Yonny Ronay is a young student, the son of humble peasants in Chiapas, Mexico. Arrested during a police inspection conducted in March 2019 in the city where he was studying, he was taken in without reason and then transported to the facilities of the Special Investigations Division of the State Attorney’s Office. Here, he was subjected to various torture techniques to force him to confess to a theft – kneeling, being slapped, beaten with a board and a rolled up cloth, waterboarding and electrocution.

To justify his arrest, he was, the following day, pictured in the local press and on social networks, next to heavy weapons. The goal was to present Yonny as a member of a criminal group and the perpetrator of a homicide in Villaflores, another town in Chiapas.

The next day, when he was supposed to be released (in the absence of incriminating evidence), police officers came to take him to the prosecutor’s office in Villaflores. The torture resumed, this time to force him to confess to the murder mentioned in the media. Yonny Ronay denounced, among other things, asphyxiation with a plastic bag coated with chili pepper. He was then placed in preventive detention, accused of aggravated homicide and then robbery.

Yonny Ronay’s arbitrary detention on the basis of fabricated evidence is a violation of his right to the presumption of innocence and due process.

Yonny has repeatedly stated that he was in the city of Cintalapa on the day of the Villaflores murder of which he is accused.

He denounced his torture during the first hearings before the judge, and medical certificates and several testimonies support his claims.

However, the Chiapas justice system deliberately ignored all of these serious violations and sentenced him in September 2021 to 31 years and six months in prison.

The production of false evidence in the case of Yonny Ronay is not an isolated incident in the state of Chiapas. In February 2020, federal authorities questioned him about testimony he allegedly produced in another case forwarded by Chiapas authorities, relating to the torture and illegal detention of two other people. However, Yonny could not have been a witness to these events since he was already in prison at the time. Furthermore, the copy of his driver’s license attached to his false testimony could only have been transmitted by the Special Investigations Division of Chiapas, which confiscated it when he was arrested.