Stop Violence Against Women
Human Rights Defender
Digna Ochoa
Ochoa's father was a union leader in a sugar factory in Veracruz, Mexico. Ochoa began to study law after hearing that her father and his friends needed more lawyers. Her father was unjustly jailed for over a year and then was "disappeared."
Ochoa worked as a prosecutor in the Attorney General's office but left because of the corruption she saw in the system. She opened an office with other lawyers and began to do defense work. Her first case involved the illegal detention and torture of several peasants by judicial police. As she pursued the case, the police harassed her and sent death threats . Ochoa was kidnapped and "disappeared." She endured a month of torture, escaped and hid for another month. Finally, her fellow lawyers, most of whom were women, filed a criminal complaint on her behalf. But, for her safety and that of her family, she left Veracruz for Mexico City, where she took a human rights course. In Mexico City, she met someone working at PRODH (Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Centre) and began working with Centro PRODH in December 1988.
Ochoa had taken on some of Mexico's most controversial cases, including defense of alleged members of the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas, and the defense of Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera, anti-logging environmentalists. AIUSA's Just Earth Campaign on Environment and Human Rights has taken up a campaign for the immediate release of Montiel and Cabrera.
Featured in Speak Truth to Power, a recent book by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, Digna Ochoa said, "It's injustice that motivates us to do something, to take risks, knowing that if we don't, things will remain the same...Something that I discovered is that the police and soldiers are used to their superiors shouting at them, and they're used to being mistreated. So when they run into a woman, otherwise insignificant to them, who demands things of them and shouts at them in an authoritarian way, they are paralyzed. And we get results."
In August 1999, after she began work on the Montiel and Cabrera case, Digna Ochoa was kidnapped and beaten by two unidentified men before being set free with the warning that she would be killed if she drew attention to the abduction. In September 1999, three mailed death threats were received at her office. Attached to one letter was one of Digna Ochoa's business cards that had been taken from her during her abduction. Then in October,1999, on the same night that the offices of her agency, PRODH, were ransacked and files destroyed, three men broke into her home. They tied her to a chair, immobilized her arms and legs, locked in the room with an open gas canister, and left her to die. Miraculously, once again, she was able to free herself.
But the determination of her persecutors finally prevailed. On 19 October, 2001, Digna Ochoa's body was found in a legal office in Mexico City. The killers left a death threat warning other human rights defenders from the PRODH, that they would meet a similar fate, if they continued their human rights work. Those who worked with Digna Ochoa are now in grave danger. At particular risk are human rights lawyers Pilar Noriega and Barbara Zamora, who worked with her on very high-profile cases.
The murder of Digna Ochoa has sent shock waves through Mexican society. It is more than 10 years since such a high-profile human rights activist has been murdered for their work. President Fox's administration, which came to power after over 70 years of one-party rule, has pledged to end impunity and radically improve Mexico's human rights situation. Digna Ochoa's murder and the death threat that goes with it, demonstrate that the authorities have failed to deliver real improvements. Digna Ochoa's murder must not remain a demonstration of the confidence her murderers have, that they will never be brought to justice.
