Democracy Ateneo Announcement 2-16-13

Compañer@s,

The ateneo scheduled for this Saturday, February 16 follows an exciting week of encounter and learning with Tony Nelson of the Mexico Solidarity Network in Chicago <http://mexicosolidarity.org/> and Pablo Obando of the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Human Rights Center in Chiapas <http://www.frayba.org.mx/>.

Tony Nelson shared some of MSN's most prominent projects organized around international solidarity with Mexico --a solidarity that insists it emerge "from below and to the left." MSN pursues some of its projects through strategic collaborations with the CNUC in Tlaxcala and the FPFVI in DF. Some of the primary projects in its home-base of Chicago are the Study Abroad Program <http://mexicosolidarity.org/studyabroad>; Autonomous University of Social Movements (AUSM) <http://mexicosolidarity.org/ausm>; and the Centro Autónomo <http://mexicosolidarity.org/centroaut%C3%B3nomo/en>. The Centro is a community centered space that has been facilitating work around housing and foreclosures as well as innovating the formation of community held land trusts. Their work reminds us that working towards constructing autonomy is organically rooted in community and always walks at its own pace.

Pablo presented the work of the FrayBa explaining its history emerging under the stewardship of first Bishop Samuel Ruiz and later shepherded by Raul Vera. FrayBa's focus is in monitoring the region's numerous human rights violations, reaching more than 800 per year, and throughout FrayBa's work, they note that they do not "teach, help, or give" but rather they learn, share, and accompany communities of struggle. Most importantly, Pablo introduced what the FrayBa calls the Social Defense Process. This process begins from the premise that "the main subjects of human rights work are the ones who have survived human rights violations," and manages human rights violations by first acknowledging that the FrayBa "are not impartial," meaning that they are committed to human rights and its agents who are part of a pueblo or community, poor, and organized. The primary focus of the project revolves around three key areas: indigenous people’s rights, land, territory, and right to consent; right to justice; and construction of peace in the context of unresolved conflicts. The architecture of the Social Defense Process is complex and includes accompanying the primary agent around human rights, investigating, documenting, and providing support to establish a collective justice. The social defense process components and its commitment to accompany an already organized community denouncing human rights violation ensures that the process promotes autonomy by refusing to direct or lead and respecting the collective subject that is the organized community.

The work that both MSN and FrayBa undertake is critical and profound not only because it supports community regeneration at a fundamental level, but more importantly it engages complex and not-so-visbile relationships also necessary to regenerate communities. In FrayBa's work, for example, the person who initiates a human rights process is not only accompanied and supported through their case, but is also a part of a series of natural networks, a pueblo, and likely to be poor and organized. In other words, they are from a community that claims them as well as a community of struggle confronting a range of social, economic, and political inequalities that they are organized to confront.

FrayBa suggested that solidarity can come in many forms from much appreciated material supports to being a human rights observer in Chiapas. Their challenge to us in the Global North, however, echos that of the Zapatista's to go beyond solidarity, engage struggles in our communities, and share it with the rest of world. How are we understanding and analyzing struggles in our communities? How are we engaging those struggles and thinking through our obligations to our communities? How are sharing what we are learning about the many advances underway in our communities that go beyond state, capital, patriarchy, and more conventional forms of solidarity?

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, February 16, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose <http://www.casavicky.com/>) to continue our regularly scheduled reflection and action space in order to address these and other questions in relation to the struggles mentioned above.

South Bay Crew

NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url<https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unitierracalifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous Democracy Ateneo announcements and summaries, they can be accessed from <https://www.box.com/s/liojs7y9zv1fsf19atq1>. For more information on the ateneo more generally, please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo>.