San Juan Copala is a little town in the municipality of Santiago Juxtlahuaca

Santiago Juxtlahuaca

Santiago Juxtlahuaca is a town and municipality in Oaxaca in south-western Mexico.It is in the Juxtlahuaca District of the Mixteca Region.-Town:The town is at a height of 1,690 meters above sea level....

 in the Mexican state of Oaxaca

Oaxaca

Oaxaca , , officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Oaxaca is one of the 31 states which, along with the Federal District, comprise the 32 federative entities of Mexico. It is divided into 571 municipalities; of which 418 are governed by the system of customs and traditions...

, inhabited by Trique

Trique

The Trique or Triqui are an indigenous people of the western part of the Mexican state of Oaxaca, centered in the municipalities of Juxtlahuaca, Tlaxiaco and Putla. They number around 23,000 according to the Ethnologue surveys. The Trique language is a Mixtecan language of Oto-Manguean genetic...

 Indians. Its inhabitants have declared themselves autonomous of the Mexican state and founded the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala

Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala

The Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala is an entity made up of Trique Indians who declared their autonomy of the Mexican state in 2006 as a reaction to repression by the Mexican state, especially the Oaxacan government, whose leader Ulises Ruiz was targeted by the APPO movement at the time...

 in 2006.
It has been the setting of events that brought international attention to the human rights

Human rights

Human rights are "commonly understood as inalienable fundamental rights to which a person is inherently entitled simply because she or he is a human being." Human rights are thus conceived as universal and egalitarian . These rights may exist as natural rights or as legal rights, in both national...

 situation in Mexico

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

 in 2010, when human rights observers Jyri Jaakkola

Jyri Jaakkola

Jyri Antero Jaakkola was a Finnish human rights activist. He was on his way to San Juan Copala, a village of Trique indigenous people that has declared itself autonomous, as a human rights observer when he was shot dead by UBISORT, a paramilitary organization connected to Institutional...

 and Bety Cariño were murdered by members of the local paramilitary

Paramilitary

A paramilitary is a force whose function and organization are similar to those of a professional military, but which is not considered part of a state's formal armed forces....

 group UBISORT

Ubisort

Ubisort y MULT are two paramilitary groups in Oaxaca, Mexico affiliated with the ruling PRI-party....

while trying to deliver humanitarian goods to San Juan Copala, which had been cut off from supplies such as food, medicine, electricity and water by a UBISORT blockade for several months.