Words from Meso-America leading up to congress

Costa Rica, January 2001 - microchip factory is installed and internet access for the entire population is announced.

Mexico - Zapatista march headed by sub-comandante Marcos goes to Mexico City.

These are the headlines. Thats what our countries are like. So different, but so similar. Glimmers of justice and hope; portraits of human suffering. Faces contorted by consumerism.

The people: communicate with gestures, with their steps, with madness, a common legacy: suffering and war; emptiness and rage.

Us women, we have paused to reflect on where our anger comes from, our pain. We have had to remember, again, that painful history that caused wounds and sowed resent.

All of us, have discovered that we are able to hate, that we are capable of sin, that we have sinned against our brothers and sisters, obliged by our human nature, that we have reacted against dictatorship and death.

Between what we remember and today our being is questioned, what being? Our struggle is pushed in between the loss of memory and justice, what struggle? The struggle for words, for images for a voice.

We are beings made of words; we are a body that travels leaving images on the earth; we are voices that communicate.

Today we communicate a reality, a history, different frameworks that come close to us like human beings. Seeing us, we know we are all different but that we all tread the same path, that we look back at the steps we have taken. We are welcomed to be builders and makers of a new hope: reconciliation with justice.