On 12 October, Latin America celebrated the indigenous resistance against the colonial invasion of the conquistadors 530 years ago.

In Mexico, different collectives, organisations and indigenous peoples coordinated through the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) called for a global day of action against militarisation and war, as a response to the Mexican government's recent decision to modify laws to allow the army to carry out public security tasks and take control of state police forces.

This move by the Mexican government is part of a series of policy initiatives that seek to give greater power to the armed forces, who play a key role in repressing social sectors that oppose megaprojects and private capital initiatives that seek to dispossess peoples' territories, as a CNI communiqué points out: "These megaprojects and these businesses are stationed in the national geography and, above all, in indigenous territories; spaces where for some time now crime, alcoholism, drug addiction and, of course, the destruction of Mother Earth, as well as human poverty and exploitation, have been growing rampant."

Mobilisations took place in the states of Veracruz, Oaxaca, Morelos, Chiapas, Jalisco and Sonora. In Mexico City, thousands of people from different indigenous peoples and neighbourhoods from different parts of the country, accompanied by relatives of disappeared persons, victims of feminicide, feminist collectives, students and civil society organisations participated in the mobilisation called by the CNI with the slogan: NO to militarisation and the war against the peoples of the National Indigenous Congress and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN).

The march emphasised the call to stop the war against the peoples in all parts of the world, including the Kurdish people, who are being systematically attacked by the Turkish state and recently by the repression in Iran.