Shadi Rohana: Solidarity with the People of Gaza from the Mexican Periphery Shadi Rohana - Al Jazeera
go to original August 14, 2014

Mexican Youth Express a Message of Solidarity to the Palestinian People - Activate the subtitles with the CC button (PabloAntonioTonatiuh)

And one morning all that was burning,

one morning the bonfires

leapt out of the earth

devouring human beings

(…) bandits with black friars spattering blessings

came through the sky to kill children

and the blood of children ran through the streets

without fuss, like children's blood

(…) Come and see the blood in the streets.

Come and see the blood in the streets.

Come and see the blood in the streets!

This fragment of Pablo Neruda's Espana en el Corazon (Spain in the Heart) was first published in Santiago de Chile in 1937 as an ode to the Republican martyrs and fighters in the war against fascism in Spain. On July 22, these words were recited in Mexico City for the opening of Gaza en el corazon poetry reading, which was part of a series of events in solidarity with the captive Palestinian people in the Gaza.

The event was held at Casa Refugio Citlaltepetl, a cultural centre that hosts writers who have been targets of political persecution in their home countries. It brought together poets, artists and writers from Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina, Guatemala, Iran, the United States, Switzerland and Palestine, all living in Mexico, who answered a call for "an urgent poetic action against the rampant spread of death and destruction in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military, and for the life and hope of a people forced to live the nightmare of war".

Among the speakers was Sylvia Marcos, a Mexican university professor and scholar, renowned for her activism for Indigenous causes in the Americas. The granddaughter of Palestinian immigrants from the city of Bethlehem, as well as a supporter and intellectual companion of the rebellious Indigenous Zapatista movement in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, Marcos referred to the Palestinian cause and the Indigenous one in Mexico as "fraternal struggles, waged by those who were dispossessed of their lands, water, trees and lives".

This declaration echoes the Zapatistas's stance toward the Palestinian cause, which they have maintained since their uprising on January 1, 1994. In a recent meeting at the Realidad Trinidad community in the Lacandon Jungle, Comandante Tacho of the Zapatista National Liberation Army told representatives of 300 autonomous communities:

"We, as Indigenous [people], know very well that what occurs [in Gaza] is not a 'conflict', but an extermination war against the Palestinian people. When Palestinians will rise up and resist again, they will know that the Zapatista peoples, despite geographical distance, are embracing Palestinians today with our collective heart, as we have always done."

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