Pax Lumina 5(3)/2024/13-16
Eugenia Legorreta
Indigenous and Intercultural Affairs Programme Coordinator at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.
In Mexico around 12% of the population belong to indigenous groups, nevertheless their historic situation has been complex and shaped by colonization, cultural assimilation, and discrimination. They have been forced to struggle for their rights and for acknowledgement of their territories.
In the indigenous peoples’ worldview their territories are more than just the borders of the land they live on and cultivate; they are spaces where life is sustained, where relationships are formed, where language is practiced and taught. Constructing ways to imagine and perceive the world. This includes a particular relationship with the natural world, and the creation of spaces where people gather and express their thankfulness for being alive.
In many indigenous communities, people have been forced to collectively organize to protect their territories from industrial projects, invasive state infrastructure projects, and even organized crime. This defense requires organization and creates pain and suffering, especially because it is carried out with lesser means and resources.
The reason people in these indigenous communities resist is to defend life itself, not just their territories, but the means to preserve life and nature for all the people who inhabit this planet. Indigenous peoples in the Americas have been forced to resist for over five hundred years.
This dynamic has been worsened by the onset of megaprojects, these are large-scale ventures in the mining, oil and gas, etc. industries that have a profound impact on the environment and involve massive budgets. They affect communities and towns in multiple ways, ranging from being displaced from their ancestral lands, ecosystem degradation, disruption of traditional ways of life, alteration of social and cultural systems, and human rights violations.
Several impacts are felt immediately by the communities, but there are others that pollute water and the environment, affecting life on the planet. For these reasons, people are forced to engage acts of organized resistance in order to defend life. Some examples of acts of resistance are protests, land occupations, legal battles, pilgrimages, blockades and social media campaigns.
According to the indigenous worldview of the Rarámuri people, Onorúame (God Father-Mother) placed us on Earth to care for it, never considering it as a resource to be exploited. Accumulating and hoarding are frowned upon and considered unnecessary because there is trust that, if the land and what sprouts from it are cared for, there will be enough for everyone. Sharing is a very important value for the Rarámuri people.
An example of community organization for territory defense can be found in the community of San Elias Repechique, which had to confront the construction of a gas pipeline, an airport, and unfettered deforestation. San Elías Repechique is a community in the Sierra Tarahumara, in the municipality of Bocoyna, Chihuahua state, in northern Mexico, located at 2368 meters above sea level. It is inhabited Rarámuri people.
Embarking on a territory defense process entails a series of difficulties; fortunately, Repechique was able to have a public assembly (refers to a gathering of community members for purposes such as decision making and problem solving. The assembly serves as a means for community members to come together and address relevant matters) to enable unity in its organization. When faced with the intrusion of megaprojects upon their territories, communities had to strengthen their ability to unite and act.
New relationships were formed with journalists and non-governmental organizations that supported them. They came up with new defense and outreach strategies, gaining support from various organizations, public and lawyers who promoted appeals and lawsuits that they won. The community assembly played a very important role because all decisions were made there, and people were informed, preventing external forces from dividing them.
The people of Repechique established that the airport damaged people’s way of living in their communities because it led to deforestation, reduced rainfall leading to difficulties in planting and harvesting corn, contaminated water, blocked trails used for animal grazing and local roads, and generated air pollution which affected the health of people living there.
In the case of the airport, when the community won the appeals, it had already been built, so as compensation they were granted a trust fund of 65 million pesos. The money was supposed to be allocated to social projects.
Nevertheless, Raramuri people have not ceased to inhabit their community; they have maintained connections with other social movements, continue to seek the means to lead a dignified life according to what is agreed upon in the assembly, and have sought support from groups outside the community. All of this has allowed them to keep resisting megaprojects, especially in defense of the forest.
The road they tread is long and going thought it requires a lot of courage and perseverance in spite of unjust conditions and being at a disadvantage. Despite the setbacks refusing to lose the conviction that they are defending the life of all species that inhabit the planet. Those acts of resistance exist as an alternative to the exploitation of nature and people caused by laisse faire capitalism. For these spaces to endure there needs to be a higher awareness of the struggle indigenous communities have to go through to protect their way of living.