Participants In The Caravan:
Cristina Bautista Salvador- Assembly of mothers and fathers of the 43 students disappeared from Ayotzinapa
Mother of Benjamin Ausencio Bautista, one of the 43 missing students. She is a native to Alpoyecancingo Mountains, in the municipality of Ahuacuotzingo, Guerrero. She was a farm worker, breadmaker, and sold food to support her family. She had to leave everything, including her harvest in search for her son.
Joaquina García Velázquez- Assembly of mothers and fathers of the 43 students disappeared from Ayotzinapa
Mother of Martin Getsemaní Sánchez, one of the 43 missing students. Native from Zumpango del Río, Eduardo Neri municipality, in the state of Guerrero and an hour away from the school where her son studies. She is married and apart from Martín she has seven children and she has worked hard to help them to succeed in their studies.
Lucía Gutiérrez Nicolás-Committee of Victims of the Repression in Nochixtlán, Oaxaca on June 19th 2016
Lucia is a native to Nochixtlan community in which was savagely attacked by federal forces on June 19th, 2016, she herself is a victim of that attack. Teacher by profession, she works in a remote community far away from the city.
Bertha Alicia Garcia Ruiz- Committee of Return Our Daughters Home of Ciudad Juarez
Mother of Brenda Berenice Castillo Garcia who was kidnapped when she was only 17 years old, her remains were found four years later. Bertha lives in Juarez City and is a mother of 6, she also takes care of her grandson that Brenda left behind who was only a month old at the time of the kidnapping.
Alicia Bustamante Perez- Ñatho-Otomi Nation from Xochicuautla from the State of Mexico
Native of the Xochicuautla indigenous community, Alicia is a wife, mother, grandmother, stylist and business owner. She has dedicated the past two years fighting vigorously in defense of her ancestral land.
Odadelmis Hermelinda Leyva Villafane- National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE)
As a representative of CNTE and of the Teachers´ union local 9 in Mexico City, she has long been involved in social struggles and feminist organizations. A graduate of the rural teachers´ college (Escuela Normal) of Tamazulapan Oaxaca, she is currently an active member of the democratic section of the teachers´ union local 9.
Maria del Carmen Mata Lopez- Alliance of National, State, and Municipal Organizations for Social Justice; San Quintín, Baja California
Maria comes from a family of agricultural workers; she is a mother of 4 and a native of Juxtlahuaca, Oaxaca. She left Oaxaca at the early age of 9 and arrived in Baja California at only 11 year old. She moved around a lot because her parents were migrant farmworkers. She started working in the fields in the northern state of Sinaloa at the age of 9. All Maria´s family continue to work in the fields
Miriam Hernandez Neri- Family member of a political prisoner from the State Estado de Mexico Teachers Collective Against the Education Reform (MMCRE-CNTE in Spanish)
Her parents instilled in her awareness so she could contribute to building a just society. Her father is a carpenter and her mother a housewife and an inspiring warrior. Miriam is the sister to Oscar Hernandez Neri, a teacher who was imprisoned for defending public education and human rights in the state of Estado de Mexico. Her brother was detained illegally and after two years and four months, the government still has not released him. Miriam was born and currently resides in the state of Estado de Mexico. Mother of a 12 years old daughter, she is a middle and high school teacher who comes from a family whose members have college education thanks to their parents´ support. From an early age.
Juan Eduardo García Maganda- Student at the Normal Rural School Raúl Isidro Burgos, Ayotzinapa / Socialist Campesino Students Federation of Mexico (FECSM)
Maganda, as he is known by his peers at school, has two sisters, one older, the other younger. A native from Coyuca de Benitez, a community near Acapulco, she is currently completing the seventh semester in the pursuit of his career as a primary school teacher. He is one of the survivors of the brutal attack in which the government security forces kidnaped and disappeared the 43 students of Ayotzinapa.
National and Regional Organizations
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Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, FIOB
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National Coordination of Workers in Education (CNTE)
Berkeley
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Students for Sensible Drug Policy
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UC Berkeley Collective for Ayotzinapa
Mexico City
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Secretariat of Communications and External Relations of the Single Union of Workers of the University of Mexico City (SUTUACM)
Los Angeles
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Students for Sensible Drug Policy
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Hermandad Mexicana, LA
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Union del Barrio, LA
Oxnard
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Todo Poder al Pueblo Collective
San Francisco
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Justice for Mexico
Seattle
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Committee Against Repression in Mexico
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Legacy of Equality, Leadership and Organizing (LELO), Seattle, WA
San Diego
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African American Studies, UCSD
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American Friends Service Committee, San Diego
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Angels Without Borders
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Association of Raza Educators (ARE), San Diego
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Artful Activists
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Coalition For Labor & Community Solidarity (CLCS)
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MAMUT Collective
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Fuerza
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Fuerza Friends of Aztlan
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Colibri Aztec Dance Group Quetzalhuiliztli
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Hermandad Mexicana, San Diego
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LOFA
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Raices sin Fronteras
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UCSD Students Borders-Workers Union (UAW 2865)
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Union del Barrio, San Diego
Individuals from:
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Arizona: Berkeley, Boston,
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Oregon: Eugene, Portland, Woodburn,
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Washington: Olympia, Seattle, Yakima, Pullman,
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California: San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Watsonville
Participants In The
Caravan (Speaking Tour) for
Social Movements &
Against The Repression In Mexico
Adherents
Brief overview of the participating organizations in
The Caravan Against the Repression in Mexico
Mexico is experiencing a continued genocide. The evidence is overwhelming. In the Vietnam War, which lasted about 20 years, 58,000 US soldiers were killed. In just the 8 years since the so-called war on drug trafficking began under the Mérida Initiative, theses figures speak louder than words: 150,000 dead, 250,000 displaced, 30,000 disappeared, 6,500 women killed (during Peña Nieto’s governance only), and 500 political prisoners. This is the reality that exists in Mexico today. The recent dissident teacher-led protests have transformed into a national protest that includes the participation of broad sectors of the population. Although the teachers and the people demonstrated peacefully, the response of the Mexican State has been bloody. The fear of a widespread uprising has led the government to suppress civil rights, preventing the free movement of citizens in the streets of many towns and different roads that converge in Mexico City.
Assembly of parents of the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa
Two years after the disappearance of these future teachers, their families are still searching for them with the same urgency with which they have been since learning of their sons’ disappearances.
The independent investigations which have been undertaken with the intent to clarify the events of the night of September 26th demonstrate the collusion between criminal organizations and state forces. The government knew in real time that the students were suffering under these attacks. Even the vehicles in which the students were taken were of the police. One of the last contacts made by the cellphone of one of the missing students was recorded on the premises of the 27th Infantry Battalion, the same place where surveillance of the tragic events was maintained, including the murder of three other students, who were peers of the 43.
More information:
Facebook of the Assembly of parents of Ayotzinapa: Mothers and fathers of Ayotzinapa
Committee of survivors of June 19th, Nochixtlán, Oaxaca
On June 19th, 2016, the federal and state police attacked the people of Nochixtlán in the state of Oaxaca. This attack was carried out with firearms against the teachers, youth, and people in general, leaving a toll of 12 dead (all killed by police with firearms), hundreds injured, and extensive material damage.
This attack was initiated when the federal police opened fire against the CNTE teachers and against the people in general who were there for town square day (día de plaza). Their intention was to dislodge a strategic roadblock in order to arrive to the city of Oaxaca. Meanwhile, there was and is an ongoing resistance against mining projects in the area, which perhaps influenced the state to attack them violently. This attack sparked the fury of the people of Nochixtlán, and the fury of people throughout Mexico and the world. Protests erupted in dozens of cities demanding an end to the repression in Nochixtlán.
"The youth who were there on June 19th carried out a popular civic action of social courage, to defend the siblings, the friends, that were the teachers. When the bullets arrived, it became more and more clear to me that the youth never anticipated it. Those who shot at them were literally hunting for them. The policemen were in an elevated position, with snipers. It was a brutal hunt.” Israel Pedro Cortes, director of the Center for Training and Management for Sustainable Development of the Mixteca in Nochixtlán.
More information:
Interview with Israel Pedro Cortes, director of the Center for Training and Management for Sustainable Development of the Mixteca in Nochixtlán by Gloria Muñoz in Ojarasca, August 12th, 2016
Drawings of children Nochixtlan in Drawings
Student Committee of the Normal Rural School Raúl Isidro Burgos Ayotzinapa / Federation of Socialist Campesino (Farmer) Students of Mexico (FECSM)
Rural teacher-training (normal) schools were founded in 1922 with the momentum of the Mexican Revolution, but after 1940 they have been viewed with mistrust by governments and in turn have had to defend their valid existence with an organized base of mobilizations. There has not been a single year in which there has not been a mobilization in defense of a rural normal school. The normal schools produce critical, analytical and reflective people; they open the minds of the people and they show them the injustices that exist. The objective of the rural teachers is to teach people what their rights are; for this reason, they engage not only with the students but with the society as representatives, doctors, and even as sociologists. The student teachers created the Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico (FECSM) in 1935 to defend against repression and preserve the integrity of normal rural schools. In the ranks of the FECSM have served: Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, general secretary of the organization in 1962, five years before they interned in the Guerrero mountains and founded the Party of the Poor; Genaro Vazquez, who like Cabañas, studied at the normal school in Ayotzinapa; and, among others, Misael Núñez Acosta, who graduated from the normal school Teneria and founded the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) in 1979, assassinated two years later. Additionally, it was rural normal teachers who accompanied Arturo Gamiz and Pablo Gomez in the attack of Madera’s barrack in 1965. However, graduates of the rural normal schools have also gone into political careers in the ranks of the Institutional Revolutionary Party and the Democratic Revolutionary Party. Several have been legislators and one has been a governor.
Students of the 17 rural normal schools study dialectical and historical materialism and the biographies of organizers in social and guerrilla struggles. Some schools retain -unofficially but compulsory for all students- the following subjects: elements of economics with socialist orientations, knowledge of the problems affecting the life of the Mexican rural working class and criticism of the given solutions in light of socialist ideas, socialist orientation, and labor and farmworker legislation.
After the rural normal had participated prominently in the student movement of 1968, the then president of the republic, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, ordered the closure of more than half of these schools. The FECSM has struggled since then in the defense of the 17 schools that remain. Rural normal schools are necessary for the country and will disappear only when there is no longer poverty nor children to educate. As long as poverty exists, the rural normal schools will have a reason to exist.
The Rural Normal School of Ayotzinapa, which now bears the name of Raúl Isidro Burgos, was founded in 1926. Only low-income students can be admitted into Ayotzinapa. Most of them are children of farmers from the communities of the Mountain, Sierra, and Costa Chica of Guerrero. The students are responsible for maintenance activities as well as participating directly in the administration of their schools. In Ayotzinapa, principals cannot make decisions without consulting the committee of students. This is a right was gained long ago, in the search for a horizontal administration. The school has suffered multiple attacks from the government. In recent years, two students were killed by the police (2011) and three others were killed and 43 were disappeared in the repression of 2014.
More information:
Facebook page of FECSM: FECSM
Facebook Rural Normal School "Raúl Isidro Burgos" Ayotzinapa Guerrero: School 1 and school 2
https://www.facebook.com/FECSM-280191692322347/
Ayotzinapa
Committee of Return Our Daughters Home, City of Juarez, and Femicide in Mexico
According to a study by the UN (United Nations) seven women are murdered every day in Mexico. In 14 years (2000-2014) 26,000 women have been violently killed, and during just the government of Enrique Peña Nieto’s governance, the number rises to over 6,500. The implementation of Plan Mérida further generated the breakdown of the social fabric by increasing the level of impunity and through the systematic attacks against women that have worsened alarmingly.
Families who lose daughters, mothers, wives or sisters find little or no support from the authorities. Since almost all of these crimes go unpunished, it facilitates further the conditions which exacerbate the problem. Although international authorities have determined the classification of these murders as crimes against humanity, it has failed to produce a serious response from the Mexican government.
Return Our Daughters Home is an organization that formed in 2001 by family and close friends of murdered and missing youth. The group began with a series of protests against impotence and indignation, and against the disappearance and murder of Lilia Alejandra Garcia Andrade, who after being subjected to severe torture for five days was strangled and her body dumped in a vacant lot. When more families found each other struggling in this movement, an organization had to be created to respond to their goal of legal justice.
The work of Return our Daughters Home has taken the subject of murdered women in the City of Juarez to a national and international level. This has not only been done in terms of the dissemination of information on these horrific and painful events, but also in the search for solutions that in the face of a lack of justice in Mexico, has taken the issue outside of the country in partnership with other organizations. This is done with the intention to have the cases be investigated before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and to end this horrific massacre of women and impunity that surrounds these crimes. The founders of this organization are Marisela Ortiz (teacher of Lilia Alejandra) and Norma Andrade (mother of Lilia Alejandra). The families who participate in this movement have turned our pain into strength as we have come to face the brutal murder of our daughters and the equally brutal ineptitude, intransigence, concealment, corruption and indifference of officials and authorities.
More information on the blog Return Our Daughters Home
http://nuestrashijasderegresoacasa.blogspot.com/
Community of the Ñatho-Otomí people of Xochicuautla, State of Mexico
Xochicuautla represents the defense of the Earth and the customs of indigenous peoples. In Mexico there are more than 300 conflicts that include the fights for protection of natural resources such as forests and water, protection of sacred places and customs, and the displacement of indigenous communities and environmental pollution.
In Xochicuaultla, State of Mexico, almost all conflicts mentioned above exist. In an attempt to build a highway, the government and the private company in charge of its construction have ignored the decisions derived from the ancestral practices of the indigenous community. If the highway is built, other companies like Coca Cola will come and apart from impacting the environment by destroying the forest, they will also seize the water that belongs to the community. But Xochicuautla is just one case. Throughout the country, there are hundreds of communities living in constant danger of losing their land and customs, and when they decide to defend themselves, the risk is greater: they are attacked, imprisoned and even killed.
In their joint statement of 2015, the Zapatista Army and the National Indigenous Congress made a statement of solidarity with the struggle of the people of Xochicuautla since 2008 against the highway toll project from Toluca to Naucalpan, which includes the destruction of their sacred forest to connect the luxury destinations of Interlomas to Toluca airport. It condemns the decree signed by the government "led by the murderer Enrique Peña Nieto," which seeks to take the communal territory of San Francisco Xochicuautla. For years, security forces of the state have escorted the Autovan machinery, part of Higa Group, which want to run the destruction of the ñätho forest. However for years, the community of San Francisco Xochicuautla has resisted, and the project of death will not happen. The community has led a legal fight presenting to different courts, but most have shown to be partially aligned to protect the powerful. "We say to San Francisco Xochicuautla that they are not alone in this walk in the resistance of the indigenous peoples."
More information:
Enlace Zapatista-Comunique in support of Xochicuautla in Spanish and English.
Facebook page of Xochicuautla: Francisco Xochicuautla
National Coordination of Workers in Education (CNTE)
The National Coordination of Workers in Education is the independent wing of the Teachers’ Union of Mexico. It was born on December 17th and 18th in 1979 in the state of Chiapas. They began demanding higher wages and union democracy and ultimately has taken on the task of the democratization of the SNTE, of education, and of the whole country.
The current struggle against the neoliberal wave that is flooding the country and tries to dismantle the social security of teachers has galvanized the teachers’ movement and state repression has considerably increased to the point of reaching physically violent repression, imprisonment of leaders, and even the murder of others: David Gemayel Ruiz Estudillo, David Nuñez Juárez, Salvador Murillo Lara, and Baldomero Santiago Enriquez. The most recent case of state repression against the CNTE and the people occurred on June 19th in the village of Nochixtlán in the state of Oaxaca
The CNTE, together with other organizations and the people demand an end to the so-called Education Reform
More information:
Why the teachers fight in the struggle: Blog
CNTE Letter in Support of the Caravan Against the Repression in Mexico: Letter
CNTE on Facebook: CNTEMX
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Day laborers and agricultural day laborers of San Quintín
On March 17, 2015, the agricultural workers of San Quintín, united under the demand that they be treated as human beings, paralyzed the region. Specific requests are summarized as the following: a wage increase, decent housing (including potable water and electricity, drainage and paved streets), the end of and punishment of sexual harassment, the end of child labor and the end of labor exploitation and racism towards indigenous people.
In the Valley of San Quintín there exist about 26 domestic and foreign agribusinesses that exploit approximately 80,000 day laborers who originally come from the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, Veracruz and Chiapas and are mainly Triqui, Mixtec, and Zapotec.
An example of the exploitation is given by a woman who gets up at 3 am and works between furrows until 6 pm, in her own words, "Sometimes you are no longer able to see [with no sunlight] and they require us to fill boxes for as long as we can endure.”
The exploitation and abuse that exists in San Quintín is an example of what happens across the country as result of NAFTA, which exempted businesses from their responsibilities as employers.
More information:
Facebook page of the Alliance of Organizations for Social Justice
Facebook of the National Democratic Independent Union of Agricultural Workers: SINDJA
