On 16 March, the Good-Government Council (JGB) of Oventic denounced the unjust incarceration of Francisco Sántiz López, EZLN support base, as well as of Lorenzo López Girón, who lacks any political affiliations. Both are from the Tenejapa official municipality and are unjustly accused of a crime that occurred in December 2011. They were arrested on 4 December 2011. Sántiz López was “falsely accused of directing a provocation in which died Pedro Méndez López, from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the Banavil ejido.” Francisco was held for 2 hours in the municipal headquarters and later handed over to the Ministerial Police of San Cristóbal de Las Casas. They were both offered their liberty if they would pay 32,000 pesos for the murder and 40,000 for carrying arms, but they refused to pay, “because their incarceration is unjust.”
The JBG denounced as “unsupportable, unacceptable, and inhumane the attitudes of the judges, ministry, and bad state and federal governments, which are so corrupt and accustomed to inventing crimes and condemning innocent peoples.” The JBG considers these attacks to be attacks on the autonomy of Zapatista communities, toward the end of impeding “the exercise of our rights to autonomy and self-determination as indigenous peoples.”
For more information (in Spanish):
Denuncian prisión injusta de una base de apoyo del EZLN, La Jornada, 18 de marzo de 2012
For more information from SIPAZ (in English):
Chiapas: CDHFBC publishes more information on the Banavil case (9 February 2012)
sipazen.wordpress.com 