In the rebellious Garifuna territory of Vallecito, Iriona, Colón, Honduras, with the presence of the elements of nature that make life grow and the hopes of those of us who walk to arrive at the Encounter, where more than 1200 women and approximately 350 girls and boys were embraced by the gathering as the continuity of life and word from Choluteca, El Paraíso, Copan, Olancho, Valle, Francisco Morazán, Gracias a Dios, Colón, Yoro, Cortes, Atlántida, Intibucá, Lempira, La Paz, Comayagua, Santa Bárbara.
With the ancestral presence of Margarita Murillo, María Enriqueta Matute, Berta Cáceres, Magdalena Morales and Tía Macucu, who in one spirit, thought and strength accompany us in all our actions. The energies of the people of Tolupán, Lenca, Misquito, Garífuna, Pech, Maya Chortí, and of the peoples in struggle were felt. We came together ten years after the coup d’état and the resistance of the people of Honduras, of the women of Honduras.
The Encounter salutes the strength and rebellion of the women, those who are present, those who did not come, those who are not physically present. We recognize that in spite of the wounds and pains of violence and oppression that impact on bodies, territories, and organizational processes, we have the enormous conviction and decision to continue thinking, creating, and working together.
The strength of the indigenous peoples’ worldview was present and expressed in spiritualities, wisdoms, experiences of resistance and ways of relating to nature and life.
In debate and conversations during the spaces of meals, breaks, work we were gathering our common words that we share now.
The coup d’état, which has become a dictatorship, has deepened the extractivist model that threatens the life projects of women and peoples, a regime of dispossession of common goods, identities, bodies, knowledge, spiritualities sustained by corruption, impunity, drug trafficking, militarization, persecution, criminalization of our sisters who fight in all the territories of Honduras.
We are living a humanitarian crisis, the product of this dispossession, which is expressed in a cruel and forceful way in the migratory exodus of our sisters and brothers causing the emptying of the territories that has had an terrible impact on people and the community social fabric and favours extractive projects that meet increasingly less opposition.
We call ourselves to the urgent need to recover and multiply the existing practices of autonomy and to propose anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, inclusive and diverse sovereign alternatives, due to the evident failure of the exercise of masculine power based on the democratic electoral colonial model, which attacks women and peoples.
We see with concern the increase in normalized violence against women’s bodies, which becomes a territory where the frustration of a macho and heteropatriarchal culture is marked, often led by men of the social movement, and encouraged by the increase in militarization and religious fundamentalism. It is true that it has retreated, but at the same time it has strengthened the role of women in the struggle with greater political clarity, knowledge, mobilizing capacity and revival of diverse struggles where they have been placing their thoughts, their voice, their bodies and their actions before each other. No violence is going to stop us.
From this meeting we commit ourselves to continue meeting in collective rebellion, to agree on the struggles of all and to rethink a Honduras without dictatorship, with autonomy and popular and women’s sovereignties.
Ten years after the coup, we continue to fight together.
For a Honduras without dictatorship.
Vallecito, Iriona, Colón June 29, 2019