Let’s remain uninformed until the body holds out

We live in a time where information is a minefield. The powerful have always used various media to confuse and create images of reality that cover up their abuses, injustices and dispossession. Now multiplied through so-called social media, fake news has become a factor of power and big business. The manipulation of elections of all kinds is sold, political, consumer, educational, health. Post-truths that contradict each other are generated, all of which generates confusion, distrust, and discouragement. Moods that isolate us, make people more manipulable and less capable of acting on the issues that affect us.

Faced with this avalanche and in the midst of the storm, the Desinformémonos portal was born 15 years ago, a useful tool to shake off those layers of verbiage aimed at preventing us from thinking critically, from recognizing ourselves and from organizing ourselves. From the beginning with a collective and open impulse called by its director, Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, journalist, weaver of worlds and much more, also a collaborator of this newspaper (https://desinformemonos.org/).

Let’s misinform ourselves, says the group that supports it, it is a space for global communication, from below, from struggles and realities from the countryside, the neighborhoods, the study centers, the factories and the indigenous communities. A space of the streets and plains, with testimonies of men and women invisible to the mass media: migrants, indigenous people, refugees, artists, sex workers, boys and girls who live on the streets, farmers, workers, students and a long etcetera made up of the dispossessed classes, Los Nadies, as the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano names them..

The task was so necessary and urgent that many of us responded with enthusiasm and heart, grateful to be able to walk together, even a few steps, in this construction. Notable photographers and artists also accompanied this task. The diversity of information, the richness of text and images of this portal, of this neighborhood magazine as it is also called, it is only possible precisely because it is collective, because it is non-profit and joins the river of free and bottom-up media in many parts of the world.

This October 25, as a celebration and review of the path traveled, Desinformémonos organized at the Colegio de San Idelfonso, in Mexico City, an extraordinary table of 15 women with incredible, but very real, stories of struggle and life, who traveled from all over the world. the corners of the country to find each other in a big hug. His mere presence was like unfolding a map of Mexico from below, a fabric that showed the struggles, the whys, the commitment to resistance, the heart and strength of towns and communities, of the countryside and the city.

There they were, shares Gloria Muñoz, Araceli Osorio, who since her daughter Lesvy was murdered, continues to fight against impunity in a country where around 12 femicides are committed daily. And Ana Enamorado, who continues searching for her son Óscar and now forms a network to search for missing migrants in Mexican territory. They held hands with Trini, an emblematic peasant of the fight for the land of Atenco. The arms of Haizel de la Cruz, who defends the Mayan territory, and those of Juana Ramírez, who does the same with those of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, were also extended; and Teresa Castellanos, who persists in the defense of water and the Nahua lands of Morelos inherited by the fight of General Zapata; and Maya, proud that the Cholulteca people of the Volcanoes, in Puebla, managed to kick out the multinational Bonafont and recovered the water from their springs. Also Argelia Betanzos, Mazatec in defense of the territory in Oaxaca; Patricia Espinosa, sister of the murdered journalist Rubén Espinosa; Joaquina Paulio, Otomí in the fight for decent housing; Krizna and Bety, sex workers, journalists and activists; Laura Rocha, from Barro Rojo; Cristina Bautista, mother of Benjamín Ascencio, one of the 43 missing normal students from Ayotzinapa; Doña Fili, neighbor and founder of the defense of the Pedregales of Santo Domingo (https://desinformemonos.org/el-abrazo/).

A hug also accompanied by a table of journalists who break veils and illuminate that map, such as Blanche Petrich and Hermann Bellinghausen, within the framework of a notable exhibition of photographers, also collaborators of Desinformémonos. And many and many more, from the auditorium or from a distance, we feel part of this meeting that embraces and embraces us.