<nettime> Grzinic: https://convivialityaspotentiality.akbild.ac.at/diary

You can read the report of a historical momentum.

https://convivialityaspotentiality.akbild.ac.at/diary/

A HISTORICAL MOMENTUM: ZAPATISTAS* AND REPRESENTATIVES* FROM MEXICAN AUTONOMOUS INDIGENOUS GROUPS ARE IN EUROPE

On September 22, 2021, we were in Vienna for a historic event. A delegation from Mexico landed at the Vienna airport at 19:00. The delegation, composed mainly of women, represent the indigenous autonomous government structure in Mexico.

The group consisted of wo/men* from National Indigenous Congress (CNI, Congreso Nacional Indígena), then Indigenous Government Council (CIG, Concejo Indígena de Gobierno ) and representatives of the Peoples' Front in Defense of the Land and Water of Puebla, Morelos and Tlaxcala (FPDTA, Frente de Pueblos en Defensa de la Tierra y el Agua de Puebla, Morelos y Tlaxcala).

The Zapatista representatives*, who had landed in Vienna a week earlier with supporters and alternative media, awaited the delegation with posters and banners ("The Tour for Life welcomes you!") and also chanted. The group waiting for the delegation also included independent journalists who had traveled to Europe with the Zapatistas, as well as insiders from the Zapatista movement who streamed the entire event.

A delegation of Zapatista Army from National Liberation on their now incessant "Tour for Life" decided a few months ago, despite Covid-19, to reverse the colonial journey of old imperial Europe to Latin America. From Mexico they set out for Europe.

The discovery of Latin America is a colonial myth and that is why the indigenous people who lived there and did not need to be discovered called the continent Abya Yala, because Latin America is a colonial name. The tour reclaims life. Abya Yala means "land in its full maturity" in the Kuna language. The Kuna believe that there are four life cycles that have developed planet Earth and that we are now living in the last life cycle. This is a prophetic view because death as murderous destruction of the environment is closely linked to the genocidal policies, suppression of basic human rights and proxy wars of imperial and colonial neoliberal capitalist states. Death sits at many kitchen tables as precarity, racism, discrimination, deportation, it is very close, but not equally for each of us.

The delegation that landed on September 22, 2021 came to Europe to join the Zapatista "Tour for Life." The delegates, as they state in their communiqué, belong to the Mayan people of Yucatán, Campeche and Quintana Roo; Popoluca from Veracruz; Biniza from Oaxaca; Purépecha from Michoacán; Rarámuri from Chihuahua, Otomí from Mexico City and Nahua from Jalisco, Puebla, Michoacán and Morelos. They see themselves "in this historic march of the Zapatista peoples, in which they recognize perhaps the last opportunity to propose a new course of humanity, which is the struggle for life."

The delegation will travel across the European continent in support of and alongside the Zapatistas, as they explain in the communiqué, "to communicate to the world what is happening in their territories and in their country through the capitalist system and its deep-rooted corruption and within the system that serves money and sows death where it stands." In contrast, the Zapatista* and indigenous delegates* want to connect with the European grassroots movement, the people and groups operating from below and to the left.

And that is why the "Tour for Life" and the representatives who have come to Europe from Mexico, as the communiqué states, "call on the peoples, the groups, the students, the workers and the organizations to listen to us in the common language in which we understand each other, without fear, without giving up and determined not to take a single step back. In other words: We fight for life." (M. Grzinic)