REGIONAL INDIGENOUS MOVEMENT IN DEFENSE OF AND IN RESPECT FOR LIFE
FIRST REGIONAL ASSEMBLY IN DEFENSE OF TERRITORY AND THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE OF THE SIERRA DE SANTA MARTA
Soteapan, Veracruz.
August 27, 2017
Communiqué
The Popoluca, Nahua and mestizo people of the Sierra de Santa Marta, gathered today, August 27th, 2017, in the municipal seat of Soteapan. Present were more than 400 people from 50 communities of the municipalities of Hueyapan de Ocampo, Soteapan, Tatahuicapan, Mecayapan and Pajapan. In addition, visitors from the municipalities of Chinameca, Cosoleacaque, Coatzacoalcos, Acayucan, Chinameca, Minatitlan, Zaragoza, AguaDulce, Los Choapas and Sayula del Sur of Xalapa, Veracruz. Also, there was representation of the Zoque people from the North of Chiapas, whom are struggling against fracking.
In coordination with our Populuca and Nuahua councils of the Indigenous Government Council, named at the national level for the integrated people of the National Indigenous Congress, we carried out our first regional assembly. Our intention was to make agreements to follow up on the process initiated years ago for the defense of our rights and our territories against bestial international capitalism. This capitalism of course, is backed by the corrupt and mafia-like, those whom make up the political class in our country.
With the energy reform and the other structural reforms, with the violence at the hands of organized crime taking place throughout the country including our region, they are violating all of our rights wanting to dispossess and destroy our territories. Amongst other things, we refer to their inability to recognize the access to electricity as a human right, to their intent to dispossess us from and contaminate our territories and our waters. They do this with wind farms, with mining activity, with oil and natural gas exploitation through conventional means as well as through mortifying fracking technology.
Today we made an internal agreement to continue in our struggle. We declare that we will continue committed to our movement of civil resistance against the high prices of electricity and we will demand that the CFE fulfill the two agreements signed at the regional and national level.
We will also continue strengthening our movement for territorial defense and we will demand the recognition of the actions of our community assemblies that constitute auto-consultation as Indigenous peoples. We will not permit another supposed consultation driven by the bad governments and their dependencies.
In coordination with other many other movements at the national level, we will not permit the entrance of wind-farm businesses or extractives industries in our territories. Nor will we offer our territories to major foreign capital like the bad governments are attempting to do with the Ley de Zona Econónomica Especial. Likewise, we will not permit the privatization of our water.
With the National Indigenous Congress and the Indigenous Government Council for Mexico, we will assert our right to self-determination and we will reconstruct our autonomy that the bad governments have robbed from us for decades. That is to say, we will reconstruct our capacity for self-government to implement a good system of life for our people.
Furthermore, we denounce the assassins of human rights defenders and the criminalization of social struggle. We demand the living return of all of the disappeared and freedom to all of the political prisoners.
We will not leave!
The hour has arrived for the flowering of the people!
Translated from the original here: http://www.pozol.org/?p=15843