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Communiqué of the Caravan for Life and Water

To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation,
To the National Indigenous Congress,
To the Indigenous Council of Government,
To the Sixth Zapatista Commission of the EZLN,
To the Europe refusing to surrender,
To those who signed the Declaration for Life,
To the peoples who struggle and resist,
To our revered Mother Earth,

The Caravan for Water and Life ends its journey today in the Zapatista lands of Cuentepec, Morelos.

For 34 days we visited our sisters, brothers, and siblings of the Tutunaku, Nahua, Otomí (ñhöñhö), Mazateco, Triqui, Zapoteco, Binizaa, Matlatzinca, Nuntaj iyi, Ayuujk peoples for whom water and land are sacred, who give their very lives to defend and recover what belongs to them.

We linked up and organized with comrades from Germany, France, Greece, Portugal, Guatemala, Chile, Spain, Holland, Switzerland, Australia, and England who also struggle and resist in their territories, and agreed too stand with the caravan and the struggles that comprise it.

We witnessed how the law of the peoples was enforced, which is not at odds with nature but rather reproduces it.

We saw this as the Nahua peoples shut down the Bonafont-Danone company and turned it into the Altepelmecalli, the water returned to their wells; the Santiago Mexquititlán dam regained water after the Otomí people took over the Barrio Cuarto well of which the State1 refuses to cede the legal rights to supply and control it.

The Tehuacán garbage dump stopped growing after being shut down by the people of Santa María Coapan; in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, 5 mining concessions were canceled and the construction of 2 hydroelectric dams prevented.

The street and market vendors2 maintain their workspaces thanks to their resistance3; the place where the traitor of the peoples Adelfo Regino Montes used to work, the INPI, was taken over by the Otomí community living in Mexico City and turned into the House of the Indigenous Peoples and Communities «Samir Flores Soberanes», from where they fight, resist and organize together.

The peoples received the Caravan in their local assemblies. We walked with them, we united our voices, we strengthened each other.

We knew the pains of the others are the same as ours4: contempt, repression, dispossession, and exploitation are the forms in which the war that capitalism imposes around the world manifests to all of us.

We went out to look for ourselves in other geographies, to witness other rages and other rebellions, because we are aware that only with the union of the peoples will we have the necessary strength to defeat this murderous system.

We transgressed the borders that have been imposed on us, we broke the fences, we united and weaved our struggles.

We exposed the voracity of capitalism and its innumerable names:

Mining, water exploitation, real estate, gentrification, contamination of land, air, rivers, and seas, dispossession of territory, transnational mega-projects, assassinations of environmentalists, imprisonments, disappearances, drug trafficking, para-militarism, conscience buying, division of peoples, the commodification of life, precarity of waged and informal labor, collusion of the state and organized and authorized crime, privatization of education, femicides, repression; violence in all its forms.

We also expose the State, faithful butler of capital, which uses all its repressive apparatus against those of us who fight for life.

It deployed its forces to evict the Nahua peoples of Altepelmecalli, to repress the comrades who defend their source of work5; to beat and imprison the participants of Okupa Cuba. It is State intervention what keeps our comrades Fidencio Aldama, Fredy García, Marcelino Ruíz Gómez, Abraham López Montejo, Germán López Montejo and the 7 political prisoners of Eloxochitlán imprisoned.

The State manifests its servant status to capital when it stripped our Otomí comrades living in Mexico City of their work spaces; when it persecutes those who fight for a place to live; when it threatens and murders journalists who defend the truth, when it tries to discredit and defame environmental defenders; harassing the liberated space of the Okupa Chiapaz.

The State perpetrates the impunity for the murders of Bety Cariño, Samir Flores and Meztli Sarabia. It keeps open the unjust criminal trial of Miguel López Vega for defending the Metlapanapa River.

It executed the forced disappearance of Sergio Rivera Hernández, water defender in Coyomeapan and of Dr. Ernesto Sernas García, lawyer for the organization Sol Rojo.

It persecutes students from public universities organizing to defend access to education; it imposes gentrification; it destroys the wetlands of Xochimilco; it displaces entire communities, and hands them over to the mining companies and drug traffickers.

The Mexican State, protecting capital’s interests, tried to disappear the rural teacher training colleges; it tried to hide the truth and justice for our 43 and from here we say:

¡Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos los vivos!

(Alive you took them away, alive must they be returned!)

We expose the State institutions6 that hand over, privatize and profit from natural land resources, privileging large companies such as Danone, Volkswagen, Audi, Nestlé, Constellation Brands, Coca Cola, Gold Corp, Black Rock among many others.

The Caravan also allowed us to observe and note our contradictions as individuals and as organizations, the capitalist practices that we reproduce and that we can only dismantle as a community, the system that inhabits our bodies and that manifests itself in our actions and words.

To eradicate commercialism, patriarchy, machismo, misogyny, colonialism, racism, and classism, it is necessary to recognize it in ourselves, enunciate it, and build alternatives.

We answer from our spaces, forms, and times that we will continue building processes of autonomy and strengthening self-determination and relations between peoples, we will continue the resistance by taking into our hands the destiny of our territories.

The Caravan also allowed us to observe and note our contradictions as individuals and as organizations, the capitalist practices that we reproduce and that we can only dismantle as a community, the system that inhabits our bodies and that manifests itself in our actions and words. To eradicate commercialism, patriarchy, machismo, misogyny, colonialism, racism, and classism, it is necessary to recognize it in ourselves, enunciate it, and build alternatives.

Today, as the caravan reaches its last stop, we ask ourselves what’s next, as did the EZLN and the National Indigenous Congress on its 25th anniversary.

We answer from our spaces, forms, and times that we will continue building processes of autonomy and strengthening self-determination and relations between peoples, we will continue the resistance by taking into our hands the destiny of our territories.

We now glimpse a common horizon of rebellion, resistance, and organization to continue weaving our struggles in defense of life, strengthened by the national and international alliances we built.

We now have the certainty that if they touch one of us, we will respond as a group and not as isolated individuals.

These are not empty words, it is a warning.

It is a warning to the governments that plot their attack against all of us, little by little there. We will not continue to subject ourselves to an isolated struggle.

It took great effort to carry out this caravan.

We understand that one day in these territories is not enough to understand their particular struggles.

Our brothers, sisters, and siblings resist day and night to stop the destruction of their land.

To learn from the struggles, there is no other way but to live them in our flesh.

«Wake up!», illustration by taller ahuehuete (2022).
A Proposal
We are aware that after this long journey through 9 states, the lessons learned must be materialized into concrete actions that can be taken to the communities to continue advancing.

That is why the National Indigenous Congress, the Indigenous Council of Government, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the peoples who struggle and resist, we propose:

Like the Caravan for Water and Life against capitalist dispossession, the construction of autonomous schools in territories that belong to the CNI, in which compañeros and compañeras from Mexico and the world can visit our communities temporarily and share the day to day with us, to know what we fight for.

And to witness that now the Nahua, ñhöñhö, Mazatec, Zapotec, Triqui, Binizaa, Matlatzinca, Nuntaj iyi, Ayuujk, and other peoples are the ones who ask the attendees, «and you, what is your story?»

We propose that this provocation be discussed and evaluated in our territories and that on October 12 of this year the answer can be known. If it is accepted, we will begin with the organizational work to make it a reality.

Finally, as a Caravan, we celebrate and support the great step taken today by our brothers and sisters of Cuentepec with the elaboration of the decree against mining for the State of Morelos, a great step not only for the Nahua peoples but for all the originary peoples who struggle for autonomy.

Today is a historic day for all of us. Today the people have decided, once again, to exercise their right to govern themselves.

Cuentepec, Morelos, April 24, 20227.
Our struggle is and will continue to be for life.
Never again a world without the peoples.

P.S.: The future of the peoples is not in international conventions, it is in the peoples who fight for autonomy and self-determination, it is in the communities that live and dream of freedom and rebuild life, not in opportunists who usurp, supplant the voice of the peoples and profit from the struggle so that this system continues.

For the integral reconstitution of our peoples!
Zapata lives, the struggle continues!
Samir lives, the struggle continues!
Long live the CNI!
Long live the CIG!
Long live the EZLN!
Because they were taken alive, we want them alive!
Long live the people who struggle and resist!
Long live the women who struggle, organize and resist!

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