Translations

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Call Out: Month for the Earth and Against Capital, June 5 – July 5

mes-tierra-contra-capitalOriginally published on It’s Going Down.
Via Contra-Info
May 29, 2016
Translated by Scott Campbell

“The struggle occurs in a given territory, with very specific characteristics, with very specific enemies and their particularities, to know all these elements is our responsibility.”

Documents for an insurrectionary topology.

It is time to deepen the struggle against the state, against capital, and against the forms they use to continue to perfect their means of dominion over us. Different materials for spreading information and reflection have been developed in recent times. Blogs, magazines, newspapers and countless other materials have been produced by compañeros with different contours but with the same intention: to contribute to the social war from an anti-authoritarian and offensive perspective.

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The San Quintín Rebellion

san-quintin-rebellionI’m excited to share news about the launch of a new microsite on the San Quintín rebellion in Mexico published by Regeneración Radio to which I contributed the translation from the Spanish original. Below are excerpts from the site. I strongly encourage you to visit the full site. It’s worth it.

The strawberry harvest was approaching and thousands of farmworkers were preparing to shut down the Transpeninsular Highway on March 17, 2015. There was no turning back. Two years earlier, a slogan had spread like a dust cloud throughout all of San Quintín Valley: fair wages. And between the rows, there where celery, squash, greens, chile, beet, cucumber, tomato, strawberry, blackberry and raspberry are planted to be sent to the other side of the border, there was already talk of a “crazy idea”: they had to rise up.

For Gloria, the movement has changed her life. Before March 17, she wasn’t aware that a strike was being planned for the entire valley. But that day she arrived at the school where she works as a teacher and the classes had been suspended. “I went back to bed. Later they told me: ‘there’s a movement and the highways, the banks are closed.’ I left and there was no one in town. I walked until I reached a group of people and approached a lady who was at the front. She told me that they were denouncing, as farmworkers, the injustices and the violations of their rights. She said to me: ‘Don’t stay silent, child, you have to speak, wherever you are, you have to speak.’” A mountain of memories came over her and she joined in the fury.

Visit The San Quintín Rebellion microsite.

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Insumisión: Strike!

cnte-marcha-huelga

Originally posted to It’s Going Down. Esta nota también está disponible en español en la página El Enemigo Común.
By Scott Campbell

The last edition of Insumisión started with news of the national teachers strike in Mexico and that’s where we’ll kick things off here. It’s been an intense fifteen days since the National Coordinating Body of Education Workers (CNTE) began an indefinite strike on May 15, primarily against plans by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to implement neoliberal reforms to the country’s education system.

Since being selected as president in 2012, Peña Nieto has attempted to privatize and standardize the Mexican education system, along with instituting policies to disempower Latin America’s largest union, the National Union of Education Workers (SNTE), and its dissident and more radical faction, the CNTE. In 2013, the CNTE mobilized its base to fight back against similar reform efforts. An article I wrote then gives some context to the developments occurring now, as well as clarifying the distinctions between the SNTE, the CNTE, and their relationships to the state.

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Insumisión: Reclaiming Life in a Panorama of Death

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Originally posted on It’s Going Down
By Scott Campbell

As the violence and repression instigated, permitted and perpetrated by the Mexican State continues to grow, it can become overwhelming to summarize it in these pages in a way that does justice to the victims and survivors of state terror and impunity. Yet as the grim tallies multiply and impact more and more lives, so does the clarity that what the state offers even in its best moments is no solution at all, and from that point resistance flourishes. The sparks of refusal and defiance despite the odds ignite around the country, making meaning out of that which seems so senseless, breathing reclaimed life into a panorama of death. As América del Valle of Atenco said earlier this month, “Even with everything they did to us, we don’t come here today as martyrs. We don’t come to cry…We’ve come here to say NO!” Lxs insumxs. Let’s see what they’ve been up to over the past two weeks.

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Insumisión: Battles Lines Are Drawn in the Face of the Looming Storm

13010838_866729443454452_903784783579646203_nOriginally posted to It’s Going Down
By Scott Campbell

Happy May Day! Around Mexico today numerous marches will be held, primarily organized by the National Education Workers Union (SNTE) and its more radical tendency, the National Education Workers Coordinating Body (CNTE). A few of the demonstrations are listed on It’s Going Down’s roundup of May Day actions. These marches are usually large, as the teachers union requires their members to show up. That extra incentive probably isn’t needed this year, as the teachers are fed up with the state’s repression and attacks on public education. The CNTE has already announced an indefinite national strike for May 15, and as a warm- up held the largest march in its 37-year history in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas on April 22. Stretching more than three miles with 100,000 participants, the march was in response to the repression faced by teachers there the week before. While the CNTE base has consistently demonstrated its militancy, the leadership remains stuck in the politics of respectability, as demonstrated during the April 22 march when they ordered that “no one should commit acts of vandalism and that anyone caught would be detained; that no one would be masked or cover their face.” The gap between the two seems likely only to widen as the union’s actions intensify.

When it comes to teachers and protests, fresh on everyone’s mind is Ayotzinapa. When it comes to a relentless dedication to preserving impunity at all costs, the Mexican state is quite impressive. This was on full display last week as the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) sent by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CIDH) released its final 600-page report in a four-hour press conference on April 24. The GIEI’s mandate was cut short by the CIDH following the Mexican government’s consistent harassment, subterfuge and non-cooperation. “The experts assured that the authorities have not followed key lines of investigation, evidence has been manipulated, obstructed and investigative work rejected, officials that would have participated in the disappearance protected, and alleged suspects tortured to obtain confessions that support the government’s version.” The details are too expansive to explore here, but the short version is that the GIEI found the students were under surveillance, the attack on them was recorded and coordinated among local and state police and the army, and that the head of the Criminal Investigations Agency (akin to the FBI in the US) had a personal role in manipulating evidence and illegally detaining and torturing someone who later “confessed” to involvement in the disappearance.

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COPINH Statement on the Investigation, Leadership and Solidarity

berta-caceres-cidh-oea-hijaCOPINH
April 8, 2016
Translated by Scott Campbell

The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) reports, communicates and denounces the following:

  1. We appreciate the national and international solidarity for an objective, impartial and non-racist investigation that clarifies the facts around the political assassination of our compañera and General Coordinator, Berta Cáceres, and leads to the truth and to justice, with the true material and intellectual authors of the murder being subjected to the law, as well as learning the facts and motives by which her murder was planned and carried out, however, we reiterate that the State of Honduras continues to fail to fulfill its obligations in this respect. Not accepting our requests, such as for an independent international investigative commission that has the trust of our organization, are the reasons for which we haven’t trusted, don’t trust and never will trust in the national laws and for which we denounce our country’s legal authorities’ manipulation of the investigation into the vile and horrendous murder of our compañera Berta Cáceres. And that Mr. Juan Orlando Hernandez has not shown the political will to speed up the investigative process and one month after the murder, neither the compañera’s relatives nor COPINH have received an official report on behalf of the government about how the investigation is proceeding into identifying the material and intellectual perpetrators.

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Public Letter: We Have the Right to Think that You are Part of the Crime

berta-caceres-missedTranslator’s note: On April 1, Gustavo Castro was permitted by the Honduran government to leave the country and is now back in Mexico.

COPINH
March 29, 2016
Translated by Scott Campbell

Relatives of Berta Cáceres report that the Attorney General is protecting the murderers. There are economic ties between the coordinator of the prosecution and DESA’s lawyers [the company behind the Agua Zarca dam]. They claim that the Honduran State knew of the plan to murder indigenous leader Berta Cáceres.

Public Letter

President of the Republic, Juan Orlando Hernández,
Attorney General of the Republic, Oscar Chinchilla,

The relatives of Berta Cáceres, the COPINH [Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras], the Platform of Social and Popular Movements of Honduras (PMSPH) and the Popular Coordination Berta Cáceres, for the ears of Honduran society and the international community, we are writing you to express and demand the following:

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“I was born to be free” – Nestora Salgado

Originally posted on El Enemigo Común.

nestora-salgado-rifle-prison-releaseTranslator’s note: After seventeen months in prison and following a national and international campaign for her release, political prisoner Nestora Salgado was released from Tepepan prison in Mexico City on March 18, just days after the below essay was published. The commander of the Community Police in Olinalá, Guerrero, Salgado was charged with three counts of kidnapping. When those charges were dismissed, the state filed three more charges for kidnapping, theft and murder. Again, those charges were dismissed for lack of evidence.

Upon exiting the prison, she was received by dozens of community police officers from Olinalá and other towns in Guerrero. Handed a rifle and addressed as commander, she said, “We are going to keep struggling so they don’t keep repressing us. If this is needed [raising the rifle], then this is where we will go, but we won’t allow them to keep trampling on us.” At a press conference later in the day, she committed herself to fighting for the freedom of Mexico’s 500 political prisoners, in particular those jailed for carrying out their duties as community police. Joined by members from the Peoples Front in Defense of the Land from Atenco, those resisting the construction of the La Parota dam in Guerrero, and family members of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, she led the count from 1 to 43. “I don’t represent any political party,” she said. “I only fight for my people. Sometimes they ask me if I’m afraid. And yes, I’m afraid, but I’ll die fighting for our people’s dignity. It doesn’t matter what I have to do, I am going to win freedom for our prisoners. I will be present in all of the struggles, as long as they need me.”

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Enough! Second COPINH member assassinated in Honduras

copinh-honduras-marchaMarch 15, 2016
COPINH
Translated by Scott Campbell

The Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) calls public attention to today’s murder of our compañero Nelson García, from the Río Chiquito community in the Cortés Department, at the hands of two unknown persons.

We regrettably inform you that compañero Nelson García was murdered when he arrived at his mother-in-law’s house to have lunch, after spending all morning helping move the belongings of displaced families from the Río Chiquito community.

The murder occurred in the midst of an eviction carried out against the community of Río Chiquito in the Río Lindo area, in the Cortés Department, during which approximately 100 police officers, 20 military police officers, 10 soldiers and several people from the DGIC (General Criminal Investigations Administration) invaded the territory reclaimed by 150 families, on which more than 75 had built their houses with the materials and efforts at hand.

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Unyielding before power and its repression

Originally posted on It’s Going Down

Iconocunam-vigilancia-quemadolasia
February 26, 2016
Translated by Scott Campbell

On the repressive circus mounted by the Mexican State

…what is condemned about anarchists is not the violence, but their having transcended denunciations and conferences, bringing disobedience, insubordination and the capacity for revolt to this point. What is condemned is precisely the fact of their standing up and walking from the point of a radical critique of power and an intransigent ethic of freedom; and, moreover, to do so until the very end.

Daniel Barret (Rafael Spósito)

When the unyielding have declared war on power with their daily, consistent action, there is not much need for “pretexts” in order to attack the subversives. For power, the fact that anarchists are unyielding to power’s norms, that they can’t be corrupted and don’t make alliances, is enough of a reason to attack them. It’s true, many times those who rule the world have to carry out “criminalization” campaigns in order to attack various struggles, anarchists included. However, other times these campaigns are much more than a campaign to “discredit”; besides, who wants credit? Do we need it? The vast majority of the time, these campaigns are part of a strike of greater magnitude, form part of an overwhelming strike that the State plans to inflict. It is within this context one can place recent events, part of power’s repression of the local anarchist or libertarian landscape, that is to say, in the Federal District [Mexico City].

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