”There is a pattern of criminalization against human rights defenders, who are usually accused of crimes they did not commit, arbitrarily detained, in several cases tortured, and their detention has been prolonged through the informal preventive detention” – 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.¨
Frayba calls for the release of Manuel Gómez Vázquez after two years and three months of arbitrary detention. Deprived of his freedom, the young man is, in fact being held prisoner for being a Zapatista.
