Anarchists in Huajuapan, Oaxaca, Mark Four Years Since the Police Killing of Salvador Olmos

Communique from anarchists in Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca, marking four years since the police killing of the anarchist radio worker and land defender, Salvador Olmos (Chava)

 

To everyone, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers.

Greetings wherever you find yourself and at whatever time of the day that you read this.

Today, four years after the vile murder of our friend Chava, our pain and rage has only increased. We see that the dignity of our assassinated social fighters, and those who remain standing, rests in the hands of those that day in and day out continue the struggle–the struggle that few want to understand and that many prefer to avoid.

After seeing that social effervescence cannot be contained by fascist and ineffective confinement, where the main goal is containment and not the solution to a pseudo-pandemic, we, those that make up the komul’li, want to share with you all a little bit about who we are, what we want, and why we struggle. We believe that because we are part of this community, we owe you some answers to the questions that you have been afraid to ask.

Who are we

To make a long story short, we are the continuation of resistance that has been taking place for more than 500 years. Why do we say that? Because we are the inheritors of our Ñuu Savi (Mixteco) culture. Although now mestizos, we continue in the search for our own culture and autonomy. We are the great-great-grandchildren of those who wanted to exterminate the white invaders who sought to destroy us and erase our true history. We are great-grandchildren of the deceived and abused slaves who believed in an independence animated by Creole interests for the benefit of the invaders. We are the grandchildren of a revolution, where again we were subjected to lies, and where the rules of the game called democracy were distorted and established, once again turning our backs on the true owners of these lands. We are the children of the conscious rebellion that has been growing by leaps and bounds and that has been learning (although slowly) of successes and failures.

We are men and women of different musical tastes, clothing, literature, ages and professions. There are those that practice sports, those that play an instrument and those that draw. There are others that paint or write. There are those that eat meat and others that don’t. Some that smoke or drink and those that don’t. We are anarchists, punks, freethinkers, anawuakas, students. We are both all and none of this (as our Mayan Zapatista brothers and sisters say). We are something new because we continue the search for the equal freedom of human beings united together with other human beings. A multicultural anarchist collective (komul’li).

We are all a community, because although separated by kilometers, towns, cities, countries or languages, we continue pertaining to a living being that is bigger than us. That is, our Mother Earth that sustains us. We are united in defending our Mother Earth which we see is daily abused more and more.

What we want

As we told you before, we are driven by the search for and conquest of freedom, in all of its expressions. We do what we believe is conducive to achieving that freedom, although you might often not see our work. For several years, various actions have been carried out that have been overshadowed because antagonism has never been our style. We clean the river, organize gatherings to interchange ideas and understand our environment, participate in marches to make visible what is going on, organize small forums to spread and raise awareness of what happens beyond the television and commercial media. We do all of this because we seek in the not too distant future that the authorities who have done so much damage and plunder will be destroyed. We struggle to destroy dogmatic religions—those religions that speak of a paradise in the afterlife and that are devoted to deceiving the masses, rather than showing the beauty of living in harmony and equilibrium in the here and now without fear of a superior being. We dream of the day in which police and military forces disappear, who since their creation, have been guard dogs for the rich, and only falsely appear to safeguard and side with the humble people. How many times have we seen them defend the people from attacks perpetrated by white-collar invaders?

“Anarchy is the highest degree of order,” and it is difficult to understand this loving theory, because it has been distorted. Only a few men and women are able to see its similarities with the natural order of Tolteca communalism, where people lived to learn and develop their being, outside of the material capitalist accumulation in which we live today. This theory is very beautiful because far from being closed and dogmatic, it is flexible and evolving. It is one that gives us strength to continue struggling, to someday put it into practice in a general manner, not by force but by majority, voluntary and responsive agreement.

That is why we learn from, and relate to, all those who prefer sharing over imposition, to advance toward a new world that we carry in our hearts, and to share it with the many other worlds that exist on this living being called planet earth.

Today we watch with anger as justice is linked to the search for legality. We see how the years pass and nothing happens, we are driven to radicalism and hostility, and the desire to transform everything, anything, but always thinking in the good of our community.

If we do not get involved with their farcical party democracy or associate ourselves with social organizations, it is because we have seen and learned that over time, these institutions only profit or seek their own interests and not real change. To work with political parties and organizations like those, would be to betray our ideals and be dishonest with you all.

If some group respects us in our organizational forms, we would support them as we would any of our brothers and sisters. That is why we stand in solidarity with the feminist compañeras that have suffered from macho subjugation, that even among us, although to a much lesser degree, we are trying to eliminate. We respect the worker’s movements and the workers that search for fair treatment and fair wages, because we too, apart from being what we are, belong to this sector. Absolute respect to each one of the hundreds of families that continue searching for the thousands of disappeared in our city, region, state, so-called country and the entire world. Full support to the thousands of political prisoners that have been subject to punishment for their thoughts and attitudes that have robbed them of their freedom. And our total support to the movements that are struggling for the defense of our Mother Earth in whatever part of the world.

For all of this and many other things, health and freedom for you all!

No to the Trans-Isthmus Corridor Megaproject!

No to mining in any form!

Long live the decolonized Anahuaka resistance!

Chava lives, the anarcho-punks continue!

Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca

June 26, 2020