To the peoples of the world

To the alternative, free, autonomous or however they are called means of communication

To the National and International Sixth

Party to war & resistance # 44

And the other 43? And the ones who are next?

It turns out that this country is not the same as two years ago when the bad government committed one of the worst crimes possible when it disappeared 43 young indigenous students from the rural student-teacher school “Raúl Isidro Burgos” in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero. This deed made us aware of the profound darkness in which we find ourselves and troubled our individual and collective heart and spirit, illuminating the night with rage, with suffering and with hope that is embodied now in the families and compañeros of the 43, and which shines in the face of millions of persons in all the geographies of Mexico and the world of below, and of the international civil society that is in solidarity and conscious.

As neighborhoods, tribes, nations and original peoples that we are, we see and make our word now as before, from the collective heart that we are.

From the geographies and calendars from below, where the mirrors of who we the Indigenous National Congress (CNI, Congreso Nacional Indígena) are, made with our resistances, rebellions and autonomies; from the places and directions from where we the original peoples are and understand the world, that is to say, from the ancient geographies where we do not cease to see, understand and resist that same violent war that the powerful implement against everyone, who suffer and resist, from who we are with an individual and collective face, we see and make the face of the 43 absent ones our word, who are present in all the corners of our country in search of truth and justice, the face that is drawn with the faces of millions of others and that shows us in the middle of the night the sacred directions, because our suffering and hope is sacred. That collective face multiplies and sees the geographies of resistance and rebellion.

From the geographies of below

The disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa continues in impunity, and to search for the truth in the midst of the putrefaction of power is to rummage through the worst of this country, in the cynicism and perversion of the political class, which only pretends to look for the disappeared compañeros, but in the face of growing evidences that demonstrate the guilt of the terrorist narco-state, those responsible for lying and trying to deform the truth even more are rewarded – as is the change of Tomás Zerón, responsible for planting supposed proof of his historic lie in the trash dump of Cocula, to the Technical Secretariat of the National Security Council (Secretaría Técnica del Consejo Nacional de Seguridad) ‒ giving us another example of the criminal nature of the bad government.

To its lie, farce and impunity, the bad government adds the outrages and injustice it commits against those who have offered solidarity and shown their support for the struggle of the families and compañeros of 43, like the youth Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano, who was always in solidarity with the struggles of the original peoples – like those of Cherán, the Yaqui tribe, the indigenous prisoners, the Zapatista communities – who was condemned by a judge to a sentence of 33 years and five months for the sextuplet crime of being young, a student, poor, being in solidarity, a rebel and being consistent.

This is what we see when we look upward to who is Power: for who murders, covers up and lies, rewards and protects, for who becomes indignant and protests against injustice, attacks and jails.

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And when we see ourselves:

In the south, the struggle of the peoples in defense of their territories against bosses and businesses, dissolves into the struggle for security and justice against the organized bands of delinquents, whose intimate relationship with the political class is with certainty, as a people, the only relationship we have with whatever state organ.

The formation of the shock groups that act against the mobilizations permeates the towns and the government plays at generating conflicts that ignite the internal weavings. Which is to say, it tries to make mirrors of its war planting discord in the communities and betting on the destruction of the most sensitive fibers. Nothing is more explosive and dangerous for this nation.

In the west, the struggles for land, security and justice are taking place in the middle of the administration of the drug cartels, which the state disguises as combating delinquency or as development policies. In turn, the peoples that have resisted and even brought down criminals through organizing from below must struggle through the permanent attempts of the bad governments to allow organized crime and its preferred political parties to take possession anew of the territories through diverse forms.

The autonomous organization of the communities, their unwavering struggle for the sacred places and ancestral lands does not cease. The defense of our mother is not negotiable. We pay close attention to the struggle of the Wixárika of Wauta-San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán community for the recuperation of close to 10,000 hectares of land surrounding the settlement of Huajimic, Nayarit, where, in spite of proving their rights in land courts, the judicial authorities have been remiss; and the bad governments make the false geographies official that divide the states, a pretext to incentivize the dispossession of the original peoples. To the Wixárika people, in their rebellion and autonomy we say: we are with you.

In the north, where the struggles for the recognition of territories persist, the mining industry’s threats, the expropriation of land, the robbery of natural resources and the submission of the resistances by the narco paramilitaries, the original peoples continue constructing every day.

The original peoples of the tribes of the north, where the Sioux nation weaves its own geographies that go beyond the official false geographies that places them in another country – but that for us we are daughters and sons of the same mother – are resisting the invasions of its sacred lands, burial sites and ceremonial centers by the construction of oil pipelines carried out by the Energy Transfer Partners company, which seeks to transport through their territories the oil that has been gotten through fracking in the Bakken region in North Dakota, which has inspired the solidarity and unity of the original peoples of the north. To them we say that their rage is ours and as the Congreso Nacional Indígena we raise and will continue raising our voice with yours. Your dignified struggle is also ours.

In the peninsula, the Maya peoples resist being disappeared by decree, defending their lands from attacks by tourist and real estate companies, where white guards proliferate and operate with impunity to dispossess the peoples, where the invasion by the transgenic agro-industry threatens the existence of the Maya peoples and the filth of magnates who are taking over agricultural lands, archeological cultural sites and even indigenous identity, attempt to convert a living people like an extension of their tongue, into commercial fetishes. The peoples that struggle against high tariffs for electricity are persecuted and criminalized.

In the center, the infrastructure projects, highways, gas pipelines, aqueducts, re-zonings, are being imposed violently and human rights are every day weakened and made more distant by the laws being imposed. The criminalization, cooptation and division outlines the strategy of powerful groups, all linked tightly in a corrupt and obscene manner with the criminal who believes he is governing this country, Enrique Peña Nieto.

In the east of the country, the violence, the fracking, the mining, the trafficking in migrants, the governmental corruption and dementia are the current against the struggle of the peoples, in the middle of entire regions taken by violent criminal groups orchestrated from the highest levels of government.

From dialogue and betrayal

Just as has been done by the teachers’ struggle, the original peoples have looked to dialogue with the bad government with our urgent demands regarding our territories, with the presentation of the disappeared, the liberating of prisoners, of justice for the murdered, of getting the police or the military out of our lands or of our demands for security and justice. But the government always refuses until it detains our spokespersons throughout the country, the military opens fire against children in Ostula, the bulldozers destroy the houses of those that resist in Xochicuautla, the federal police open fire against the dignified people that accompany the teachers in Nochixtlán. The bad governments pretend to dialogue and simulate for years agreements with the Wixárika people to achieve the peaceful restitution of its territory, while configuring the violent reordering of the region.

And the government talks as if nothing has happened and offers the will to cede, as long as both sides agree. The government cedes a part of what it has just finished destroying, frees a prisoner, compensates the family of a murdered one, pretends to look for the disappeared. And in exchange asks that the peoples cede their collective patrimony, which is their dignity, their autonomous organization, and their territory.

In various geographies of our country we are resorting to consultations when we say that we do not want their mines, their wind turbines, their transgenic seeds, their dams and we demand that they ask the peoples, but the bad government always responds pretending that it “consults how to consult if it consults or not the form of consulting” (or something like that), which is full of simulation, the supplanting of our word, the manipulation and cooptation of our people, of threats and repression. And it’s this way until it says that’s enough and that we have already said that yes we want their projects of death, or that we are divided and should attend to all the positions.

And while they pretend to keep us pacified with their lying agenda and the NGOs “experts” in “consultations” fill their pockets, advancing quickly to concretize – even before beginning their supposed consultation – the robbery of the water from the Yaqui river, the mining companies and their rights to destroy Wirikuta, the wind turbines to invade all the Isthmus and the imposing of transgenic seeds on the Maya Riviera.

The directions of the world are our geographies and in them we find and recognize each other, because we know that the struggle is not just for today or today only, we do not struggle for power or folklore that lying campaigns offer, but to weave and reweave what we are, were and will be as original peoples.

The faces of the 43 missing and the tenacity of their families and compañeros, are the 43 other parties to war and resistance. To them we add our suffering, our rages, the resistances of the original peoples and the rebellion of millions in Mexico and the world.

And the parties of war and resistance of the persecuted and stigmatized other, of the abused, disappeared and murdered women, of infancy converted into merchandise, of the criminalized youth, of exploited labor, of the persecuted rebellions, of the polluted natural world, of the suffering humanity are next.

With all that humanity, with this land that we are, today we reiterate that truth and justice are an indispensable demand and that the punishment of the guilty ones, of all the guilty ones, will be born from the struggle from below, where, now more than ever and as original peoples of the CNI, we know that there is no room for surrender, or selling out, or wavering.

Truth and Justice for Ayotzinapa!

Freedom for Luis Fernando Sotelo Zambrano!

Free all political prisoners

For the full reconstitution of our peoples

Never again a Mexico without us.

Congreso Nacional Indígena (Indigenous National Congress)

Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation).

Mexico, September 2016.

En español: http://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2016/09/22/parte-de-guerra-y-de-resistencia-44/