Pena Nieto on Mexico Indigenous Rights: Praise Abroad, Protest at Home Laura Carlsen - CIP Americas
go to original October 10, 2014

Following the UN World Conference on Indigenous Peoples, Mexican indigenous leaders accused President Enrique Peña Nieto of portraying himself as a champion of indigenous rights in the international forum while violating them at home.

“President Enrique Peña Nieto’s speech was hypocritical, really, because here we suffer human rights violations, imprisonment, harassment and persecution,” said Felicitas Martinez, Me’phaa, of the Regional Organization of Community Authorities-Community Police of the state of Guererero.

Martinez spoke at a recent press conference in Mexico City. She participated in New York City events, along with a group of indigenous and rural women from Mexico, Central America and Southeast Asia affiliated through the international feminist organization, JASS

The women leaders expressed the distance between the official discourse and reality in their territories throughout Mexico. Martinez listed some of the prominent cases of indigenous leaders imprisoned in the country for defending the same rights the president endorsed in his UN speech, including Nestora Salgado, coordinator of the community police in Olinalá, Guerrero; Marco Antonio Suástegui, of La Parota, also in the state of Guerrero; and Mario Luna, of the Yaqui people of Vícam, Sonora, criminalized for opposing the illegal Independence Aqueduct. She concluded:”There is no justicia.”

In his presentation at the UN, Peña Nieto boasted that the final resolution of the World Conference incorporated several proposals from the official Mexican delegation, including: that the post-2015 development agenda includes the rights of indigenous peoples, and that national laws be amended and implemented to fully respect the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Peña Nieto concluded his speech by affirming that “In Mexico our constitution recognizes and guarantees the right of indigenous peoples and communities to self-determination, and consequently to the autonomy to decide their internal forms of coexistence and social, economic, political and cultural organization.“

Read the rest at CIP Americas

Laura Carlsen is the director of the Americas Program in Mexico City and advisor to Just Associates (JASS)

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