Mexico is living in a complex context. Insecurity permeates many territories and criminal groups continue to intimidate the population in an attempt to impose their law and control daily life through assaults, extortion, armed confrontations and pacts with actors at the municipal, state and federal levels.

Horseback riding Water Our Sister and the Yes to Life Collective, defending the gifts of Mother Earth

Seventy-five percent of the country has some degree of drought due to the overexploitation of groundwater and surface water and the lack of rain in 2023, which has been the hottest and driest year in history. The lack of water affects the daily life of the population, food production has decreased, groundwater tables have been depleted, and water supply systems for the population do not have enough water to cover the basic needs of the population. There is a broad consensus on this issue: authorities and companies must take decisive action to remedy this deficiency. At Crianza Mutua Mexico we maintain that water is a source of life, a sacred good because life depends on it; we must adapt ourselves to the rhythms of nature, of which we are a part, and not try to dominate it.

If we add to these two problems the electoral process the country is going through, in which the political forces postpone attention to the real problems and prioritise the search for power by monopolising elected posts, mainly the Presidency of the Republic. It is likely that the party that calls itself “left”, currently in power, will manage to keep it, but it should be clear that, deep down, it maintains a logic in line with the interests of the economic power that seeks to continue extracting life from the communities through the imposition of private megaprojects.

As Crianza Mutua we will continue to identify and connect groups through communal networks that are actively dismantling hierarchies in everyday life, putting into practice principles of sufficiency, building and expanding their autonomy from the market and the state. To this end, we will focus our energy and strength on the follow-up of the last virtual meeting that convened us last November 2023, in which we were able to share the experience of the Mexican delegates who participated in the global meeting in Kenya, we were able to listen to the people who lived this meeting, and we made known the general agreements and the next steps in our network, in particular the plans for our next face-to-face meeting in Northern Mexico.

In this regard, the collectives “Saberes y Sabores”, “Centro de Salud Alternativa (CESANA)”, “Colectivo Sí a la Vida” and “Custodios del Arroyo San Miguel”, peasants from the Chihuahuan Desert, invite compas, collectives and academics who are seeking new ways to care for life and defend the territory, to a weekend meeting (to be defined) in May, in the Ejido Jalpa, Municipality of General Cepeda, Coahuila, and in the framework of their annual Cabalgata del Agua Nuestra Hermana, in order to share their daily lives, organizational experiences, popular education, resistance and struggle in defense of their land, water, soil, landscape, animals, plants and culture.

Therefore, compas from Crianza Mutua in collaboration with the Global Tapestry of Alternatives are managing the necessary funds so that various collectives from Mexico can join this meeting. They will leave in a caravan from Chiapas, Oaxaca, San Luis Potosí, Hidalgo, Veracruz and other parts of our country, and even from other parts of Latin America.

Our experience at the General Assembly in Kenya was and still is like an oasis and at the same time a kind of overflow of knowledge and experiences shared by comrades from different regions of the world that we have not yet finished digesting. We shared with communities that create dreams and hope by resisting the savage capitalism that lives in the bowels of society, sometimes visibly, sometimes imperceptibly. These communities are interwoven in autonomous processes with the aim of caring for life in all its expressions. We were able to see and understand this in the territory of the Tharaka brothers in central Kenya and in the visit we made to the Maasai community in the Il-Ngwesi Community Conservancy, two communities that have resisted for centuries from the spiritual-ancestral and agro-ecological processes in search of a harmonious relationship with the land and healthy coexistence with animals. We were also able to understand it in the stories of all the companions who shared their experiences, such is the case of Zacatecas in Mexico, where the communities in desolate and deserted landscapes struggle metre by metre for land tenure against the state and mining companies, which seek to dispossess them of their territories. These processes where life is bred in a dynamic of mutuality, complicity and solidarity are multiplying more and more in the global south and in “the global north which is also south”, showing us that it is possible to change the practices, the decisions that lead us to the death of life on the planet for actions that lead us to nurture life and maintain our own possibilities of existence.

To find ourselves in the geographies of the origins of humanity according to the reading of the West, speaks to us of beginnings. A beginning that in this case is continuity. We have been meeting virtually for several years now. This was the opportunity to share in person. We met processes that we walked and lived the alternatives, we made distant geographies close to us. African communities welcomed us with their earthy smiles, with their wind dances, in their millenary rexistences. Likewise India, the women of Kurdistan, the Philippines, Spain, our Latin American fabrics (Mexico-Colombia) including Ecuador and other deep paths. The Yurumanguí River was woven with the source of the Nile at the base of Mount Kenya with immense geographies that ask us to liberate water, to liberate life, from a system of death and destruction such as capitalism that is massacring not only humans but also non-humans or more than humans. We understood and weaved in our hearts the solidarity of the roots of the earth that cry out to show us the way to a more harmonious way of living. This gives us the strength to continue to do so in a woven and protected way. We are very grateful for this.
The visit to Kenya meant the meeting of many different cultures and ways of thinking to weave a collective dream that allowed us to cross limits and frontiers imposed by capitalism, because not even the language barrier was an impediment for the affection and closeness to flow. It also allowed us to recognise the strengths of the different organisations that nurtured the assembly, their influence and their work in their immediate environment. It was clear that we are not alone in this struggle for the respect and dignity of all beings that inhabit this planet and that the love for spirituality, mother earth and ancestry is a commitment of all of us who were at the assembly, it is a shared conviction. It only remains for us to thank those who thought of this assembly and extended the invitations to the people who attended this meeting, to the land of Kenya for receiving us, to the universe for moving its magical cosmo-positive energy and to each one of us for letting ourselves be seduced by it.

On the 2nd and 3rd of December we held the second face-to-face meeting of Crianzas Mutuas Colombia. We gathered more than 20 processes from Kumanday, Cauca and Valle del Cauca to get to know our alternatives and to reflect collectively on how we want to continue weaving ourselves together. We visited the process of the Liberation of Mother Earth and the Casa del niño y de la niña. The first of these processes has been led by the Nasa indigenous people and has consisted of liberating the land from the intensive exploitation of sugar cane to give way to more symbiotic ways of inhabiting the land in accordance with the cosmovision of the Nasa people. The second process has been led by the black people of the municipality of Villa Rica and has given rise to agroecology processes based on ancestral knowledge, their own forms of education, political training for women and children, among others. Thanks to this meeting, we have strengthened bonds of trust and solidarity.

In the past few months, Vikalp Sangam has had the annual General Assembly gathering, which has prompted a deeper look at elements of the Vikalp Sangam’s structure and process, with changes like naming the ‘Core Group’ as ‘General Assembly’. The General Assembly has also released the ‘People’s Manifesto for a Just and Equitable India’, that presents earthy alternatives of policies and governance to the worsening situation of hundreds of millions of people in India, and of its natural environment as well. This Manifesto is now available in English as well as a variety of regional vernacular languages.
We are preparing for the 10th anniversary of the Vikalp Sangam process. This National Vikalp Sangam also comes at a crucial time because 2024 is the election year in India. Hoping to bring in people from the varied Sangams that have happened over the years, this NVS will be a time of celebration and reflection for us.

Vikalp Sangam was able to host one session at the recent World Social Forum 2024, in Kathmandu. Titled ‘South Asia Vikalp Sangam’, the session had participants from Nepal and Bangladesh, and aimed to encourage a regional Weaving process. We discussed the history of the VSVikalp Sangam (India) process, along with presenting our own learnings and challenges over the years. We have now invited groups from Nepal to join us at the National Vikalp Sangam to encourage more interlinkages.

Additionally, Vikalp Sangam has started a new webinar series named ‘From Yesterday, Towards Tomorrow’, creating platforms of dialogue on seminal thinkers such as Mahatma Gandhi, Dr B R Ambedkar and Savitribai Phule to understand how their philosophies can provide a framework for the problems we are facing today. Episodes of this series can be found on the Vikalp Sangam youtube channel here.