Today the International Civil Commission on Human Rights presented its conclusions, following an intense fact-finding mission in parts of Mexico. The document was a harsh indictment of President Felipe Calderón's government and state and local governments for what the Commission calls the "extremely critical" situation of human rights in Mexico.
The Commission's work bears close examination because it is based not on rhetoric or officially arranged tours, but more than 280 carefully documented interviews with a wide range of victims, their family members, grassroots organizations, human rights groups and government officials. This often heart-breaking reservoir of material forms the basis for its preliminary conclusions and recommendations and the more detailed report that will follow.
I was commissioned as a member of the delegation and assisted with interviews in the Lacandon Jungle in Chiapas, in Oaxaca City and in Mexico City. While the report (available in Spanish at http://cciodh.pangea.org/, English coming up soon) is strong stuff, it can´t compare to the experience of actually listening to individuals who have been beaten and terrorized--like the men and women rounded up during the police crackdown in Oaxaca on November 25, 2006, or Zapatista sympathizers hounded by paramilitary groups. Nor can the words on the page convey the power of the tears on the cheek of a daughter whose father has been imprisoned, killed or disappeared.
I came back deeply dismayed. Although I had been at least somewhat prepared for what we´d find, the impact of the personal contact and the sheer number of violations reported provided a grimmer perspective than I´d expected.
Over the course of three weeks, the Commission examined the situation in the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Mexico. This visit was the sixth since the Commission was founded following the massacre of indigenous people in Acteal, Chiapas on December 22, 1997. Although it was intended to follow-up on previous investigations, the delegates heard scores of testimonies regarding new cases from 2007.
The testimonies of human rights violations were charged with fear, grief and indignation. It rapidly became clear that despite the government´s claims that the crisis is over in Oaxaca and that the conflict in Chiapas has been resolved, not only are both states embroiled in endemic violence, but the violence follows patterns that involve the active participation or at the least the complicity of governments and police forces. This pattern of human rights abuses, the Commission concludes, constitutes a conscious government policy. Practices such as arbitrary arrests of members of social movements are often justified by inventing false evidence for crimes of robbery, sexual aggression or even murder. The logic is to "criminalize members of social movements, thereby also avoiding that they be categorized as political prisoners."
The Commission's investigation and preliminary conclusions provide a wealth of information for analyzing what's really happening on the ground in Mexico. The more active role of the military, increased paramilitary activity and selective violence by police forces combine to create environments where the violation of human rights is commonplace. After the violations have occured they are compounded by a justice system that fails to punish the guilty, especiallywhen on the side of the state, and confuses impunity with keeping the peace.
We´ll talk more about the human rights situation in Mexico and the findings of the VI Commission in later blogs, and in articles on the webpage http://www.americaspolicy.org/. The work of the 51 Commission members deserves a broad airing and the situation they report should be widely known. Mexico is at a critical point at which it can continue down this road of stomping out dissidence and refusing to recognize injustices of the past, or it can reverse the present course and institute firm practices and institutions for the respect of human rights as a top priority.
Here's a video from the commission's interview of political prisoner Flavio Sosa:
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.
Excellent post. Mexico's severe human rights failures have really been ignored in much of the US mainstream media as the "colombianization" of the country receives all the press. Moreover, with all of the attention that the 2006 presidential race received, and the fact that at the Federal level Mexico is still a strong presidential system, coverage in the US tends to drastically underplay cacique power in the states (some coverage of the Lydia Cacho and Oaxaca cases notwithstanding). So thanks for drawing attention to this report. A suggestion for another post: the new judicial "reform." While all the rights groups in Mexico (even the much-maligned Soberanes and the CNDH) are up in arms about the search and detention provisions, I've seen nothing in the US press. While Mexico clearly needs real judicial reform, the way that the new law will provide further tools of repression to the Ruizes and Marins of the world deserves to be noted.
ReplyDeleteHaman rights violations have always been ignored by the US government as long as whomever commits the violations serve their purpose.
ReplyDeleteWhy Mexico does not invest more in judicially stopping the violations committed within the country is beyond me. It is not new that these violations occur.