 For more videos on people's struggles please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch. Despite the public health crisis and the coronavirus lockdown, the rates of violence in Mexico have increased to alarming rates. Mexico's movements and organized communities have been mobilizing on the ground responses to the violence and the public health and economic crisis. Here to discuss with us the challenges facing Mexico's movements in this challenging conjunction is Magviel Sanchez-Kiros and Militant from Jóvelins ante la Emergencia Nacional. Thank you so much for joining us. The government has 54,000 murders. It's an alarming figure. It doesn't only correspond to the lack of action or the government's actions. That's because it comes from a more complicated plot. But from the social movements and the public in general, we can't say that we can't content ourselves with having a new government if the murders continue to grow and the horror scenario still extends. So, something that has grown is what you say, the violence of gender. The feminists have grown. Mexico, days before the pandemic, had an impressive mobilization of women. I've never seen such a big one in history. It was March 8th and March 9th with a big stop. Many millions of women were mobilized in unedited mobilizations. But that was a blow because then the pandemic came and it seems that everything was forgotten. And the president also, in that kind of contradictions of his government, declared that women were going to be very well because they were going to be in their homes or that they were going to return to their ideal role, which was to be there helping the family and the violence in the houses has increased, the feminicides have increased, which are not always motivated by the internal life, but also, and many times, which is the most serious, the gravity of which are the criminal groups and those who kill women for killing women, simply, no? So, it's a situation of very strong violence against women, and also that economic violence against them is getting worse and worse. And there is also a very risky thing that we have seen from the new government, which in the immediate future may not be so strong, but that for future scenarios it will be very, very serious, which is the power that the government is giving to the army. They are giving them a lot of economic resources, they are giving them big businesses so that it not only depends on the federal budget, but it can also depend on its own income, is helping them, giving them a legitimacy that they do not have the army by supporting them, being them a president with a certain legitimacy. So, it's a very complicated situation. The movements, in this respect, we have had many difficulties because we have not, first, we have not known what to do immediately in front of the pandemic. Something that is very important is that about 10% of the municipalities of the country in front of the pandemic, they separated themselves completely and put community districts in their entrances, preventing the entry of people from the outside to avoid contagion. And those 240, almost 300 municipalities that did that were organized by the people, it is not a government action, but the people said, let's go to assembly, let's organize ourselves and others. Thanks to that type of initiative, thanks to deep traditions of the people, of care in health, of food, of organizing and responding to the crisis in a solidarity way, the crisis has not been so deep. And Mexico has been able to get out relatively ahead, thanks to that. Social movements, we have developed different initiatives of support, of solidarity, of what is called popular policies, of delivering food to people who are in worse conditions, of solidifying with different spaces, of doctors taking initiatives beyond their hospitals, or their role in the hospital. There have been many of those initiatives, they are too much, they are not coordinated with each other, they are not centralized, and they do not end up being a proposal in front of the government. If they are not immediate resistance reforms, they are very rehearsed, as they are rehearsed, for example, when they were rehearsed in front of the tremor of three years ago, or so many tragedies that happen in Mexico, there is always an important popular response. But we have not yet been able to make it clear what is going on, how it is going to continue. Because also the scenario that comes up in economic terms is going to be worse, the health term is going to be worse, and the question is still there. There are several examples, there are several initiatives that begin to be discussed, and especially the need now in the face of these elections that come next year, that we cannot stay in the simple expectation of seeing how a political debate takes place in certain parties, but that the movements have to do something. But still, being honest, it is still a lot to be made clear what the basis is. The immediate resistance we already have. That in Mexico is almost spontaneously given, in the communities there is a lot of experience. The greater challenge of how to bring back the resistance in something, in a unitary political project of all the oppressed, the dominated sectors, we still lack. And I think we also lack, not only because of the social movements that exist, but also, and mainly, because we have not had the capacity to think and organize because of the size of the violence that exists in our country. The rate of violence is so high that it has not given us that breath. So, we have to think in every day more adverse conditions, the alternatives, and more and more forcefully to recreate them, because they are also more urgent and unnecessary.