JUNE 29, 2021
To the peoples and governments of the world
From the sacred lands of San Diego Xayakalan, communal territory of Santa Maria Ostula.
For the last Twelve years we have met to commemorate that, by agreement of the general assembly of the community members, supported by a strong mobilization by the community police and the communal guard, we recovered more than a thousand hectares of land that had been violently invaded by so-called small landowners of La Placita, Michoacán. They justified this on the basis of technical mistakes in the Ostula official map, that superimposed these supposed small properties on top of communal lands.
Even though our lands are protected as farmland, with this dispossession they aim to treat the area in conflict as thought it were composed of small properties, so that it can serve the capitalist interests of the criminal and business groups, who have subjugated our mother earth for many years, seeing her as a source minerals, destroying the mountains and contaminating the rivers. They see her as precious woods to be sold, with the shameless help of the government, to oriental markets, passing through the ports of Lázaro Cárdenas y Manzanillo. Because she is bordered by the Pacific Ocean, they see her as an appropriate space for the movement of firearms and drugs.
All of this is measured in millions of dollars by governments, business, and criminales, but we measure it in the blood and suffering of our peoples, since they have taken 41 community members (among them two minors), who have been murdered or disappeared by military or criminal groups, with complete impunity.
But for our community, it is and will always be our land, the same land that our parents and grandparents fought for, the same one that we sow and that we honor in our traditional feasts.
The federal government has gravely failed in its constitutional responsibility to give us, as original peoples, legal instruments that will permit us to defend what is ours, which was recognized in the presidential resolution of April 27, 1964. This same resolution marks the boundaries from the Pacific Ocean to the stone landmark known as La Majahuas, including the immovable points: the hills of Mancira, La Lagunita, San Franciscote and Tepataxte, whose location has not been recognized in the trial by limits of the file 78/2004 of the United Agrarian Court of district 38 based in the city of Colima.
Therefore, this past June 21, together with our legal team, we submitted an appeal to the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation, to determine the “proper demarcation, boundaries and legal protections that are effective on the communal lands, and what are the probational standards in cases of invasion of particular communal properties,” since the legal instances have used the map with technical deficiencies that were pointed out by the reviewer of the Secretary of Agrarian Reform, engineer Fracisco Osorio Labastida, in 1958, without having been corrected before the Presidential Resolution. These mistakes were documented and pointed out by the Superior Agrarian Tribunal, who ordered an expert review that has not been fulfilled to this moment.
That’s why today, on June 29, 2021, twelve years after the recovery of our communal lands, we decided of course not to take a step back in the protection and defense of our territory. Our dead and our disappeared ones are the biggest conviction we have to not allow them to snatch a square centimeter more. The greater the attack on our mother earth, the greater will be the response of our organization.
Lastly, we send a fraternal greeting to everyone who has raised their voices in favor of our struggle, those who have demanded justice alongside us. We ask you to once again spread the word, to write and disseminate the reason why powerful interests have tried to silence us. We ask you to stay tuned to the words of our community inviting you to participate in the campaign for solidarity that we have launched to stop new injustices from happening, which will be a new escalation of violence, whose consequences could be worse than the trail of blood that we has followed us these twelve years.
June 29, 2021. .
Never Again A Mexico Without Us
Indigenous Community of Santa María Ostula