Since the late 1980s, CIESAS has specialized in the studies of legal anthropology with the pioneering investigations of María Teresa Sierra and Victoria Chenaut. In the present moment, CIESAS research is a mandatory reference in the study of legal anthropology throughout Latin America. Likewise, its masters and doctorate programs within the specialty of Cultural Diversity, Identity and Power, is one of the few spaces that trains legal anthropologists with a gender perspective. The CIESAS Mexico City team of Rosalva Aída Hernández, María Teresa Sierra, Rachel Sieder and Mariana Mora, has developed several collective projects which have produced collective books, doctoral and master thesis and various academic articles. On this page we share some of these collective products.

In this chapter, the author presents her reflections on the possibilities and limitations of international litigation in order for indigenous women to access justice in the current Mexican political and social context. Based on the analysis of the case of Inés Fernández Ortega before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), she addresses the way in which violence, racism and gender inequalities affect the lives of indigenous Mexican women and determine their lack of access to Justice. It also analyzes the appropriation of human rights discourses and international justice spaces that Inés Fernández and the women of her organization have used as tools to denounce the violence, racism and economic marginalization suffered by them and their communities.

Download PDF

Autodeterminação, autonomia territorial e acesso à justiça: povos indígenas em movimento na América Latina.

Capitulo en libro: Mulheres indígenas e o acesso à justiça: a perspectiva de gênero na antropologia jurídica latino-americana

Escrito por: Rosalva Aída Hernández y María Teresa Sierra

Idioma: portuges

Indigenous Justice and State: Contemporary Violence

This book is the product of the collective project “Globalization, Justice and Rights in a Gender and Power perspective” (CONACYT) coordinated by María Teresa Sierra and Rosalva Aída Hernández, in which undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students participated. The book brings together ten case studies developed in the Mexican states of Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Puebla, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Morelos and the Guatemalan Altiplano, addressing the transformation of the state’s relationship with indigenous peoples from the privileged focus of the dispute over rights and justice in times of strong changes marked by neoliberal globalization, multicultural policies and processes of political transition that affect the nature of the State and society in Mexico and Guatemala. In particular, the book explores the tensions between multicultural policies, and policies of criminal reform, which are both aimed at recognizing indigenous rights and alternative forms of justice, as well as the new national security policies that promote the tightening of the State and the new controls over the population. What may look like opposite sides of the same coin, in reality, are two expressions of the same state-building process, which respond to the demands of economic globalization to generate new governance models.

INDIGENOUS JUSTICE AND STATE: CHAPTER 8

Gender Complementarities and Exclusion in Mesoamerica and the Andes

This book is part of the academic dialogues of the academic collaboration project sponsored by the British Academy of Science and the Caribbean Link Program Scholarship. The purpose of this scholarship is to facilitate dialogue between academics in Latin America and the United Kingdom. The editors of this book set out to expand this dialogue to include representatives of various indigenous groups and organizations, as well as in the workshops that were held within the framework of the project. This collective effort is the product of several dialogues between British and Latin American academics, among those working in the Andean region (mainly Bolivia and Peru) and the Mesoamerican region (mainly Mexico and Guatemala); as well as with indigenous activists and university academics, many of who divide their time between academia and activism. Rarely had the analysis of gender relations in the Andean region been put into dialogue with reflections of Mesoamerican realities, and it had even been less possible to create a space in which indigenous academics and activists shared experiences and reflections on the challenges which implies the decolonization and depatriarization of our countries.

Download PDF

AYOTZINAPA and the Mexican State Crisis

In this special issue of the journal of CIESAS ICHAN TECOLOTL, the members of the area of ​​Legal Anthropology of CIESAS, in collaboration with other colleagues of the institution, reflect on the context of violence and impunity that enabled the Ayotzinapa tragedy. On September 26, 2014, six students from Ayotzinapa Teaching School were killed by police forces, and 43 other students were forcibly disappeared. In addition to expressing our solidarity with the families of the students, as well as our outrage, as academics, we have a special responsibility to contribute to the analysis of the causes of violence and of the general crisis, in order to propose measures and recommendations that help us get out of this crossroads. During the months following this tragic event, discussion and analysis forums on Ayotzinapa were organized at the different CIESAS campuses. This issue of the ICHAN is dedicated to presenting some of these debates. On November 27 2014, a forum took place at Casa Chata, one of the CIESAS headquarters in Mexico City, to present the work of María Teresa Sierra, María Bertely, Aída Hernández, Severine Durin, Mariana Mora, Carlos Flores, and Alberto Aziz. In this edition of ICHAN, Mariana Mora, Aída Hernández and María Teresa Sierra, present their work done in Guerrero over the years. Here they offer a look from different trajectories and experiences with the aim of analyzing the human rights emergency that exists in the state of Guerrero, as well as some of the responses that are generated from the organizations themselves.

Download PDF

Expert Report of the case of Inés Fernandez Ortega

Subject: Rape of an indigenous Me’phaa by members of the Mexican Army. Presented before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. April-May 2010

On August 30, 2010, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued two sentences in which it condemned the Mexican State for its involvement in the sexual rape of two young indigenous women in the Mountain region of Guerrero, in 2002 during the militarization of the state. These two Mep’haa women reported being raped b members of the Mexican army. The incidents occurred at different times with a month difference between them. The successful defense strategy for both cases, carried out mainly by the civil organization, Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Montaña, Tlachinollan, AC, with support from the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), included the presentation of several expert reports, including two in anthropology, which were released in April and May of the same year 2010, during a public session held in Lima, Peru. These expert opinions were prepared by Rosalva Aìda Hernández and Héctor Ortíz Elizondo. In this magazine we present the context in which the expert opinions were conducted, as well as the full-text expert report presented in the case of Inés Fernández Ortega.

Download PDF

Border crossings, indigenous identities, gender and justice in the Americas