April 9, 2011

To the Wirikuta Defense Front of Tamatsima Waha’a

To the Civil Society in General

To the Three Powers of the Mexican State

Will they understand in time? The governments and corporations that control the material order of the world be capable of understanding in time that the disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis that only manage to define as natural phenomenon are the furious word of those our people know as kaka+yarixi, deities or fundamental forces of nature that feel, think and have the word that permits us to live?

For us, these disasters have an urgent message so that humanity try another way to relate with nature. We don’t know if government officials will be capable of listening and attending to the call in time, because they don’t show any signs of being good at dialog.

After our sacred site of Wirikuta was ordered by governmental decree and a management plan that protects it, the government grants concessions to a Canadian mining company that threatens the Sierra of Catorce and the desert lowlands that comprise this sacred zone, in the municipalities of Charcas, Villa de la Paz, Villa de Ramos, Zacatón, Catorce, Matehuala and Villa de Guadalupe.

We have been for more than seven months demanding that the government of our country cancel the concessions of the mining company First Majestic or Real Bonanza in the Sierra of Catorce and we have heard no response from any of the municipal, state or federal institutions. So what good, then, are the agreements, the decrees, the management plans and the word of Felipe Calderón dressed as a Wixárika promising the protection of our sacred places at the hour of signing the pact of Hauxamanaka just two years ago?

We have been demanding for more than seven months and once again, we make our demand:

That the federal government cancel the 22 mining concessions to the Canadian company First Majestic Silver Corp. and its Mexican “prestanombres” (one who loans his name in order to conduct business), Real Bonanza S.A. de C.V. Mining in this sacred place not only destroys a fundamental pillar of the Wixárika culture, it is an attack that brings as a consequence many natural disasters and death.

The mining company asks us to let them extract minerals from the sierra in exchange for giving us the Cerro Quemado. We explained to them that the Sierra of Catorce is a sacred whole for which mining is not possible, and respect to the Quemado. From the South to the North, the sierra is a collection of kaka+yarixi or fundamental ancestors and the springs that are essential for the rain and the fertility of our country. Wirikuta free of mining and of projects that destroy her natural fragility is what we are demanding that the government enforce.

We are not alone in this struggle. Every day more support is growing for the defense of Wirikuta. The Tamatsima Waha’a front, of which we are the point of the arrow, is constituted of numerous Mexican civil organizations and from other places in the world who are working intensely to offer solutions and build alliances with other peoples and other movements that also defend the roots of life.

We appreciate the support of the indigenous people of the United States and Canada, organized in the Native American Church and of course our brothers of the National Indigenous Congress.

We have organized conferences, debates, festivals to sprad the word of our right to be respected and we plan still more musical festivals and gatherings and creative activities so that this threat of extermination be detained.

This is the path of our struggle. In what other way does the government want us to remind it of its historic and moral constitutional obligation to respect our fundamental patrimony, the patrimony of all Mexicans and all of humanity?

Listen, ladies and gentlemen of the government and who dominate the corporations: Wirikuta is the matrix of life. Matrix of the rain and of fertility. A place to remember our origen and the natural future of humanity. There is no room there for either mines nor industrial tomato growers. There is room for other projects so that the ejidal campesino families who live in Wirikuta, and those of us in the Wirikuta Defense Front have proposals for that.

We salute with respect all of those who have put first their dignity in the face of so many years of dispossesion and discrimination that today Wirikuta has as one of the zones with the highest immigration rates in the country. We salute with the same respect the campesinos of Wirikuta who wait through this criminal exploitation with hopes of an improvement in their living conditions and who hope too with the pain of seeing their children go to the United States, Monterrey and other places to neer return, and who hope for the beginning of the mining exploitation with the pain of seeing that the uncontrolled ambition for money wants to do away with the sacred rain that keeps us alive, to throw them off their lands or make them accept with humility the mining alternative, who await First Majestic with the pain of living with the contamination of heavy metals left behind by the mining activities of the past.

To you, our brothers, our proposal is to change from below, from the local organization of so much injustice that you are now living, reconstructing your social fabric. We have made your situation our own and we are working so that between us we may demonstrate that we are capable of constructing dignified alternatives.

We appreciate the initiatives that are being worked on in an organized manner for the realization of cultural festivals, especially the group of artists and intellectuals who have joined this struggle. We exhort them to continue with this historic force and to trust in our organizational structure headed by our assemblies and tradtional authorities, projected in the path of the Wirikuta Defense Front of Tamatsima Waha’a.

We send our recognition and congratulations to the companions with whom together, we are the Wirikuta Defense Front of Tamatsima Waha’a for the nomination of an international award in the category of Human Rights, which is our demonstration that civil society can organize using the tools of communication that we count on, for which we call on the civil society to support this nomination by voting for our website and the other campaigns that have been launched by our movement.

We wish to reiterate the need to maintain an interlocution and coordination of confidence through the Jalisco Association in Support of Indigenous Groups (AJAGI), and to avoid delays in communication in our communities, which is indeed complicated.

This is what we wish to communicate to the people of Mexico and the Mexican State. It is what we reiterate from the Colonia Rivera Aceves, locality of Waut+a, in this tenth reunion of the Regional Wixarika Council for the Defense of Wirikuta conformed by our traditional and agrarian governments, kawiterutsixi and mara’akate and this is what we communicate to all of our friends of the Front, the journalists, intellectuals, groups of artists, politicians and to the society and general.

Attentively

Wirikuta is not for sale, Never again a Mexico without us.

 

REGIONAL WIXARIKA COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENSE OF WIRIKUTA

Tiway+la- Colonia Rivera Aceves,
C.l. San Sebastián Teponahuaxtlán a 9 de abril de 2011

POR WAUT+A SAN SEBASTIÁN TEPONAHUAXTLÁN y KURUXI MANUKÁ

OCTAVIANO DÍAZ CHEM Presidente C. B. C.

EMILIO CHINO LÓPEZ

Tesorero C.B.C.

GONZALO GARCÍA DE LA CRUZ Secretario C.B.C.

JOSÉ GUADALUPE SERIO DE LA CRUZ Gobernado Waut+a

POR LA COMUNIDAD DE TUAPURIE SANTA CATARINA CUEXCOMATITLÁN

JUAN TORRES GONZÁLEZ Presidente C. B. C.

MARCOS COSIO DE LA ROSA Secretario C.B.C

JULIO DE LA CRUZ CARRILLO Gobernador

POR LA COMUNIDAD UWENI MUYEWE COMUNIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE BANCOS DE SAN HIPÓLITO

SANTOS DE LA CRUZ CARRILLO Presidente del Comisariado Autónomo de Bienes Comunales

HERMENEGILDO CARRILLO CARRILLO  Jefe de Manzana de Mesa Alteña Anexo Uweni Muyewe

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Versión en Español

http://frenteendefensadewirikuta.org/PDF/Pronunciamiento-de-la-Rivera-Aceves-09y10abril.pdf