On August 22, 2020, the ORCAO paramilitary organization looted and burned two Zapatista coffee warehouses in Cuxuljá, Chiapas. This is the latest in an accelerating series of attacks on the Zapatista project since the current administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) took office.
Many of you will remember that in 2017 as Trump took office, the Zapatistas sent four tons of their coffee harvest to migrant and other communities in struggle in the United States as an organizing resource. Now we need to organize our own coffee solidarity effort — not only to help recover the cost of the lost harvest, but to show there is widespread solidarity with the Zapatista project.
The Zapatistas have been one of few voices to denounce AMLO’s purportedly “progressive” government for doubling down on previous administrations’ socially and environmentally destructive capitalist megaprojects. These policies have dispossessed hundreds of thousands of their land and resources and made Indigenous and other communities resisting such projects the target of state and paramilitary repression. It is important to note that one of the principal investors in these megaprojects is the world’s largest financial firm, BlackRock.
Support the Zapatista project, a project that has not only created a horizon of dignified self-organization that has inspired all of us, but also shown profound and far-reaching solidarity with our own struggles. Solidarity means acting from the knowledge that in the face of destruction and dispossession, our best resource is each other!
