In the run-up to the signing of NAFTA, Mexico entered into an extractivist boom, repealing limiting legislation from the Constitution and opening its territory to foreign investment. This exponential increase in territory under concession, as revealed by a recent investigation, has brought only dispossession and environmental degradation, and as it has in Chiapas, an increase in organized crime.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador published, on May 8th in the Official Gazette of the Federation (DOF), the reforms to the Mining, National Waters, Ecological Balance and Environmental Protection, and Prevention and Integral Waste Management Laws, approved on April 28 by the Plenary of the Senate of the Republic.
While the changes were celebrated by many environmental activists and organizations, the agrarian lawyer who is part of the legal team of the National Indigenous Congress (CNI), Carlos González, classified the reforms as “half-baked.”
Women’s Movement in Defense of Mother Earth and Territory seeks a way to join efforts with other movements in the country and the world in defense of nature, the environment, peasants, indigenous peoples, and women who are the most affected by the violence of the capitalist system. The movement, driven by the strength and determination of indigenous and peasant women, has sought, since its inception, to transcend individual and local processes, heading towards the regional construction of the Movement to fight against all forms of violence against women and their families generated by the neo-liberal, patriarchal and neo-extractivist capitalist system — from the increase in poverty, migration and drug trafficking, to the dispossession of land by other groups, organized crime, or even sometimes by their own family members.
Raúl Zibechi calls on us to ask: What is the State that corresponds to this mafia capitalism, which destroys everything to accumulate more and more capital?
It is a State dedicated to war and to dispossession against those at the bottom.
Meanwhile, the poles and glaciers melt and drain into the sea, the coasts are inundated, the most beautiful forests and jungles burn. To top it all, for the benefit of those who seek to extract and extract and extract material to consume it.
