By Raúl Romero. Peninsula 360 Press [P360P]
Friday, August 13, 2021. In the zocalo of Mexico City, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador leads the event. 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance. 1521 Mexico ? Tenochtitlan. His speech is accurate from the beginning: "Today, August 13, a funeral date, as the master Carlos Pellicer would say, we remember the fall of the Great Tenochtitlan and we offer forgiveness to the victims of the catastrophe caused by the Spanish military occupation of Mesoamerica and the rest of the territory of the current Mexican Republic? Further on, the president also points out: "So the great lesson of the so-called Conquest is that nothing justifies imposing by force on other nations or cultures, a political, economic, social or religious model for the sake of the good of the conquered or with the excuse of civilization....".
At the same time, outside the Zócalo, prevented from moving forward by the capital police, a contingent of people from different indigenous peoples mobilized under the slogan "We are not going to let you go, we are not going to let you go. 500 years since the beginning of the resistance. They did not conquer us. There is the Otomí Indigenous Community, resident in the CDMX, who struggle for decent housing and who took over the offices of the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples to convert them into the "House of Indigenous Peoples and Communities Samir Flores Soberanes". There are also the Otomí peoples of the Autonomous Council of Santiago Mexquititlán, Querétaro, who are defending the water from their community well. There are also the United Peoples of the Cholulteca region of Puebla, who a few days ago took over the facilities of the Bonafont company as a protest against the plundering of the region's water. Also participating are members of the Binni'zaa people who in the state of Oaxaca are resisting the imposition of the Inter-Oceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
500 years later, the peoples are resisting. They resist megaprojects and the dispossession of their territories. The Yaqui people resist, and pay with jail, death and disappearances for daring to defend what is theirs. The Mayan people also resist, those who refuse to be stripped of their best lands to be sent to work in the hotels and restaurants promised to them by the misnamed Mayan Train. The people of Tecámac resist, those who denounce the scarcity of water in the face of the construction of the Santa Lucía Airport.
In Mexico, the people say, the 501st year of resistance has begun.
Raúl Romero is a sociologist, Latin Americanist and academic technician at the Institute for Social Research at UNAM.
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