Jailing of Mexican ecologists protested
Copyright 2000, Reuters
November 1, 2000
By Michael Christie
Global rights watchdog Amnesty International and U.S. environmental group the Sierra Club Tuesday vowed to step up an international campaign to free two jailed Mexican ecological activists they say were imprisoned for defending the environment.
Amnesty and Sierra Club condemned an appeal judge's rejection of new evidence in the case of Rodolfo Montiel, winner of this year's $125,000 environmental prize awarded by the San Francisco-based Goldman Foundation, and his colleague Teodoro Cabrera. They had been jailed for seven and 10 years respectively on marijuana and gun charges.
"This ruling against Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera sets a dangerous precedent against environmental activists in Mexico," said Alejandro Queral, the Sierra Club's director for Human Rights and the Environment.
The new evidence rejected by a Mexican judge was testimony from Danish doctors proving the activists were tortured into making confessions that they grew marijuana and owned illegal weapons, the two organizations said in a statement.
Montiel and Cabrera lead poor farmers' opposition to logging in Mexico's rugged, southern state of Guerrero. In May 1999, they were arrested by the army and later sentenced on the drugs and illegal weapons charges.
Amnesty and other human rights groups consider them to be prisoners of conscience, jailed on trumped up charges for defending the environment.
Mexican human rights group Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez (Prodh) says they were forced to pose for photographs with weapons in their arms that did not belong to them.
Prodh on Tuesday provided Reuters with a letter to the head of the Supreme Court, Genaro Gongora Pimentel, in which it said it had heard "with indignation" that Guerrero magistrate Hector Moises Vinas Pineda had rejected the ecologists' appeal.
"Affront to justice"
The human rights center, which is handling Montiel's and Cabrera's defense, said in the letter to Gongora Pimentel that "the affront to rule of law is so great ... that we, the defense, only heard about the ruling through the media."
"We can only lament that federal courts, far from being truly impartial institutions braking the arbitrary actions of the authorities, act as legitimizers of impunity and human rights violations in Mexico," it added.
Montiel and Cabrera have asked for the intervention of President-elect Vicente Fox, who dealt the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) its first presidential election defeat in 71 years, and takes office Dec. 1.
Calling on Fox to have the activists released immediately, Diego Zavala of Amnesty International said the case would be a litmus test for the new government.
"The new administration will have an opportunity to show the people of Mexico that it will uphold its commitment to human rights and environmental protection," Zavala said.