In Chiapas, 42% of indigenous people who were arrested did not receive the assistance of an interpreter in any part of their legal proceedings. Today, they serve their sentences without understanding what was said during their trials.

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, MEXICO — At 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning, people line up to visit their imprisoned relatives. It’s a visiting day at Centro Estatal de Reinserción Social para Sentenciados No. 5, better known as CERSS 5. At a concrete table beneath a canopy of palm fronds sit Petrona Hernández Pérez and Lucía Pérez, the spouses, respectively, of Agustín Pérez Domínguez and Juan Velasco Aguilar, from the neighborhood of K’a’ni’ in San Juan Cancuc. Both men are being held at CERSS 5. The women, accompanied by some of their children, have brought bean tamalitos, along with other items they managed to carry for the monthly visit.

“Our family on the outside is suffering because we can’t take care of them,” Pérez Domínguez says.

He was detained in K’a’ni’ in May 2022, together with Velasco Aguilar and Manuel Sántiz Cruz, accused of the homicide of a local police officer. Two additional men, one of whom is Pérez Domínguez’s brother, were arrested outside CERSS 5 three days later, after having testified in favor of the accused men. One thing they have in common, besides being speakers of Tseltal, is that none of them knows how to communicate in Spanish, the only exception being Pérez Domínguez, who only speaks a little of it.

In May 2023, the men were sentenced to 25 years in prison. This followed a legal process they say contained inconsistencies due to a lack of translation and interpretation into their language because the person assigned to provide those services did not produce a certificate or other document accrediting his knowledge of Tseltal.

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