Category: Solidarity

Nationwide Strike Targets U.S. Prisons

Nationwide strike calls for end to prison slavery and inhumane conditions

by carolina saldaña

 The Nationwide Prison Strike throughout the United States began on August 21, 2018, the anniversary of the assassination of George Jackson in San Quentin Prison in California and ended on September 9th, 47 years after the rebellion in Attica prison, NY. Two historic dates in the revolutionary movement inside the country’s prisons.

On July 17th of this year, the artist, analyst and organizer Kevin ‘Rashid’ Johnson, of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, wrote an article that places this strike in the context of several years of resistance in the prisons of Texas, Georgia, Alabama, California and Florida as of 2010. Rashid argues that a new movement is on the rise against slavery and the inhuman conditions in prisons, which is eroding the structures of isolation imposed almost half a century ago to put an end to the prison movement that existed in the 60s and 70s.

During the Nationwide Prison Strike of 2018, there were actions in at least 36 institutions in 17 states.

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Support an Independent Journalism Collective in Latin America

Avispa Midia, an independent journalism collective in Latin America whose work has appeared in translation on El Enemigo Común, recently launched a fundraising campaign to continue expanding their important work.

For the past four years, Avispa Midia has provided in-depth coverage of events throughout Latin America, from risky situations like the 2016 teachers’ protests in Nochixtlan, Oaxaca, where federal police assassinated 8 people, to catastrophes like the major earthquakes that devastated Mexico in September 2017. They have also worked throughout Central America and Brazil to investigate how military and police forces collude with organized crime to control populations and protect corporate interests.

Today, this independent journalism collective — which has made the best of limited resources in the absence of stable funding — is asking for your solidarity so that it can continue to visit and document resistance movements and fix and replace basic equipment.

DONATE HERE

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Review of 2017 Edition of Look for Me in the Whirlwind

This book contains the original version of Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21 with new texts that place it in the context of the whirlinds of our times

Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st Century Revolutions. Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Shaba Om, Jamal Joseph. Ed. dequi kioni-sadiki and Matt Meyer. Foreword Jamil Al-Amin. Afterword Mumia Abu-Jamal. (Oakland: PM Press. 2017)

Review by carolina saldaña

At 5 am on April 2, 1969, hundreds of FBI, CIA and NYC police agents armed with shotguns, bullet-proof vests and a shoot-to-kill attitude broke down the doors of dozens of houses, apartments and offices to serve arrest warrants on 21 key members of the New York City Black Panthers. According to the absurd accusations, based on information provided by three infiltrators, these men and women had conspired to blow up schools, department stores, police precincts and the New York Botanical Gardens. It was the longest trial ever held in the city at that time.

Two years later, on May 13, 1971, the Panther 21 were acquitted of all charges after only 45 minutes of jury deliberation.

Originally published in 1971, Look for Me in the Whirlwind: The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21, written in prison, emerges anew with additional texts that point to the relevance of this experience for the struggles of this century. Here we find poems, stories, analyses, eulogies and songs never or rarely seen before.

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Support Autonomous Brigades from Oaxaca Bringing aid to the Areas Affected by the Earthquakes

All funds collected will be delivered equally to two different autonomous brigades. One of the brigades is comprised of collectives and organizations that work directly with affected communities, taking aid and supporting the community in alternative healing practices. The other brigade is composed of 2 doctors and other volunteers taking aid and engaging in medical assistance and now setting up two community kitchens feeding approximately 13 – 15 families.

The Most Devastated Zones

Two strong earthquakes battered Mexico this September. The first, with a magnitude of 8.1 degrees, hit the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca on September 7th; the second arrived on September 19th with a magnitude of 7.1 degrees, affecting areas in Puebla, Morelos, Mexico City, and Mexico State. In Oaxaca in the South of Mexico, two of the most devastated zones were the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the neighboring Sierra.

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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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