Nestora Salgado Release a Triumph of Cross-Border Organizing for Justice in Mexico Nidia Bautista - Upside Down World
go to original April 16, 2016

Two and a half years after she was thrown into a Mexican federal penal facility, arrested without a warrant and charged with kidnapping, indigenous community police leader Nestora Salgado was freed from Tepepan Women’s Social Rehabilitation Center in Mexico City mid-March.

A judge threw out the charges against Salgado on March 17 after stating they had no basis. While in custody, the activist originally from Olinala, Guerrero endured a stint in a maximum-security prison, solitary confinement, and the denial of medication and physical therapy she needed to fully heal from injuries she sustained in a car accident in 2002.

A day after her liberation order, Salgado participated in a news conference where she detailed the injustice and frustration surrounding her detainment. "I felt that I was buried alive in a drawer. I was out of touch for 20 months, in isolation for a crime that I did not commit. They didn’t even let me coexist with the other prisoners. I only saw them when I went to court. They treated me in the most brutal way that they could. It’s difficult to struggle against the government when they are out to get you, but it’s even worse that they did this when all I wanted was to defend my community," stated Salgado.

In 2012 Salgado became the leader of the community police that tasked itself with fighting police corruption and drug cartels in Olinala. Salgado, 45, immigrated to Seattle as a teenager but returned to her hometown in 2012. Once back home she became increasingly outspoken against the lawlessness and corruption that riddled Olinala. In 2011 a gang called “Los Rojos” took control of the town - a rival of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, Los Rojos are also present in the states of Morelos and Mexico. Under cartel rule, Olinala had seen an increase in extortion, kidnapping and homicide.

In October 2012 Salgado was compelled to take action after the kidnapping and slaying of a local taxi driver. She organized her community and was successful in unarming local police and driving the armed gunman out of the town. However a year after Salgado became known as “Comandanta” she was accused and arrested for kidnapping - charges she and her community fought as both unfounded and untrue.

It began in the summer of 2012, when Salgado and her 156-member community police force arrested three teenage girls accused of dealing cocaine for their drug-trafficker boyfriends. As punishment they sent them to a detention center in the village of El Paraiso. During that time, the group also detained a city official and two associates accused of stealing a cow. According to many Olinala residents, Salgado and the community police overstepped their boundaries. Soon after state officials released the three detained government officials and arrested Salgado and 30 of her officers.

Months later and after most of the community police detainees had been released, Salgado remained detained in federal prison. And it was an unusual detention - kidnapping is not a federal crime in the country but federal detention is allowed if the person detained is considered “particularly dangerous.”  The constitutional reform in 2008 formally allowed the practice of detention without a judicial order. And after extensive scrutiny from international human rights agencies - including the documentation of complaints of incommunication, intimidation, and torture - the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, the Committee against Torture, the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances and the Special Rapporteur have called for an end to arbitrary detentions in Mexico.

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