Mexico City, August 6th, 2018

Dear Liaisons friends,

A little more than a month has gone by since the Mexican State celebrated its saddest and most grotesque party–the presidential election. You all know perfectly well, on such an occasion, the kinds of absurd games and pathetic figures that enter the scene. If something has been able to unite what the border we share had separated, it is this feeling of absurdity in the face of the electoral panorama.

Only a few weeks have passed, but we can already observe some signs of the coming disaster: the expansion of “Special Economic Zones”–zones of fiscal exception that incentivize dispossession and coincide with a good part of the country’s South; the resurrection and strengthening of a work ethic inseparable from self-blame and exhaustion; a series of deals with the “mafia of power” these new figures had claimed to fight; the unbearable permanence of the thousands of femicides that occur each year in this country and the continuation of a civil war whose most obvious paradigm is the mass grave.

You don’t have to know our country well to recognize in this disaster the very intensification of our current situation. Such a future could only arrive concealed in speeches about hope. They ceaselessly invoke the ghosts of an epoch of supposed historical splendor: the “national heroes” and their “grand transformations” from above, while each citizen becomes a cop, supervising a sacrificial commitment to “the Nation”–a commitment to the anti-political One of capitalist monotheism that disqualifies as heretical those more occupied with building a world than destroying one.

In such a situation, where the State seems to have the “legitimacy” to lay waste to everything, we feel more alone than ever. Yet, for this very reason, also much denser and stronger. We no longer have to distinguish ourselves from progressives, democrats, liberals, green capitalists or bad writers. Now, with greater clarity, we only have to draw the front lines that traverse us and increasingly confront the powers that govern and annihilate us. Such a task can only begin from the desire to find each other and conspire with those that share at different scales a horizon decidedly richer and happier than that one which wants to be unique and always imposes itself from outside.

This is why connecting with you in these conditions has meant a happy encounter for us. It is truly moving to find such a closeness in the farthest friends, to send letters to those we haven’t met, and to make of our geographic dispersion the sketch of a force in construction. We know, as well, that this letter will find you together, conspiring. And we know that this is the best way to respond to us: thinking and constructing together until our distance coincides exactly with our common force.