Raúl Zibechi warns that the wars of dispossession against the peoples have only just begun. How do we face the storm?
What “we see today is that an enormous storm is coming, that it is already underway, an infernal earthquake upon us. We cannot build material barriers against it (…) we can unite and give our arms and give ourselves to life and to mother earth, with the hope that she will show us the way.”
Friday marked what would have been the 98th birthday of Malcolm X. As part of the remembrance, Raúl Zibechi honors the significance of the Black Panther Party in service to their communities and in construction of autonomy.
“More than half a century ago the Black Panther party was probably one of the first organizations to launch an alternative health care system to that of the hegemonic system. The pamphlet “Medical Self-Defense. Black Panthers and Zapatistas,”* not only reveals the similarities between the two experiences in health care, but details the achievements of the U.S. Black movement.”
The Judiciary of the State of Chiapas sentenced to 25 years in prison the Tseltal defenders Manuel Sántiz Cruz, Juan Velasco Aguilar, Agustín Pérez Velasco, Martín Pérez Domínguez and Agustín Pérez Domínguez, who were arbitrarily detained for defending their territory in 2022.The sentence was issued by the Chiapas judge despite the fact that last May 3 three of the five Tseltales declared that, after their arbitrary detention at the hands of the San Juan Cancuc municipal police, the National Guard and the army on May 29, 2022, they were handed over to the Indigenous Justice Prosecutor’s Office, “who first fabricated the crime of drug possession and then involved them in the homicide for which they were sentenced,” explained the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba).
We recognized that even in the midst of all the destruction of the capitalists there are many achievements that we are reaping: The first and most important is that after 500 years of attempts to exterminate us WE ARE STILL HERE, the organization of the community against dispossession, as well as the lands recuperated in different towns, the struggle of women for the recognition and exercise of their rights, the struggle for water, the liberation of political prisoners, the relocation of the train stations in Merida and Campeche, the establishment of zones free of extractive projects, the conservation of languages and traditional festivals and the construction of autonomies.
Raúl Zibechi reflects on the Caravan “El Sur Resiste”
“There is a profound interaction between resistances and other worlds. The construction of realities different from the hegemonic ones feeds resistance, because in these spaces people find oxygen and at the same time project the type of society in which they wish to live. The interesting thing is that this dual dynamic of resistance and construction of the new has become the common sense of the people.”
