Article by PBI-Canada

On January 21, Peace Brigades International-Mexico accompanied the Tlachinollan Human Rights Centre and others at a virtual meeting with representatives from seven embassies, including the Embassy of the United States in Mexico.

The meeting was focused on informing the embassies about the human rights situation in the state of Guerrero, specifically the deepening crisis of forced disappearances.

Just three of the cases raised include:

Arnulfo Cerón Soriano

Juan Sánchez Gaspar spoke on behalf of the Popular Front of the Mountain he demanded justice in the murder of Arnulfo Cerón Soriano.

Arnulfo Cerón Soriano was a 47-year-old Indigenous Nahua lawyer and social activist with the Popular Front of the Mountain and Movement for the Freedom of Political Prisoners of the State of Guerrero (MOLPEG). He had previously worked as a lawyer with Tlachinollan Human Rights Centre in the mid-1990s.

On October 11, 2019, he was disappeared in the city of Tlapa in Guerrero. Forty days later, on November 20, his body was found in a clandestine grave.

The “Ayotzinapa 43”

Doña Cristina Bautista demanded an investigation of all the members of the army involved in the disappearance of her 19-year-old son Benjamin in 2014.

The “Ayotzinapa 43” were students from a politically radical, poor, mostly Indigenous teachers’ college in the town of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero. In September 2014 they were forcibly disappeared from a bus in the city of Iguala (about 200 kilometres north-west of the school) while they were en route to Mexico City to commemorate the anniversary of the Tlatelolco massacre (in which the Mexican Armed Forces had killed hundreds of people who were protesting against the Olympics on October 2, 1968).

Rosendo Radilla Pacheco

And Tita Radilla expressed outrage that the Mexican State has not complied with an Inter-American Court judgment related to the disappearance of her father Rosendo at a military checkpoint near Atoyac de Álvarez in Guerrero.

The November 23, 2009 IACHR judgement has been summarized as follows: “On August 25, 1974, Mr. Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, a 60 year-old musician and political and social activist, was arrested by members of the Mexican Army in the State of Guerrero and eventually disappeared. The State failed to establish the whereabouts of Mr. Radilla Pacheco. The Court found that the State violated the American Convention on Human Rights and the American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons.”

More than 79,000 people disappeared

In December 2020, The Washington Post reported: “More than 79,000 people have disappeared in Mexico, most of them since 2006.”

NBC News has further noted: “The majority of disappearances have been reported since 2006 and 40 percent were recorded since December 2018, since the start of the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.”

The culprits in the disappearances are often named in media reports and studies as members of the armed forces, criminal gangs, and the police.

The Tlachinollan Human Rights Centre works to defend and protect the collective rights of the Indigenous Na savi, Me’phaa, Nauas, Nn´anncue and Mestizo peoples of the Montaña and Costa Chica regions of Guerrero.

PBI-Mexico has accompanied the Tlachinollan Human Rights Centre since 2003.

To read the full report on the meeting with embassy staff written by the Tlachinollan Human Rights Centre and PBI-Mexico in Spanish, please click here. For an English translation of their article, click here.