INTERNATIONAL ENCOUNTER OF RESISTANCE AND SOLIDARITY OF INDIGENOUS AND PEASANT PEOPLES. 

11, 12, 13 AND 14 OF OCTOBER 2003 / VENEZUELA. 

"I will return and I will be millions…", Tupaj Katari, 1781  

We are close to commemorating the date of the beginning of Indigenous resistance. 511 years ago began one of the most terrible exterminations in the history of humanity, and from then on this history has been written with our Indigenous blood, with our suffering, our misery, our exclusion and abandonment. 

They wanted to destroy our millennial cultures, languages, beliefs and cults, so that we would then be subjected to other distant cultures.  They snatched our lands, the essence of our very life. And this practice of imposition and negation has essentially always been the same, denying the very identity of our oppressed peoples. 

Today in Venezuela blow winds of deep changes. People have begun to write their own history, they have begun to appropriate their destination and they have forever broken the silence into which they had sunk. Today Indigenous rights codified in the Constitution, the delivery of lands to their original and ancestral owners, a search for food sovereignty--today all of these are State policies and the essence of a new democracy. As people of the world we manifest our deep solidarity with these winds that transcend borders, climbing the Andes, flying over the Amazon, the highlands and arriving to distant destinations of the Southern Cone of our continent.  

It is an unstoppable force that advances and that impels us to rediscover ourselves and our brothers, that fills with hope the new horizons that we are building and that points out a new path that we should walk, a call to cure the wounded and to liquidate a millennial debt with our Indigenous and rural peoples. 

Impelled by this process that we consider vital for Indigenous and peasant peoples of our hemisphere and of the world, we summon them to be in Venezuela for the commemoration of the 12 of October, the official date in the country as well as that of the resistance of our oppressed peoples. 

We are confronting new threats and new challenges that we should face united, as the single people that we are, to have even more force in our actions. We are called to rescue the Bolivarian and ancestral ideal of Latin American unity, the one that extends beyond economics and is born in the heart of our peoples. 

For this reason we INVITE all Indigenous and peasant peoples of the world to meet during the 11, 12, 13 and 14 of October in Venezuela, homeland of Guaicaipuró and Ezequiel Zamora, to meet with the aims of strengthening the fight against neoliberal globalization, against the FTAA, the IMF, the WTO and any other form of imperialism, for the earth, the seeds, the forests, agricultural crops, the culture, the water and the natural elements, essence of life and in favor of a series of proposals that come from our bases, the eternally excluded and to promote concrete experiences that provide evidence that a different world is possible.  

GLOBALIZE THE FIGHT! GLOBALIZE THE HOPE!! 

National Summoning Organizations: CONIVE (National Indian Council of Venezuela), National Agrarian Coordinator Ezequiel Zamora, Forum Bolivarian of Our America, Attac-Venezuela, Catia Tve 

International Summoning Organizations: COICA, CONAIE, Via Campesina, CLOC, MST. 

With the support of: CICA, Amazon Alliance, Amazon Watch, Indigenous Parliament of America, Continental Alliance, Association No to FTAA of Agricultural Salvation.