Mexico military violations soar

“They hit me until I didn’t know where the blood was coming from any more. Then they made me and the other women get on a bus. They raped us there and took us to the prison where they did it all over again,” Claudia Hernández says. “We were just simple women who made tortillas and looked after the children. We couldn’t fight”.

Hernández is one of the thousands of victims of abuse perpetrated by the Mexican authorities. In 2006 she was sexually abused, beaten and jailed by Mexican federal police after demonstrating on behalf of disenfranchized flower sellers in San Salvador Atenco.

According to an investigation into the Atenco incident carried out by Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), 145 people were arbitrarily arrested, 207 subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and 26 women raped. Forward-looking recommendations that the CNDH made in response to the attacks included improved training for security forces.

However, this training has either not been implemented or has been worse than ineffective. Human rights violations committed by the Mexican military have risen dramatically since the Atenco atrocity, according to an Amnesty International report released this week. In 2006, the CNDH recorded 182 complaints of military abuse, but in the 18-month period between January 2008 and June 2009 they received almost 2,000.

“There is a disturbing pattern of crimes committed by the military in their security operations, abuse that is being denied and ignored by the authorities in Mexico,” said Amnesty International’s Kerrie Howard. “The cases that we’ve been able to investigate are truly shocking. But what is more shocking is that we know that this is only the tip of the iceberg.”

President Felipe Calderón’s massive deployment of troops across Mexico is to blame, according to Luiz Arraiga, head of the Mexico City-based human rights organization Center Prodh. “The army is trained in combat against an enemy, not in the rights of civilians,” he said. “Over the course of Calderón’s presidency, reported violations have increased by 600 percent. We have had reports of torturing, beating and electric shocks, and there is evidence that the army falsified medical reports to cover their tracks.”

In October 2008, Saúl Reyes and five other men were arrested at a car-wash station in Ciudad Juárez. The five men were later charged with possession of drugs and firearms, but Reyes was never seen alive again. His body was found in March 2009, and the death certificate stated that he had died the day after his arrest, of brain damage from blows to the head. The case was closed by the federal judge and is being treated as an ordinary murder, with no mention of military involvement at all.

The army enjoys immunity from standard Mexican jurisdiction. Cases are tried in a special closed court presided over by the military itself. Civilians receive no information about these cases and are unable to challenge verdicts – something illegal under international human rights law but permitted under Article 57 of the Mexican military code.

Since 2006, 45,000 Mexican soldiers have been at war with the powerful drug cartels. These include the macabre cult-cartel La Familia, and Los Zetas, a gang made up of former elite soldiers. The cartels use increasingly extreme methods of violence – in one incident, La Familia rolled 6 severed heads onto a disco dance floor. The military fights violence with violence, and deadly gun battles take place weekly.