In recent weeks, collectives of relatives of the disappeared from all over the country have been discussing the report presented last March 28 by the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) for the Ayotzinapa case out of indignation and despair. This report documents in detail what the families have been saying and shouting in the streets: It was the State!
Self-defense is an artform of life in the midst of a system of death. It is a way of walking through obstacles, teaching us to continue being peoples and human beings. Not to conquer something like power, but simply to continue walking as the very lives that we are.
In the struggle for the defense of water, peoples and organizations confront transnationals, multinationals and also the Mexican State, which defends private interests over the common good. The water crisis is the most penetrating, acute and invisible facet of the ecological devastation of the Earth, writes Vandana Shiva in The Water Wars.
As its name says, the caravan is not against this or that government, it is against capitalist dispossession and against the governments that sustain it. It is against the destruction that is disguised as progress. The environmentalism of the peoples, that which is built from below and to the left, invites us to change the questions — development for whom and at what cost?
At the foot of the majestic ceiba tree, in the humid sunny mornings and dusk of La Realidad, in the Lacandon jungle, where advisors and guests of the EZLN waited to meet with the commanders, Gustavo Esteva would talk for hours with other advisors.
