Mexican Disappearances Shielded by Impunity, United Nations Says Dudley Althaus - Chron.com | |
go to original March 15, 2012 |
MEXICO CITY - Shielded by a chronic pattern of impunity, Mexican soldiers, police and other authorities have carried out or failed to properly investigate thousands of "enforced disappearances" of Mexican citizens during the past five years of gangland violence, according to a United Nations commission.
While many such disappearances have been the work of gangsters, "not all the disappeared people have been kidnapped by members of organized crime acting alone," commission member Ariel Dulitzky, a University of Texas law professor, told Mexican officials Wednesday in a video conference from U.N. offices in Geneva.
"The participation of (government forces) in forced disappearances is also present," Dulitzky said. "Impunity affects all cases of forced disappearances."
Detailed information
An Argentine human rights expert, Dulitzky was with a five-member "working group" that spent 12 days last March investigating such disappearances in southern Mexico and near the Texas border. The group's report was finished in December but formally presented Wednesday to Mexican officials and human rights advocates at U.N. offices in Mexico City.
Dulitzky and other commission members "received specific, detailed and reliable information on enforced disappearances carried out by public authorities, criminal groups or individuals with direct or indirect support from public officials," the U.N. report contends.
Dulitzky noted that the Calderon government invited the U.N. group to investigate the recent disappearances as well as more than 1,300 others that took place in the so-called "Dirty War" of the 1970s, when security forces repressed an armed leftist insurgency in southern Guerrero state as well as Monterrey and other northern cities.
"Just the supposition or hypothesis of a forced disappearance demands concern regardless of where or how it happened," said Nestor Gonzalez, an assistant federal attorney general.
"There isn't, nor should there be, any excuse to not investigate a suspected case of forced disappearance, regardless of its circumstances," Gonzalez said.
Not an accurate count
Some 60,000 Mexican soldiers and marines have spearheaded President Felipe Calderon's offensive on organized crime gangs, which have expanded from drug traffickers into kidnapping, extortion and other crimes.
More than 50,000 people have been killed in fighting - much of which has taken place on and near the Texas border - among rival gangsters or between them and security forces since December 2006. Thousands more people, which Dulitzky said could not be accurately counted, simply have gone missing amid the mayhem.
The U.N. report urges "the withdrawal of military forces from public safety operations ... as a means of preventing enforced disappearances."
Human rights advocates define enforced disappearances as the kidnapping and likely killing of individuals, often with security forces' complicity.
Such victims are said to have been "disappeared." They often never resurface, either dead or alive.
The discovery of clandestine graves, some holding scores of people, happens nearly every week.
Government officials and the media dub the tombs "narco-graves," pinning the victims on organized crime.
"For us it's much easier to find a person disappeared by organized crime than by authorities," Consuelo Morales, a Roman Catholic nun who heads CADHAC, a human rights group in Monterrey, said.
Monterrey targeted
CADHAC has recorded dozens of disappearances in the Monterrey area in the past several years. Nearly 200 bodies were pulled from mass graves in neighboring Tamaulipas, which borders south Texas.
"We are talking about a problem that the government ... has not managed to recognize, has not had the capacity or will to deal with," Blanca Martinez of Fundem, a group that supports families of the vanished, said at Wednesday's event as she ticked off a list of three dozen people who have been "disappeared."
dudley.althaus@chron.com
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