Against Capitalist Exploitation - Indigenous Mexican Activists Speak Out

Mexico: Communiqué From the People of San Sebastián Bachajón, Read to the Indigenous National Congress

Written by San Sebastian Bachajón
Tuesday, 27 August 2013 09:11
from here    Compañeros and compañeras, receive our combative greetings to all the peoples and communities who struggle and resist with dignity, in Mexico and the world, against the capitalist exploitation of indigenous territories which seeks to own the land, air, water, forests, native seeds, and life itself. We warmly greet students from the Zapatista Escuelita, the Indigenous National Congress and the compañeros and compañeras of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. We are indigenous Tseltal people from San Sebastian Bachajon, adherents to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, we fight to defend our territory from dispossession by the government to impose an ecotourist megaproject, and as indigenous people we make your struggle our own; we embrace the struggle for life that each of you undertakes from the place or space you come from, because all of us are here to build a better world for all. We know that the lords of money and power are planning everywhere, day and night, how to end our world, wanting us and all we represent to disappear. We who are indigenous struggle to continue to be what we are, to build our own way of life and to conserve our territory, defending it from the ambition of those above, because to them we are only an obstacle to their being increasingly rich and powerful, because those who truly command are those who have power and money, the government is only their puppet, serving power and money and not the people. Those from above give orders to destroy us, our peoples, and order the destruction of all that gives us life, building dams, ecotourism projects, wind parks, stealing the rivers through pipes, stealing and polluting our seeds, opening mines, and to achieve this they order the killing of our brothers, dignified men and women who fight to defend the Mother Earth, they imprison us, torture us and make us disappear, but they forget that we are one, that we are not alone and that as children of the earth our roots are still alive in spite of all the death that they offer us. The struggle of our people of San Sebastián Bachajón is to conserve our indigenous territory which we inherited from our ancestors, it is where we live, it gives us life and identity. We are defending our land with our lives if necessary, against the ambition of the government and of the lords of money who want to build luxury hotels, golf courses and runways for rich tourists, at the cost of the exploitation, marginalization and discrimination of our people; faced with the defence we have mounted against these projects the government has had only one answer: repression, imprisonment and death. Our brothers from San Sebastian Bachajon have been imprisoned, on the 3rd of February 2011, 117 of our compañeros were imprisoned; they were released in the same year thanks to the solidarity of all of you; still unjustly imprisoned are our compañeros Antonio Estrada Estrada in Playas de Catazajá, and Miguel Demeza Jiménez in El Amate, tortured and accused using fabricated evidence, violating their human rights because the justice of the bad government is not for the poor and the indigenous. Another response from the bad government and the lords of money and power has been death, they ordered the killing of our brother Juan Vázquez Guzmán on the 24th of April this year, so far this crime of the bad government remains unpunished. Our compañero Juan Vázquez Guzmán is an example of struggle and of love for his people, he gave his life for his people, he struggled for his people to be free from the oppression and the abuse of power of the bad government, he struggled to recover the territory which had been seized, he always inspired the compañeros and compañeras to continue struggling and defending their land, he was always also closely following the legal work such as the amparo (order for legal protection) 274/2011 from the Seventh District Court, and he constantly denounced the politicians and corrupt judges who have until now favoured the dispossession. In spite of so much repression our people continue resisting with the intention of gaining victory, as we were taught by our compañero Juan Vázquez Guzmán, cowardly murdered by the bad government. Although the rulers do not like it, we will continue defending our territory because this is where we come from, and we are not leaving despite their repression and corruption, we will defend it as our grandfathers and grandmothers did until we achieve victory. Freedom and Justice for ANTONIO ESTRADA ESTRADA, MIGUEL DEMEZA JIMENEZ, and ALBERTO PATISHTAN GOMEZ. From the northern zone of Chiapas, receive an embrace from women and men of San Sebastian Bachajón. Attentively Land and Freedom! Hasta la victoria siempre! Freedom Political Prisoners! Juan Vazquez Guzman Lives, the Bachajón Struggle continues!