Insituto Nacional de lenguas Indigenas, Mexico (National Institute of Indigenous languages) on Item
IV
I’m Havier Lopez Sanchez, member of the Maya Tzelzap People from [Chaupez] Mexico. It’s a
great honour to be here in this extremely important Forum.
Mexico would like to thank the organizers of this extremely important event as part of the 20th
anniversary of the Declaration. Thank you, because we have an opportunity to set out
experiences regarding the implementation of the Declaration. And we’re also convinced that it will
give us the opportunity to think a little bit about and identify everything that remains to be done in
order to eradicate all forms of prejudice, discrimination and racism.
As of the reform of Article 2 of the Political Constitution of the United States of Mexico in 2001.
Mexico is a country which is multicultural and multilingual. In 2003 the Federal Law to Prevent
Discrimination came into force. Since that year linguistic rights are embodied in the General Law of
Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It recognises the Indigenous languages as heritage of all Mexicans as
well as other [national languages] have the same standing as Spanish. The General Law on
language rights has really meant a sea change in the policies of the Mexican state. It establishes the
language rights of Indigenous peoples in legal and judicial acts, education as well as in mass media.
The National Institute for Indigenous Languages therefore meeting this desire for a real language
policy which implies a legal recognition of a language diversity of the country as well as fostering
multilingualism in linguistic policy.
It’s worth pointing out that our experience in the implementation of the Declaration and the
compliance of this with the language rights of Indigenous people is focused on the implementation of
public policies promoting the participation of all social agents, be it Indigenous peoples, women and
men, young people, civil associations, public and private institutions, universities, research centres,
indigenous and non-indigenous experts, different mass media, the inter-institutional effort as well as
integrating efforts with the states, municipalities, and the federation itself as part of an
overall institutional responsibility.
We would like to highlight the following actions that the Mexican state [Faya] Institute has carried
out, such as national research into the catalogue of the Indigenous languages which has been
published as a book and also online, which sets out with a degree of certainty how many Indigenous
languages there are in our country. Also, we worked to design a new ethnic census where we’ve
seen the self-identification of 15 730 074 Indigenous people from which about 6930000 speak some
form of an Indigenous language. We have trained, accredited and certified translators and
interpreters in Indigenous languages and we also have the national body of translators and
interpreters.