By Jill Powis
On 4 and 5 May, Alba Cruz visited the UK as part of a wider tour of Europe, to highlight the human rights situation in Oaxaca State, which has deteriorated dramatically since 2006. Alba is a member of the Committee 25 November, which provides legal advice and defence for victims of human rights violations in the state. PBI began accompanying the Committee in 2009 as a result of the threats its members have received due to their work.
Alba herself has been the target of frequent attacks, both physical and verbal. “Since 2006, I have been harassed in my house and at the office – phone calls, physical aggression, theft of my car’s licence plates, interference with the brakes on my car.” Since September 2009, her car has been tampered with three more times – its wheels unscrewed, its tyres slashed, and crashed into by another car while parked. In addition, when driving her car she has been deliberately crashed into twice. Nobody has been charged in connection with these incidents.
The threats against Alba have continued during her European visit. On the night of April 30th, after meetings with members of the European Parliament and officials, Alba received the following text message: “We have to acknowledge you for something bitch but not your protegé, and we want him to show us he meant what he said because he's not worth it. A shot, his damn death will be slow so that he remembers us; but think about the proposal we made before, there's still time, you just say where we can talk, the boss says we won't play games, a sign, we understand, we're waiting, we'll be there you know, kisses baby”. On the same day, the union leader Marcelino Coache, who is represented by Alba Cruz, was threatened via another text message: “fool if you keep on with what you said in the square, because you're going to die”.
Alba and Mercelino believe the threats are a reaction to their recent public activities. In her meetings with authorities, members of parliament, lawyers, bar associations and other governmental and non-governmental organisations in the UK, Spain, Netherlands and France, as well as representatives of the European Parliament, Commission and Council, Alba has been making public the violence suffered by human rights defenders in Oaxaca in a climate of impunity. Marcelino Coache has also made public declarations condemning recent violence against a civil mission in Oaxaca.
One of the reasons for recent attacks against Alba is believed her legal defence of Juan Manuel Martínez Moreno, arrested in 2008 for the murder of Brad Will, a US journalist shot dead two years before while filming a march in Oaxaca. As a result of Alba and her colleagues’ bravery and persistence, Juan Manuel was finally released in February 2010, after a federal court dismissed the charges against him as baseless. According to Alba, Juan Manuel’s story “is an emblematic case of the injustice and impunity experienced in Mexico. Evidence against him is lacking, yet there are clearly political interests behind this accusation”. She believes that he has been used as a scapegoat, as a conviction for the murder of Brad Will was a condition for the approval of US military aid under the Mérida Initiative, a joint US-Mexican programme to combat the ever more powerful and destabilising drugs trade in Mexico.
Juan Manuel and his family have also been the targets of threats and harassment. In one such case, at the beginning of December 2009, a man visited him in prison and warned him “"Tell your lawyer to keep quiet, she's overdone it, she should stop making so much noise – we know where you, she, and your relatives live." His wife has reported that she is regularly followed by the man believed to be Brad Will’s true killer. In addition to this persecution, there are concerns that, although Juan Manuel has been freed, the state judge in Oaxaca included spurious claims about his involvement in the killing in his release papers which not only serve to stigmatise him, but may be used as grounds for detaining him again.
PBI’s accompaniment of Committee 25 November is currently focussing on ensuring the safety of Alba and the other lawyers working on Juan Manuel’s case, one of the many abuses committed against the background of the social protests between May 2006 and June 2007 in Oaxaca, one of the poorest and most underdeveloped states in Mexico, with a large indigenous and highly marginalised population. The Committee 25 November’s name itself commemorates the wave of human rights violations on that date in 2006, when 139 people were arbitrarily detained and imprisoned, with many tortured, and houses and schools were raided illegally. It estimates that over the whole 2006-7 period, there were a total of 502 arbitrary detentions, as well as 26 killings in which the authorities were implicated, 246 cases of torture, and seven forced disappearances. The Committee, along with ANAD (the Association of Democratic Lawyers), has been instrumental in seeking justice for the victims, in what has become known as the ‘Oaxaca Case‘. In October 2009, as a result of their efforts, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that Ulíses Ruiz, Oaxaca’s Governor, and other public officials were clearly responsible for the violation of a range of rights recognised in the Constitution, including the right to life, freedom and physical integrity.
However, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling, the human rights violations committed in the Oaxaca case remain in impunity, and so Alba and her colleagues in Committee 25 November continue in their courageous struggle for justice.
