Editorial Team
Publication Date
January 8, 2024
Marissa Revilla, GPJ Mexico
Friends and relatives form a line to visit people detained at CERSS 5, a prison in San Cristóbal de Las Casas.
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.
According to data from various organizations, a significant number of people who speak indigenous languages and who have been deprived of their liberty do not have access to an interpreter. In Chiapas, whose indigenous presence is one of the highest in Mexico, the situation puts the state’s indigenous population at a disadvantage — despite Articles 6 and 7 of the local constitution, which recognize the right to a public defender and interpreter who speaks the defendant’s language.
In a 2017 report, ASILEGAL, an organization that defends and promotes the human rights of people deprived of their liberty, showed that 42% of the indigenous people surveyed in Chiapas did not have an interpreter or translator. Meanwhile, 45% of those who did have access to this service said they could not understand the interpreter or translator provided to them, which often occurs because the interpreter and defendant speak different variants of an indigenous language, based on the report.
General recommendation 45/2021 of the National Human Rights Commission, which addresses the right of indigenous people subject to criminal proceedings to be assisted by interpreters, translators and defense counsel who have knowledge of their language and culture, states that “9 out of every 10 people in detention do not receive the assistance of an interpreter or translator during their detention process, nor [do they receive it] while criminal proceedings are being conducted.”
In Chiapas, nearly 30% of people above the age of 3 speak at least one of the 12 indigenous languages officially recognized by the state constitution. By contrast, data from the National Institute of Indigenous Languages shows that in Chiapas, there are only 13 registered interpreters specializing in law who are trained to provide interpretation services in the fields of law enforcement and justice administration.
Juan Pablo Nava, a member of Grupo de Trabajo No Estamos Todxs, a collective in the state of Chiapas that works to free political prisoners, says 99% of detained people who come from an indigenous community did not speak Spanish nor were they bilingual at the time of their detention.
“This leaves them in a vacuum. They do not understand what’s happening … and it can lead to them being sentenced, to the process taking longer and often to hearings being suspended because there is no interpreter. Or [there are] other cases in which our colleagues who do speak Spanish, or who at least understand it for the most part, have noticed that the translator is not translating correctly,” Nava says.
Susana de la Cruz Ruiz is a member of two organizations: Colectivo de Familiares de Ex Presos en Lucha and Organización de Familias Unidas contra la Tortura y en Defensa de los Derechos Humanos. She says that in her experience as a family member and advocate, she has witnessed instances in which there are no specialists to translate and interpret when the people who are being detained make their initial appearance before an authority, when they have confrontation hearings or in any hearing when interpretation is needed between the defendant and the defense counsel, authority, judge or attorneys present. Or if they do have them, they work in another language.
“For example, the colleagues from Cancuc are Tseltal, and a Ch’ol translator/interpreter arrives, or they do not appear at the hearings because they said there were no translators and they were postponed,” de la Cruz Ruiz says.
Mariano López Pérez, head of the Chiapas State Attorney General’s Office for Indigenous Justice, which is responsible for handling crimes with connections to indigenous communities, says the office always meets translation and interpretation needs and provides help in this area to the offices of other attorneys general. However, he recognizes there is also a real need for a statewide translation and interpretation body, adding that the primary obstacle is that there is no funding to hire such professionals.
In response, both authorities and social organizations have made efforts to build up a larger and better trained team to meet translation and interpretation needs.
López Pérez says the attorney general’s office seeks support from such entities as Centro Estatal de Lenguas, Arte y Literatura Indígenas (CELALI), a center for the promotion of indigenous culture; Secretaría para el Desarrollo Sustentable de los Pueblos Indígenas, the government ministry in charge of conduction policy with and for the state’s indigenous people; and the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples.
“The group of translators that the attorney general’s office has is in the two-year diploma course being taught by CELALI,” he says. CELALI recently wrapped up a diploma course for interpreters. As part of a project to improve the translation and interpretation system in Chiapas’ justice administration, 31 interpreters were trained in five of the state’s 12 officially recognized indigenous languages for the state justice system. Participants hailed from the state attorney general’s office; Instituto de Elecciones y Participación Ciudadana, the local elections authority; the State Commission on Human Rights; the Intercultural University of Chiapas; and the judiciary.
Sebastián Patishtán Méndez, director of CELALI, says lack of training is one of the greatest problems facing translators and interpreters and prevents them from explaining certain concepts. “First,” he says, “we have to do a thorough analysis and translate the concept from legalese to a common Spanish that everyone can understand.”
The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention investigates cases of detention imposed arbitrarily or incompatible with the international standards put forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or in the international legal tools accepted by stakeholder governments. It is also one of the entities that has pointed out the effects that a lack of translation and interpretation services has on the legal procedures of speakers of indigenous languages.
In 2021, it published opinion 43/2021, regarding Adrián Gómez, Germán López, Abraham López, Juan de la Cruz and Marcelino Ruiz, all of whom are Mexicans who speak indigenous languages. They were accused of crimes ranging from kidnapping to homicide, which were alleged to have occurred in different places and in different years. And they were freed following years during which their families and multiple organizations reported violations of their rights in their legal proceedings.
The document concludes, “The Working Group is not convinced those detained were provided medical attention, a translator or professional legal counsel” and that “in their handling of indigenous persons who have not mastered the Spanish language, the authorities, in their failure to provide an interpreter, placed those detained at a disadvantage when facing detention and when seeking to exercise their human rights as they pertain to questioning the legality of the detention, adequate legal defense and due process of law.”
In the case of the five Tseltal men, the High Court of Justice of the State of Chiapas overturned their sentence in August 2023, on the basis that they were not afforded due process by not having adequate Tseltal translation.
Jorge Gómez Hernández, defense counsel for the accused parties and an attorney with Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas Center for Human Rights, a civic organization in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, says some of the hearings had to be postponed because there was no interpreter, and those that had been assigned to them spoke a different variant of Tseltal than the defendants.
With the sentence overturned, the next step should be the reinstatement of the last stage of the criminal proceedings: the oral trial, in which evidence from witnesses, experts and police is presented, Gómez Hernández says.
However, López Pérez says the reinstatement depends on a court decision over whether the translation and interpretation claim is substantiated or if the sentence will be upheld. The prosecutor’s office argues that there was no deficiency in the translation and interpretation services, nor in the availability of those providing them, López Pérez says.
“If the repeal goes through, we will make the corrections they want, find out what the issue was with the translator without the need to reinstate the whole trial. We are subject to it. Although, it’s not that there was no translator,” López Pérez says.
Hernández Pérez, the spouse of Pérez Domínguez, with whom she has six children, defends his innocence through an interpreter from her community. She says she saw the now-deceased police officer come out alive from the location where he and the defendants crossed paths.
“I am not afraid to say it because I am not a liar. It’s just that I have to say it in Tseltal because I don’t know Spanish,” she says. “If I speak in my language, everything comes out. I saw with my own eyes that the police officer was fine when he left. Nothing is clear, and that’s why I’m worried.”
Marissa Revilla is a Global Press Journal reporter based in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Mexico.
