Since 1994, the Zapatista movement has encompassed struggles and resistance in various geographies of the planet, in such a way that it is incomplete to talk about Zapatismo without including some of the thousands of fireflies that have been lighting the path of resistance for 30 years. Their testimonies are intertwined with commemorative engravings of the 30th anniversary of the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a sample of the many artistic expressions reflecting the insurrection. Below are some of the recordings and excerpts from the testimonies included in the book ‘’What Are They Going To Forgive Us For?’’, edited by Desinformémonos, with the support of the Rosa Luxemburg Mexico Foundation.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For telling the world that in this country called Mexico, 11 to 13 women are being murdered every day for the simple fact of being one, most of the time after having suffered endless violence, normalized mainly by you, State institutions? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who, with your indifference, complicity, inaction and impunity, treat us with contempt and hatred as a civil society, as the women that we are? Do you have blood on your hands?
Araceli Osorio Martínez, mother of Lesvy, a 22-year-old victim of femicide in Ciudad Universitaria of UNAM, on May 3rd, 2017. Mexico City, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For walking with the memory of our 30 thousand compañeros in our flesh and in our hearts? To mock a Decree that says that we cannot mobilize in the streets, and walk through them with flags and laughter flying? Who can talk about forgiveness, when we learned from the children of the 30 thousand disappeared, that we do not forget, we do not forgive and we do not reconcile?
Claudia Korol, Pañuelos en Rebeldía Buenos Aires, Argentina.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For not asking for permission to operate a community radio, telephone and television? Of trying to generate our own energy with water and the sun without concessions and permits and in small ways, because we believe that small solutions are the global solutions to this climate catastrophe that the great transnational empires, precursors of consumerism, have caused us? For beginning to build our own health systems, after many years of deceiving us that we were a priority? For founding schools and universities where we think about our science, philosophy, techniques and art? For continuing to play the shawm and the drum, to continue dancing our ceremonial dances, and not lend ourselves to the spectacle of commercial tourism? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? Do you communicate what is best for your employer? You who vote and modify laws sitting from comfort without even knowing us?
Oswaldo Martínez Flores, Xhidza Town, Communal Autonomous University of Oaxaca (UACO) Santa María Yaviche, Oaxaca, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For publicly denouncing inside and outside of Mexico that the human rights of migrants are not respected in this country? That I, a Honduran migrant woman, had the courage to come to this country to look for my son and show the State that it is incapable of providing security to people so that they do not disappear? That I, a foreigner in this country, came to search, investigate and demand punishment of those responsible for all this violence in which we live? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? The governments that continue to create murderous immigration policies?
Ana Enamorado, mother of Oscar Antonio López Enamorado, who disappeared on January 19th, 2010 in Jalisco, Mexico Regional Network of Migrant Families. Honduras/Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
That we had organized and denounced the exploitation of the Chronopost company and DPD as undocumented workers in France? For having fought and marched in the streets of Paris more than 250 times to demand our rights as migrant workers? Of having exposed racism? Of having approached a union to carry out our fight? For having come to put out the fire that you set in our countries in Africa? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who repressed us and forced us to emigrate and look for a life outside our homes?
Vitry Collective of Undocumented Workers, Paris, France.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For continuing to plant the cornfield, making our stoves, moles, tortillas and community festivals wherever we are, like here, in Watsonville, California? For being campesinos with dignity, in the south and in the north, and defying their capricious walls and racist efforts to erase or detain us? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You whose fanaticism is towards requisition and power? You who only know about wars, competition and domination? You who monopolize the land to extract and contaminate it?
Tierras Milperas, Watsonville Peasant Organization, California, United States.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For opposing the inauguration of the misnamed Mayan train, which is the inauguration of humiliation, of a mockery of the Mayans of the Yucatan Peninsula? For opposing ways that are thought to bring development, when in reality insecurity and organized crime will come from them? To roads on which the lies of a government that has always been deaf and insensitive to the cries, requests and demands of the native peoples? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You racists and colonialists? The complex system of dispossession that history takes from us? A system that is against our way of living?
Pedro Uc, Assembly of Defenders of the Múuch´ Xíinbal Mayan Territory. Yucatan, Mexico
What are they going to forgive us for?
For being unsubmissive whores who do not sell themselves in exchange for the crumbs they give with their “social support”? For taking to the streets and denouncing them as a pimp government? For discovering that you are part of human trafficking networks at a national and international level? Of not allowing them to govern our bodies or decide what we want to work on? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who rape, disappear, repress, torture, mutilate and strangle sex workers? You who, with operations to simulate your actions against trafficking, detain us, beat us and extort us?
Krizna Aven, sex worker, activist and journalist Mexico City, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For demanding the presentation alive of our 43 children who disappeared on September 26th, 2014? For looking for them in all the neighborhoods, the abandoned houses and the corners of Iguala, Guerrero? For insisting that the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa students was a state crime? For believing the experts who denied the “historical truth”? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? The 27th Infantry Battalion, which disappeared our children? The army and drug trafficking that took them from us?
Cristina Bautista Salvador, mother of Benjamín Ascencio Bautista, one of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa who disappeared on September 26th, 2014. Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For taking to the streets to denounce the femicidal violence that prevails in the state of Chihuahua, particularly in Ciudad Juárez? For taking to the bridges every March 8th to denounce that 30 years after the first femicides in 1993, there are hundreds of families, mothers, fathers and children waiting for justice? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who have opted for impunity and oblivion? You who profit from violence and ecocidal devastation?
Movement against Militarization, Women against Militarization, Para que no nos Mine la Mina, Defense Front of El Chamizal. Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For having entrusted the care of our children to a daycare center sponsored by the IMSS (Mexican Social Security Institute), the most precious thing we had, to be able to get ahead in this country as a working mother? For returning for them after a day of work and no longer find them alive? What are they going to forgive us mothers, fathers and family members for, who 15 years after the tragedy are still seeking justice, since there is currently no person in prison to answer for the death of 49 babies?
Julia Escalante, mother of Fátima Sofía Moreno Escalante, a two-year-four-month-old baby who died at the ABC Nursery in Hermosillo on June 5, 2009. Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For having removed the rich arrogant invader from our lands in Mezcala, Jalisco, and thus guaranteeing life for our successors? To stand up and fight as a Coca people? For not forgetting and recovering our language and history? For existing for who we are, even if racism and classism hit us? For maintaining our community lands and the right to a dignified life? For continuing being the owners of the land and not the servants of money? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who invade our lands to build on community lands? You who take refuge in organized crime and complicit governments?
Coca community of Mezcala Jalisco, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For organizing ourselves because we saw the need and demand of the people for their rights? For organizing against a decree expropriating our land in 2001 to build an airport? For not letting tehm take away 5,700 hectares from thirteen towns, 4,600 of them belonging to our town of San Salvador Atenco? For rebelling against imposition? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who tried to take away, dilute us, and imprison us? You who murdered Javier Cortés and Alexis Behnumea, and sexually raped colleagues and minors?
Trinidad Ramírez, People’s Front in Defense of the Land San Salvador Atenco, State of Mexico, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For being Mazatec women who confront the State? For not lowering our heads in the face of institutional racism? For preserving our Énna language, clothing, singing, dancing, planting, and mutual help? For appealing to the memory of the indigenous Ricardo Flores Magón, born in our lands? For counting on the solidarity of sisters and brothers around the world? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You, who commit attempted ethnocide in Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón?
Mazatec Women for Freedom, Eloxochitlán de Flores Magón, Oaxaca, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For being 70 women from the state of Guanajuato looking for our missing relatives? For being women who live in the suburbs and work in the maquila, cleaning houses, ironing, collecting bottles and so on, to survive while we carry out the searches? Using our own means to find 180 bodies of our relatives and 19 people alive in a year of searching? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? Do you allow 3,800 people to be missing in Guanajuato?
Bibiana Mendoza, Until We Find You Collective, Guanajuato, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
Do we have to apologize for continuing to fight for those ideals now against the Ortega-Murillo dictatorship? Why not surrender to the lies of the new tyrants who, disguised as revolutionaries, have murdered our people? Do we have to ask for forgiveness for being next to the people and suffering with them death, prison, persecution and exile by the criminal power that covers itself with the name of Sandino? Apologize for denouncing that they have become the new millionaires and their policies are “wild capitalism”, extractivist, misogynistic and colonialist?
Mónica Baltodano, guerrilla commander of the 1979 Revolution. Nicaraguan, exiled in Costa Rica. Nicaragua.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For fighting so that the crime that took the life of my mother and our historical leader does not go unpunished? For shouting with all our might every March 2nd: “Justice for Berta Cáceres!”, “Justice for the Lenca people!”? For denouncing with names and surnames the intellectual murderers of my mother who today remain unpunished? For defending with our lives the sacred Gualcarque River and the rivers that live in our mountains because my mother’s spirit lives there? For not allowing her voice to die that lives in the worthy struggle of the people of the world? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who kill us every day with total impunity just for being from a historically plundered people, who have risen up to the sound of the peoples of the earth?
Bertha Zúniga Cáceres, COPINH La Esperanza, Intibucá, Honduras.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For being short and tight in an artistic discipline that is tremendously racist and elitist in origin? For dancing in any space, turning the street, the public square, repatriation or settler camps into stages? For being dancers from popular neighborhoods? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You, cultural officials, who ignore and despise us? You who do not guarantee decent treatment for our profession? Do you judge us for being different from the norm?
Barro Rojo Arte Escénico, Mexico City, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For occupying a 170-hectare forest to prevent it from being razed to build a gigantic police training center and a Hollywood studio? For having undertaken a fight in defense of life and territory, against the municipal corruption of the city of Atlanta and the global forces of social control that always choose death and profit over land? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? It doesn’t matter, because we will never forgive what they have done and continue to try to do.
Weelaunee Autonomous Collective, Movement in Defense of the Forest. Atlanta, United States.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For organizing since 2012 against a thermoelectric plant in the community of Huexca, which is part of the Morelos Comprehensive Project? For opposing the megaproject because it violates the land and our people? For not allowing the operation of the thermoelectric plant, which requires 265 liters of water per second and leaves the farmer without water? For protecting this sugarcane and rice growing area so that they don’t leave us without food? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who murdered Samir Flores for fighting against the Morelos Comprehensive Project, for defending life and for organizing children?
Teresa Castellanos, People’s Front in Defense of Land and Water (FPDTA) Morelos, Puebla, Tlaxcala. Huexca, Morelos, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For fighting against the lies of the false renewable solutions to the climate crisis that destroy our territories in the Oaxacan Isthmus? For denouncing the geopolitical, economic and military interests of the United States and its allies from the Global North on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who open our lands to build open pit mines that contaminate the soil, water and air?
Assembly of the Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus in Defense of the Land and Territory (APIIDTT). Oaxaca, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For organizing against the privatization of health in Sicily, where the mafia controls the health system? For fighting against organized crime that destroys our children with drugs? For opposing the militarization of the United States in our region, where there are three military bases that transform our territory? For supporting our migrant brothers who cross the Mediterranean in search of hope and a dignified life? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who divide the north from the south and have left us forgotten?
Terra Insumisa Collective Alcamo Global South Sicily Delegation. Sicily, Italy.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For fighting against a multinational company called Chemours Company that intended to produce 65 thousand tons of sodium cyanide per year? For uncovering that the narco-government of Gómez Palacio, Durango, awarded a contract to Chemours to deliver 43 thousand liters of water per hour, leaving 22 communities without this vital liquid? For not allowing the installation of a gas pipeline that would pass just a few meters from an explosives factory, putting our communities at risk? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You, with your institutions like the INEGI, that erased 22 communities from the map that would be the first to be affected in the event of a disaster?
United Front of Laguna Peoples in Defense of Life and Territory (FUPLDVT). Durango, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For releasing the water that the Bonafont-Danone company deprived us of for more than 29 years? For touring the Cholulteca towns and their volcanoes to organize ourselves and autonomously defend the life of our ameyales, lagoons and rivers? For destroying a bottling plant that imposed contempt, exploitation and death to, on its ruins, build life? For stopping the extraction of one million 640 thousand liters of water daily from our territory? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who for centuries have imprisoned, repressed and murdered our brothers who have defended Mother Earth?
United Peoples of the Cholulteca Region and the Puebla Volcanoes, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For fighting for the right to decent housing? For facing a real estate cartel that aims to enrich itself regardless of whether the homes are inhabited or not? For not letting the cooperative model be lost? For trying to avoid the disappearance of historical struggles for the right to collective housing such as the Palo Alto cooperative? For being moved by other struggles in the territory, searching for people, taking care of the forests, the water, the native cultures, from any injustice? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? The real estate cartel? Governments that evict people from spaces they live in? Airbnb that, being a multinational company, gentrifies all cities?
Xochiquetzalli Housing Cooperative. First LGBT+ housing cooperative in Mexico. Mexico City, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For denouncing the crimes against humanity and the human rights violations committed in Palestine, which left more than 23 thousand civilians dead in 90 days? For demanding justice for the murder of 10,000 Palestinian boys and girls? For denouncing the genocide committed against the Palestinian people and the ethnic cleansing to which they are subjected? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You, the oppressors? You, the accomplices of the war industry that distributes weapons and military technology to repress social movements in southern countries?
Ara Galán, Palestine-Mexico Solidarity Collective.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For fighting as agricultural workers of the San Quintín Valley so that we are respected? For wanting to have better living conditions, better working conditions? For demanding that the Federal Labor Law be respected? For not allowing more harassment in the agricultural fields towards our fellow day laborers? Who can grant forgiveness? You who allow corruption to continue in this government and do little to defend the working men and women of this country?
Agricultural workers from the San Quintín Valley, Baja California, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For converting the Glorieta de Colón, a symbol of Spanish colonization, barbarism and oppression, into the Glorieta of Women who Struggle, a site of Living Memory that vindicates the struggles of women in its long history—present and past? —, that brings us all together in a hug that makes us feel accompanied? For not being willing to be silenced? For tearing apart our voices to denounce violence, injustice and impunity and not be accomplices of an opaque State? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? You who have used our causes and our pain to come to power and once there, not only do you not keep your word, but on top of that you criminalize and persecute us?
Glorieta of the Women Who Struggle, Mexico City, Mexico.
What are they going to forgive us for?
For leaving Haiti, a small country where ten to 20 people can be shot dead in one day? For fleeing from hunger, bullets, malaria? For not having anything? For surviving the hell of Darién, where children, women and men die every day from diseases and at the hands of extortionists? Who has to ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? The governments that expel us from our countries with their indifference to violence?
Emmanuel, a migrant from Haiti at the Casa Tochan shelter in Mexico City. Haiti/Mexico.
Original article at https://ojarasca.jornada.com.mx/2024/02/09/de-que-nos-van-a-perdonar-imagen-y-palabra-desde-las-resistencias-322-4433.html
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.