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Resistencia

Resistencia

Illustration published by Guacamaya on Sept. 19, 2022, as part of the Fuerzas Represivas publication.

The following is an English translation of the Guacamaya poem accompanying the Repressive Forces leaks of military and police documents from Mexico, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and El Salvador in the fall of 2022.

Original Spanish: https://enlacehacktivista.org/poema_guacamaya.txt


RESISTENCIA

In the feathers of this burning body,
we bring the colors spilled on the resting bodies,
of a people that resists and burns
from 529 years of invasion.

In the nooks and corners of this, our large home
although the pain is abundant
and laughter is frozen by the grimace of death,
we bring our clay hands filled with seeds;
with the force and the spell of nature
symbol of the common motherland: Abya Yala.

We bring that eloquent audacity into the secret mystery
of the stones: grandmothers who tell us,
they speak to us with their immutable yet fluid resistance.
Likewise we bring our song of Guacamaya,
our connected intelligence,
our ancestral resistance pierced in the skin,
and now in the cables that would kill us in days gone by.

We have seen and felt the horror of war.
They came from afar declaring flags,
the nations seized our peoples,
they cut off our braids,
they dressed us in their own way,
They set upon us the military, police,
judges, and prosecutors to bind our feet,
and above all our thought.

They came from afar with shrapnel,
from afar with their trucks and their science.
They came to extract with their machines of slavery:
first human, now automated.
They have been able to take everything except our conscience.

They knew how to see our peoples as tools,
they subjected them to their game of death,
but still we are like stone, like earth,
like the song of a thousand birds, like life itself:
resisting.
We bloom again
We walk the streets, the rivers, the jungles, the mountains.
We pierce their feeble corruptible nets,
we meddle in their most sordid affairs
and we dirty their neat displays
so we can see how they really are.
So that we know that the eternal night to which we were condemned
although long and exhausting, not because it is night,
rather, because it is the shadow cast
that invaded our days and blocked the light of inti [the ancient Incan sun];
that night ends,
and the word dawns upon us, the first word
which reflected in the mirror of Marcos,
becomes tripled.
Freedom for Abya Yala,
and for those of us who inhabit her!
Because the flower is capable of more with its tender color
than the murderous steel of sword or cannon,
the landscapes of Mother Earth, although violated
through innumerable breaches of plunder,
they light up and heal with the red blood their children shed!

Here in our home
the worlds congregate:
the eagle of the north,
the guacamaya [macaw] of the center,
and the condor of the south!
We move with the principles of our own time,
with our spiral time,
of long accounts of a thousand years,
with our sunlit lunar calendar!
Our victory is life!