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l past March 8, Inés Fernández Ortega, an indigenous Me’phaa from Barranca Tecuani, municipality of Ayutla de los Libres, Guerrero, reported at a press conference that seven days earlier, on March 1, the second district judge of the state of Guerrero handed down a sentence of 20 years of imprisonment. imprisonment and dismissal of Hugo Humberto García de León, second sergeant of infantry of the Mexican Army for torture, rape, robbery and burglary committed against him.
To give us an idea of the structural remoteness with the principle of prompt and expeditious justice, let’s just remember that on March 22, 2002, Inés Fernández Ortega was at home with her children; suddenly a group of armed Army elements broke in; she was beaten, raped and sexually tortured. Inés and her family began a long and winding road in search of justice, resisting all kinds of aggressions and pressures on her community by the Army. At the local level, neither the Public Ministry nor the health centers of Ayutla de los Libres attended to him. For this reason, social and human rights organizations, such as Tlachinollan, intervened to receive the complaint. Since the investigations were left in the hands of the Army through the use of military jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute human rights violations, they turned to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and then to the Inter-American Court (Coridh), which in August 2010, it handed down a sentence against the Mexican State for violation of the rights of Inés and her family, and ordered the punishment of those responsible and full reparation for the damages.
Two years later, the then Secretary of the Interior issued a public apology on behalf of the Mexican State and, in 2021, his current undersecretary, Alejandro Encinas, inaugurated the Casa de los Saberes in Ayutla de los Libres, a community center dedicated to guaranteeing that other women do not suffer the deep grievances suffered by Inés and so many others in the country and in the world. In this context, the second district judge of the state of Guerrero issued his important sentence 12 and a half years after the resolution of the Coridh and was valued by Inés Fernández, as well as by the Tlachinollan Center, both for the content stated above and for the fact that in it the argument of the Coridh was resumed, an unusual factor, since it incorporated the gender perspective, for the evaluation of the evidence in cases of violence against women. Likewise, it returned to the intersection of discrimination suffered by the indigenous and the asymmetrical relations that exist in the face of the military authorities that attack them.
It should be remembered that there are other cases resolved by the Coridh located in Guerrero and with responsibility of the military in acts that violate human rights, another similar to that of Inés, that of Valentina Rosendo Cantú, in addition to other previous ones of a different nature such as that of the alleged forced disappearance of Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, which would have taken place since August 25, 1974, at the hands of Army troops, that of the subjugation of Messrs. Teodoro Cabrera García and Rodolfo Montiel Flores on May 2, 1999 to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, while they were detained and in the custody of members of the Mexican Army, for their failure to present themselves without delay before a judge or other official authorized to exercise judicial functions that would control the legality of the detention, and for the irregularities that occurred in the criminal proceedings brought against him
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With these and other cases in mind, the Tlachinollan Center highlighted: The territorial control imposed by the Army, as part of its counterinsurgency strategy, which subjugates the indigenous communities that organize themselves autonomously, represents a threat against women, because the soldiers who violate human rights are not punished
. He stressed that the sentence issued by the second district judge agrees with Inés and vindicates her word. She is a woman who always spoke the truth. The sentence, she indicated, comes after two decades, in a context where the Mexican Army is provided with a legal framework that allows it to assume security tasks. He concluded that this case shows clearly what happens when the armed forces assume public security tasks and do not have civilian controls that force them to render accounts
(statement-positioning 8/3/23). It is worth incorporating the fair reflections of Tlachinollan, which have also promoted other reliable spaces such as the Pro Center for Human Rights, to support that the government should make a stop along the way to analyze the present risk scenarios without a defensive attitude.
