Efforts Continue to Free Indigenous Activist and Ex-Director of Community Police in Mexico Giovanna Salazar - Global Voices
go to original February 28, 2016

Nestora Salgado delivers a speech during the inauguration of community police in Buenavista, Alpoyeca in the Mexican state of Guerrero. (Armahedonmaya)

I'm writing to you from prison, where I've been held for 30 months on charges of a supposed kidnapping that never happened. I, like many political prisoners in this country, am in jail for fighting for peace and justice. That's the real kidnapping here.

With these words, Nestora Salgado, the indigenous activist and ex-director of the community police of Olinalá, Mexico, began an online petition requesting that the respective authorities begin the process of her release. The said petition is one of several actions that have been taken to demand the human rights defender's release, as well as to call attention to the abuses and arbitrary actions committed against her since the day of her arrest on August 21, 2013.

From 2012 until the moment of her detention, Nestora had worked as the director of the Regional Co-ordination of Community Police Authorities (CRAC-PC) for the Mexican state of Guerrero, which was a community system of security and justice created in 1995 to confront crime in the region.

The CRAC-PC, like the large majority of community police organizations, is a type of self-organized alternative security model to institutional police bodies, and is guided by the customs and practices of the people and communities in which it operates. However, in contrast to other community police organizations which operate in Mexican territory, Nestora's organization was recognized by Guerrero state government in 2011 through Law 701, which concerned the “Recognition, Rights, and Cultures of the Indigenous Peoples and Communities of Guerrero.”

A Controversial Arrest

According to a coalition of human rights organizations composed by the Initiative of Mesoamerican Female Human Rights Defenders, the Mexican National Network of Human Rights Defenders, and the National Network for “Full Rights for Him and Her”:

The human rights defender's arrest was carried out after an ostentatious operation that included members of the Mexican army, navy, state police, and Olinalá Municipal Police, without proof of any court-ordered arrest warrant issued by a competent authority — nor was Nestora told the reasons for her arrest. From the beginning, the arrest was fraught with irregularities that demonstrated flagrant violations of the right to personal freedom, and it was carried out with a complete lack of respect for guaranteed due process, and other violations of her human rights.

Nestora was arrested together with 30 other members of the CRAC-PC on charges of kidnapping and organized crime. However, said charges were based on actions that were part of the powers and duties of the community police. As the website Animal Político:

The leader's defense rejects that any kidnapping was committed, given that the supposed victims were people who had committed some offense to the community, and were arrested by the community police and imprisoned in Olinalá's house of justice.

Likewise, given that the activities of the community police were part of a legally set-up indigenous justice system, the criterion of “organized crime” is not applicable.

Read the rest at Global Voices | Español

Translated by Anna Bjorklund

Related: Mexico Drug War-Guerrero: Nestora Salgado, Unswerving Commitment (Mexico Voices)

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