“We Don’t Want to Kill Anybody. What We Want Is to Take Away Their Power to Kill.”

Las Abejas of Acteal, Chiapas, Receive the Caravan of Peace with These Words

By Mariano Pérez Vázquez, Juan Vázquez Luna, José Ramón Vásquez Entzin, Victorio Pérez Paciencia and Mariano Pérez Sántiz
Las Abejas (a civil society organization)

September 16, 2011

To the members of the Southern Caravan of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity
To all the victims of Felipe Calderon’s war
To all people who accompany us tonight
To everyone who listens to these words

Brothers and Sisters,

Today we meet in the Sacred Land of Acteal. We accompany our dead, our martyrs of Acteal. Their sacrifice gives us strength to continue in struggle. You accompany us and you accompany your dead; your own pain and your bravery to not remain silent also strengthen us. The 50,000 dead of this absurd war by Calderon that fills us with pain and indignation also accompany us. To all who have come to this prayer that we have just made, all of us, in this sacred place.

Our struggle for the past fourteen years has been for truth and justice for the Acteal massacre, and now we have joined the struggle to stop Calderon’s war. We are here, together, to demonstrate once more that our Mexico every day floods so quickly with blood because of all the violence that shares the same root in the evil government and its system. We want to say that our eyes are already tired of seeing so much death every day of innocents surrounded by impunity; our ears already don’t want to listen to the dishonest words of Felipe Calderon; of combatting narco-trafficking and how his “National Security Law,” whose only goal is to justify his absurd war against the Mexican people and the crimes that happen when those in power create fear to control the people, is necessary; our hearts already do not want to feel nor live with this terrorism of the State.

This situation in which we live in our country reminds us of what our Mayan ancestors told us in the book, the Popol Vuh: When the Lords of Xibalba dominated the world their evil was more macabre, bloodier, it was a world where one breathed terror. Then, the twins Junajpu and Ixbalanque had a meeting, thought with their hearts, and agreed to go down into the underworld to fight against the lords of death, the Lords of Xibalba, to make justice and peace be born. Today the people of Mexico have made this same agreement. That is why we are here.

You have come from the center of our land, from the land of the great Zapata and the earth that is named for the great Morelos. You have come many kilometers to get here. You have crossed the lands of Xibalba, that is, of the lords of death, of the Zetas, of the kidnappers, of the corrupt authorities in collision with the criminals, lands of pain and death but also of dignity, of resistance, of struggle and of hope.

You have come here to land that has also suffered and struggled, from Chiapas and from the Sacred Land of Acteal. When you left Mexico City toward the north the caravan met in the Zócalo (city square) and Javier named the origins of the Mexican nation from that place of the Eagle and the Nopal cactus. He said that we must refound our country. Today you are in another symbolic place, where this open wound inflicts the nation. Because from here they have been exposed and made evident what the usurpers of the Nation, the men of money, of weapons, of twisted laws, of the stolen symbols of the country, of the patriotic words and the anti-Mexican contracts, what these unjust men have done to the true Nation, that of the men and women of the land.

Here in Acteal it has been seen that these men will even massacre women and children to conserve their privileges masked as nation. Here we think that this is a good place to light up this refoundation of the nation that Javier Sicilia spoke of, on this day, on this night, to give another “Cry of Independence,” not the cry that continues the farce of those who raise the tri-colored flag while they sell away the homeland, not the cry of those who parade with the Army waving the Mexican flag while they deliver that same Army ot the United States through the Merida Initiative, but the true cry, that which cries that we are tired and that proclaims that we want to be independent from them. That the nation that we are refounding be of the oppressed, the marginalized, the exploited; from the victims of the terrible violence unleashed by the gods of power and money, and also of all those who decide to leave their privileged place and come over to the other side, who decide to cast their luck with the poor of the earth. We believe with the compañero Javier Sicilia in the conversion of hearts, but the conversion of the powerful is, as we read in the Word of God, more difficult than a camel passing through the eye of a needle. And their words have no value, they can’t be believed if they are not accompanied by deeds; may they leave behind their wealth, get down from their pedestals, return what they have stolen, and confess their crimes.

We don’t want to kill anybody. What we want is to take away their power to kill. We want the lords of death to cease to govern over our land. And the first step to cease their governance is to not obey them. That’s why we are in resistance and we are in agreement with the path of nonviolent civil disobedience that this caravan has made its banner.

You have come crossing these paths and you have freed yourselves from the traps of Xibalba, but others have not been able to do so and have fallen in the traps of the lords of death. That is to say that they continue to be caught in the webs of lies of the evil government, that they still believe that the Army is going to protect them, that Calderon’s war is against narco-trafficking and not against all the people. God willing, actions like this caravan will awaken them and it won’t be necessary for them to also suffer in their own flesh what others of us have lived so that they will finally open their eyes. We already don’t believe in anything about the system of evil government that Calderon heads.

If the system of death on which Calderon depends still has strength it is because of money, it is because of weapons, it is because of violence, it is because of its deceptions. This system of terror, we await its destruction. Because we urgently need to breath peace with justice and dignity. Because we want to be true men and women. Because we want to be Mexican men and women. And because we only want to die when it is ordered by nature or decided by our Creators in the Heart of Heaven and Earth. But if we die due to interests of the empire, if we die because of the economic interests of the narco-traffickers, of the evil Mexican government and its partners in looting this nation, they will find in their path our dignified struggle and their ears will have to hear our cry.

Brothers and sisters, the path of peace is not easy to encounter. But that does not mean we should go back, because the wisdom of our ancestors has taught us that it is only worthwhile to retreat when we have walked the wrong path. Our struggle for peace and justice together with the brothers and sisters of the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity and with thousands of men and women hit by this war and the terrorism of the State is like that, we are not mistaken. And that’s why we are here and that’s why this struggle does not end here today. You of the Southern Caravan and all the people in solidarity who accompany us have come to hear the words and the power of the blood of the Martyrs of Acteal. Here you have come to find our thoughts and our hearts and to exchange experiences, difficulties and proposals for future action.

Above all, never again will our voices and our hearts be snuffed out. Never will our heart or memory forget these crimes. Because our dead have faces, they have first and last names. Just like those who are responsible for these bloody deaths also have first and last names, they who are up there, above, disguised as “governors” of Mexico. And that’s why we in the Las Abejas organization see that the path to end the violence and evil will of the Lords of Xibalba – that is, the evil government of Felipe Calderon – is in unity and in struggle with conscience.

Only that way can we construct the path of peace with justice and dignity. If we trust in weapons, in the Army, in the so-called “National Security Law,” those will only bring us more terror and will never stop the spiral of violence in our Mexico. We will fight, then, with the wisdom of our Mayan ancestors like the twins Junajpu and Ixbalanque and, with the example of Jesus with nonviolence.

Attentively,

The voice of the civil society organization Las Abejas

By its governing directors:

Mariano Pérez Vázquez, Juan Vázquez Luna, José Ramón Vásquez Entzin, Victorio Pérez Paciencia and Mariano Pérez Sántiz

Translation for Narco News by Al Giordano.

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