Juanita Alonzo talks with a representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the Social Readaptation Center in Reynosa, Tamaulipas. UN-DH Mexico
The Tamaulipas Prosecutor's Office has released the Guatemalan migrant Juanita Alonzo, unjustly detained and imprisoned in 2014, as confirmed by the Miguel Agustín Pro Júarez Human Rights Center, which was accompanying her case.
Alonzo had just arrived in Mexico from Guatemala and was waiting in this border entity for her time to cross into the United States.
She only spoke Chuj, a language from the Mayan family, and yet she was forced to sign some documents in which she accused herself of belonging to a gang of kidnappers.
She was imprisoned in the city of Reynosa and she remained behind bars for seven years.
This week, following a UN ruling, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called for her immediate release.
"Today we celebrate the freedom of Juana Alonzo Santizo, the Tamaulipas State Attorney General's Office finally heeded the call not to continue with the accusation against Juana Alonzo, a Chuj migrant, who will be able to return to her family in Guatemala," reads the agency's statement. He celebrated his release this Saturday.
“The support of the community, the media and organizations, such as Promoters of Migrant Freedom, the Migration Affairs Program of the Ibero and the UNODH Mexico, as well as the work in the last stage of the Federal Institute of Public Defender, was essential to make injustice visible and achieve Juana's freedom”, he adds.
Although the visibility of the case reached its highest point when the president mentioned his case this Friday.
“There is all the evidence that she was tortured and that she has been imprisoned for years.
Even the Tamaulipas authorities have already agreed to release her from her.
Hopefully they will do it today because they accepted that it was an injustice," said López Obrador.
The Governor of the State, Francisco Cabeza de Vaca, also spoke in the same sense.
Alonzo's release comes after years of struggle by her family and the human rights groups that have accompanied her, but especially after the ruling issued by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which analyzed her case and in September 2021 he warned: Mexico had to release her in a maximum of six months.
The decision of the Prosecutor's Office has come after nine.
"Juanita's case is not isolated," insists the Center's statement.
"In Mexico, the human rights of migrants are widely violated and there is a pattern of fabricated criminal accusations against them, based on stigma and prejudice," he says.
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