A Mexican student was set on fire and severely burnt in a classroom because his ‘only offence’ was speaking an Indigenous language in a country that is still working to abolish racial prejudice. In June, two students are accused of spilling alcohol on Juan Zamorano’s seat at a high school in Queretaro, Mexico’s central state. According to his relatives, when the 14-year-old saw his trousers were wet and rose up, one of them set Zamorano on fire.
He was hospitalised with second and third-degree burns and was only recently released. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador stated that the issue might be handled by the country’s attorney general’s office if required. Juan’s ‘only fault was speaking Otomi,’ according to Lopez Obrador’s spokesman, Jesus Ramirez, who also stated that combating racism was everyone’s responsibility.
According to his family’s lawyers, Juan had previously been subjected to weeks of bullying because of his Indigenous Otomi ancestry, and they had filed complaints against the accused assailants and school officials. The Otomi are one of the hundreds of Indigenous communities in the Latin American country, with an estimated population of 350,000. Juan’s mother tongue is Otomi, but he ‘doesn’t want to use it much since it’s a source of derision, harassment, and bullying,’ one of the family’s lawyers, Ernesto Franco, told AFP.
According to the family, even Zamorano’s instructor bullied him because of his ethnicity. ‘ She feels we’re not her class, we’re not her race,’ Zamorano’s father, who described the incident as ‘attempted murder,’ told the daily El Universal. Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples encouraged authorities to ‘sanction children and adults participating in harassment and recurrent attacks on minors’. It stated that immediate action is needed in schools to prevent additional incidences of prejudice and racism.
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