As many of you know, IRTF has been involved in the resistance at Line 3 and took a delegation to Minnesota this summer to show our support for the movement. In our continued solidarity, we ask that our community reads through and engages with this call to action from a water protector that has been on the ground protesting for a year:
The Honduran people will participate massively in these elections as an expression of social exasperation from the deepening of social inequality, the impoverishment that now impacts 73% of the population, the migration crisis, the systematic violation of human rights, the criminalization of social protest, the multiple expressions of violence in general and in particular against girls and women. Honduras will not change at the ballot box but voting against the dictatorship that governs us will be one step. The majority of the Honduran people will vote to reject these accumulated ills.
The United States is a contradiction. From the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution to the Statue of Liberty beckoning the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the U.S. trumpets to the world – and does not hesitate to export at gunpoint – the ideals of democracy, freedom, and unbridled capitalism; yet, it is a nation that is also based upon the murderous oppression of Black, Indigenous and other peoples of color. The United States was born of Indigenous genocide and settler colonialism, and African slavery, which included genocide and extractive colonialism, all driven by capitalism and the desire to exploit every natural and human resource for the fulfillment of greed and hegemony. These are not historical issues which have been overcome; they exist today in other no less deadly forms than their earlier iterations.
