La Lucha

La Lucha dives into the city of Juárez, where 97% of murders go unsolved. This is the true story of lawyer and organizer Lucha Castro who, along with several other human rights advocates and a community of protesters, fought to stop the violence, find the killers, and change the system that enabled them.

Graphic novels are more commonly known to illustrate the trials and tribulations of fictional superheroes, but the characters of La Lucha: The Story of Lucha Castro and Human Rights Defenders are starkly real. A series of vignettes threaded together by one of the leading Mexican WHRDs, Lucha Castro, the book offers a rich depiction of the complexity and challenges in the lives of WHRDs and the profound importance of their work. It also engages active storytelling as a means of educating for human rights.

The day after the book was released, a campaign of defamation was launched against Lucha Castro and her colleague Irma Villanueva, which puts the two women at direct risk. This is precisely the conditions this book is meant to address and counter – to provide a counter-narrative to the efforts to smear, harass and defame human rights defenders.