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By Chris Covert
Rantburg.com
The US Department of State annual Human Rights report for 2011 on Mexico criticizes Mexican security forces for human right abuses in several areas, but also points out improvements made by those forces regarding human rights, according to the reported published on the agency's website late last week.
Did the report mention the terrible human rights abuses committed by the drug cartels? No? Didn't think so...
The report refers to three high profile deaths at the hand of Mexican security forces, one of which occurred this year in Veracruz state, where Joaquin Figueroa Vasquez was killed in a high speed pursuit. The Mexican government said that Figueroa Vasquez was a drug trafficking suspect who was killed in the course of events, while the victim's family and their human rights activists said he was executed.
The second case, the April 2010 deaths of two children ages five and nine in Nuevo Leon, remains under investigation. The Mexican Comision Nacional Derecha Humanos (CNDH) or human rights commission claims the children were killed by army troops, while the Secretaria de Defensa Nacional (SEDENA), the controlling agency for the Mexican Army, maintains they were killed by grenade shrapnel from drug cartel operatives. The last case, involving Monterrey university students killed by Mexican Army troops, also remains unresolved.
The report does make mention of security forces' positive activities in the realm of human rights. SEDENA reported that since 2006, 16 soldiers have been convicted of human rights crimes, while 168 soldiers were under active investigation and another 65 were undergoing military trials for their alleged crimes.
According to the report, the CNDH provided human rights training to 30,108 military personnel during the year. Additionally, SEDENA reported that during the year 207,829 soldiers participated in courses dedicated to human rights.
A bit of an error took place in compiling the document. The report refers to an order issued by Mexican President Felipe Calderon Hinojosa in December, 2010 for SEDENA to write down rules on the use of force in the conduct their duties in the drug war.
SEDENA compiled those rules and published them just last month.
You can read the Rantburg report on those newly published guidelines in the next story below, entitled: SEDENA outlines Mexican Army use of force guidelines
Another concern in the report was how the Mexican Army treats its detainees. In the section concerning detentions, SEDENA was accused of needlessly detaining suspects for too long without the involvement of federal or state authorities.
How this represents a problem in the report is unclear. SEDENA apparently does send out patrols and those patrol sometimes encounter armed suspects with connections to the drug cartels. The issue in the report appears to be delay between detentions or shootings, and the subsequent and legally required reporting of the incident to the Procuraduria General de la Republica (PGR) or attorney general, but it may be a tacit criticism of how army patrols are ordered and executed which lead to those encounters.
Another problem detailed in the report is the Mexican legal system's use of a process colloquially known as "rooting", or arraignment. Under the process a suspect can be detained incommunicado without charge or trial for up to 80 days with the approval of a judge. In practice, in fighting drug cartels prosecutors generally request 40 days to investigate a criminal. Rooting requests are for suspects who represent an extreme danger of more violence and when detention is the only way to prevent outside influences being involved in the investigation.
The rooting is a tool which helps prosecutors investigate serious crimes. For example, it was used in the case of the multiple murder perpetrated by prison inmates in Durango's Centro Readaptacion Social Number 2 (CERESO), where prison administrators as well as guards commissioned hits against Los Zetas facilities such as bars in the La Laguna region of Mexico in the summer of 2010.
The issue in the report is that rooting invites torture. While the anecdotal evidence suggests that torture may have occurred in some cases, the practice of torture while in preventative detention does not appear to be widespread..
Perhaps one of the most startling sections in the report was the reference to the case of disgraced Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) president Humberto Moreira Valdes, who suffered weeks of negative press last year because of the huge run-up of Coahuila state public debt and the subsequent crimes committed to hide the debt and steal the proceeds. That sorry case has taken down at least 12 former Coahuila state officials, but oddly not Moreira, who presided over the debt run-up as governor of Coahuila.
According to the report of Mexican Secretaria de Hacienda y Credito Publico de Mexico or Finance Ministry filed a criminal charge against the state for failing to properly disclose the tremendous amount of debt, the highest per capita in Mexico. The matter is still under investigation.
It is a pretty good bet that if PRI wins in July, that investigation will quietly go away.
Chris Covert writes Mexican Drug War and national political news for Rantburg.com
© Copyright 2012 by Chris Covert
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