NY Times: Elisabeth Malkin. Mexico City — In May 2011, Jethro Sánchez, a 27-year-old engineer, was detained by the Mexican Army, and found tortured and killed. An army colonel was accused of ordering soldiers to hide the body to cover up the crime, and the case vanished in the country’s maze of military justice.
But Mexico’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the colonel should be tried in civilian courts, a decision that human rights groups say could upend the way Mexico deals with rights abuses committed by the military in the course of fighting the country’s pervasive drug war. Read more.
The MexicoBlog of the Americas Program, a fiscally sponsored program of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is written by Laura Carlsen. I monitor and analyze international press on Mexico, with a focus on security, immigration, human rights and social movements for peace and justice, from a feminist perspective. And sometimes I simply muse.
According to the School of the Americas Watch organization's online database (http://www.soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/soawhinsec-grads/graduate-database-search), Colonel José Guadalupe Arias Agredano was an SOA grad in 1996. Chalk up yet another direct connection between human rights violations in the military and the influence of the US foreign policy via the WHINSEC. Let's hope more awareness is emphasized by Justice Zaldívar.
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