No justice in Mexico
The case typifies the lack of justice that indigenous people face in Mexico.
The figures are bleak: 98 percent of reported crimes go completely unpunished in Mexico, according to various government and independent counts, and tens of thousands of people serve months or even years in jail while awaiting a formal trial, suffering a lack of legal counsel, family visits, and medical attention.
The United States has for years tried to help Mexico upgrade its justice system through high-stakes funding campaigns such as the Mérida Initiative, but Amnesty International denounces the country’s flagrant human rights violations year a after year.
Following expressions of outrage from indigenous groups and human rights organizations, the charges against Jacinta were eventually dropped and she was released — on Mexican Independence Day — in September 2009, more than three years after her unlawful arrest. Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered the release of her two co-defendants the following April.
It was the first time that a Mexican citizen held the government accountable for a wrongful incarceration and was awarded reparations and a public apology.
“We live in a country that is extremely discriminatory towards indigenous people,” Martha Sánchez, coordinator of indigenous affairs at the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute, told VICE News. “Indigenous women are continually viewed as criminals, and in the courts they are not provided with interpreters.”
Outrageous offenses are routinely committed against indigenous women in Mexico.
In May, an indigenous woman was forced to give birth in the bathroom of a hospital because doctors refused to admit her to an emergency room. It was the latest in an astonishing string of reported cases of indigenous women being denied adequate medical attention at public hospitals in Mexico.
Right across our border, all the way from California to Texas. What a ####ing shame.
Not so hot for minority citizens on this side, either, and I don't mean Cuban-Americans. This will end, in time.
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