Human Rights Watch: Abuses by authorities rampant in Mexico’s war against drug cartels

By Associated Press

MEXICO CITY — Israel Arzate Melendez said soldiers snatched him off the street, gave him electric shocks, asphyxiated him and threatened that his wife would be raped and killed unless he admitted to a role in one of Mexico’s most infamous cases of drug violence.

When Arzate told a judge he was tortured into falsely confessing to a role in the 2010 massacre of 15 teens at a party in Ciudad Juarez, she responded that his account was too detailed to be fabricated.

Arzate’s case was among dozens cited by the group Human Rights Watch in an investigation released Wednesday that accuses the Mexican government of torture, forced disappearances and extra-judicial killings in its war against organized crime.

Two years in the making, the report says the deployment of Mexican troops has coincided with an escalation of violence that had killed more than 35,000 people by the end of 2010. The government hasn’t issued new figures since then, although news media and other groups put the number at more than 43,000.

The report outlines misconduct at all levels of authority, from prosecutors who give detainees prewritten confessions to sign, to medical examiners who classify beatings and electric shock as causing minor injuries.

Only 15 soldiers have been convicted out of the 3,671 investigations launched by military prosecutors into alleged human rights violations by soldiers against civilians from 2007 to June 2011, according to the report. Not a single soldier or state official has been convicted in any of more than 200 cases the New York-based organization documented in the report.

“The existing approach is certainly not working,” Executive Director Kenneth Roth told The Associated Press. “While one can’t speak of causality, there’s at least a correlation between the deployment of an unaccountable army prone to abuse and the explosion of cartel violence.”

Human Rights Watch investigators met with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, the country’s interior secretary, attorney general and leaders of the armed forces to present the report. Calderon said in a statement Wednesday that he would form a joint working group with Human Rights Watch to analyze the findings.

But he added that criminals are the biggest threat to the human rights of Mexicans and said his government has the legal and ethical obligation to employ every method at its disposal to establish authority in communities where drug gangs are warring.

The organization demands that the government stop allowing the military judicial system to prosecute military crimes and to end the practice of dropping suspects at military bases, where they are routinely tortured into confessions.

The report says it documented 170 cases with credible evidence of torture, including waterboarding, electric shocks and asphyxiation, 39 forced disappearances and 24 cases of extra-judicial killings by security forces. The investigators said they only used cases in which victims’ accounts could be corroborated by eyewitnesses, medical reports, coinciding testimony by people with no connections to each other or official investigations.


(2011-11-10/washingtonpost.com)