Mexico: Three of the Six Indigenous Political Prisoners of San Pedro Tlanixco are Free

Communiqué From the Movement for the Freedom of the Defenders of Water and Life of San Pedro Tlanixco

Three compañerxs are already free and with us.

To the Zapatista Army of National Liberation

To the National Indigenous Congress

To the Indigenous Governing Council and its Networks of Support

To the Adherents of the Sixth Declaration of the Lancandon Jungle

To the Network Against Repression and for Solidarity

To the Women, Men and Others of Good Heart

Compañeras and compañeros:

From the Movement for the Freedom of the Defenders of Water and Life of San Pedro Tlanixco, we want to share with you our immense happiness. Today, our compañera, Dominga González Martínez, and our compañeros, Lorenzo Sánchez Berriozábal and Marco Antonio Pérez González, are free and in our community with their loved ones.

We want to thank all of you who from your strength and your heart, informed, organized and mobilized for each one of our compañerxs.

However, three compañeros remain imprisoned and two more with arrest warrants, for which the struggle for freedom and justice continues.

We will not rest until we see Pedro Sánchez Berriozábal, Rómulo Arias Mireles and Teófilo Pérez González, free. We will continue fighting so that the two compañeros who are far from their homes due to arrest warrants can soon return to their homes with their families.

Our struggle continues alongside the National Indigenous Congress, the Indigenous Governing Council and the Network Against Repression and for Solidarity. With autonomy and self-organization, we continue building a world where freedom, justice and democracy are not mere institutions of the state and instruments of capitalism, but something alive and human for everyone.

This significant victory has been fundamentally possible thanks to the organization of various collective efforts. With rebellion and resistance, every day and every night, we opened the crack in the different walls that political and economic power sought to surround us with—barriers maintaining kidnapped a woman and five men who decided to defend the water and life of our community.

Today the corrupt judicial system has not given us anything. The freedom of our compañera and our compañeros has always been an act of elemental justice—the fruit of many actions, mobilizations, letters, statements, forums, gathers, meetings, marches and rallies. Much has been said and done over more than ten years so that we can again embrace the defenders of water and life.

The repression against our community has sought to silence us, defeat us, maintain us discredited and forgotten. With state, judicial and federal police, media, racist penal codes, institutions as bureaucratic as they are inhumane, steel bars, searches, insults and contempt, they tried to gag us, but they were wrong. Our conviction of struggle has daily fed and grown. Convinced that justice is a profoundly social act, we set ourselves out the task of looking with other enraged people, other struggles, other pains, other rebellions.

And here we are, without asking, without demanding, without expecting anything from above. Our dignity stands firm as our fists, just as they did from day one. Freedom and justice beats in our collective heart, which we build daily from below and to the left.

It is not the institutions of the repressive and police state at the service of the capitalist system where the word freedom acquires direction, destiny and company. It is in the struggle, in the streets, in the town squares, in the places, in the spaces, freedom is found in the resistance.

Defense of our water and our territory is still alive in our memory. It is there where everything began, because it is there where our roots lie. As Indigenous people, as Nahua people, we endorse the commitment to uphold the principle that the land belongs to those who work it. Our struggle is for life and we will not allow them to dispossess us of our water that runs through our mountains.

We call on you all to remain attentive to the three compañeros that are still imprisoned and the two compas that still have arrest warrants out for them.

We are anti-capitalists. We come from below and to the left. From there we will continue sowing pathways toward the freedom that rises daily on the horizon of the new world; the dignified life for which we fight. That is where are efforts are directed.

Freedom and justice for Rómula Arias Mireles!

Freedom and justice for Pedro Sánchez Berriozábal!

Freedom and justice for Teófilo Pérez González.

Freedom and justice for Fidencio Aldama Pérez!

Cancellation of the arrest warrants!