Mexico historically has opted for form over substance in the promotion and protection of human rights. If Mexico rigorously adhered to the provisions of its Constitution and statutes, Mexico's human rights recorded would be exemplary.
Human Rights Watch, 1990165
Throughout Latin America in the 1950s and the 1960s, authoritarian governments abused human rights in the name of the crusade against communism. Similarly the left violated human rights with impunity in the name of carrying out a radical transformation of an inherently inhuman social order while denigrating the very concept of human rights as a fafade to mask fundamental social inequalities. As political scientist Francisco Panizza noted, “Double standards on both sides of the great ideological divide of that time risked emptying the concept of human rights of its meaning.”166
During the 1970s, human rights issues assumed unprecedented centrality. The Carter administration (1977—1981) in the United States attributed new importance to the issue. At the same time, the opposition in Latin America sought to find a new language that would be more difficult to silence and began to accept the importance of formal democracy. A new global culture and the rise of international public opinion increased the attention focused on human rights. Satellite TV made it increasingly difficult for governments to conceal their crimes.167
The notion of human rights only entered Mexican political discourse in the relatively recent past. None of those protesting government suppression of the 1968 student movement invoked the notion of “human rights.” Rather, condemnation of government action revolved round such notions as repression and violations of university autonomy.168
Between 1970 and 1976, just as human rights issues were taking on increased significance throughout the Americas, Mexico went though a largely secret version of the same “Dirty War” that flared up in other Latin American countries. In Mexico, a part of the generation of 1968 clashed with the power of the government and the army. During this period, political arrests, torture, disappearances, and murder by security forces increased markedly. The government itself later identified more than 700 cases of enforced disappearances and more than a hundred extrajudicial executions during the Dirty War.169
In an effort to improve his image, in 1977 President Lopez Portillo freed 552 political prisoners. At the time, Amnesty International estimated that an additional 100 to 200 political prisoners might have remained in government custody. While freeing prisoners was a positive gesture, it did not indicate a significant improvement in human rights. Amnesty International commented on the human rights situation during 1981, Lopez Portillo’s last full year in office, noting that it “continued to receive reports of arbitrary detentions, torture, and killings by regular army units, acting in conjunction with local landowners and unofficial paramilitary units.”170
The 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, which caused the headquarters of the Attorney General of the Federal District to collapse, dramatically illustrated Mexico’s continuing abuse of human rights. Rescue workers there found bodies bearing unmistakable signs of torture. This, of course, was just one indicator of systematic human rights abuse during the De la Madrid administration (1982—1988). A 1987 Amnesty International report noted that it continued to receive “reports of political killing, torture, arbitrary arrest of political opponents and the use in evidence of confessions obtained under duress.”171
In 1984, sociologist Sergio Aguayo founded the Mexican Academy for Human Rights, which investigated individual violations of human rights and educated the public about their rights. Among the Academy’s board members were intellectual luminaries such as Carlos Fuentes and Elena Poniatowska. The Catholic Church organized several human rights groups, including the Centro Vitoria, which initially addressed Central American human rights violations but later focused on Mexican ones. In 1988, Miguel Concha Malo, of the Centro Vitoria, published a detailed tabulation of some 6,813 human rights violations that occurred between 1971 and 1986. Of these, 2,982 were against peasants, 449 against students, and 316 against workers. More than a third of the violations—2,440—were in Chiapas. By the mid-1980s, there were at least fifteen human rights groups functioning in Mexico.172
In 1989, shortly before NAFTA negotiations were to begin and just after the release of a scathing Americas Watch report, Human Rights in Mexico: a Policy of Impunity, Salinas founded the CNDH. Jorge Carpizo, a Supreme Court justice and former rector of the National University, was chosen to head the CNDH, thus lending credibility to this new government agency. The CNDH’s mandate included the investigation of human rights abuses by government agents and the forwarding of its findings to the agency responsible for such action. The CNDH lacked authority to enforce its recommendations, which all too often were ignored by the government agencies responsible for human rights abuses. Statutes explicitly prohibited it from investigating violations of political and labor rights. As Aguayo noted, Salinas “created the commission in 48 hours because he wanted to create a card for his trip to Washington.”173
Despite its statutory limitations, the CNDH unquestionably played an important role in promoting human rights in Mexico. It released hard-hitting reports on torture and “disappearances” committed by the army and strongly criticized government actions against supporters of the EZLN. It sent its own medical staff to examine torture victims and carry out exhumations, thus providing important human rights documentation. It also sponsored many studies and symposia and published a wide range of documents concerning human rights.174
By 1994, Salinas’s last year in office, there were no signs of his “modernization” when it came to human rights. An Amnesty International account of events that year reported:
Scores of prisoners of conscience, mostly indigenous peasants, were detained. The widespread use of torture and ill-treatment by law enforcement agents continued to be reported. At least twenty people “disappeared” and the whereabouts of hundreds who “disappeared” in previous years remained unknown. Dozens of people were extrajudicially executed. Those responsible for human rights violations continued to benefit from impunity.175
In general, as long-time human rights activist Mariclaire Acosta observed, the human rights situation worsened under President Zedillo (1994—2000) as:
¦ rampant human rights violations occurred in Chiapas;
¦ the institutionalized presence of the military in many rural areas produced serious human rights abuses;
¦ those responsible for various massacres, especially in the state of Guerrero, remained un - punished.176
Amnesty International Secretary General Pierre Sane observed in 1997: “There is a human rights crisis in Mexico today. The threats, attacks and other violations against human rights defenders, as well as journalists, have rocketed to unprecedented proportions.” Sane charged that Zedillo lacked the political will to curb human rights abuses, especially in cases involving the armed forces, and noted that Zedillo’s use of the military to run key police agencies was “fueling the crisis.”177 In 2000, Vicente Fox’s new administration seemed to bode well for human rights. As he had promised during his campaign, he named a special prosecutor for crimes committed during the Dirty War. He also appointed human rights activist Mariclaire Acosta as Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs for Human Rights and Democracy.178
By 2006, those who had pinned their hopes on Fox were sorely disappointed. Acosta found herself in a turf battle with the government’s National Commission on Human Rights, which she described as having spent “15 years covering up the truth about human rights in Mexico.” Later she was essentially fired when Foreign Minister Ernesto Derbez abolished her position. The special prosecutor appointed to investigate the Dirty War never won a single conviction as his office was pressured by the PRI and the armed forces not to delve into sensitive matters. As Amnesty International reported in 2007, “President Vicente Fox completed his mandate without fulfilling the administration’s commitment to end human rights violations and impunity, which remained widespread.” Nor did the 2006 presidential campaign seem to offer a better future, since as Amnesty International investigator Rupert Knox noted, there was a total absence of human rights discussion during the campaign.179
Of the various human rights problems inherited by the Fox administration, the murder of women in Ciudad Juarez received the most publicity. Up until the 1990s, roughly three women a year were murdered in the city. Then in the early 1990s, corpses, mostly of young women, many who had been raped and mutilated, began turning up in fields. By 2007, more than 400 victims had been found. The killings have been widely linked to the rapid change in gender roles in a city where so many women work in maquiladoras and where narco-trafficking, the sex trade, and globalization have eaten away at the social fabric. The Ciudad Juarez police department was woefully inadequate in investigating these crimes due to budget limitations. The city, with twice the population of its neighbor El Paso, had less than an eighth of El Paso’s budget. Compounding the lack of resources was incompetence and corruption, leading to botched investigations. As Human Rights Watch noted in 2007, “The failure over a decade to resolve the murders of hundreds of young women and girls in Ciudad Juarez, in Chihuahua state, offers a paradigmatic example of impunity in Mexico.”180 Oaxaca also illustrated the scant attention paid to human rights. In May 2006, 70,000 of the state’s teachers, who earned only $400 to $600 a month, struck for higher wages and better working conditions in what was almost an annual ritual. To ensure that their demands were not ignored, striking teachers formed an encampment in the colonial center of Oaxaca City. In a sharp departure from past practice, in June the governor ordered the violent removal of the teachers using police and tear gas. This enraged teachers and led to a broadening of the movement that became known as the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO). APPO raised a new demand—that Governor Ulises Ruiz be removed from office. Through October the demonstrators occupied the town center, shutting down the lucrative tourist trade and seizing state-owned radio and TV stations. On October 27, 2006, parties loyal to Ruiz attacked the demonstrators in the city, killing three, including an American journalist. This led the Fox administration to send some 4,000 police, backed by tear gas, water cannons, and helicopters. The force made its way through the protestors’ barricades and restored an uneasy calm to the city. Hundreds were arrested in the police crackdown, many of whom had not violated the law. The National Commission of Human Rights reported that by January 31, 2007, as a result of the conflict, twenty had been killed, 381 injured, and 366 arrested. There were fifteen documented cases of torture, of which thirteen were committed by the Federal Preventive Police and two by Oaxaca State police.181
Human rights reports published during the Calderon administration made it clear that rather than bringing an improvement in human rights, having a PAN president in Los Pinos simply meant violations as usual. Amnesty International documented the continued use of torture and linked continued human rights abuse to the widespread use of the military in the fight against drugs. In 2008, Liliana Velazquez, president of Amnesty International in Mexico, declared that authorities in Oaxaca, Chihuahua, and the State of Mexico “owe their citizens an apology for the reigning impunity related to police abuse and the murder of women.”182
Human rights abuses continue despite laws and the dedicated efforts of countless human rights activists since:
¦ Violators of human rights are rarely punished. A 2007 report by Amnesty International concluded:
Impunity for human rights violations remains the rule. The lack of accountability for public security and criminal justice officials means that they are free to resort to abusive practices when carrying out their duties, in the knowledge that they will not be sanctioned.183
¦ The war on drugs invites abuse when anti-narcotics operations occur in rural areas, since praise and promotions result from obtaining convictions on drug charges. As a 2009 Americas Watch report noted, while carrying out its drug-enforcement duties, the armed forces have “committed serious human rights violations, including enforced disappearances, killings, torture, rapes, and arbitrary detentions.” The report noted that no member of the military had been convicted for such abuses by the military courts that try such offences.184
¦ Human rights violations are seen as key to maintaining the status quo. As journalist John Ross wrote in 2007, “The criminalization of social protest is filling the nation’s jails and prisons with political prisoners.”185
¦ Law enforcement is heavily reliant on the use of torture to obtain confessions that judges then use to convict even if the accused retracts the confession. Shifting to conventional investigative work to obtain convictions would require large expenditures and extensive training of police.
World History
