UNITING THE MULTITUDE DOWN MEXICO WAY

The Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity  (MPJD) has expressed support for the Zapatistas  (EZLN) in a letter also published in their journal.  As described by the Swathmore College News and Events:

.. the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity (MPJD), Sicilia united a vast group of drug war victims-families who had lost innocent loved ones in the crossfire of Mexico's escalating conflict. They filled dozens of caravan buses and traveled across Mexico telling their stories and drawing attention not only to the heavy hand of state security forces but also to the corruption of the court system, police forces, and politicians who were unable to hold killers and traffickers accountable.

The MPJD as many of you know has organized numerous mass actions including street protests, marches and caravans across Mexico and the USA.  The Nation has reported that  last June the movement produced a list of demands, which included the demilitarization of security forces, a serious and scrupulous investigation of drug-related crime, the allowance of regulated drug use, new rules to stop international money laundering and an end to weapons trade with the United States.  

Like the Zapatistas, but in a different way, the MPJD is a movement of the multitudes against an outpost of the Empire and is an attempt without seizing state power to build a new world for all of the oppressed and working people.

The following is taken from a Zapatista support site entitled The Flower of the World Will Not Die.

Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity Responds to the EZLN

México D.F. on January 3, 2013.

Our struggle is for life, and the evil government offers death as the future.

Our struggle is for justice, and the evil government is filled with criminals and assassins.

Our struggle is for peace, and the evil government announces war and destruction.

CCRI-CG of the EZLN

To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

Brothers and sisters

First, we send you a fraternal embrace for your 29 years as EZLN and for the 19 years since you appeared publically. We congratulate you because we, in our short existence as a movement, know full well how difficult it is to build and sustain an organization. And above all, for your steadfastness, for showing us that morals, ethics and truth are the most powerful tools to build a world with peace, justice, dignity and democracy.

We also use this letter to thank you for the many lessons you have given to Mexican society and the solidarity you gave to the victims of May 7, 2011, when, making our cry yours, We’ve Had It Up to Here! [¡Estamos hasta la madre!], you came out to march in silence to demand an end to the war and justice for the victims. We will never forget that great mobilization and message as well as the fraternal reception that the Good Government of Oventic gave to the Caravan to the South.

Since then, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity diagnosed the national emergency that you had already foreseen. With our walk in sorrow, we confirmed that this world is indeed crumbling and, facing this, we recuperated the fundamental elements of our humanness and life to begin building another world.

Just like you, we have taken on the struggle in the terrain of the symbolic to show the breadth of the transcendence of our causes. That’s why we have put the testimony of the victims before the discourse of politics. However, the deafening system – in which the political class and organized crime have satiated their ambition for power and wealth, imposing a criminal economy where life and death are interchangeable products – has blocked all understanding of the gravity of the situation in which we are submerged: 80,000 dead, 20,000 disappeared, hundreds of thousands displaced and families and bodies destroyed. This new face of war is nothing more than the extension of the long night of the 500 years, which the dictatorship of the State party has taken charge of redressing in paramilitarism and repression against the people and social movements.

In spite of the foregoing, we walked to raise up the voice and testimony of the victims throughout the width and breadth of the country, as well as across the United States of North America, publically calling for accountability from those above, all political parties and all the powers that be, exposing the ethical and moral degradation of the political class, the criminals and the institutions. In our walk we have also seen dignified peoples and persons who are confronting this reality, breaking with the dynamics of the system and putting down the bases for the construction of other worlds, almost always with youth, victims and indigenous peoples as the main social subjects. We also identify as the indigenous peoples those who can be found heading up the construction of alternatives: Cherán, Santa María Ostula and Tiripetío in Michoacán; the peoples of the mountain and coast of Guerrero who bringing to life the Community Police; the defense of the sacred lands of the Wirrárikas and hundreds of communities that resist the megaprojects, the extraction economy and the accumulation of wealth by plunder.

Since May 8, 2011, before thousands of people in main plaza of Mexico City, we proposed the necessity of setting the minimum bases needed to begin the reconstruction of the country. In that sense, we believe that one of the first necessary minimum measures is the signing and fulfillment of the San Andrés Larráinzar Accords, a project that would be the first step, not only to begin to pay off the historic debt that the Mexican nation has with her first peoples but so that the State keeps its word and, above all, to begin the construction of a model of democracy and justice through which true peace with dignity can be consolidated. That’s why, and responding to your most recent communiqués, we want to let you know that we are ready to begin walking at your side and at the side of all Mexicans who are committed to this demand. That we believe that a Mexico with Peace, Justice and Dignity is only possible with Democracy and Liberty. That Mexico cannot be a complete nation with her peoples.

Dear Zapatista sisters and brothers,

We say from our hearts, which have been hurt by war and that struggle so that other families don’t have to live the sorrow of losing or having a family member disappeared: we embrace your struggle the way you have embraced ours. We will struggle for a Mexico for all, a country that truly includes and recognizes her indigenous peoples, for a country where there are no dead or disappeared due to the ambition and opulence of a few and one in which, as your communities have already begun doing so, life that has been violently taken away can begin to flower again.

In the construction of a Mexico with Peace, Justice, Democracy and Dignity. All together!

Yours,

Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad

(Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity)