Watching the cloudy days out the window during confinement, bored with the computer, one morning, I rescued among my old books, "A Cloudy Time" by Octavio Paz, a 1980 edition. The book, neither poetry nor novel, is a collection of profound articles that reading them takes us by the hand through the human struggle''s labyrinth in search of wisdom, understanding, and modernity.
Cloudy Times that in a figurative sense are blurred time weaves his significant criticism of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes; his little confidence in the masses and the parties, leads us, with facts, slowly to question how actions for political and humanitarian advance shattered. Therefore, new wise visions, opinions, or studies are ignored by power. I went from disappointment to depression, his last reflection titled End or Beginning.
PAZ DID NOT SEE THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT.
The world was different in 1980. The Berlin Wall had not fallen, and democratic regimes in Latin America slowly recovered. Environmental studies were still barely painted. However, the feminist movement, which Paz is not concerned with, was powerful and intense. He is more interested in preventing the collapse and how some people call planned economies with centralism and bulging of the state apparatus, the government, or socialism. Modern democracy projects were certainly being rehearsed. How did he not see the feminist revolt? Like the green wave and the youthful diamond that is here today, a rebellion that would mark the next decades and would strongly and continuously oppose patriarchal authoritarianism, that of dictatorships.
As it were, Paz makes us think about the necessary citizenship advances by preventing the defense of the land and the beloved freedom in all respects. No one could have known that eight years later, we would undertake in Mexico -1988- the grand march to strengthen citizenship, the freedom to vote, and institutional autonomy in counterweight to the State party.
FROM THE REBELLIONS OF THE 1990S TO FEMINIST MOVEMENTS
I thought about this, reading about the Polish resistance, the rebellions of the 1990s against the Stasi in Democratic Germany, the slow fall of the military dictatorships underpinned by the great patriarch, the United States.
These years we have witnessed many changes, but among them those of the citizen commitment, in the dozens of initiatives to conserve the environment, improve social and political participation of women; to recognize and embrace the causes of homosexuality to the LGTB movement, the birth of feminist gender theories and even the strengthened demand of native peoples. And of course, the appearance in our words and concerns of the true meaning of violence against women: femicide.
Each issue was inscribed in the rear for cornering the State party. In all directions. His impulse was adding the adhesion of thousands and millions of Mexican men and women, as we were building spaces, participation, clear consciences, and above all, hope for change, a phrase that today is annoying and suddenly empty.
Nothing was easy. The enormous number of deaths that the road has left; imprisonment and enforced disappearances. On one side of that road, human trafficking for sexual exploitation and forced labor, and the growing influence in the daily life of the crime, drug trafficking, and everything added to it.
We have experienced the rebirth of the always high-sounding Europe for Europeans and the United States for Americans. And the decline of the state party in Mexico sustained the inheritance of the builders of the Mexican Revolution, today almost dead, we saw this long stage of the so-called neoliberalism. In a parallel, groups for citizenship grew, and the struggle and the organization of the workers crushed.
WOMEN MOBILIZING OTHER WOMEN
Hard to think about it. This is why this poor and undemocratic vision of our current regime is outrageous. A friend told me a couple of days ago that this was possible because of that civic feat, accumulated and raised; that had the contribution of the Zapatista uprising and that of women, many Christian, mobilizing other women the national territory, for more than 30 years.
In return, the President of the Republic only insults social and non-governmental organizations. It is like a bipolar individual, who goes back in time, who only, as in feudalism, sees two kinds of people: the selfish, corrupt, and owners of material goods and those others, humble, without any options. That is why he hates the middle class and secular and progressive thoughts. It is binary.
He kicks and disavows the citizens who gave him the empirical and scientific elements to come to power. On the contrary, he does not touch the real powers that be, as would be expected. He hates knowledge and research, and he consents to what we call ladinos, like those of the CNTE, and his peers in all fields. I think so; he is bipolar and has what we feminists call gender blindness. Women stop being citizens searching for freedom to swell, in their thinking, an indecipherable mass called the people. I don''t understand this throwback. I don''t understand it. We will see. Traducción: Valentina K. Yanes