Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Mexico’s government is under the glare of stage lights in different national and international venues for allegedly allowing the systematic violation of human rights. The administration of President Felipe Calderon faces a test Tuesday, February 10, when the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council will submit Mexico to a three-hour exam and possibly assign voluntary make-up work.

Although the UN committee’s grading of Mexico’s compliance with international human rights standards is pending, a network of prominent Mexican human rights organizations has already given the Calderon administration an “F” in the subject matter.

“Torture continues, extrajudicial executions and forced disappearances occur, freedom of expression is limited, and practically none of the cultural and economic rights is guaranteed or protected,” charged a report from civil society organizations delivered to the UN Human Rights Council prior to this week’s meeting.

In their report, the groups also criticized the Mexican government for failing to align federal and state laws with international human rights agreements signed by Mexico City, and for failing to ratify the International Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, an agreement which could open to the door to prosecutions of forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions carried out by soldiers and police officers since the 1970s.

A big problem, according to the report, is that the Calderon administration follows long-standing political traditions of permitting Mexican soldiers, who constitute the front-line troops in the drug war, to escape civilian prosecution for criminal offenses.

Groups signing the document included the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Center, the Mexican Human Rights Academy, the International Federation of the Rights of Man, and dozens of other Mexican human rights advocacy organizations.

Although the report’s authors noted progress in implementing an oral-based trial system with the presumption of innocence as a guiding principle, the activists criticized a 2008 legal reform that allows suspects to be held without charges for 80 days, a length of time the report compared to the “normal period” of preventive detention lasting two to seven days in other democracies.

Overall, the report concludes, human rights violations and impunity are constants in Mexico.

In another Swiss show-down of sorts, the Mexican government faces a complaint filed February 5 in the International Labor Organization (ILO) by an international federation of mining and metal workers. The complaint accuses Mexico of committing systematic violations of “union freedom” as defined by the ILO. According to the complaint, Mexico only permits the existence of company or government-sanctioned unions.

The international unions’ action grows out of a long-running battle between two Mexican presidential administrations and miners’ union President Napoleon Gomez Urrutia, whom the Calderon administration is attempting to extradite from Canada to undergo prosecution at home.

Gomez fled to Canada in 2006 after the administration of former Mexican President Vicente Fox pressed legal charges related to the alleged mishandling of union funds. Gomez and his supporters, consider the case a maneuver by the Mexican government to divert attention away from the February 2006 explosion at the Grupo Mexico-owned Pasta de Conchos coal mine in northern Coahuila state that killed 65 miners. Only two bodies of killed workers were ever recovered.

Jose Luis Soberanes, president of the National Human Rights Commission
(CNDH) said recently the federal attorney general’s office (PGR) was not addressing justice recommendations made by his office about Pasta de Conchos, but PGR official Juan de Dios Castro Lozano disputed the assertion and said an investigation into the mine disaster was open.

Unsatisfied with the state’s response to the tragedy, victims’ relatives are considering taking their case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, D.C.

As the Calderon administration prepared to take the hot seat in Geneva this week, multiple human rights controversies stirred throughout the country and abroad. Concluding a visit to the southern state of Guerrero last week, a delegation from Amnesty International demanded the government release five indigenous men accused of the murder of an army informant last year.

Kerrie Howard, deputy program director of the Americas Program for Amnesty International, said charges against the men, all of whom belong to the activist OPIM organization, are “not credible.” The OPIM has experienced a long series of conflicts and run-ins with the Mexican army and other authorities.

In response to the Amnesty International visit, Guerrero Governor Zeferino Torreblanca said he “greatly respected” the work of the international advocacy organization but it was the job of the courts to decide the fate of the five men.

Physicians for Human Rights, meanwhile, released a statement last week that said the PGR was ignoring forensic evidence challenging the official version of the murder of US journalist Brad Will in Oaxaca in 2006. An anti-government activist, Manuel Martinez Moreno, is being charged with the crime despite professions of innocence.

In still another development, renewed press attention is being devoted to the massive May 2006 police raid against protestors in San Salvador Atenco outside Mexico City that resulted in the deaths of Alejandro Benumea and Javier Cortes Santiago, the injuries of at least 50 people and more than 200 arrests.

Mexico’s Supreme Court is considering a report this week by an investigative team headed by Justice Jesus Gudino Pelayo which concluded nearly 3,000 public servants committed violations of eight constitutional rights in Atenco.

Sexual aggressions against 31 of 50 female detainees could have equaled “torture prohibited by international and national law,” according to the report.

Female prisoners have testified they were forced to endure bodily molestation and engage in oral sex with arresting officers. At least one woman was reportedly subjected to forced vaginal penetration with a metal object.

While condemning the “violent and criminal actions” of protestors, Justice Gudino Pelayo characterized the raid staged by state and federal police as “excessive, disproportionate, inefficient, and indolent.”

Many of the Atenco violations described in the Supreme Court report were earlier documented by the CNDH.

The Supreme Court’s report named Mexico state Governor Enrique Pena Nieto, federal Attorney General Eduardo Medina and Miguel Angel Yunes, director of a national social security institute, as among the high officials ultimately responsible for the police rampage. The report also questioned the PGR’s special unit for crimes of violence against women for its slowness in acting on the Atenco matter.

The unit, currently headed by former Ciudad Juarez special women’s commissioner Guadalupe Morfin, reports directly to Attorney General Medina. At the time of the Atenco confrontation, Medina oversaw federal police sent to help crush the rebellion. As Mexico’s attorney general, Medina is in a key position in any US-Mexico security alliance, which could expand under the Obama White House.

Governor Pena, who is frequently mentioned as a possible presidential candidate for the opposition PRI party in 2012, said the Supreme Court report was the opinion of one judge but he stressed his administration is cooperating with a probe that represents an opportunity to clarify facts.

No reparations of damages or prosecutions against Pena and other officials will result from the Supreme Court’s Atenco deliberations this week. Arguing constitutional limitations prevent the Supreme Court from meting out punishments, Justice Gudino Pelayo said the high court’s final report could instead be used to help regulate police conduct vis-a-vis future citizen demonstrations.

Atenco activists continue demanding punishment for state officials and freedom for remaining detainees, some of whom are serving very lengthy prison terms human rights advocates have characterized as draconian.

“We demand a solution to this case, the release of all our companions and justice,” said Trinidad Ramirez, wife of imprisoned Atenco leader Ignacio del Valle, who was sentenced to 112 years in prison for kidnapping and other alleged crimes.