Day One Highlights Day One Highlights + What’s Ahead Tomorrow – Democracies Under Attack

We opened day 1 of Democracies Under Attack: From Crisis to Strategy with a powerful invocation from Rosalina Tuyuc, who grounded us in the energies of the day’s Nahual and set the tone for a gathering rooted in reflection, connection, and collective purpose.

Mynor Alonzo from FOCO: “We will have 140 people gathered here for three days to engage in a collective process of analysis using dialogue-based methodologies. We don’t believe in top-down expertise here. We know that the work of an academic who has spent a lifetime studying is just as valuable as the knowledge of an activist who has lived those realities firsthand. Given the waves of autocratic threats facing our democracies, we see this as a crucial moment to come together, deliberate, and chart paths for collective action.”

María Camila Castellanos from Unión de Resistencias de Bogotá – URB shared how “everything erupted with the murder of Dilan Cruz in 2019, which left us with many people blinded, comrades imprisoned, and a fractured social movement. We started calling ourselves ‘the nobodies’ because no political party represented us. We began organizing even with broken spirits. It was us—with our dead and our wounded—who helped bring the current president to power. But nothing changed. During his campaign, the government promised that the youth from the front lines would be released from prison, but to this day, 369 young people remain deprived of their freedom. We have become symbolic victims of a state that does not represent us. What’s left for us now is to radicalize—and to not allow corruption, fear of organizing, or systematic violence to take root in our spaces of resistance. We must remain grounded in love, in the humanization of the social movement, and in our micro-powers to be able to support our youth.”

Daniel Valencia from Red Accion Regional, “Just a few days ago we marked World Press Freedom Day, and it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the state of journalism in our countries. In El Salvador alone—where I’m from—there were 800 attacks on journalists last year, and similar patterns are playing out across the region. I’ve been a journalist for 23 years, and for a long time, many of us naively believed that organized crime was the main problem facing our countries. What we didn’t see coming was the gradual shift toward authoritarianism, which began with the 2009 coup in Honduras. Today, independent media must join forces so we can keep reporting the truth.”