“The enormous profits generated by illicit financial flows from migrant smuggling are likely to be reinvested in illegal markets, fueling further instability, corruption and criminal activities in the region,” UNCTAD notes.
“In Mexico, in addition to the structural challenges that have affected indigenous peoples, generating significant gaps regarding inequality, marginalization and access to their rights, indigenous peoples also face violence from different actors, including organized crime groups, who dispute the control of their territory. Leaders of these peoples are particularly exposed to reprisals or violent actions due to their visibility when defending their territory and way of life. Their assassinations or disappearances have a chilling effect on all indigenous people…”
“Do you remember when they said that Mexico did not pay [for the construction] of the wall? […] Mexico gave us 28,000 free soldiers. That is much more than a little [money] for the wall.”
The most accurate x-ray of what happened on the night of Iguala is the one elaborated by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) in its sixth and last report. The work is a documented log of impunity in Mexico, which seems to have as its central axis the famous story by Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness, in which the old sailor Marlow, on his voyage through the Congo colonized by the Belgians, exclaims: “I hate, I abhor and I cannot stand lies […]. In lies there are stains of death, an aroma of mortality.”
30 years after the Zapatista compañeras achieved the approval of their Revolutionary Women’s Law, which has allowed them to put into daily practice a world free of machismo and violence, and together with our compañeros, in autonomy, to participate in the construction of a dignified life, which is a source of inspiration for our struggle in our territories. On August 5 and 6, 2023, we gathered, in the First Internal Meeting of Women of the National Indigenous Congress.
We are the women who fight, who organize ourselves, who learn to say NO to mistreatment, NO to silence, NO to war…
