ECVC Youth Coordination: Solidarity letter to MNCI
ECVC YOUTH COORDINATION
Solidarity Letter
Monday, December 15th 2014
Dear comrades:
From our particular corner of the world, the Via Campesina European Coordination of young men and women peasants and farmers feels impelled to contact you, fellow youth members of Via Campesina – as well as relatives, farmers and peasants, herders and shepherds, small-scale fishers, and original indigenous communities, all of whom are part of the National Peasant Indigenous Movement (MNCI), a member organisation of the Latin American Coordination of Rural Organisations (CLOC-VC), and who are sowers of struggle and resistance, sowers of ideas, sowers of life – in order to offer to you our solidarity at this historic moment of the trial for the assassination of your comrade Cristian Ferreyra (present).
Now that the sentences been pronounced, we of the European coordination of young men and women peasants and farmers are left with no doubt that, despite the road that has been travelled and the lives that have been lost in defence of the land, there is still a long way to go. Millions of men, women, and children are dying because they are trying to defend their land; they are dying on the land; they are being assassinated by a system that, now that this trial is over, continues to go unpunished.
Our comrade Cristian defended land that was invaded by large scale agri-business land-owners who, after this trial is over, still have not been found guilty, have not been convicted for dispossessing centuries-old peasant communities. It is women and men farmers who are dying at the hands of hired gunmen capable of killing for trifling sums of money and willing to risk being convicted while defending the despicable law of agri-business landlords.
Despite the fact that the perpetrator has been found guilty, those who planned this crime, as well as the capitalist agro-industrial system, which produces pollution and causes the death of millions of persons, continue alive and untrammelled on their path of dispossession, genocide, and pollution.
Where a peasant comrade falls, thousands will raise up their name; their struggle will become everyone’s struggle and will be waged by millions. It is our right and our duty not to cease our efforts to search for and to build food sovereignty and to defend agroecology – as the only real alternative to the inegalitarian, polluting, plantation-based agro-industrial development model.
Take strength sisters and brothers in knowing that, somewhere in the farthest corners of the world, another young woman and another young man will rise up and without faltering cry out aloud: THERE MUST NOT BE ONE MORE LIFE LOST IN DEFENCE OF THE RIGHT TO LAND!!!
GLOBALIZE THE STRUGGLE
GLOBALIZE HOPE