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| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Mexican Chief Justice: Ruling to be Applied Narrowly |
| 2011-07-15 |
| By Chris Covert Two days after releasing a landmark decision, the chief justice of the Mexican Supreme Court said Thursday the new ruling is not mandatory with regard to concurrent cases involving the Mexican military. The decision set off a wave of protests especially within the Mexican military community who fear the new ruling would be applied to counternarcotics operations now and in the future. Chief Justice Juan Silva Meza said Thursday that while the new ruling is not mandatory, Mexican civilian courts will proceed to investigate cases of forced disappearance, especially those which took place in years passed. The case at issue is the disappearance of Rosendo Radilla. Radilla disappeared at a military checkpoint in Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero on August 25th, 1974. Radilla was an activist and a politician during the Mexican Dirty War of the 1970s and 1980s. During that time a succession of Partido Revolutionario Institucional (PRI) presidents used the Mexican military to crush the opposition of primarily leftist and communist insurgencies, armed and otherwise, throughout Mexico. Guerrero being one of the poorest states in Mexico was especially receptive to leftist movements. Indeed even today, it still has a communist guerilla group active within its borders. Radilla's fate has never been determined. In 2001, a case was brought before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The case eventually made its way through a special prosecutor into the Mexican legal system because the Mexican government was a signatory to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). Despite work done by a special prosecutor the IACHR later condemned the Mexican government for its lack of resolution of the case. Throughout the life of the case the Mexican military continued to assert its jurisdiction in the case, which meant that resolution in civil courts was for all intents and purposes barred. Therefore, if a military investigation of the matter was done and concluded, the military was not obligated to detail its findings, including releasing the names and identities of witnesses and potential perpetrators. Wednesday's ruling changes all that. Now not only will Radilla's disappearance be investigated by local and state courts, so will a number of other similar disappearances be investigated as well by civil legal authorities. The ruling now removes military jurisdiction as an impediment to concluding those investigations. Such investigations are a potential firestorm for the PRI, which in most cases prosecuted the Dirty War. If a commander in the Mexican Army is discovered to be complicit in the disappearance, it is entirely possible that the responsibility for the crime could go straight to the top. I.E: for PRI presidents. In an election year in which the PRI is riding high from several stunning electoral wins not only in governors houses, but also in local legislatures and cities; painful revelations from the distant past such as the Radilla case could come at a high political cost for the PRI. |
| Posted by:badanov |