[Author’s Note: Initially submitted in 2012, as part of the course material for the Master’s Program in Women’s Spirituality at the California Institute of Integral Studies. At the time of this publication, thanks to the efforts of this remarkable woman and others who have kept their unflinshing and caring commitment for the human rights of Indigenous People, the Autonomous Community of San Juan Copalá thrives and celebrates it sacred Earth-based and stars embodied cultural legacy. This is my small contribution in telling the story of Betty Cariño—herstory and history.]
“The release of convicts accused of the assassination of activists in San Juan Copalá, Oaxaca”
El caso de Alberta Cariño, van dos liberados
Humanitarian Spirituality in Action
—Or Integrating Fragmented Identities
Everyone experiences loss, but how can the personal losses experienced in my life, as a panentheist, ecofeminist woman, relatively safe in the urban U.S., be of any significance while others, who are an extension of who I am, who constitute my own larger body (Virat),[19] inseparable from this interconnected breathing System-Universe called me and/or Earth, confront ethnic cleansing, the genocide of first peoples, bleeding communities displaced from one place to another, and women that lullaby their children going to sleep in hunger night after night, and without water for basic hygiene or medicine for their elders? How do I put the luxury of my peaceful life to work for those for whom peace is not available and have little or no choices? Even in my dreams, I hear their voices sobbing in a simple and honorable desire to live.
The work of Bety Cariño was spirituality in action, whether her activism was fueled by a spiritual calling or not. He life was dedicated to protecting the lives and living conditions of those who were less fortunate. The so called First World and its leaders keep expanding the projections for consumerism, militarization, while corporate occupations and governments keep funding paramilitaries to carry out genocidal attacks against indigenous people (ethnic cleansing), while most of the people of the United States live in the midst of an economic collapse. In the midst of the present chaos, “First World” people, have much to learn from people who protect a small autonomous territory and farm their land, hold meetings of elders to keep the social order, support each other by celebrating and consuming the healing plants of the earth, and indigenous women can teach us much about sustainable ways of living, healing and dying in peace.
In what ways is our need for spiritual activism hampered by participating in a society which promotes the social club called churchgoers’ religion? Can one even be a mediocre Christian, Jew or Hindu and still support a status quo and ethnic cleansing so close to us, right in our back yard, in the southern tip of Mexico?
It is in this context that the ongoing repression and displacement of the people of San Juan Copala becomes an affront to the humanity of all freedom loving people. The assassination of first peoples, reasserted on April 27, 2010, with the ambush and shooting of human rights Mixteca activist Bety Cariño and Finnish human rights activist Jyri Jaakkola in La Sabana, a region controlled by the armed group Unión de Bienestar Social de la Región Triqui (UBICORT), a name which roughly and euphemistically translates as, “Social Welfare Union for the Triqui Region.” The Nordic male invaders that swept over egalitarian agricultural matrilineal societies, as detailed in the work of Marija Gimbutas, and the Spanish Conquerors who invaded the peoples of the original nations in the “New World,” are still informing the psycho-pathological attitudes of “divide and conquer” that the Eurocentric ruling patriarchal societies keep perpetuating for centuries and are again enacted in the massacres and murderous attacks, another form of “ethnic cleansing” against the Triqui indigenous people of the Autonomous Territory of San Juan Copala.
Reading some of the works by Cherie Moraga, I am made aware of the tremendous need for women activists in the Oaxaca region and elsewhere in Latin America to unite. At a time when Moraga “began to make political the fact of being a Chicana”[20] she recalls her brother mentioning that he never felt “culturally deprived.” Moraga goes on to describe what many so called Latina women can relate to, how males in the household are served, sure with privileges like this there is no reason why males would feel culturally deprived. The one parallel that I find between Bety Cariño and Moraga’s feminism is the way in which each broke away from being the witness to atrocities, and worked for creating their own vision of what a more just world can be. Unlike Moraga, Cariño lives in a heterosexual family environment, but much like Moraga, she had a vision of how women can help each other beyond the socially acceptable normative values of kyriarchal society.
Philosophical ethnocentricity has served to silence the voices and positions of indigenous women. Feminist Sylvia Marcos gives greater emphasis to decolonizing efforts which, according to her, “should be grounded at the epistemological level.” This is precisely the context in which Bety Cariño challenged an establishment that perpetuates the colonization of indigenous people. Through her efforts at CACTUS (Spanish language acronym for the non-profit founded by Ms. Cariño) she and others in the second caravan, challenged the colonizing stance of the government supported guerrillas, and this cost her her life. Like Cariño, many indigenous feminist women impose their efforts in ways that effectively correct what Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak calls “the international feminist tendency to matronize the Southern woman as belonging to gender oppressive second-class cultures.”[21] What is seen as by others as imposing, may be precisely what Marcos and other authors suggest by “decolonizing efforts […] grounded at the epistemological level.”[22] How else can one present a silenced, distorted and rejected indigenous epistemology to those who have imposed their culture and epistemology in your own land other than by being even more imposing, more persistent? The persistence of the Triqui and the Mixteca people is endless.
I hope that my voice contributes with a different flavor to a similar shout exposing the oppression against the Triqui nation. I believe that being a panentheist includes being a mujerista, feminist, womanist, ecofeminist, deep ecologist, and a radical and revolutionary spiritualist in solidarity with Bety Cariño and the indigenous women of San Juan Copala and the Mixteca first people of Oaxaca, Mexico. Even when I write from a different standpoint, I appreciate the academic contributions, the intimate narrative and transparency of standpoint of the self-described “movement writer”[23] and Chicana mujerista Cherrie Moraga.
In her important contribution Mujerista Theology, Ada María Isasi-Díaz describes her need for a systemic analysis, which also lays out the relationships possible between mujeristas and the oppressed, “To join the liberative praxis of the oppressed, and to have personal relationships with them, has enabled me to understand systemic oppression and to go beyond thinking, as my mother does, that persons are oppressed because they do not try hard enough to overcome the limitations of their situations.”[24] The understanding of this systemic oppression requires the in depth analysis of why are people oppressed. How do good people collude with the oppressor? How do good people stop being inactive witnesses supporting the status quo of oppression?
What makes spirituality meaningful? Spirituality for me is inseparable from an urge to experience my phenomenological, individual self rendered small by the limitations imposed by social and mental constructs (born of a conditioned mind), while experiencing I am One with the larger mass of humanity, the Hindu Virat, that inseparable “other” of greater significance than any particular “I or me,” in need of pampering, personal caring and egoic attention.
Do I want to go to San Juan Copala and become another victim? No. In A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology, the editors make reference to S. Saldívar-Hull who urges women of color under capitalism to write.[25] It is in the spirit of activism for change, activism for transforming a culture of oppression into an egalitarian culture of coexistence that I write about indigenous women and the indigenous cultures. I write as an act of defiance to the oppressor, I write as an activist and spiritual revolutionary dedicated to stir others to stop crimes against Earth and humanity.
I hope for this essay to grow from a warming to a burning voice of conscience to all good people to join in solidarity with the plight of the first peoples of San Juan Copala confronting an empire of destruction which profits from genocidal wars.
Addendum I
By Betty Cariño
Mixteca-Oaxaca-Mexico
Testimonyoffered by Bety Cariño to the Front Line Dublin Platform, February 2010
“OUR FEET STEADY AND FIRM ON THE GROUND – OUR HEADS HELD HIGH;
DIGNIFIED, WITH FOCUSED SPIRIT AND BURNING HEART BROTHERS AND SISTERS,
With my voice, I speak for my brothers and sisters of my mixteco people, from rebellious Oaxaca in this great country called Mexico. And in these lines I cannot speak of myself without speaking of the others, because I can only exist if they exist. Therefore, we exist as us.
Brothers and sisters, these women I am; a daughter, a sister, a mother, a comrade, a teacher, an indigenous woman, a Mixteca, an Oaxaqueña, a Mexican, they represent us women who go forward leading our peoples against the looting of our mother Earth, for the benefit of large transnational corporations and financial capital. Today, with our voices, with our struggles, with our hands, the legitimate wishes for social justice of the Mexican Revolution are being kept alive; our struggle is the same one the Morelos, the Magón, the great Zapata and, in today’s Mexico, the EZLN led, a struggle that has cost the lives of thousands of Mexicans, all of them poor people from the bottom of society who have fought these fights. The place they have been given in history continues to be one of exclusion and they have been forgotten. Today we, the young, the indigenous peoples and the women are at the head of this catastrophe.
Our fields now are the scenes of ruin and disaster, victims of indiscriminate commercial opening, genetically modified crops, the ambitions of the multinationals; this has consequently caused the forced migration of millions of our brothers and sisters who, in the words of my grandfather, “have to leave in order to remain”.
In Mexico the right to autonomy, the right to exist for the indigenous peoples is still being denied, and today we want to live another history: we are rebelling and we are saying enough is enough, today and here we want to say that they are afraid of us because we are not afraid of them, because despite their threats, despite their slander, despite their harassment we continue to walk towards a sun which we think shines strongly; we think the time of the peoples is coming closer, the time of unrepressed women, the time of the people at the bottom.
These days, discontent is present throughout the length and breadth of our national territory. Because of this the presence and participation of us, the women we defend, cannot be put off any more in the daily business of human rights; we want to construct a world with Justice and dignity; without any kind of discrimination; today we are pushing forward a profound and extensive process of organisation, mobilisation, analysis, discussion and consensus which is helping us to build up a world in which many worlds can fit. We are the result of many fights, we carry in our blood the inheritance of our grandmothers, our roots make demands of us and our daughters are rebelling.”
Addendum II
San Juan Copala: On the second caravan and the autonomous project, May 20, 2010
TO THE HONEST STATE, NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL MEDIA
TO THE OTHER CAMPAIGN
TO THE SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS
TO THE PEOPLE OF MEXICO
TO THE NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANIZATIONS
Twenty days after the brutal murder of our comrades ALBERTA CARIÑO TRUJILLO AND JYRI JAAKKOLA, along with others wounded by high-caliber weapons in the hands of groups completely identified with the state, there has been no justice. This impunity has favored this paramilitary group which calls itself a “SOCIAL ORGANIZATION” (UBISORT), so that it again commits another attack against the inhabitants of the AUTONOMOUS MUNICIPALITY, obeying the orders issued from the halls of government, kidnapping on May 14 comrade MARGARITA LOPEZ MARTINEZ and SUSANA MARTINEZ, holding them for approximately two hours during which they received all kinds of threats, and on May 15, this same group, commanded by RUFINO and ANASTACIO JUÁREZ HERNANDEZ, kidnapped twelve inhabitants of the AUTONOMOUS MUNICIPALITY of San Juan Copala for an entire night; during which time they were beaten, threatened and stripped of all their belongings,
including the food which they had previously bought in Juxtlahuaca, as well as money, most of it which was to pay for the Opportunities program. They are: FELIPA DE JESÚS SUÁREZ, JOAQUINA VELASCO AGUILERA, MARTIMIANA AGUILERA, ISABEL BAUTISTA RAMÍREZ, MARCELINA RAMÍREZ, LORENA MERINO MARTÍNEZ, LETICIA VELASCO AGUILERA (CHILD), ROSARIO VELASCO ALLENDE (CHILD), JOSEFA RAMIREZ BAUTISTA (CHILD), TWO CHILDREN OF FOUR YEARS OF AGE AND A ONE-YEAR-OLD BABY.
AS A RESULT OF ALL THIS WE ANNOUNCE: [Four points of understanding]
Addendum III
[transcripción de la carta que Maureen Meyer, Coordinadora Principal de Programas para México y Centroamérica, WOLA, dirigió al Gobernador de Oaxaca, Lic. Gabino Cué Monteagudo, el 10 de junio de 2011.]
[membrete papel de oficio: Washington Office on Latin America]
Lic. Gabino Cué Monteagudo
Gobernador de Oaxaca
Estimado Sr. Gobernador,
Por medio de la presente, la Oficina en Washington para Asuntos Latinoamericanos (WOLA por sus siglas en inglés) le expresa nuestra profunda preocupación por la situación que miembros del Pueblo Indígena Triqui de San Juan Copala están padeciendo en consecuencia del desplazamiento del que fueron objeto en septiembre del año pasado por grupos paramilitares. Como consecuencia de lo ocurrido, 20 personas fueron asesinadas y varios otros s imatizantes del Municipio Autónomo de San Juan Copala fueron heridos.
WOLA ha estado siguiendo los conflictos en San Juan Copala desde los hechos violentos del 27 de abril de 2010 cuando un grupo de aproximadamente 30 observadores de derechos humanos fue emboscado por un grupo armado cuando éste se dirigía a la comunidad, resultando en el asesinato de dos observadores y varios heridos. Hemos tenido la oportunidad de poder discutir con ustedes esta situación en las reuniones que hemos realizado durante sus visitas a Washington, D.C. También hemos mantenido comunicación con miembros del Pueblo Triqui quienes nos brindaron testimonio sobre la riesgosa situación que aún padece la Comunidad Triqui.
Tenemos conocimiento sobre la movilización que tuvo lugar en las semanas pasadas donde Triquis de diferentes comunidades viajaron a la Ciudad de México a pedir apoyo para asegurar su retorno, debido a la poca acción del Estado para garantizar el acceso a su territorio y continuar con su vida en paz en su comunidad como es su legítimo derecho.
En seguimiento a las conversaciones que hemos mantenido con usted sobre esta situación y por la importancia que su gobierno está dando a los conflictos en el estado de Oaxaca, le solicitamos respetuosamente informarnos sobre las acciones de su gobierno respecto a las garantías de
protección de este grupo vulnerable y para crear las condiciones de seguridad que permitiría a los desplazados del municipio autónomo poder regresar a San Juan Copala. De la misma manera, solicitamos que su gobernó lleve a cabo una investigación de los hechos de violación a los derechos humanos ocurridos en San Juan Copala y en el territorio del pueblo Triqui para poder llevar a los responsables a la justicia.
Agradezco su atención y respuesta por escrito a la presente petición.
Respetuosamente,
/S/ Maureen Meyer, Coordinadora Principal de Programas para México y Centroamérica
CC: Erendira Cruzvillegas Fuentes, Comisionada para la Atención de los Derechos Humanos del Poder Ejecutivo
Addendum IV
On 18 January, members from the community of San José del Progreso gathered to speak out against a pipeline that the mining company Cuzcatlán wants so it can exploit the community’s water resources. http://intercontinentalcry.org/zapotec-protesters-shot-on-behalf-of-canadian-mining-company/
CONTINUUM RESOURCES has been exploring/excavating underground in the lands of the Zapoteca population of San José del Progreso in Valle de Ocotlán taking advantage of the concessions/grants/ trade-off awarded to them by the Federal Government.
In 2008, the Canadian company FORTUNA SILVER MINES, INC. bought CONTINUUM´s concessions/grants/ trade-off and commenced dynamite explosions of an access ramp as part of their plans and preparation for the large scale exploitation gold and silver in the Oaxaca territory. Commercial production began Se pt, 1, 2011. The preparation period began in 2010, while the exploitation phase began in 2011, and is projected to last at least another 12 years—to process an estimated 1,5000 daily tons mineral. To achieve their goals, the company will require an enormous amount of water, which, in turn, will expel highly toxic substances into the water supplies of the whole region.
Mexican National Security Law’s is an ominous mirror-image of the US “Homeland Security,” while in the Northern empire inaction and complacency mark the paradox of a powerful nation’s people as if rendered impotent like robots, in contrast to the inspiring activism and righteous outrage, commitment and valor of the Triqui people and the people of Oaxaca.
(End of the Essay)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Swami Pujananda Saraswati.
Notes
[19] Virat: macrocosm, the physical world extending to the galactic beyond. Glossary of Sanskrit terms, http://www.selfdiscoveryportal.com/cmSanskrit.htm
[20] Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 92.
[21] Marcos, Mesoamerican Women’s, 35.
[22] Marcos, Mesoamerican Women’s, 34.
[23] Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years (Boston: South End Press, 1983), p. v.
[24] Letty M. Russell, Inheriting Our Mothers Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective, (Louisville: The Westmister Press, 1988) 102.
[25] María Pilar Aquino, et. al., A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 146.
Reference
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