Generationally we have been told, since post-dictatorship times, that flies cannot enter a closed mouth, which is why we hang ourselves and are so brazen, because it is not a question of fear for what our grandparents lived through in the dictatorships, but of looking elsewhere when the violence is experienced by the native peoples who have always been seen as the servants of the urban mestizos. The most beaten, the most impoverished, the most exploited to the point of bursting their skins, the most mass murdered.
If there are any people who have been violated in Latin American history, it is the native peoples, who have survived genocide for 500 years and yet their resistance is greater than any university cardboard and asphalted street. They have been betrayed time and again by the mestizo who, with his silence, covers up any act of violence perpetrated by the government, which, with its tentacles of oppression, criminalises any manifestation of denunciation and resistance carried out by the native peoples.
The government takes away their right to education, to health, to an integral life, they force them to be the servants of the most ruthless landowner and even of the most starving mestizo who, in exchange for a pittance, has them cleaning their houses and taking care of their children. Because they are, together with the Negroes, the last in the queue, those who carry on their backs all the charges of the immoral and treacherous society that sits at ease on the dignity of those who continue to look straight ahead, even if blood drips from their temples and their feet are broken.
It is still those hands that build, that stand in solidarity, it is still those shawls that shelter, it is still those eyes that, despite the tears, glimpse the dawns of struggle and resistance that no mestizo will ever be able to match. They are the ones who know the land and its charms, the voice of the mountains and the tempest of the sea, they are the ones who know the wisdom of the rivers and the nobility of the volcanoes. It is they who know the immensity of the rain and the purity of the petal of the wild flowers.
We, the mediocre, the arrogant, the urban mestizos, are the betrayal, the silence that kills when it overlaps governmental violence and we turn to look elsewhere because the light that emanates from the heart of the original peoples forces us to hide under our beds, because we are so tiny and cowardly in the face of so much guts, resistance and dignity of those who have been fighting for more than 500 years. We can put university degrees, asphalt and Teflon under our beds with us, which have no place when it comes to struggle and fortitude, because for that we have the example of the teachers of teachers, who without knowing how to read or write teach us to defend the land and life, united in solidarity. Malaya, but we are good, but for betrayal and for the silence that kills in the same way as shooting shrapnel, we also have blood on our hands, because at the end of the day in this society of masks, no one can hide the cross of their parish.
