses is to create a corridor for the exploitation of water, minerals, coal reserves, and electricity-generating projects. Here are the plants, bacteria, mushrooms that heal, and these are all things they also want to take away,” explained biologist Patricia Mora, from the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Integral Regional Development – Oaxaca Unit of the National Polytechnic Institute (CIIDIR Oaxaca).

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U.S. Army Operations to Advance in Mexico

With U.S. Military support, the Mexican and Guatemalan armed forces created a Task Force to carry out operations on the Mexico and Guatemala border.

By Santiago Navarro F
Avispa Midia
April 27, 2017
Translated by El Enemigo Común

With the support of the Southern and Northern Commands of the U.S. Military, the Mexican and Guatemalan armed forces have begun the creation of a new elite group, a Task Force that will carry out joint operations on the border shared by Mexico and Guatemala. This elite group is added to the seven Task Forces created and formed by the government of the United States together with Central American governments.

According to General Juan Manuel Pérez Ramirez, Chief of the Guatemalan Defense Staff, this Task Force will carry out reconnaissance work, including aerial and ground patrols, sharing information and intelligence to combat transnational organized crime. In February of 2017, a special report by Avispa Media documented the Southern and Northern Commands’ visit to Mexican territory, as well as to Honduras and Guatemala, where participants requested anonymity.

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Mesoamerican Caravan to Publish Collaborative Book on Land Defense

The book will feature insight into the strategies corporations use to impose projects, as well as the strategies communities use to defend their land.

These mountains are not for sale. Photo by Caravana Mesoamericana.

This month, the Mesoamerican Caravan launched a community fundraiser to support the publication of “Mesoamerica Rising: A book from Peoples in Resistance, for Peoples in Resistance,” which aims to compile the stories, lessons, and autonomous alternatives shared by land and water protectors from Mexico to Costa Rica. Members of the project hope that the book, which grew out of the caravan’s collaboration with indigenous and campesino communities that oppose megaprojects like mines, pipelines, and dams, will serve as a practical tool “from and for peoples everywhere that are working to knock down the extractive industry and create something more just in its place.”

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State of Mexico Manifesto: The Burning Voice of Those Who Resist on the Periphery

Here, in the State of Mexico, all the factors that define the periphery come together. Our gender, our empty pockets, our scorched skin color are denied, spit upon and vilified.

Somos el medio
Translated by Scott Campbell

April 10, 2017

Today we say: Enough!

Beyond the last metro station the buses depart for the end of the world…

We are from that horseshoe that surrounds Mexico City; that blankets it, gives it food, water and air to live.

We are the ones who work in the big corporations, in the gentrified and commercially valuable neighborhoods; who clean homes, offices, who make food sprout from the fields.

We are those people whose right to walk is an obligation and the bicycle a source of work; who see half our lives ground away in the guts of public transportation.

We are those who live behind the contaminated river, among massacred trees and under an enormous haze of filth.

We are those who are offered egg shells as homes and shopping malls as the only place to expand the spirit.

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