Last Wednesday (January 18, 2012) a bulldozer started opening way to set a pipe that would supply water from the communities well to the mining company, breaking through many of the water pipes that fed the homes. As community members came out to peacefully try to stop the digging, municipal police opened fire. Abigail Vasquez Sánchez was hit by a bullet in the leg. She is in the hospital recuperating. Bernardo Méndez Vásquez was shot 3 times—in the chest, shoulder, and stomach—and died the next day.

We ask that you please send us your signatures of support, including the name of your organization or collective and country, no later than Monday, October 17, 2011, to this address: movimientoporjusticiadelbarrio@yahoo.com

“…In Mexico they have been beating us down a lot with these mines. There are several activists who have been murdered, there is a lot of persecution; but life goes on through the communities and countries.” These are the words of Rurik Hernández, member of the Broad Opposition Front (F.A.O.) to the San Xavier Mine, in the municipality of Cerro de San Pedro, belonging to the state of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. This is an open-pit mine extracting gold and silver, where cyanide is used as an extractor in the heap leaching process. After ten years of legal rulings, the F.A.O. has won some victories; the company doesn’t have permits, they were able to cancel the project. However, the company keeps mining. But the F.A.O. also participates in advising groups, peoples, communities and movements who are facing off against other mining ventures.

There's a popular saying in Latin America that if they're going to globalize commerce and capitalism, we're going to globalize the struggle. With that pretext the Mesoamerican Peoples Forum was launched in 2001 in Tamaulipas, Mexico to combat Plan Puebla Panama, a neoliberal plan, replete with mega projects, launched by the Interamerican Bank of Development and promoted by former Mexican president Vicente Fox. Plan Puebla Panama has since been re-baptized as Project Mesoamerica incorporating Plan Colombia and the Mexican Merida Initiative, two U.S. conceived projects that funnel millions of dollars into army budgets supposedly to combat “narcotrafficking.”