As Palestinian grassroots Stop the Wall Campaign we reiterate our solidarity with the Mexican people and all those affected by the US Wall and the Trump administration’s anti-migration policies. The years of joint struggles together with Mexican movements have shown us the atrocious level of necropolitics, that include endless violations of human rights and the rights of the peoples of Mexico. Israel contributes with its weapons, technology and trainings to facilitate this veritable war on the people and reaps huge profits from this dirty business. This urgently underlines the need for the people to unite in the fight against militarization and for peace, justice and freedom.
In particular, we want to express our solidarity with those directly targeted over the last weeks by paramilitary groups. On May 23, in the vicinity of Chilapa, Guerrero, Mexico, the comrades Bartolo Hilario Morales and Isaías Xanteco Ahuejote, both of the Nahua peoples of the lower mountains of the state of Guerrero, were cruelly murdered and their bodies dishonoured. Only three days later, in Oaxaca, México, the paramilitary group ‘Antorcha Campesina’ has assaulted with machetes and firearms comrades of the Mixteca people and abducted eleven of them. Only days later those kidnapped have been released, after being brutally beaten. We demand immediate end to the killings and abuses by paramilitary and official forces and an end to impunity.
Coiniciding with US pressure on Mexico to collaborate in walling off migrants already at its southern border and to repress and criminalize them instead of supporting them, last week Irineo Mujica from Peoples Without Borders and Cristóbal Sanchez have been arrested by Mexican forces and have been released only a week later because of lack of evidence. We demand an immediate end to the imprisonment of human rights defenders and an end to anti-migration policies and Walls.
The indigenous peoples, peasant communities and grassroots activists suffer no doubt the most cruel daily repression and violence, yet, the attacks last week reached the Senate of the Republic, where Senator Citlally Hernandez was the target of an attack operated through a book-bomb. We are glad to know she is in good health.
We express our deep solidarity with the people of Mexico in struggle for their rights and against militarization and criminalization. We share the sorrow with the families, friends and communities of all those that suffer the continuous attacks and have lost their dear ones.
As Palestinians we know very well the sufferings of other brotherly people, since we live the effects of war, militarization and displacement day by day, but it is not only that which connects our struggles. Israel’s machine of military and ‘security’ companies, institutions and its models of repression, aggravates and gains profits from Mexico’s militarization. In the ‘Second Popular Tribunal on the Role of Israel in the militarization of Latin America – Mexico Chapter’ we have highlighted how our struggles are directly connected. Israel has been supporting and profiting for decades on the most serious human rights abuses in the continent and in Mexico.
Israel has exported the ideology of walls to the Mexican border and beyond. The world has ushered into an era of walls. Israel has found ways and allies to normalize walls and their related regime of exclusion, oppression and dispossession. Within a world where supremacist and racist politics are gaining ground as tools to perpetuate colonial, neoliberal, racial, gender and many more injustices, Israel is today a role model for most of the political forces of the rising far right.
We promise that we will not tire until we have broken these nefarious ties of complicity. The weapons and methods that kill the Palestinian people shall not continue to kill and repress the Mexican people! A military embargo on Israel is urgent today more than ever!
We deeply appreciate the solidarity that we have received from the Mexican territories, from Oaxaca to Tijuana. Only recently, from Mexico City to the communities in Oaxaca and other places, numerous initiatives of BDS and commemoration of the Nakba, the beginning of the ethnic cleansing of our people and the Israeli apartheid regime, have been taking place.
As Stop the Wall Campaign we call for an intensification of our joint struggle against the militarization of our peoples, our lives and our lands and their borders. We have to stand together to ensure that, neither in Palestine nor in Mexico, not one more will be dying or lingering in prisons for the basic and inalientable rights with which we are all born.
Together towards freedom, equality and justice!
Together for a World without Walls!