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Text File | 1994-05-02 | 29KB | 530 lines

<text> <title> Mexico: Human Rights Watch </title> <article> <hdr> Human Rights Watch World Report 1992 Americas Watch: Mexico </hdr> <body> Human Rights Developments During 1991, pressure mounted on the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to improve human rights conditions in Mexico. Americas Watch and other international human rights organizations, in cooperation with an expanding network of non-governmental human rights activists in Mexico, focused national and international attention on numerous ongoing abuses in the country. These include murder, torture and other abuses by federal and state police; violence associated with electoral fraud; violations of labor rights; rural violence; threats against human rights monitors and journalists; and impunity for just about everyone who engages in such abuses. The pressure came as Mexico and the United States proceeded with negotiations of a free-trade accord. Ratification of a North American Free Trade Agreement, a goal announced by the two nations in June 1990, is a cornerstone of President Salinas's economic policy. His government has worked hard to anticipate and deflect criticism from Washington concerning Mexican domestic policies. One component of this effort has been an extensive campaign to improve Mexico's human rights image. Following the May 1990 murder of human rights activist Norma Corona Sapién, the Salinas government instituted a series of reforms, including the establishment of a National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) and the implementation of legal and institutional reforms and personnel changes. In a handful of serious, high-profile cases, progress has been made toward identifying and prosecuting those responsible for violent abuses. Despite these reforms, many steps that are necessary to realize permanent human rights improvements have not been taken. (For a more detailed description of reforms taken in 1990, see Americas Watch, Unceasing Abuses: Human Rights in Mexico One Year After the Introduction of Reform, September 1991, pp. 3-8.) The Salinas government has paid scant attention to rights abuses that do not relate to the administration of justice. Rural violence, particularly unannounced forced evictions of peasants from their homes by police working in cooperation with local rural bosses, is ongoing and unchecked. Human rights activists and journalists have been threatened, and labor activists who oppose government-affiliated unions have found their right to freedom of expression trampled. The fraud and corruption that marred the August 1991 mid-term elections contributed to a highly charged political climate, which in the past has sparked violence. More fundamentally, the Salinas government has not reversed Mexico's long-standing policy of impunity for those who commit human rights abuses. Hundreds of cases of disappearance some more than twenty years old remain unsolved and their perpetrators unpunished. The use of torture by federal and state police notwithstanding the many reforms introduced to combat the practice remains routine. Adequate investigation of torture allegations is rare. Even when a serious investigation occurs, the will is often lacking to prosecute and punish the responsible officers and their superiors. If the human rights reforms introduced by the Salinas government are to succeed, they must be supported by a firm and consistent determination to throw the book at all those responsible for torture and other human rights abuses. A positive development in the face of a worsening human rights situation was the June 1990 formation of the National Human Rights Commission, a government agency headed by respected Supreme Court Justice Jorge Carpizo, who reports directly to President Salinas. The CNDH has some three hundred staff members, including approximately sixty lawyers responsible for investigating complaints. As of September 1991, the commission had received more than two thousand admissible complaints of recent serious violations of human rights by government agents, including numerous cases of illegal deprivation of liberty, torture, death threats and homicide. In that time, the commission had issued 119 recommendations. Many concerned highly publicized cases or cases on which non-governmental human rights groups had focused. Other cases, many equally serious, first received public attention as a result of the CNDH recommendations. While the majority of the recommendations have been directed to state government officials, thirty were sent to the federal attorney general and another three were sent to the Defense Ministry. Many called for the prosecution of agents who had committed the abuse and their superior officers. The CNDH lacks prosecutorial powers and depends on publicity and the influence of Dr. Carpizo, backed by President Salinas, to enforce its recommendations. President Salinas has decreed that all prosecutors, police and other government agencies are to cooperate fully with commission investigations. In some cases, he has condemned human rights violations under consideration by the CNDH or called for a CNDH recommendation to be implemented. But President Salinas has avoided public confrontation with state government officials or agencies of the federal executive branch that ignore or reject CNDH recommendations. During its first year, the CNDH was routinely stymied by Federal Attorney General Enrique Alvarez del Castillo and a number of state officials who refused to comply with CNDH recommendations or did an end run around the CNDH by promising to "investigate" a CNDH recommendation while in fact doing nothing. (The federal attorney general heads the Procuraduría General de la República (PGR). The investigative branch of the Procuraduría is the Federal Judicial Police.) In several highly publicized cases involving abuse by officers of the Federal Judicial Police, Attorney General Alvarez del Castillo either impeded the commission's investigation or refused to carry out its recommendations. (See Americas Watch, Unceasing Abuses, pp. 3-5.) Since Alvarez del Castillo was replaced by Ignacio Morales Lechuga in May 1991, there have been significant developments in several highly publicized cases, including some in which Alvarez del Castillo had defied CNDH recommendations. Antonio Valencia Fontes, the attorney for relatives of the November 1989 disappearance victim Sergio Machi Ramírez, was released a month after Morales Lechuga became federal attorney general. Shortly after the disappearance, Valencia Fontes and four friends and relatives of Machi Ramírez had been arrested, held incommunicado and tortured. They were incarcerated on trumped up charges for a year and a half before Morales Lechuga dropped the charges and the five were freed. Valencia Fontes is seeking indemnification for wrongful imprisonment and mistreatment. Morales Lechuga moved to clean up the human rights mess left by Alvarez del Castillo. He took action in the May 1990 Aguililla case, which resulted from a heavy-handed anti-narcotics raid in Michoacán. (See Americas Watch, Unceasing Abuses, p. 10; and Americas Watch, Human Rights in Mexico: A Policy of Impunity, June 1990, pp. 15-16.) President Salinas in December 1990 publicly expressed his support for a November 1990 CNDH recommendation that had called for a complete investigation into the events in Aguililla, the release of four men imprisoned following the raid, and the punishment of all police who committed human rights abuses. Two of the men were released in December 1990, but two others remained incarcerated until Morales Lechuga dropped charges against them on June 26, 1991. Morales Lechuga's office announced in late September that it had taken criminal action against a Federal Judicial Police commander, a Public Ministry agent in Michoacán state, and others responsible for human rights violations related to the raid.