A Juan Zamorano, a 14-year-old indigenous student, was set on fire by his classmates at the beginning of June for being indigenousand the brutal aggression reminded Mexico of the discrimination that the native peoples of the country experience day by day.
The incident, which caught national attention, occurred on June 6 at a high school in the central state of Querétaro.
That day, two of Juan’s classmates placed alcohol on his school seat. When the boy felt his pants wet, he stood up and one of them took the opportunity to set him on fire, leaving him with second and third degree burns..
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He speaks this mother tongue but he does not want to talk about it much because it is a cause for ridicule, harassment, ‘bullying’
The attack was not fortuitous: Juan had already suffered ridicule and harassment for his origin for weeks, according to his family’s lawyers, who filed complaints against the aggressors and the school authorities. The boy just got out of the hospital last Monday.
“Both his father and his mother are indigenous,” says Ernesto Franco, one of the Zamorano family’s lawyers. “He speaks this mother tongue but he doesn’t want to talk about it much because it’s a cause for ridicule, harassment, ‘bullying’.”
The family has denounced to the press that even the classroom teacher herself harassed Juan because of his Otomi origin.a native town of which there are an estimated 350,000 people in Mexico.
“She thinks we are not of her class, we are not of her race,” Juan’s father told the newspaper El Universal, who also described the attack as “attempted murder.”
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The attack against Juan generated a cascade of reactions from government institutions: the local prosecutor’s office announced an investigation, the two young aggressors face legal proceedings, and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that if necessary the country’s attorney general’s office could deal with the case.
For its part, the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI) called for “sanctioning minors and adults involved in harassment and recurring aggression against minors.”
“(It is) urgent that measures be adopted in the country’s public and private schools, to prevent the continuation of cases of discrimination and racism against indigenous children and adolescents,” he added in a statement.
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The case of discrimination against Juan is not the only one
In Mexico, a country of 126 million inhabitants and where some 7.3 million people speak an indigenous language, discrimination is common.
For example, in March of this year, an Otomi woman denounced that the staff of a restaurant in the popular Roma neighborhood in Mexico City, where she was eating, prevented her from accessing the toilet, alleging that it was only for diners.
According to an INEGI survey published in 2018, 40.33% of the indigenous population have reported having been discriminated against, and almost 50% consider that their rights are respected little or not at all in the country.
That same survey also allows us to see the prejudices of Mexicans against the indigenous population. Three out of 10 people agreed with the statement: “the poverty of indigenous people is due to their culture.”
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For Alexandra Haas, director of the Oxfam Mexico NGO, cases like Juan’s are not isolated since they are part of a systemic racism in the country.
In 2019, a study by that organization found that in Mexico speaking an indigenous language, identifying with an indigenous, black or mulatto community or having a darker skin tone implies less chance of advancing in the educational and labor system.
Juan’s case “is a state of shock at how far discrimination can go,” says Haas.
“We cannot say that we arrive at that act as something impossible to foresee. There are decades and centuries of racial and indigenous discrimination and it is very structural,” adds the former director of the National Council to Prevent Discrimination (Conapred).
To address the problem, Mexico has a law to prevent discrimination and there are institutions responsible for receiving complaints in this regard. In addition, in Mexico City there are usually legends in businesses that warn that in these places there is no discrimination based on gender, race or belief.
THE UNIVERSAL / MEXICO (GDA)
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