Schools for Chiapas was present at the press conference convened by Frayba today in response to the latest aggression in the Zapatista autonomous community of Moisés y Ghandi. Here is their statement.
The Judiciary of the State of Chiapas sentenced to 25 years in prison the Tseltal defenders Manuel Sántiz Cruz, Juan Velasco Aguilar, Agustín Pérez Velasco, Martín Pérez Domínguez and Agustín Pérez Domínguez, who were arbitrarily detained for defending their territory in 2022.The sentence was issued by the Chiapas judge despite the fact that last May 3 three of the five Tseltales declared that, after their arbitrary detention at the hands of the San Juan Cancuc municipal police, the National Guard and the army on May 29, 2022, they were handed over to the Indigenous Justice Prosecutor’s Office, “who first fabricated the crime of drug possession and then involved them in the homicide for which they were sentenced,” explained the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba).
¨¨Juanita was born in San Juan Cancuc, a small municipality in the mountainous region of the Chiapas Highlands, mostly populated by members of the same ethnic group as hers, the Tseltals. Her story is by no means unique. She follows the patterns of an rugged reality that repeats itself. A systematic dynamic that “criminalizes and makes invisible” indigenous women and results in “concealment by the justice system of the feminicidal sexual assaults of which they are victims,” in the words of Colectiva Cereza, a human rights organization defense that offers “legal and psychosocial accompaniment” to imprisoned women.¨
In this article from El País, Alejandro Santos Cid analyses the latest report from the Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Center for Human Rights and pulls together the threads that link the megaprojects of the Mexican government, human rights abuses, migration, militarization and the surge in organized crime in Chiapas. He does so in the context of the recent Sur Resiste caravan and the resistance of the Zapatista communities and the National Indigenous Congress to the death projects.
As the U.S. ends the Title 42 provision rejecting asylum seekers due to the COVID public health emergency, this article describes the current status at the U.S. Mexico Border.
As the policy comes to a close, the UNHCR and IOM express concern about new restrictions affecting access to asylum for refugees and migrants in the Americas under the Biden administration.
