The meeting room in the prison of Villa de Etla, a town in Oaxaca,Mexico, doubles as a classroom with school desks and a small library. The walls feature motivational phrases such as “First things first”, “Live and let live” and “Little by little, you’ll go far”.
Pablo López Alavez, a 56-year-oldenvironmental defender, has had nearly 15 years to contemplate these sentiments – and faces15 more, after being imprisoned for murders he says he did not commit.
The office of the UN high commissioner for human rightshas describedhis detention as arbitrary. Some organisations argue that the true reason he is behind bars is hisresistance to loggingnear his community, and have called for his release. But their call has fallen on closed ears: last month a retrial confirmed his 30-year sentence.
Stocky and greying, dressed in the khaki reserved for inmates, López Alavez tucks himself into one of the chairs and rests his elbows on the desk. “I imagine you’d like to know whether I’m within the truth, or if I am with the lies,” he says, before apologising for his Spanish.
López Alavez comes from the Indigenous community of San Isidro Aloápam, and speaks a Zapotec dialect as his first language. His Spanish is occasionally stiff and legalistic – learned while defending himself in court.
He traces the events that led to his arrest back to the 1980s, when the conflict between his community and its neighbour, San Miguel Aloápam, began with a land dispute. San Isidro was denied titles to nearby forests, while San Miguel was authorised to log them.
López Alavez’s family farmed and kept animals in San Isidro. For 20 years before his arrest, he was a community leader, resisting deforestation to protect their water sources.
“It takes two hours to bring down a great pine tree. But it takes more than 50 years for one to grow,” says López Alavez. “We were thinking ahead: ‘if we destroy it all, what would happen?’”
Friction between the communities grew until two people from San Miguelwere killedin contested circumstances in 2007, whilepeople from San Isidro began to be arrestedfor alleged crimes.
Then, in 2010, López Alavez says he was kidnapped. He was driving near San Isidro with his wife and grandchild when a pickup truck cut them off and armed masked men seized him. They took him to a field near San Miguel and threw him on the ground in front of a group of people.
“That’s him,” López Alavez heard a voice say. “Kill him.”
He says one of the masked men came up to him and asked if he wanted to live. “I told him that’s no question to ask,” says López Alavez. “If your mind is made up, pull the trigger.”
They beat him instead, before taking him to another town where they handed him over to state police, who brought him to Villa de Etla’s prison. Then they told him he was accused of murdering the two people from San Miguel.
López Alavez has protested his innocence all along, saying he was not in town on the day the murders took place, but working in construction in a community eight hours away. He provided witness testimonies, and a certificate from that community’s local police.
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Yet, in 2017, López Alavez received a 30-year sentence. In 2020, due to irregularities in the trial, the state court restarted the process. But last month it produced the same sentence.
As well as describing López Alavez’s detention as arbitrary, the UNhas notedviolations of due process in the trial, inconsistencies in the evidence against him and a lack of consideration of evidence provided by the defence.
The UN concludeds that “the true motive for the detention and trial of López Alavez ishis activity as a defenderof the human rights of his community.” Numerous organisations describe his case as part of a “systematic and alarming” pattern of criminalisation of Indigenous environmental defenders across Mexico.
Since then, López Alavez has kept repeating the number of years, months, and days he has been deprived of his freedom – precisely 14 years, 7 months and 25 days at the time he is speaking to the Guardian – as if he can see the tally on the walls of his mind.
“I’ve lost everything I built in my community,” he says. “Now my family is living here in a rented house.”
For a couple of years after his arrest, he says, the authorities in San Isidro kept talking about the defence of nature. “But then fear won. And now they are quiet,” he says. “People are afraid of ending up here with me.”
López Alavez dwells on the cost for his family. “When my wife left the community, she couldn’t speak Spanish, she didn’t know how to live in a city,” he says. “She has suffered a lot trying to get justice.”
She still receives threats, he adds. “Sometimes when she visits she tells me that someone followed her. If something were to happen to her, the government would never investigate it,” he says.
By making furniture, López Alavez has been able to support his family from prison. His children did not finish school, pushed to work to help support the home. The greatest punishment is what they have done to his family, he says, and asks to pause for a moment to take his glasses off and rub his eyes.
López Alavez plans to keep fighting his case at the state level. If that doesn’t work, he will take it to a federal judge. He hopes that local interests might hold less sway there. But he has also made a direct appeal for the president, Claudia Sheinbaum, and her party, Morena, to live up to their discourse.
“They say there will be change, that they will fix the problems in Indigenous communities. I want to see it,” says López Alavez. “I ask the president to intervene. I ask her to pay attention to the voice of this Indigenous Zapotec, who has spent 14 years, 7 months and 25 days in prison, accused of a crime he did not commit.”