King foreshadowed that if we maintain our exploitive economic and political systems, then we’d get not only racial apartheid, but economic apartheid as well. And unfortunately, that is exactly where we’re heading without systemic change.
Today, indigenous people in Argentina are struggling to preserve their way of life in a scenario made complex mainly due to conflicts over land. Ninety-two percent of indigenous communities do not have titles to the land they live on. “There are still legacies from the colonial era and the history of exclusion is still highly visible,” explained James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples.
A quarter century after their uprising, perhaps the most meaningful gift from the Zapatistas is a spark of hope, a sense of what is possible, even in dark and uncertain times.
As he milks his cow, Salvadoran Gilberto Gomez laments that poor harvests, due to excessive rain or drought, practically forced his three children to leave the country and undertake the risky journey, as undocumented migrants, to the United States. “They became disillusioned, seeing that almost every year we lost a good part of our crops, and they decided they had to leave, because they didn’t see how they could build a future here,” Gómez said as he untied the cow’s hind legs after milking.
Muffling the voices of civil society rarely works over long periods of time, and the anti-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign, now penetrating the very heart of US government, is bound to eventually resurrect a nationwide conversation. Is protecting Israeli Apartheid more important to Americans than preserving the fundamental nature of their own democracy?
In walking out of their country en masse, Hondurans are making a loud, bold statement about the extreme injustices they face at home.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019