James A. Goldston: In Mexico, the Rule of Law is an Empty Promise James A. Goldston - Open Society Foundations
go to original June 9, 2016

Protestors in Mexico City demand answers from the government in the case of 43 missing students believed taken by security forces. (Miami Herald)

A few weeks ago, the front page of Mexico’s pro-government tabloid La Razon carried a picture of President Enrique Peña Nieto and his wife watching school children play with Lego, on the last day of their state visit to Denmark. Smaller headlines pointed inside to another big story: a new video showing two Mexican soldiers and a federal police officer torturing a young woman suspect by suffocating her with a plastic bag, pulling her hair, and placing a gun to her head.

Such is the contradiction of Mexico today.

The president has been a prophet of the positive. Mexico is economically advancing, open to foreign investors, and playing a constructive role on the international stage.

But then there is the Mexico of the plastic bag. The electric shock. The gun. A country where government forces, as well as the drug cartels, have committed atrocities that, according to an extensive legal analysis by my colleagues at the Open Society Justice Initiative, may amount to crimes against humanity.

The two soldiers in the video, for instance, should be tried for torture. But only six people have been convicted of torture by federal courts in Mexico since 2006, though it is widely used.

Consider the killings at a place called Tlatlaya in June 2014. Mexico’s human rights commission concluded that the army executed at least 12 persons in cold blood, then altered the scene to suggest they had died in an exchange of fire. Charges initially brought against seven soldiers have since been dropped.

But no case has transfixed Mexico more than the September 2014 abduction by police of 43 students attending a college in Ayotzinapa, a small town in the poor, rural state of Guerrero. The victims have not been seen again. The case captured public attention precisely because it was symptomatic of the widespread brutality and impunity that have poisoned Mexican criminal justice since the onset of a militarized war on drugs a decade ago.

...The authorities have pursued a legitimate goal: subduing organized crime. But they have done so by allowing the use of indiscriminate force against civilians assumed to be associated with criminal cartels, with almost no accountability.

Read the rest at Miami Herald

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!