Palestine Square, located in the heart of Mexico City, awoke yesterday as a symbolic territory: the starting point and ethical horizon of the event. ‘’A Rumor is Ppreading: Something Will Happen in the City…’’
It was an 11-hour event in which music, poetry, visual art, and collective voice intertwined to denounce the genocide in Gaza, Palestinian territory, and to build bridges with other struggles having an impact Mexico and the world.
Palestine did not appear as a distant cause. It was evoked as an open wound: an occupied space that engages with dispossession, militarization, extractivism, and the violence present in multiple geographies.
From the stage, activists and collectives named the plaza “a territory free of apartheid,” and defined it as a place of contested memory and dignity, where culture is also exercised as political action.
The event began at 11:00 a.m. with the presentation of the book “What Will They Forgive Us For?”, published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, featuring journalist Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, a contributor to this publishing house, researcher and activist Cristina Híjar, and graphic artist Antonio Valverde.
The publication brings together 30 testimonies of current struggles, accompanied by 30 commemorative prints marking the 30th anniversary of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) uprising. Híjar emphasized the political origin of the question that gives the book its title. “There are 30 testimonies, 30 prints. It’s the question from an EZLN communiqué of January 18th, 1994.”
More than three decades after the uprising, the question has been revisited as a relevant challenge, transformed into an active call for collective organization, based on the premise that no resistance should remain isolated.
The graphic and literary edition was conceived as an exercise in international collaboration. Texts and images denounce specific grievances—related to water, land, and collective rights—and trace a map of struggles connecting communities in Mexico with Palestine, Kurdistan, the Amazon, and Patagonia.
From this perspective, Zapatismo emerged as an inspiration and a possibility for building alternatives to “bad living,” in dialogue with current community processes.
Antonio Valverde focused his remarks on the political role of art. He denounced the individualization of struggle as a strategy for social demobilization and pointed out that the terror imposed by organized crime operates as a form of counterinsurgency.
He also criticized land dispossession, the criminalization of protest, and the tepid foreign policy toward Palestine, and called on artists and printmaking workshops to produce images that accompany social struggles.
Gloria Muñoz highlighted the self-organized nature of the event and emphasized that there was no better place to present the book than Palestine Square. She reaffirmed that Zapatismo is not a thing of the past: “It is present, it is feminine, and it is plural.”
More than 60 people were involved in the publishing project, which was completed in just three weeks. Dozens of attendees received a complimentary copy.
Throughout the day, musical and performing arts groups such as La Mosca con Smoking, Los Nakos, Botellita Retornable, León Chávez Teixeiro, Francisco Barrios El Mastuerzo, Las Musas Sonideras, and Mexican Sound System, as well as contemporary dance companies like Pendular, La Coraza, and Barro Rojo, participated, bringing to the stage a celebration of history, shared struggle, and a shared sense of purpose.
The event concluded at 10 p.m. with a massive fandango for peace and life.
Original article by Daniel López Aguilar, La Jornada, February 8th, 2026.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.