The Nahuatl phrase totlajtol nejnemi means 'the word that walks'. It is the name chosen by the brigade of Citizens' and People's Police (PCP) that came from Guerrero to Tenochtitlán (Nahuatl word for Mexico City), according to the statement shared among the residents of Tlalpan this week.
I sat on a bench in the main plaza to listen to their presentation of their reason for being:
"We want our people to stop being factories for migrants and cheap labor. We want our children and grandchildren to have their own land in full development of all areas of life. These are, among others, the reasons that give life to our organization. This is why we invite you to join this movement. We do not want war. We love life, liberty, nature and peace."
Like the majority of Mexicans, these men, with their machetes in their belts, are fed up with abuses of power. These men are brave and seem willing to protect themselves from the cowardice in which the governing children of neoliberalism have settled themselves. Because a country in which children, rather than being in school, work and are exploited, while bureaucratic officials, legislators and IFE counselors feed themselves with large spoons, is a country of cowards.
More than anything else, what happens to the women being killed, raped, disappeared without the guilty being punished, is cowardice. It is a lack of shame--as Lula [da Silva, former president of Brazil] said--that explains the impunity and abandonment of the weakest: children, youth, women, indigenous, peasants and workers. It is despicable, a vile thing to compromise our oil and run over the teachers and the public school.
In Mexico it's not a lack of money but of fairness, commitment, dignity and intelligence in the service of the people. A brief look at the news in recent weeks shows the state of barbarism in which we live, while those are busy with their reforms and ad hoc agreements for their personal projects:
- Two women disappear every day in Edomex [state of Mexico, adjacent to Mexico City];
- There has not been a single conviction for gender violence;
- One of every ten children in Mexico work;
- There is a surge of children trained to kill by narco hitmen;
- Six million children between the ages of 3 and 17 cannot go to school;
- Over 1,000 boys work in the agricultural fields of Nayarit;
- More than 18 million children are in extreme poverty according to the INEGI [National Institute of Statistics];
- Mexico has 145,000 millionaires and 2,540 multi-millionaires
- There are more super-rich in Mexico than there are, on average, globally from 2007 to 2012.