Version imprimableWe have to do something extraordinary. We have to take over the streets and squares of the cities, and our countryside too. To bring together our voices, our hands. This silence is killing us. The noise of the dominant media system echoes our silence, it reproduces it, it weaves the networks of lies that send us to sleep and annihilate desire. We have to do something against submission and resignation, against the narrowing of ideas, against the collective death wish. We must call again on the voices, the arms and the legs of all those who know that it is in the streets that the present and the future is decided. We must overcome, once and for all, the fear that is skillfully disseminated, realize that we have almost nothing to lose and that the day is coming when we will have already lost everything because we remained silent and alone, we had given up.
The pillage (the loan, the aid, the relief - these names that they give it, depending on the type of lie they want to formulate) came, and with it the implementation of devastating political measures involving a colossal rise in unemployment, insecurity, poverty and social inequality, the sale of the majority of state assets, with cuts in the budgets of social security, education, health (where the plan is to privatize the national health system), culture and all public services that are essential for the population, so that all the money can be channeled to pay and enrich those who speculated on sovereign debt. After more than a year of austerity imposed by outside intervention, our perspectives, those of most people who live in Portugal, are only getting worse.
The austerity that they are imposing, and which is destroying our dignity and our life, does not work and is destroying democracy. Those who govern in accordance with the Memorandum of the Troika are handing over the basic instruments for the running of the country to speculators and technocrats, applying an economic model which is based on the law of the jungle, the law of the strongest, despising our interests as a society, our living conditions and our dignity.
Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, the countries held hostage by the Troika and financial speculation, are losing their sovereignty, like all the countries on which this regime of austerity is imposed.
It is against the inevitability of this death that is being imposed and announced that we need to do something extraordinary.
We must build alternatives, step by step, taking strength from the mobilization of the people of these countries, so that Greek, Spanish, Italian, Irish, Portuguese citizens and all people come together, coordinate their actions, fighting for their lives and joining their voices together.
If they want us to bend and force us to accept unemployment, poverty and inequality as a way of life, we will respond with the force of democracy, freedom, mobilization and struggle. We want to take the decisions of the present into our hands in order to build a future.
This is an appeal from a group of citizens from various sectors of intervention and various political currents. We are talking to everyone, to all the collectives, movements, associations, non-governmental organizations, trade unions, political organizations and parties that share the basics of this call so that they will join us in the street on 15 September.
They have divided us in order to oppress us. Let us unite to free ourselves!
Signatories: Ana Carla Gonçalves, Ana Nicolau, Antonio Costa Santos, António Pinho Vargas, Belandina Vaz, Bruno Neto, Chullage, Diana Póvoas, Fabiola Cardoso, Frederico Aleixo, Helena Pato, Joana Manuel, Joao Camargo, Luis Bernardo Magda Alves, Magdala Gusmão, Marco Marques, Margarida Vale Gato, Mariana Avelas, Myriam Zaluar, Nuno Ramos de Almeida, Paula Marques, Paulo Raposo, Ricardo dead, Rita Veloso, Rui Franco, Sandra Monteiro, São José LapaTiago Rodrigues.
