An educational tradition committed to the underclasses, normal schools ike Ayotzinapa and the student teachers graduating from them have long served peasant and indigenous communities across the Mexican countryside. But the State, has long considered them a threat.
‘But one only had to look at the rough sandals and dusty feet, the faces wrinkled by the sun, the broken teeth of many of the peasants who came with their bamboo clubs to the capital of Guerrero. Poverty is far from extinct. And what’s more, the leaders of the demonstration camouflaged their demands, which the government summed up in the release of two detained gangsters, with a list of social improvements in their communities: sewage drainage, asphalt streets, educational improvements and security on the roads. No one has any doubt that this is also necessary. But the absence of the State has been giving way to drug trafficking, little by little, election after election.”
Luis Hernandez Navarro again connects the dots of criminality creeping up from every crack in Chiapas. All of this, he points out, somehow beneath the noses of the Army and National Guard in the state.
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.
Tomorrow, September 26th, 2022 marks the 8-year anniversary of the barbaric mass-disappeance and murder of 43 normalistas (student teachers) who were traveling to Mexico City from their school in Iguala, Guerrero. Though the crime was dismissed by the previous administration as a tragic incident perpetrated by the drug gang, Guerreros Unidos, just over a month ago, the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice published a report indicating that the whole event was a “crime of the state.”
Article translated from Luis Hernández Navarro, in La Jornada.
