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Almost five hundred years ago Tenochtitlan was besieged by an army made up of Spaniards and their allies, the defense of the city can be compared to other stories that tell the dramatic days that take place around a besieged city: heroic and desperate gestures, lack of food and fresh water and, in the case of Tenochtitlan, the arrival of mass death due to smallpox. The site lasted for months, from May 26 to August 13, 1521. I try to imagine the last rales of the defense, house by house, the last attempts to avoid the establishment of the new order that ended the world as it was known in these land. The political and government structures would definitely change, and not only that, the decline that the native population suffered between wars, terrible epidemics and famines was dramatic and shaped a different world; This should have been lived as an apocalypse. The conquest of these lands not only sealed the fate of this side of the world but that of the world completely. This world, as we know it today, ordered by three major systems, colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism, consolidated in the midst of that catastrophe. Capitalism needs the colonial order, just as colonialism was not established by a matriarchy. It is deeply embedded systems. Racism, which orders and classifies bodies, is a child of colonialism as machismo is of patriarchy and the classism of capitalism.
This complex system of three heads implanted by the colonial order was perfected with the establishment of national states. The national state provided a structure that has given legal framework to these systems, it is not surprising then that racism has been legal and institutional, that the countries that were born excluded women as citizens with the right to vote and that the state is the protector of capital The legal framework of the world's democracies has sheltered patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism. If we pass the reality through this sieve we will not realize that apparently disconnected phenomena arose from the same matrix of oppression systems, from subsystems within a larger system. We cannot talk about indigenous peoples without talking about the struggles of the Afro-descendant population or without talking about the struggle for respect for the human rights of migrants or the struggle of women around the world. For example, the struggle of indigenous peoples and the struggle for the rights of migrants have the state in common: it is the state that has fought the existence of indigenous peoples and it is the borders of the state that become a obstacle to the free movement of people. The establishment of the colonial order, which is in turn patriarchal and capitalist and which now administers the state, ordered reality and created categories of oppression as "Indian," the colonial order established the slave trade from Africa and enhanced capital accumulation. . To achieve all this, keeping women in a category of oppression was also essential.
The consequences are visible. I write these lines at a time in history when they announce and begin to experience the ravages of something called "climate change." In a short time this system of three main ingredients is ending the planet. The site of the world has begun. The forecasts are discouraging and agents who could do something to stop this death process are doing almost nothing and it seems they will not. In such a context, the consequences of the damage to the environment announce radical socio-political effects: new privileges will be created, massive migrations of people who are more vulnerable to the environmental catastrophe will be increased, we will suffer a frontal attack on the territories of indigenous peoples to become of the inputs that capitalism needs to perpetuate itself, a resurgence of border control, among many processes all crossed by gender. You feel the inevitability of the catastrophe that stands before humanity, that tension that announces the imminence of a terrible and complex event. Inequalities will increase framed in an environmental crisis never seen before. Every social struggle will need to accommodate within the reality that the increasingly growing effects of climate change draw.
I suppose that same tension that I now perceive felt the inhabitants of this side of the world five hundred years ago, the imminence of an ineffable catastrophe. Against all odds the indigenous peoples continue to exist, despite the death and apocalypse of five hundred years ago. How was that possible? Because in the midst of catastrophes, resistance is articulated that bets on life and despite a context that provides so much death. Of that catastrophe that comes, of the tension that precedes it and of the articulation of the resistances I will be speaking in these lines, because, against all odds, here we continue.
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