San Juan Copala is a little town in the municipality of Santiago Juxtlahuaca in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, inhabited by Trique Indians. Its inhabitants have declared themselves autonomous of the Mexican state and founded the Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala in 2006. It has been the setting of events that brought international attention to the human rights situation in Mexico in 2010, when human rights observers Jyri Jaakkola and Bety Cariño were murdered by members of the local paramilitary group UBISORT 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.[1]