Good afternoon. My name is Araceli. As the general context in our country has already been discussed, I want to talk about the State of Guerrero, which is one of the states that has been most affected historically, given the level of education, the economic situation, discrimination, corruption, and all of these things.
Currently, these same conditions continue to exist. Guerrero is one of the states that has seen the most breaches of fundamental rights, such as forced disappearances and forced displacement. These topics are not discussed very often. My colleague mentioned the issue of the 43 students who disappeared, but there are many other cases of people who have disappeared, and these cases are not recognized currently. There are seven groups of families of disappeared individuals who are looking for 2,000 people in the State of Guerrero alone.
With that in mind, we note that the most affected population is the indigenous population, especially indigenous women, many of whom do not speak Spanish, even though Spanish is the language of the majority of Mexicans. These women are the most vulnerable individuals because they often live in extreme poverty. They are extremely marginalized. They do not speak the dominant language.
They need justice, but it is very hard for them. The government doesn't show a great deal of interest in fixing serious problems, so these women need to go by themselves to look in pits and trenches to see if they can find their family members. They need to exhume the bodies themselves, because no one is going to help them.
As for the forensic services, there are just far too many corpses in Guerrero. There are corpses that are placed in unofficial locations; no protocol is followed to preserve those bodies or to collect data that would allow them to be identified.
Another issue is the matter of forced displacement. There is no legislation to help these victims. Very often, people who know these victims who have been disappeared need to move themselves because of the amount of violence that is inflicted on them. There is a community in Guerrero that is one of the 50 most violent, where there are 191 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. That's an extremely high rate.
By the month of September, 5,000 families were displaced. There is one case, for example, where three communities were displaced in less than three days. Five hundred families were affected by this. Why did they have to move? Because they were afraid of being murdered.
There is no public policy in place to fix this, and these problems are hitting the State of Guerrero very hard. We need the help of international organizations to ensure that our rights are respected. As activists who support these human rights, we are the only ones who can do something for these victims. We find ourselves grappling with a real battlefield, and we're the only ones who are insisting that these basic human rights be respected.
There is a lack of respect for the rule of law, and there is a criminalization campaign that is being carried on by some parts of the state. You need to recognize the reality that we are experiencing every day. This situation must become better known in the world. We need to end the silence. We need the statistics and the events to become well known outside our borders.
Thank you.