A peasant fighting logging in Mexico’s mountains was cleared of murder charges and ordered freed on Thursday after 10 months in jail in a case that sparked international outcry over corruption in the courts.
Felipe Arreaga, 56, who has been held in a sweltering jail on the Pacific coast since November, was exonerated in the 1998 murder of the son of a powerful local landowner, said a rights group working in his defense.
“They declared him innocent,” defense lawyer Mario Patron told Reuters by telephone from the courtroom.
Rights workers worldwide had said the charge was trumped up by a network of special interests seeking to silence Arreaga and fellow environmentalists over their anti-logging campaign.
The ruling by a criminal court judge in the coastal resort of Zihuatanejo was seen as a victory for human rights in a system that often puts police, prosecutors and courts at the service of political leaders, especially in the countryside.
Greenpeace, Amnesty International, other groups and U.S. Rep. Bob Filner, a California Democrat, had called for the release of Arreaga, who helped found the Peasant Ecologists of the Petatlan Sierra.
The environmental group is celebrated internationally for blocking corporate logging in the Sierra Madre off the Pacific coast in the 1990s.
Arreaga was the latest in a line of members arrested or charged in what their supporters say were bogus cases engineered by local political bosses, or caciques, who hold sway with the military, police and courts.
In August, he received the international Chico Mendes Award, named for an Amazon activist killed in the fight to protect the rain forest when he was gunned down in 1988.
President Vicente Fox was elected in 2000, ending 71 years of rule by the authoritarian PRI party. Though Fox pledged to end justice abuse, the United Nations and other experts say the system is still rife with corruption.
Rights groups said Thursday’s ruling represented a step forward for the judiciary in Guerrero state, a largely rural, poor state known for political cronyism under the PRI.
In an earlier high-profile case, Petatlan ecologists Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera were held on gun and drug charges until Fox freed them in 2001 under mounting indignation from rights groups worldwide who said the two were tortured to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
Fox has proposed sweeping reforms to professionalize police, depoliticize prosecutors and open legal proceedings to public scrutiny. But the measure looks doomed in the partisan climate ahead of next year’s presidential election.
Mexico has among the highest levels of deforestation in the world. In the Petatlan Sierra, Greenpeace says loggers destroyed 40 percent of 558,000 acres of forest from 1992 to 2000, until the ecologists helped stop it.
