A Door Opens So We Can Continue Weaving and Transforming Across Any Borders
This was a very valuable experience. What we have woven collectively will contribute to our lives and struggles in Costa Rica.
We are united by living in capitalist, neoliberal, authoritarian states. We also have the conviction that there can be something better for our daughters, our sons, families, and the international working class.
It strengthens us to meet and share with people from other countries, in addition to El Salvador. And to have a broader and more comprehensive vision connecting our problems, dreams, practices, and path traveled.
We became even more convinced of the need to recognize what we have in common, with deep respect for divergences.
Some strengths: We are grateful to know that we are not alone, that there are many more people with the same ideal. Also, that there can be no sensible theory if it does not start from our daily lives. Our life stories are vital for analyzing and understanding reality and the path to follow.
Together with comrades from India, El Salvador, the United States, Mexico, and Africa, we approach elements of the context and of our actions. We strengthen our capacities to continue articulating our struggles.
Some lessons: Learning with maquila workers in El Salvador, victims of human rights abuses by the Salvadoran state.
Sharing with valuable farmworkers, who gave their youthful years to the struggle for popular liberation and today continue to contribute to the profound and radical transformation of society.
Experiencing that, although borders have historically been invented to divide us, as workers we are united by too many dreams that strengthen our struggles and transgress them.
Problematizing the disastrous and inhuman impact of the capitalist, patriarchal, colonialist system that prevailed in our working class and the different ways in which it is expressed in the organizational field, in our subjectivities (emotions) and in our lives.
Identifying obstacles and fears, objective and subjective factors produced by the ideological machinery. Where the rogue media feeds the collective subconscious, delegitimizing popular action, while legal mechanisms and “national and military security” are perfected to repress, restrict and stop the popular, student, union, feminist, indigenous, anti-colonialist, and other movements
Growing individually and collectively from the teachings and learning that we exchange with a correct methodology, where the word of each and every one is equally important and necessary.
Deconstructing and relearning from a dialectical approach to history where we recognize ourselves from the specificities of our spaces and biographies. This opens possibilities to get to know each other better, unlearn and learn reciprocally. The dialectical materialist theme of contradictions was highly significant.
Understanding the importance of having an internationalist newspaper as a strategic tool for information, political training, and popular organization.
Key points that unite us amid differentiated contexts: Assuming the strategic task of dismantling patriarchal schemes and relationships and discrimination in all areas of our lives.
Taking great steps as a working class implies seeing our struggles from an internationalist perspective.
Considering as key actors the farmworkers and the labor sector, along with public and private employees.
We are grateful for having been invited to this event where affection, knowledge, and experience come together as a crucial engine for the profound transformation of our lives and society. Thus, sharing everything learned in different spaces of our actions.
—Movement of Workers and Farmworkers (MTC), Costa Rica
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