Schools for Chiapas / Escuelas para Chiapas

17/08/2026

The spaces for sharing knowledge take place in the territory, and that means sharing much more than the activities that bring us together.

There is time around the fire, preparing food, talking, listening, and sharing the everyday moments that are part of being together.

For Schools for Chiapas, being in the territory means showing up with respect, listening before speaking, and recognizing that knowledge does not move in only one direction.

We value the meals, conversations, stories, and time that communities choose to share with us.

These moments are not a backdrop to our work. They are part of how relationships are built.

13/08/2026

| What does Ohuira Bay mean to the Mayo-Yoreme communities? What does the ammonia plant mean for nature and community life in the bay? What would happen if the bay were to die?

| Don’t miss 🌊Ohuira, the Threatened Bay🐬, a documentary about the ¡Aquí no! movement’s fight against a German-funded ammonia plant in Topolobampo, Sinaloa.

🎥A documentary by Gloria Muñoz and Alberto Cortés

🎬Premiere: August 12 | Desinformémonos YouTube channel

12/08/2026

This week's Schools for Chiapas Weekly carries one throughline across every story: whose voice counts?

In Oaxaca, journalist Francisco Alejandro Leyva Aguilar — known for his column "El Zumbido del Moscardón" — was shot dead months after accusing state officials of threatening his life for reporting on corruption. In Chiapas, the EZLN held a five-day seminar on the "War Against Humanity," declaring that capitalism cannot be humanized, and announced that 1,111 Zapatistas will travel to Mexico City this December to stand with families still searching for the disappeared. A new shadow report is asking whether Mexico's consultation process on a proposed Indigenous Peoples Act will mean anything — or repeat 25 years of unmet promises, especially with energy megaprojects getting their own fast track. In San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Hands Up founder Nick Bilbrough brought the voices and poems of children in Gaza into the room, some of them no longer alive to read them himself. And in Chenalhó, two members of Las Abejas de Acteal were arbitrarily detained for reconnecting a neighbor's electricity — and released only after urgent international pressure.

From Oaxaca to Chenalhó to Gaza, it's the same question: who gets to decide, and who gets to speak.

Swipe through this week's full roundup — and stay with us. Stay loud.

📖 Full stories and sources: https://schoolsforchiapas.org

11/08/2026

Women taking health into their own hands.

On the coast of Chiapas, women are coming together to learn, practice, and share ways of caring for their health and the health of their communities.

These spaces strengthen women’s autonomy and keep knowledge moving from one woman to another — caring for themselves, their families, and their land.

Health is a right, and care grows stronger when it is shared.

Learn more about this project and the work of Schools for Chiapas on our website: https://schoolsforchiapas.org/health/

06/08/2026

Weaving Words: Literacy for the Lives of Women in the Highlands of Chiapas

Learning to read and write also means naming what sustains life.

In our literacy workshops, words emerge from the participants’ lived experiences. To learn and to nixtamalize—the process of cooking and soaking corn in an alkaline solution to prepare it for making tortillas—are two of the verbs developed throughout this process, where reading and writing are strengthened through the knowledge, memory, and traditions that women have shared and passed down across generations.

Learn more about our projects in Chiapas by visiting our website. Link in bio.

31/07/2026

This week's Weekly is about the words power uses to describe what it does to people who are in its way.

In Guerrero, a man who spent years denouncing a cartel through every institutional channel available to him — courts, human rights commissions, the Inter-American system — is now called a murderer. Forty officers, a helicopter, twenty-five hours without contact with his family: this is what "justice" looked like for Jesús Plácido Galindo. Chiapas organizations, the National Indigenous Congress, and over a hundred signatories have said his name and demanded his release.

Meanwhile, 55 billion pesos are being distributed as "Justice Plans" for Indigenous and Afro-Mexican peoples — in the same breath as new industrial megaprojects on their land. "This reform carries more weight for what it fails to recognize," a CNI lawyer told us: the territory itself. Development, it turns out, is often just dispossession with better paperwork.

Zoom out further, and the pattern gets older. This week we also translate a piece tracing white supremacy back to its origins — how slavery, practiced across nearly every ancient civilization, became racialized only a few centuries ago, and how that same ideology is being invoked today, from Potosí's silver mines to speeches promising to "restore Western supremacy."

And in the Sierra-Frontera of Chiapas, a year after officials declared the region "pacified," a new report finds disappearances and displacement continuing much as before. As one resident put it: "The violence has decreased a little, but we know there is no true peace."

None of these stories are about isolated bad actors. They're about the vocabulary states and capital use to make dispossession sound like progress — and about the people, across Guerrero, Chiapas, and Abya Yala, who keep refusing to accept the new name for the old thing.

Swipe through this week's Weekly for the full summaries, and visit schoolsforchiapas.org for the complete stories and sources.

🌱 This translation work is only possible because of people who support it — visit our solidarity store or consider a recurring donation to help us keep going.

31/07/2026

“We were born male, but we have the soul of a woman.” — Marijose

Mesa: Diferencias
Semillero: Semillero Guerra Contra La Humanidad (Las Poblaciones Y La Naturaleza Bajo Asedio).

Diferencias brought together the voices and experiences of trans people, otroas, women, and Zapatista compañeras to reflect on the many ways capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism seek to erase, exclude, and divide those who do not fit within their norms. Through personal stories and collective reflections, the panel affirmed that every person deserves to live with dignity, and that differences are not a weakness but an essential part of the collective defense of life.

Listen the Mesa: Diferencias at Enlace Zapatisa https://enlacezapatista.ezln.org.mx/2026/07/24/transmision-en-vivo-del-semillero-guerra-contra-la-humanidad-las-poblaciones-y-la-naturaleza-bajo-asedio-viernes-24-de-julio-1800-horas/

📷 Chiabe Lozano Maurer

28/07/2026

28/07/2026

This week's Weekly moves between a funeral and a rally, a boat and a prison cell — and somehow, it's all the same story.

Las Abejas de Acteal mark another month of impunity, still waiting for justice almost thirty years after Acteal, still watching new violence arrive in old forms. In Cuba, a small Zapatista boat — the Lacandona — docks beside the solidarity vessel Astral, carrying not demands, but medicine. "The smallest, certainly," said Subcomandante Marcos, "but also part of the whole."

In Guerrero, Jesús Plácido Galindo — a recognized human rights defender, a son following his father's legacy of protecting Indigenous land — was seized by dozens of armed officers and disappeared into the prison system for nearly a day before his family even learned where he was. Chiapas organizations, the EZLN, and the National Indigenous Congress have all called for his immediate release. Now grassroots movements around the world are being asked to join Global Days of Action on his behalf.

And in Puebla, in the U.S. Capitol, in the pages of a 2,000-year-old story about a man named Spartacus — the same pattern keeps surfacing: power protecting itself by criminalizing whoever resists it, and calling it something else.

We don't publish these stories side by side because they're the same event. We publish them together because they come from the same root — and because the response, everywhere, keeps being the same too: organize, document, refuse to look away, and refuse to be silent.

Swipe through this week's Weekly to read the full summaries, and visit schoolsforchiapas.org for the complete stories, sources, and ways to take action.

🌱 Every story we translate and share is possible because of people who support this work — visit our solidarity store or make a recurring donation to help us keep going.