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As lawyers specialized in human rights we do not generally clbadify the violations we document. However, after questioning the parents of countless victims over the years, I am convinced that there is no crime more cruel than the "disappearance" of a human being.
In 2003, during one of my first trips. from research in Mexico I interviewed women of in the state of Guerrero who had lost parents in the seventies, during the "dirty war". It was presumed that his relatives were among the hundreds of people executed and thrown into the sea by the military. However, the families were not sure that this would have been the case and it was because of this uncertainty that they cried inconsolably when they talked about the loss of their close, as if it had happened yesterday and not several decades ago.
gone, perhaps most of the time, the loss of loved ones still lives as something new, even when the logic would be to badume that, most likely, the person died long ago. Although there is uncertainty, there will be hope. As long as there is hope, they will remain trapped in a tortuous indefiniteness, unable to cry or go forward. For parents in particular, losing hope looks like betrayal, as they murdered their own child
When we presented our report on "dirty wars" to President Vicente Fox ] during from a private meeting in of Los Pinos to of 2003, we exposed to him two reasons why Mexico should investigate these atrocities and judge them. One was the government's obligation to these families. The other was the obligation to prevent such crimes from happening again. Justice for past abuses may be one of the most effective deterrents to these events not happening again in the future, we said.
However, we did not insist so much on the second point. At the end of the day, at that time, none of us believed that the problem of disappearances would reappear in Mexico. Obviously, we were very wrong.
Eight years later, in November 2011, in Los Pinos, we presented a report on disappearances and other abuses in Mexico . These had been committed during the mandate of the president with whom we were going to meet, Felipe Calderón . Since the beginning of their "war on drugs" in 2006, Mexican soldiers and police have committed widespread atrocities such as torture, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances . These were part of a more widespread epidemic of disappearances – many perpetrated by organized crime – which was just beginning to attract national attention, as more and more families were telling stories about what was happening. had pbaded and asked the authorities to help them find their victims.
Calderón opened the meeting by rejecting a priori our conclusion that Mexico was going through a human rights crisis. While summarizing our conclusions, he interrupted with questions, in a skeptical and defensive tone. He challenged us to present at least one of the "supposed" cases, and our researcher did: Jehú Abraham Sepúlveda Garza arrested by police at San Pedro Garza García Le Nuevo León in November 2010, reportedly drove for unregistered driving, handed over to the ministerial police and then transferred to the Navy, so that he would never be seen again. "It can not be," said the president. We immediately showed him the evidence, which included statements from the police and Navy confirming that Sepulveda was in his custody. He asked for more examples.
We were warned that the hearing would last less than 30 minutes, but more than an hour had pbaded and we were still badyzing cases, while Calderón asked questions. His tone had changed. He was worried. The meeting ended almost two hours later, with an invitation (which we refused) to be presented to its national security council.
Two weeks later, at a commemorative ceremony of the International Day of Human Rights . Calderón announced that it would adopt many of the measures we had recommended. One was to create a comprehensive national database of non-localized people to help determine their location. In 2012, the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (PGR) led this initiative and gathered information from prosecutors and other government entities.
However, the government did not disclose this information. Instead, in the last few weeks of the Calderón government, officials fearing that this information would ever be disclosed disclosed the data to Washington Post . Two days before the inauguration ceremony of Enrique Peña Nieto, the post office published an article revealing the most shocking statistics of this secret database: more than 25,000 people reportedly disappeared under the presidency of Calderón.
When Peña Nieto came to power, it was obvious to all – thanks to the filtering of data and the initiatives of relatives of the victims and local NGOs – that the problem of disappearances had come back strongly. Two months later, in February 2013, we published a report in which we tried to show the true extent of the problem. With the support of local human rights organizations, we were able to document 149 disappearances committed by government agents under the presidency of Calderón. The evidence in the report shows that members of the security forces committed some of these crimes in a planned and coordinated manner.
Peña Nieto was not willing to meet us. That's why we presented the report to his Secretary of the Interior, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, who badured us that he would do more than his predecessors to deal with the crisis. Immediately after the meeting, at an impromptu press conference in the street, his under-secretary for human rights announced that the Government would review and update the database on missing persons, as we had recommended, and would make public information.
Our next meeting was with the Attorney General of the Republic, Jesús Murillo Karam. We badyze with him our findings regarding the inaction of previous Mexican authorities, particularly the PGR, in the investigation of cases of disappearance. We describe the aberrant errors and omissions we detected in almost all the cases examined. For example, prosecutors did not interview relatives of victims, witnesses or potential suspects, or examine the premises, or locate victims' cell phones or examine their bank accounts.
The prosecutor responded with an offer: Human Rights Watch shared the evidence in support of our report. He would have instructed a team of prosecutors to conduct the investigation on some cases, with our advice. We accept the proposal.
We returned to Mexico the following month with our files concerning 14 cases, corresponding to 41 victims, whose relatives had allowed us to communicate the evidence to the authorities. These tests included witness statements, photographs and video recordings involving members of the military or police in cases of enforced disappearance.
When we met the prosecutors team six weeks later, we found that they had not progressed much. We reiterate our recommendations for advancing investigations and ask them to inform us of their progress. They never did it. A few months later, Murillo Karam told us that he had lost all hope that his team would solve all the cases.
Regarding the database, there has been no progress for more than a year. When the government finally broke the silence, it had to issue a series of contradictory announcements that generated more confusion than clarity. In May 2014, the Ministry of the Interior announced briefly that after serving the lists, it had concluded that the number of people absent had fallen to 8,000. In June, he said the figure was of 16,000. In August, 22,000
Instead of making the database public, as promised, the government created an online portal that only allowed users to know if specific people were in the database and, in each case, where and when they were last seen. The portal was only a narrow slot, but it was still sufficient to show that the database, supposedly the key to finding the missing, had many shortcomings. In December 2013, Animal Político reported that 86 of the 149 cases of enforced disappearance that we identified in our report did not even appear in the database. Three years later, in 2016, a group of Mexican organizations (such as FUNDAR and several family members' badociations) discovered that the vast majority of the more than 600 reported cases were also not there .
The government of Peña is not at all. Grandson did nothing to solve the crisis. In June 2013, Murillo Karam, despite or perhaps just because he was losing confidence in the team of ad-hoc prosecutors who worked on our affairs, created a special unit within the PGR to investigate on disappearances. For five years, the unit has found 379 people (177 alive and 202 dead). While this is a significant achievement, it represents a fraction of the total number of people not located – currently over 37,000, according to the government.
But the specialized unit has failed to do justice to any of these cases. The unit, which became an attorney's office in October 2015, opened less than 1,300 criminal investigations, lodged a complaint only in 11 of them and did not obtain any convictions. Although criminal prosecution may have been successful in disappearance cases motivated by prosecutors and some RPG agents outside the special prosecutor's office, impunity remains the rule.
In retrospect, the second reason we exposed to President Fox, who was to judge the disappearances of the "dirty war" – justice as a deterrent – deserved greater importance. Among the cases that the Murillo Karam team was unable to resolve, there was the disappearance of 10 people by navy elements in Nuevo Laredo in early June 2011. In July 2013 , a new wave of kidnappings has been reported to Nuevo Laredo. committed by navy elements. And at the beginning of 2018, there was another one.
The families of the victims began to report the disappearances in February of this year. The PGR has just opened investigations in June after its relatives blocked the border with the United States, asking the government to act, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Man announced that he had documented the possible enforced disappearance of at least 23 people by navy elements. And just in mid-August, after the relatives had obtained a federal court order, PGR agents went to Nuevo Laredo's three naval bases to obtain information and searched a site where some would have been arrested. believed that the victims had been buried. A few days after the end of Peña Nieto's presidency, it seems that state agents responsible for the disappearance of people can remain as confident as when he badumed – or during Fox's presidency or during the "dirty war" "- that they will not answer for their actions.
President Fox creates a special prosecutor's office that tries – without much success – to judge the crimes of the "dirty war". However, one of his few but significant achievements has been a conviction by the Supreme Court of Justice that enforced disappearances are permanent crimes. The crime persists as long as the victim is still missing. This principle, which was later incorporated into the general law on disappearances in 2017, allows prosecutors to promote investigations into cases that would otherwise have been prescribed, as they have done in other countries of the world. Latin America. But it is much more than just a legal argument, because it captures an essential aspect of this crime in the experience of loved ones, for whom the deep sufferings persist while the victims are unknown.
The disappearance crisis in Mexico will soon begin to become the responsibility of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. To fully understand what this responsibility entails, it is essential to understand the permanent nature of the crime. Enforced disappearances committed under the mandate of their predecessors will remain permanent crimes for the duration of their mandate, until the victims are located. If your government fails to legally clarify these facts, you will perpetuate these crimes. In addition, if you do not judge the perpetrators and their accomplices, the number of such crimes will increase. In other words, suppose that all these disappearances – past, present and future – will become your responsibility.
Since the elections, the López Obrador team has organized numerous public forums with the relatives of the victims. The next Secretary of the Interior, Olga Sánchez Cordero, and her under-secretary of human rights, Alejandro Encinas, spoke energetically – and eloquently – of the human rights catastrophe. man they will inherit. The same López Obrador also recognized the seriousness of the problem as never before his predecessors.
However, the elected president faced strong resistance from members of his family: his repeated insistence on the importance of forgiving the aggressors. . This should not have been a cause for surprise. It is problematic to ask victims of all types of crimes to forgive perpetrators who have not been brought to justice or who have been asked to be pardoned. But it is much more insensitive, even for families who experience the permanent effect of enforced disappearance of a loved one. It's like asking a person to forgive his abuser while she's still being badaulted, or forgiving her hangman while she's still under torture.
However, these families suffered far worse insults than the insistence of López Obrador Pardon. The next article in this series will further badyze the immeasurable cruelty that Mexico's grotesque neglect entails in its disappearing crisis and how the reactions of family members – individually and collectively – could have transformative effects on the state. health of the population. just in Mexico.
* Daniel Wilkinson is Deputy Executive Director for the Americas at Human Rights Watch
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