The Comca’ac Indigenous Group Denounces the Sonora State Government’s Plan to Take their Land

By Hermann Bellinghausen
La Jornada

October 24, 2006

PUNTA CHUECA, SONORA, OCTOBER 22: The council of elders of the Comca’ac nation (a people also known as the Seri) greeted Subcomandante Marcos this evening in their main community, handing over to him the “staff of authority” of this dignified and combative people. Antonio Robles, the president of the council, then sang the national anthem of the Comca’ac, a war song filled with the breath of the sea. Less than 100 meters away, the Gulf of California swayed with its smooth waves, where the Great Tortoise was born in immemorial times.

“Everywhere, we have seen that the government wants to sell the lands, the seas and the mountains that are protecting the indigenous people to foreigners,” expressed the Zapatista leader to these inhabitants in their ceremonial center. He greeted the men, women, children and elders and told them: “We come to know, not only the pain of this nation, but also its struggles, in order to unite them with those struggles of all the other peoples of América into one single struggle.”

The community’s elderly chief ended his song with a speech in the living language of the Comca’ac, and one youth paraphrased the significance of the song, which always evokes the memory of those warriors that fought to defend themselves. “When the State says that these lands are theirs, we say that the blood spilt on this land by our ancestors is here and it belongs to us.”

Behind them stood the splendid beauty of Tiburón Island, the sacred symbol of these people, but today it symbolizes the potential profit for businessman-governor Eduardo Bours Castelo and all of his accomplices in the Escalera Nautica project, renamed colonial-style as the “Sea of Cortés Project,” which is trying to privatize all of the beaches of Sonora and the rest of the Baja Peninsula.

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