Detained Mexican ActivistNestora Salgado to Be Freed

Borderland Beat by DD republished from TeleSur and the BB Forum

Detained community police leader and activist, Nestora Salgado, is to be released, according to legislators.

For those of you who are not familiar with the story of Nestora, here is a little background excerpted from the Forum article. To read the entire article go to the Forum hyperlink above.

At first, the 41-year-old mother of three was, in the words of a supporter, “a sensation” in her mountainous Guerrero homeland, where she returned recently after 20 years in the United States. As she led this remote town in an uprising against vicious criminals, she was fierce, confident, and charismatic.

“She had more right to be the leader because she has more guts than any man,” said villager Marisela Jimenez.

On the day in October when Olinala (her hometown) rebelled, it was Salgado who commandeered a police patrol car and used its megaphone to call people into the streets. “Leave your fear at home! Come out!”

And, as church bells tolled in solidarity, they came out, by the thousands. Within days, they had expelled many of the crooks, villagers say.

But her adopted American “can-do” met a Mexican “can’t-be.”

Today, Salgado sits in a Mexican penitentiary, far from her home and her people, accused of kidnapping and guilty, certainly, of having run afoul of a clash of cultures, politics and generations-old clan rivalries.

The name of Salgado’s hometown, Olinala, means “place of earthquakes” in the Nahuatl language. By bus, it would take hours to get there from the nearest city, if there were buses. But few buses go. The single paved road in and out of Olinala looks as though a giant chewed its edges and took big bites out of bends where rock slides can obliterate the pathway in a matter of minutes.

Salgado left this place long ago. Already a mother of two at age 20, she followed her then-husband to the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s, worked hard as a waitress, had another child, divorced, remarried, ended up in Seattle and became a U.S. citizen. Always tough-minded, relatives say, she learned about basic civil rights and how to demand them, and the potential power of women.

She began trips back home, staying longer each time, taking donated money and clothing to neighbors, building a house, room by room, and making plans to settle permanently.

The Guerrero she returned to, however, had changed. Los Rojos had taken over.

Los Rojos — the Reds — were a thuggish branch of one of the bigger drug cartels taking up positions through central Mexico. During the last couple of years, they managed to terrorize Olinala with small numbers of outlaws who, according to many in the town, had the protection of corrupt police and recently elected politicians.

The catalyst for the uprising was the Oct. 27 funeral of a taxi driver who, after refusing to pay extortion money to Los Rojos, had been kidnapped and killed. As townspeople buried the man, a rumor flew among the mourners that another cabbie had been kidnapped.

Passions were high. Authorities were doing nothing. The town rebelled, thousands pouring into the streets, led by Nestora Salgado.

“The people here did not know how to defend themselves. She was the first to take charge. She commanded respect.”

It was a giddy moment, by all accounts, with most of the townspeople united about the need to defend themselves.

“Fear and necessity motivate us,” Salgado told an interviewer before her arrest. “We were fed up with authorities not doing anything.” She knew some of the risks: “Do not squash us like cockroaches,” she warned the government.

Guerrero has a long tradition of legally recognized community policing under rules for indigenous populations that were enacted largely in response to a 1995 massacre of peasants by state security forces.

There are specific requirements and restrictions: Their guns must be single-shot rifles and low-caliber pistols

. Suspects in serious crimes must be turned over to the mainstream authorities.

Salgado and her supporters said they were availing themselves of those rules for indigenous pueblos to form a community police force under what is formally known as the Regional Coordinator of Community Authorities, or CRAC. Other towns across Guerrero followed suit.

That summer (2013) , Salgado and her group arrested three teenage girls and accused them of dealing cocaine for their narco boyfriends. They sent the girls to a detention center at Paraiso.

Then she arrested a politically connected City Hall official and two associates, accusing them of stealing a cow. The three men were detained after the people who had been transporting the cow were killed in an ambush. That arrest was probably the last straw.

Salgado’s allies insist that each time they turned a suspect over to government officials, he or she was immediately released.

State authorities sent in the army to free the three cow theft suspects and arrest Salgado and 30 of her associates. It was late August; within hours, she was accused of kidnapping three adults and three minors (the girls, who were also freed) and transported to a federal penitentiary in Nayarit.

“I have nothing against the lady,” Guerrero Gov. Angel Aguirre said at the time. “What I cannot permit, as governor … is people taking justice in their own hands. We cannot live by the law of the jungle.”   

Angel Aquirre

Aguirre has since resigned as Governor of Guerrero in the wake of the disclosures of government corruption that has come out during  the social movement of unrest and protests that have developed after the “Iguala Massacre”.

Only 2 people have been allowed to visit Nestora while she has been in prison, her sister and mother.  And they were allowed only a 40 minute visit after traveling 40 hours on a bus to get there.  And that was only after the US Embassy intervened with Mexican authorities requesting that the visit be  allowed (intervention was because she is a US naturalized citizen).

Nestora has not been forgotten and the reason for her purported imminent release may be because the protesters all over Mexico and internationally have included the release of her,  Dr. Mireles and other political prisoners in their demands for justice for the “missing 43”.

Whatever the reason, the Guerrero state government has promised to terminate legal proceedings against community police leader and social activist, Nestora Salgado, before the year ends, according to legislators of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

The legislators say they are confident that Salgado, community elected commander of the Regional Coordination of Communal Authorities – Community Police or CRAC in the predominantly indigenous community of Olinala, Guerrero will be set free in the coming hours.

Last week, a committee of representatives met with Guerrero State authorities and cabinet members of the state’s interim governor, Rogelio Ortega, to negotiate the release of Salgado and another 14 members of the CRAC, detained on August 21, 2013.

In an interview with La Jornada Rep. Roberto Lopez Suarez (PRD), member of the human rights commission in Mexico's House of Representatives, said "The commitment of the governor is that Nestora will obtain her freedom without condition, and the rest of the 14 leaders of the community police that are in prison will also obtain their freedom in coming weeks." The federal government had already dropped charges against Salgado.

Salgado, a naturalized U.S. citizen and defender of indigenous rights, was detained without an arrest warrant, accused of kidnapping, after she and other members of the CRAC detained local politicians and municipal police suspected of having ties with organized crime.

The CRAC, formed in 1995, is a legally and constitutionally recognized innovative system of participatory justice and policing based on indigenous “uses and customs.” The more than 18-year-old project operates in more than 128 indigenous and mestizo communities of the Costa Chica and la Montaña regions of Guerrero