Latina Student Fights for Indigenous Protection in Mexico

There’s a wonderful story about a Latina law student who petitioned for and won legal protection for an indigenous group in Oaxaca, Mexico. The story of Carla Espinoza’s fight for the safety of the people of Zimatlan ran in the El Paso Times.

“A group of people from Nopalera armed with military weaponry started attacking the Zimatlan community,” Espinoza said. “The aggressions included gunshots that lasted for days, burned houses, stolen cattle, disappeared people, gravely injured people, and the impossibility of accessing the parcels of land and therefore hunger.”

Espinoza, a graduate of The University of Texas at El Paso and and student at DePaul University College of Law, “helped organize a caravan that took 50 women and children to a safe place and brought attention to their plight.” She then “wrote reports to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, and requested the award of ‘precautionary measures’ for Zimatlan and the disappeared people.” All of this at 23 years of age.

The most lasting part of her advocacy work in Oaxaca, according to the El Paso times, is this:

“The third part of the measures set a precedent because it was the first time in Mexican law and in the Inter-American system that the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights awarded measures to protect land rights in Mexico.”

Espinoza is back home in El Paso for the holidays and will return to her studies at DePaul.