Miguel Angel de los Santos

Miguel Angel de los Santos is organizing and training indigenous human rights defenders who were elected by their local communities in 13 regions of the state of Chiapas to deal directly with government agencies and courts so they do not have to depend on outside help from lawyers, NGOs, or church or government institutions, thus fostering their own empowerment.

Miguel fosters the self-defense of indigenous peoples, eliminating their dependence on NGOs, private lawyers, church, or government agencies, by training young members of their communities-elected by their communities-to perform human rights legal defense work themselves in state, national, and international courts. To deal with the myriad human rights violations in their state, defenders elected in each of the 13 regions, join together in the Community Human Rights Defenders Network and also train 30 human rights promoters in each region. This makes the defense a collective effort, owned by the community, strengthening its self-organization and self-determination and empowering it without resorting to prohibitive expense.

With the rise in human rights violations in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, many organizations have been established to promote human rights and defend those whose rights have been violated. Miguel saw, however, that in the case of indigenous people, the defense was not made by those directly involved, but by others from outside the communities. This left the communities vulnerable and weakened the defense itself.

Human rights violations are on the rise in Mexico. In 1999 Amnesty International declared a serious decline over the previous five years in the situation of human rights in Mexico, with a particularly sharp crisis in the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero. Also in 1999, a U.N. subcommission found that perpetrators of serious human rights violations enjoyed impunity, particularly in the case of violations against indigenous peoples. In Chiapas, despite a slight improvement under the current governor, the Friar Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Center documented 45 cases of violations in the first year of his administration and accused Chiapas police of continuing to use torture, death threats, theft, and abuse of their authority against indigenous communities.

Poverty, the lack of respect for civil and collective rights, and land disputes are still at the center of the state's conflict: organized protests are often repressed, with concomitant human rights violations. Land disputes often include occupations and police intervening to evict occupiers, often using excessive force and violating human rights.

In addition, after the 1994 EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) armed uprising, the state has been militarized, with up to 70,000 troops, or half of Mexico's army, occupying different areas, mainly in indigenous communities. This has put these communities at risk, threatening their culture by making it impossible for them to carry out their lives in the traditional manner. Further, they have suffered numerous human rights violations, including cases that have been taken all the way to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, like the torture and execution of three Tzeltal elders and the rape of three Tzeltal women in Altamirano in 1994.

Paramilitary organizations have also carried out their activities under the noses of the army and police forces. The violence they have caused has left hundreds dead since 1995, and more than 10,000 displaced persons are unable to return to their home villages.

Several human rights NGOs have been set up in Chiapas to try to deal with these violations, but until now, they have all worked from outside the indigenous community, servicing it, but making it dependent on them. Their focus has been paternalistic, particularly the first NGOs that were closely linked to the Catholic Church.

The problem has been that NGOs do the work for the indigenous people, creating dependence among the local communities and the victims, who do not learn to defend themselves. If the NGOs leave, the community is left without support or anyone to defend them.

In the cases in which the NGOs train local promoters, they are limited to recognizing the legal stipulations that protect human rights, identifying violations, taking testimony, and presenting the cases to the organizations that trained them. Then the NGO itself makes the decisions about the action to be taken (contacting government offices or human rights groups and holding press conferences), and the promoter returns to his or her community. Even in this case, then, the actual defense of the case is out of the hands of the victims or human rights promoters.

One government effort in the 1970s attempted to create "popular lawyers." The National Indigenous Institute sponsored the training of indigenous people to litigate criminal and agrarian cases. However, the participants did not have community backing and were never answerable to the communities. As a result, the project failed.

Miguel's strategy has been to involve the nine regions' communities directly in naming those to be trained as human rights defenders. He then encourages self-organization of the defenders and ensures that they get all the training they need to take full responsibility for defending their cases, all the way up to the international tribunal level.

In 13 regions of Chiapas, community meetings have elected young people from each region to be trained as human rights defenders. They come to their first session of the training workshop with minutes from their community meetings under their arms. The first group of 12 went through a year's instruction in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, including hands-on training and apprenticeship in dealing with cases directly. An important part of the course included self-esteem enhancement so that the defenders could understand that they did not have to be lawyers to do their work or to demand justice in court. This has also given them the security they need to be able to deal with the discrimination of court and government officials, who are used to dealing with professionals and people of mixed blood, but not with indigenous defenders. The second group of 14 is now being trained. Several of the defenders have presented cases before national and international bodies like the Interamerican Human Rights Commission and the International Labor Organization.

The 26 defenders have formed the Community Human Rights Defenders Network–a horizontal organization with the community at the center. The communities are the heart of the network, monitoring it and giving it backing. Around the community, the defenders are grouped. Around the defenders, a group of advisors support the defenders' work, providing specific training when needed. Miguel is a founder of the network, designing the structure, concept, and putting the pieces together. He also sometimes acts as an advisor when the defenders require it for a particular case or to write legal documents or prepare arguments. He has been trying to work himself out of this role by bringing in other lawyers for this work so that he can focus on expanding his network of defenders to other communities.

The defenders meet once a month for three days: two days for further training (generally given by Miguel) and one day for an exchange of information and experiences and discussion of the cases and problems they are dealing with.

The network's slogan is indicative of its aim: "Defending Ourselves" means just that, that the community is taking on its own defense.

Each two-person defender team attends to the needs of an average of 30 hamlets or villages and in each of these, they have trained human rights promoters who work with them. They document the cases using, among other things, donated cameras and tape recorders. While traditional defense implies that the victim goes to an NGO or government body to seek help, these defenders involve the victim and the community in the defense. Central decisions, like the denunciation of a human rights violation, are left up to the community and the victim, with the aid of the defenders, who are members of the community. For the most part, these activities are all carried out in the local language.

Miguel's program has already successfully resolved human rights violations. In one case, two defenders from one community mobilized other community members to fight the illegal arrest of one of a neighbor. The man had been accused of a crime primarily because he was selling a product that the military wanted to sell exclusively. He was whisked out of the community and put into jail in another city. Community members followed the truck and put pressure on the authorities who, as a result, released the man only a few days later. A man who otherwise could have effectively "disappeared" was thus returned home. If NGOs had dealt with the case, they would probably not have been able to get involved until much later, long past the time when the case could be resolved easily.

Miguel's goal for the immediate future is to finish training the second generation of defenders. In the medium term, he hopes to set up offices in each one of the regions from which the defenders will work. And, long-term, his goal is to make the network completely independent and autonomous. Several of the defenders are currently studying law, and they themselves will then be able to take over the advisory duties needed to prepare cases, thus allowing the communities to have complete control of the network.

Miguel was arbitrarily arrested and tortured at the age of 17. His family's impotence and anguish at the injustice marked his future profoundly, even defining his university major: he first studied political economy to be able to participate in the transformation of society. Later, he studied law because he witnessed the systematic violation of human rights of the indigenous in Chiapas and felt it was his duty as a human being to defend them. His work as an attorney and an activist brought him into contact with even more human rights violations. But the specific inspiration for the Defenders Network came from the experience of the defense campaign, beginning in 1995, organized around unjustly jailed indigenous prisoners who founded The Voice of Cerro Hueco group. Miguel saw how some former prisoners began to help in the defense campaign, first making photocopies and helping to accompany witnesses, and later presenting basic briefs, prepping witnesses, and performing other paralegal tasks. The positive results inspired Miguel to begin forming the Defenders Network.

Miguel has two master's degrees: one in criminal science from the Manuel José de Rojas Institute of Higher Education in Chiapas and the other in international human rights law from Notre Dame University in the United States.