Executive Summary
Pablo López Alavéz has been arbitrarily detained in Oaxaca, Mexico for over 14 years. He is an Indigenous Zapotec forest defender and local community leader who was arbitrarily arrested and detained in August 2010 for alleged criminal activity in 2007 amidst conflict about the protection of natural resources. His criminalization is emblematic of the harassment and targeting of Indigenous and environmental defenders in Mexico and particularly in Oaxaca.
From his initial abduction by unidentified armed men throughout the last 14 years of detention, the legal proceedings against him have been marked by due process violations. In 2017, after seven years of pretrial detention, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention found his detention to be arbitrary and in retaliation for his legitimate human rights and advocacy work. In 2020, a federal Mexican criminal court recognized that his right to effective participation had been violated as he had not been provided with an interpreter or an accredited defense lawyer.
The American Bar Association Center for Human Rights reviewed and analyzed documents from his case and affirmed the Working Group’s findings of arbitrary arrest and pretrial detention as well as the federal court’s finding of a violation to his right to effective participation. Additionally, the review found that the courts have repeatedly failed to provide him with adequate legal analysis and impartiality under international and domestic law. The judicial decisions have accepted at face value testimonies against him that were inconsistent and contradictory, did not mention him, or were word for word recitations. On the other hand, exculpatory evidence, including documents by local authorities that stated Mr. López Alavéz was working in a different community on the day of the alleged crime, were repeatedly discredited with convoluted justifications. In all, the treatment of evidence in this case violated Mr. López Alavéz’s right to a competent and impartial tribunal as well as the presumption of innocence.