Juan Velasco Aguilar
Juan Velasco Aguilar is an indigenous Tseltal human rights defender from San Juan Cancuc, Chiapas. Juan Velasco Aguilar's work focuses on the pacific defence of the rights of indigenous peoples, particularly the right to autonomy and self-determination.
San Juan Cancuc, in Altos de Chiapas, is a maya-tseltal indigenous municipality that has fought against the environmental and human rights violations generated by the construction project of a mega highway that would cross their territory in order to connect the cities of San Cristóbal de Las Casas and Palenque. This project consists in the implementation of different tourist attractions with social and environmental effects against the land of the indigenous peoples that live in the area.
The 45 communities that are part of San Juan Cancuc have unanimously declared their opposition to the construction of the mega highway, as previous administrations attempted to reactivate its construction.
In this collective process of resilience and defence of their rights to autonomy and self-determination, different tensions arose with municipal and State authorities. In May 2022, Agustín Pérez Velasco, Martín Pérez Domínguez, Juan Velasco Aguilar and Agustín Pérez Domínguez, who participated in the collective process of defence of their rights as tseltal people, were arbitrarily detained as part of a joint operation by the Mexican State, the National Guard and the municipality police. They were disappeared for more than 24 hours, to be later falsely accused of a crime they did not commit and remained detained under a pre trial detention order.
To this day, they are under a criminal process in order to obtain their freedom, for which they were sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in 2023 even though the proof against them was fabricated and unsustainable. Later, they were part of an appeal process that, instead of acknowledging their innocence, ended up confirming their sentence in April 2024.
