The journalist and activist Marcela de Jesús Natalia is known in her community as
Cui, we, nde',
which means in
Ñomn' daa
(amuzgo): “One, two and three”.
This was also the name of the children's program that she created for children to learn the language and culture of her municipality, Xochistlahuaca, in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero.
Every afternoon the program played through the loudspeakers and radios of her community until three bullets to the head silenced Marcela's voice.
One two.
Three.
It was the morning of Saturday, June 3, 2017. She remembers it perfectly because it was her 54th birthday. "My family had planned to make me a pozole to celebrate when I got off duty," she told EL PAÍS.
“I congratulated all the people who had a birthday that day and I put on the mornings.
For me it was a holiday, ”he recalls.
He opened the front door and took two steps.
On the sidewalk, seated, a hit man was waiting for her.
The man got up and walked towards her.
"I heard the irons thunder, as he was cutting the cartridge, then I turned to look at him and that was when I saw that he was pointing at my forehead."
Those seconds seemed eternal.
“I did not panic, the only thing that came to me at that moment was to tell God: father, they are killing me.
Help me".
After that attack, the journalist never returned to her town.
"I saw that a fire came out of the gun and the revolver turned."
Marcela raised her hands and shielded her face from her.
The bullet went through her wrist.
The second shot was worse.
She destroyed the jaw on the left side of her and left half of her face paralyzed.
Some of the scars still linger on her face.
The third shot she received was in her right temple.
"A taxi driver says that my murderer hugged me, he dragged me to the sidewalk and there he gave me the coup de grace."
She tells it serenely, her voice does not tremble.
She fixes both of her dark eyes and recounts the facts one by one.
She shows that she is a good communicator.
“The importance is in the details,” she says.
She was about to die, but she survived.
Six operations later and after many efforts, she managed to recover her speech.
If there is a word that defines her, she is a fighter.
Marcela recounts the long list of violence that she has experienced in her life since she was little.
Like millions of women in the world, she experienced double discrimination for being a woman and indigenous.
She wears her hair gathered around her head, she wears the traditional huipil of the Ñom 'daa women and from under it, a petticoat of an intense blue color peeks out.
“I remember that one day on the radio they forbade me to wear my huipil,” she says at one point in the conversation.
Her life has been a constant fight to defend her freedom and her rights.
At the age of nine, she ran away from her home to avoid being married off to an older man.
“I rebelled against the rules of my house, against the rules of my family, because they were already setting me aside to get married,” she explains.
She also experienced the violence of the State.
“The Health and malaria vaccination staff would come to fumigate our huts and I would see how they groped and raped the women;
Those of the Army would arrive and they would kill us a cow or a goat and they would also grope us and rape us, ”she denounces.
Abuse after abuse, Marcela was learning the importance of not being intimidated.
She found the way to help her people through communication and went to work for a radio station in Oaxaca.
“Since then, the idea of being the voice of my race was born to me.
I felt so helpless from being treated so I wanted to face them,” she says.
“I found in journalism the way to help my race: talking about human rights, ecology, violence against women, children's rights.
My race also has the right to be informed ”, she assures.
Marcela de Jesús Natalia pictured at her home, after the interview. Mónica González Islas
Far from leaving behind that long list of abuses, in 1998 the Oaxaca Prosecutor's Office arrested Marcela and her 16-year-old son, and accused them of having organized an assault on a highway and of qualified homicide.
A judge sentenced her without evidence to 80 years in prison and she had to live behind bars "for three years and five days," she says, until she could prove that on the day the events occurred, she was hundreds of kilometers from the scene. .
The Superior Court of Oaxaca acquitted her without charges.
"The authorities that seek justice are experts in fabricating crimes, but to investigate public officials and the powerful, they turn deaf, blind and mute," says the journalist.
After five years fighting for justice to be done in her case, Marcela denounces that the Special Prosecutor's Office for Attention to Crimes committed against Freedom of Expression (FEADLE) has shelved her case because the perpetrators of the attack are in prison.
In total there were two hitmen who were waiting for her outside the radio station to kill her.
“Although they sentenced my material authors, they are not the most important ones,” she affirms.
“The person who paid them 50,000 pesos (3,000 dollars) to assassinate me, the current municipal president of Xochistlahuaca, the PRI member Aceadeth Rocha Ramírez, has yet to be arrested,” she says with a firm voice.
De Jesús says that the attack has to do with political differences over municipal issues, for denouncing mismanagement in the City Hall and for pointing out the abandonment of the indigenous population of the municipality.
95% of the people who live in Xochistlahuaca.
Added to racism and machismo are gender-based political violence and violence for practicing journalism, a profession severely punished throughout the country, and which closed 2022 as the most violent year against communicators.
“I have colleagues there who do not touch on issues of social interest out of fear.
The authorities have threatened me that they will imprison me if I continue to touch on human rights issues, ”he explains.
Now, on her way to turning 60 and still recovering from the aftermath of the attack, Marcela claims to be able to return to her municipality and continue doing what she likes best: working at Radio Guerrero Ometepec.
She will be alive away from her community and her family has plunged her into deep sadness.
She misses her six children and her 10 grandchildren.
With the only company of her dog Catsé, which in
Ñomn' daa
means “butterfly”, and some pots where she grows chili peppers and tomatoes, the days go by very slowly for this woman who waits for justice that never comes.
This newspaper contacted the manager of Radio Ometepec, who remained silent regarding the case of the indigenous communicator.
“I demand that the State and Governor Evelyn Salgado comply with what is their responsibility, that my case be thoroughly investigated, because I have to fulfill the commitment to make my race's right to be informed a reality,” she insists.
When the governor came to power two years ago, the governor promised that Guerrero would become "a sanctuary for women where they can be protected."
Marcela de Jesús continues to hope that she fulfills that promise.
“I have the energy, I have the voice and I want to continue exercising: I am an activist, I am a feminist, I am a defender of human rights and I am a journalist”.
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