Pope's Refusal to Mention the 'Disappeared' Was a Great PR Victory for Mexican President Hans Egil Offerdal - The Tablet
go to original March 9, 2016

Pope Francis talks with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto during a meeting with representatives of civil society and the diplomatic corps at the National Palace in Mexico City. (CNS/Paul Haring)

Last month's visit of Pope Francis to Mexico, was a spectacular public relations victory for president Enrique Peña Nieto. However, the trip ended up being an enormous disappointment to human rights defenders and the socially committed minority of the country’s Catholic Church.

This because of Francis’ failure to address one of the nation’s most flagrant human rights issues: more than 25,000 disappearances since 2007, according to the Mexican government’s own data. Even though forced disappearances have been defined as a crime against humanity, the Argentinian pope was utterly silent on the issue.

Is it unfair to expect that a Pope coming from the nation that 'educated' the world about forced disappearances, not only would have the evident moral authority to speak on the issue, but would also be particularly sensitive to the theme, given his own history and experiences in the past?

The forced disappearancee of 43 students from Ayotzinapa in September 2014, led the heroic priest working with migrants in the impoverished state of Oaxaca, Fr. Alejandro Solalinde, to comment that “the whole of Mexico is a clandestine mass grave”. That same year one person went missing every day on average, and this in a nation without a military dictatorship. Just one week before Francis stepped onto Mexican soil, the headline of the newspaper Excelsior stated that 201 mass graves have been discovered in the country since 2006. In a previous story, the paper had pointed out that the government has 120 agents working on the more than 25 000 missing person cases. This might explain why Amnesty International remarked that “search efforts for missing people were generally ineffective”.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has described the missing 43 students case as “the worst human rights atrocity in recent memory”. The criminal investigation has, at best, been unprofessional and HRW claims that the government has “proved unable or unwilling to conduct a serious investigation”.

Read the rest at The Tablet

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