Opinion • Ojalá Editorial Collective • March 27, 2024 • Leer en castellano

When we published our first story just over a year ago, we launched a process of learning and sharing ideas, art and reporting organized around our desire to help in the creation of a common sense of dissidence.

Our goal is to contribute to the emergence of a shared political vocabulary that prioritizes and defends the reproduction of dignified life; and that imagines, rehearses and explores forms of organization that allow us to encounter, understand and recognize one another as we transform our worlds on a daily basis.

This March marks the beginning of our second year. 

We seek to foster conversation among Ojalá's collaborators, among our community of readers, and with like-minded independent media and political projects.

We are actively working to tighten the threads of the fabric that we have woven. Though our circumstances and contexts vary, to a large extent, we share a common understanding of the world in which we live.

The system we live in combines capitalism with the recolonization of territories and the natural world and that guarantees its expansion through violence, racism and patriarchal hierarchies. We know that the center cannot hold. 

In weaving together the voices and perspectives that we publish, we strive to shed insight on conflicts that divide us and weaken our capacity to resist, as well as to cultivate knowledge of experiences and strategies of social struggle that are already underway.  

Ojalá is one node in a network that aims to transform everything that exists, drawing on a range of endeavors that includes pedagogy, science, art, technology, philosophy, spirituality, storytelling and games.

Journalism in the service of life

Feminist thought and communal wisdom are deep wells that provide us with insights that help make sense of the increasingly fascist turn among governments and the expansion of counterinsurgency.

Last year, we started off by covering March 8 (8M) demonstrations in several Latin American cities. We think of that date, which commemorates the International Day of Working Women, as a compass through which to understand the struggles and desires that guide us throughout the rest of the year.

Last year's 8M in Mexico saw a series of massive, decentralized mobilizations that emphatically rejected transphobia. We reported on the creativity and courage articulated in the slogans, graffiti and placards created by the youngest demonstrators in the streets of Cochabamba, Bolivia; as well as on the care, joy and rebellious spirit that coursed through the re/productive strike on March 8 in Montevideo, Uruguay. 

Silvia Federici and Verónica Gago pointed out that throughout the cycle of mobilizations in recent years, feminism had centered an anti-capitalist perspective and challenged the poverty and ecological devastation that neoliberalism has produced.

Gago and Federici also formulated eight theses that capture the breadth of the horizons of feminist struggle that foreground the reproduction of life and strategies for self-defense against violence.

In the Uruguayan capital, the transformative vision of feminist militancy rests on a commitment to defending the reproduction of life, particularly in the struggle for clean drinking water.

In Argentina, mobilized women, queer, transgender and non-binary folks have embraced the feminist idiom that emphasizes the centrality of care work. They have produced the most powerful opposition to President Javier Milei’s brutal neoliberalism to date. In Paraguay, feminists burst onto a political scene controlled by the traditional right and the ultra-right.

The ongoing exercise of memory, reflection and (self-)criticism is a crucial part of feminist practice, which we have worked to share in a variety of ways. 

It constantly transcends the narrow confines of liberal feminism, which remains focused on gender parity and the idea that timid institutional change is the only way for women to participate in public affairs. 

For the vast majority of women and sexual and gender dissidents, the struggle against sexual and femicidal violence and the creation of alternative forms of justice are urgently important.

While forms of protest such as escrache [organized, unsanctioned, public call-outs of male aggressors] are used to denounce rape culture and publicly call out aggressors, the search for justice goes beyond punitivist practices in search of alternatives that ensure truth, the repair of injury and non-repetition.

We have also explored the experiences and reflections of women—many of whom do not identify as feminist— who are working to defend life through popular or community activism in urban and rural contexts. We reported on several of these experiences in our first year at Ojalá.

States have proven incapable of providing justice for the disappeared and the victims of violence. This has led search collectives formed by relatives of the disappeared to build their own communities and to develop and share grassroots search techniques. 

Even in the face of so many obstacles, women are re-inventing ways to subvert the existing order, even in typically conservative institutions like universities and football fanclubs.

Dispelling confusion and nourishing debate 

We believe that feminist and communal perspectives can help us analyze issues beyond women's struggles and local organizing.

Progressive governments remain unable to deliver on their promises and their primary function seems to be disorganizing social struggle. They continue to rely on extractivist economic models.

In Mexico, megaprojects are being implemented throughout the country, not without resistance from different territories. The Morelos Integral Project, in Puebla and Tlaxcala, has not been shut down, and defenders of the Metlapanapa River continue to face criminalization. 

Communities living in territories impacted by the Andrés Manuel López Obrador administration’s flagship projects, such as the Mayan Train and the Inter-Oceanic Corridor, are already feeling the detrimental effects of the authoritarian, rushed way these projects have been imposed. 

Fifty years after the coup d'état in Chile, which laid the foundations of extractivism in Latin America, demonstrations, mobilizations, and resistance (which have been erased from official history) keep emancipatory possibility alive.

The constituent assembly process in that country has had a limited capacity to express the spirit of the social explosion that began in October of 2019. Chile’s economic elites continue holding fast to their privileges, just like their counterparts in Colombia and Honduras. 

Over the past year we have witnessed the intensification of war in Ecuador and a trend toward militarization throughout the Americas. All of this takes place in the shadow of Israel’s six-month-long genocidal military campaign in Palestine, backed by the West. 

In the second half of last year, communal organizations in Guatemala demonstrated the scope of their grassroots capacities. Thanks to the fabric of connection among Indigenous communities, they were able to seize public space and impose a communal veto against election fraud.

We begin our second year of reporting infused with the immense energy deployed in several capital cities during the March 8 protests. We are always learning and participating in ongoing debates with renewed enthusiasm.

Our first year has been an experiment in the production of other meanings and in the articulation of a critical, rigorous journalistic project with an international reach in Spanish and English. 

In our second year, we plan to consolidate this work by diversifying our funding sources and opening the horizons of our reporting and analysis to other regions and countries in the hemisphere.

We hope that we can continue together with you, dear readers and accomplices, as we carry on in the next leg of our journey.

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