We Can Pretend Mexico’s War Isn’t ‘Made in the U.S.A.’, But the Numbers Don’t Lie

From #USTired2: Stop the US Government’s Deadly Plan Mexico

For too many people living in the United States, it has been easy to ignore what’s happening in Mexico. But the plain truth is that the money that’s fueling this war is coming from one place: the United States. And it’s our job to stop it.

First, of course, there is the amount of money that drug traffickers make selling narcotics, marijuana, and amphetamines here in the U.S.: even conservative estimates put this at $30 billion each year. The drug trade is so profitable that one UN official argued that during the global banking crisis in 2008, drug money was the only thing keeping the world banking system afloat. So the drug habits of people here in the U.S. are making billions of dollars for the cartels—and therefore for the big international banks—every year, providing the monetary incentives for the kind of graft and corruption that has infected the Mexican state from top to bottom. Our love of cocaine and pot is fueling the disintegration of the entire Mexican political structure.

Read the rest of the article here.

Take action here.

Join the December 3rd National Mobilization for Peace in Mexico here.

Read more about Plan Mexico here.

Deferred (In)Action: Where’s the solidarity with indigenous people facing militarization?

From Alex Soto, 

Komkch’ed e Wah ‘osithk (Sells) 

Tohono O’odham Nation

Reposted from the O’odham Solidarity Across Borders Collective.

To all those unaware of the fine print of Obama’s immigration plan:

First and foremost, it will direct more resources to border security. Meaning…further militarization of Indigenous communities who are divided by the so-called border, such as my home community of the Tohono O’odham Nation. Our O’odham him’dag (way of life) will once again be attacked by settler border politics, as it was in 1848 and 1852 when the so-called border was illegally imposed. Attacked like we were in 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was enacted. These borderland policies are being devised and implemented without any settler consciousness to the Indigenous peoples who will be most negatively impacted by such policies. The Indigenous nations who pre-date so called Mexico and the United Snakkkes end up almost voiceless.

Basically Obama’s 2014 Immigration plan = border militarization = 21st century colonization.

So in light of Obama’s latest immigration plan, I’m writing this to say “DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE”. The plan is anti-Indigenous and anti-Migrant. Please look at the bigger picture (NAFTA). Please see the trade off. Please see the state’s 2014 divide and conquer tactics.
Then ask yourself, what does an anti-colonial migrant/Indigenous response to this all look like? What does a world without NAFTA borders look like? What does collective liberation look like in O’odham lands? Lipan Apache Lands? Yoeme Lands? Kickapoo Lands? Indigenous homelands which are now in the so-called border region?

Where’s the solidarity with Indigenous people facing militarization?

I recognize this is a complex issue. I do not want fellow Indigenous migrants coming from the southern hemisphere to be criminalized by racist laws. I do not want families to be separated, loved ones to be deported, or for them to ever have to walk the hot desert in the first place, just to have a “chance” in this neo-liberal, NAFTA world we are forced to slave in. But at the same time, I do not want my homeland to be a police state. I do not want our ceremonies to be disrupted. I do not want our jewed (land) destroyed by border security apparatus. I do not want our sky to be polluted by more Border Patrol helicopters, cameras placed atop rotating cranes as tall as skyscrapers, or drones. I do not want freedom of movement for O’odham to be granted only to the holders of bio-metric colonial passports. I do not want CANAMEX/NAFTA corridors scarring our lands with freeways (Loop 202/Interstate 11). Ultimately I do not want, in the words of my late grandfather, who saw the Berlin Wall with his own eyes while being stationed in Germany, “an O’odham Berlin Wall” built at the border.

These are just a few thoughts I have at this time. Overall I maintain my hopes we can all get our shit together. We just have to weather the neo-colonial, mainstream migrant rights industrial complex funded by the creator knows who (but is worth a longer analysis), Dream ACTors and at the same time, we also have to weather the settler state, while empowering our own community. Either way, we got this… because we have to.

#ourdreamisyournightmare

#attacktheROOTnotEACHOTHER

#OodhamRiseUP

#eeewhatBorder

#browningofamerikkka

#akathebrowningofwhite supremacy

#smash21stcenturyColonialism

#eeewhatReform

#dontbelievethehype

#sayingtheshitthatyoucantsay

For additional resources please check:

http://www.indigenousaction.org/comprehensive-immigration-reform-is-anti-immigrant-anti-indigenous/

http://oodhamsolidarity.blogspot.com/2010/04/movement-demands-autonomy-oodham.html

http://inaborderworld.org/2014/03/13/colonization_immigrant_rights/http://survivalsolidarity.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/a-call-to-action-pdf1.pdf

http://stopcanamex.blogspot.com/

Video and a Brief Explainer from the Mexico City Uprising

Correction: The text says Flores Magon’s newspaper was Metamorphis. Actually, it was Regeneración. Sorry about that. You can read the Regeneración newsletter here in Spanish or English. See a photo of one of the newsletter’s layouts, down below.

Mexico City

Riot police stomp on the teacher’s encampment in Mexico City’s El Zocalo during the September 13 eviction. Both the cathedral and the concrete sit on top of the sacred ruins of the Mexica Temples.

For a couple of weeks now, mass mobilizations have been taking place in Mexico City against the privatization of education and energy. The Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación–National Commission of Education Workers (CNTE) were joined by a large anarchist contingent and several clashes with police took place. In the next couple of days, a video was sent to Bay Area Intifada, but we didn’t want to post riots without context.

A comrade living in Mexico City–who we’ll call “Mateo” due to requested anonymity–gave us a quick rundown of what’s going on, from where he’s standing. For a larger picture of the historical context leading up to the uprising, we rapped with “Lola,” a comrade who describes herself as an economic refugee and creative thinker from the West Coast.

This is the video from Los Tejemedios, taken on 1 September:

Bay Area Intifada: I know the media filters things out (or just completely misrepresents struggles). So how would you explain what’s happening in Mexico City? (It doesn’t have to be exhaustive…just a quick explanation.)

Mateo: It’s a lot of things. It is the Partido Revolucionario Institucional–Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) back in power under President Enrique Peña Nieto, to begin with. On top of mass electoral fraud, he is now imposing serious structural reforms which include the privatization of lab, energy, and education, which are key elements protected by the revolutionary Constitution of 1917. This particular expression of discontent is being forerun by the CNTE with a national teacher strike. But now things are shifting because the mass repression is beginning to solicit a more popular response. Los Tejemedios footage from the eviction day:

BAI: And now the the people are militantly filling the streets. But these mass actions don’t often suddenly happen out of nowhere, right? Well, I guess maybe sometimes they do, but am I wrong in saying that’s not the case here? What was the buildup like before everything got heated?

M: The teacher strike began the process, which propelled into an escalation of tactics leading up to Mexico’s Independence Day. The government refused to allow the encampment [in Zocala Plaza] to continue into the Independence Day celebrations. So ironically, they evicted the encampment in order to celebrate the nation’s independence.

BAI: And going back even further–decades even–what has led up to this moment in the context of a larger political shift in Mexico?