Mexico City | Desinformémonos. This Friday, the five Tseltal defenders from San Juan Cancuc were released. They had been imprisoned since 2022 in the State Center for Social Reintegration for Convicts (CERSS) No. 5 and had been sentenced to 25 years in prison for crimes fabricated by the Chiapas State Judicial Branch.
“Today it is a reality, our compañeros are free,” celebrated the Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center (Frayba), after the Collegiate Court of the Judiciary granted amparos and judicial protection to defenders Manuel Sántiz Cruz, Agustín Pérez Domínguez, Juan Velasco Aguilar, Agustín Pérez Velasco, and Martín Pérez Domínguez, who in 2022 were arbitrarily detained, disappeared, accused, and criminally prosecuted “in retaliation for their work as community defenders in the context of the imposition of infrastructure projects and militarization in their territory.”
The judges ruled that the allegations of rights violations against the five Tseltal defenders were “well-founded” and accepted the arguments presented by organizations such as Frayba, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, and European delegations to demonstrate that the detentions were arbitrary.
The release of the five Tseltal prisoners comes a month after a delegation of activists and defenders from Mexico and Europe carried out the “Mexico-European Union Cooperation Trip. Dialogues for Peace and Human Rights,“ who during their visit to Chiapas joined the demand for the immediate release of the five Tseltales and denounced the indigenous prosecutor’s office as a ”factory of guilty parties.”
On May 29, 2022, three of the five Tseltal defenders from San Juan Cancuc were arbitrarily detained by the municipal police, the National Guard, and the army, and subsequently handed over to the Indigenous Justice Prosecutor’s Office, an institution that, according to Frayba, “fabricated charges of drug possession against them and then implicated them in the homicide for which they were sentenced.” Days later, on June 1, the other two sentenced defenders were arbitrarily detained by members of the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection and the Specialized Police outside CERSS No. 5 in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, while visiting their comrades and in retaliation for having witnessed the operation and arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
The 25-year prison sentence against the defenders was handed down by a state judge in May 2023, despite irregularities in the case of the five Tseltales, including the fact that their arrest was carried out without an arrest warrant and without the detainees being informed of the charges against them, and that the victims were not brought before a judge when they were arrested.
Original text published by Desinformemonos on November 22nd, 2025.
Translation by Schools for Chiapas.