When indigenous leader Nestora Salgado, a Washington state resident and naturalized U.S. citizen, traveled south of the U.S.-Mexico border last year, she did not expect to end up a political prisoner. Her first trips to her hometown of Olinalá, Guerrero, were to bring aid to its desperately poor residents. But she found the town run by criminal gangs and drug dealers, who terrorize and murder citizens, rape young girls, and spread prostitution and drug addiction. When she exposed the collusion of Mexican officials with these thugs, she found herself in prison, facing trumped up charges of kidnapping.
In October 2012, she helped set up a community police force after a taxicab driver, who refused to pay protection money to a local gang, was murdered. Community policing is legal for indigenous people under the Mexican constitution and Guerrero state law. In spring of 2013, she was elected to serve as a coordinator of the force. On her watch, crime plummeted 90 percent and there were no killings. A feminist, she worked to empower women against domestic violence and abuse.
Local authorities were furious with Salgado when she refused to release politically connected suspects, including the town sheriff, without a trial. On August 21, 2013, in a sweep of arrests, she was seized by federal troops and incarcerated in a maximum security prison hundreds of miles from her family and supporters. She was denied access to lawyers and the medications and exercise she needs for neuropathy in her hands and feet. She has suffered constant harassment.
The multi-national fight to free Nestora. Salgado’s family has been publicizing the case and working hard for her freedom. Because of the political nature of the charges against her, it will take international public pressure to win her liberty and that of her jailed associates.
When the Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) heard of Salgado’s plight, it helped set up ad hoc defense committees. The committees organized picketing on International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2013, at Mexican consulates in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon. They delivered letters to President Enrique Peña Nieto demanding her release. More protests were organized in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica by the Committee for Revolutionary International Regroupment (CRIR). Australia FSP raised the case at a Human Rights Day speak out.
In early December, some 5,000 marchers took to the streets of Guerrero’s capital, Chilpancingo, protesting the arrests of community police.
In the U.S., supporters continue to add to the 115 organizations and individuals who have endorsed the campaign and to the over 6,200 signers on a petition to pressure the U.S. government to demand her release. A list of endorsers and a link to the petition are posted on this website. The case has garnered extensive media attention, reaching over 150 media outlets in the U.S. and Mexico. The U.S. Spanish language TV station, Univision, has said it is planning a short documentary.
Salgado’s U.S.-based human rights attorneys, Thomas Antkowiak and Alejandra Gonza, filed requests to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention to declare Salgado’s arrest a violation of international law. Her defense attorney in Mexico is seeking her release in federal court there.
Economic forces behind the attacks. The National Human Rights Commission of Mexico reported in December on the growing number of indigenous police forces. To the alarm of government officials and businessmen, they are active in 46 of 81 towns in Guerrero, and in 11 of the 31 Mexican states. Politicians want to repeal all laws that authorize self-defense groups, because they undermine state authority. While the commission predictably backs the smear of indigenous police as “vigilantes,” it admits their growth is due to government failure to meet the needs of the people. Seven out of 10 Guerrero residents live in poverty, half of them in extreme poverty. Threats and assassinations of activists are commonplace.
The report also questions whether Salgado’s arrest and removal so far away from her family was politically motivated to block her freedom of speech and association. A separate report is supposed to address her treatment, since the governor of Guerrero initially sanctioned her efforts, providing supplies, vehicles, and equipment.
Salgado’s arrest is part of a concerted effort to scapegoat community police for the rise in violence and social unrest, despite the fact that they have been functioning for decades on indigenous models of justice. Three other coordinators in Guerrero — Gonzalo Molina, Arturo Campos and Bernardino García — are in jail on false charges of kidnapping and terrorism. At least 10 other community police officers have been arrested.
Legions of federal and state troops and police have occupied Olinalá since Salgado’s arrest, to intimidate people from protesting and to stop their policing work.
To justify the repression, Salgado and the others are accused of “taking the law into their own hands.” But in fact, since Salgado and the community police were sidelined, there have been four homicides and a 50 percent increase in crime in Olinalá.
The blame-the-victim strategy and the charges of being “infiltrated by subversives” are intended to undermine opposition by indigenous people not only to drug cartels, but to mining operations. Canadian corporations hold 26 concessions for gold and silver in 42 locations in Guerrero. Many indigenous people have learned the hard way that precious metal extraction brings few jobs, no end to poverty, massive pollution, and further loss of their communal lands.
The Mexican government wants to silence and disarm community police before they coalesce into a political movement against the neo-liberal agenda of privatizing not just gold and silver resources, but oil production, electrical power and education.
Struggle transcending borders. This campaign provides a unique opportunity to build an international united front to defend indigenous people’s right to self-determination.
Nestora Salgado teaches what she learned in the U.S. about free speech and equal rights for women and people of color. In doing so, she unleashes the leadership potential of those most oppressed, especially indigenous women. The willingness of Salgado and her co-fighters to risk imprisonment, hardship, and even their lives in this cause, raises class consciousness in the U.S. and internationally.
To help or donate, contact Fred Hyde at [email protected] or 206-854-9057.
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