Amnesty International denounces abuses by Mexican army

MEXICO CITY - Amnesty International (AI) says that in the past two years there has been an increase in human rights abuses by Mexican military personnel assigned to law enforcement activities, including torture and extrajudicial executions.

AI spokesman Alberto Herrera presented here a report containing five “emblematic” cases that the watchdog group considers to be “only the tip of the iceberg”.

The military courts’ investigations of alleged abuses do not comply with “basic international human rights standards”, Herrera said.

The AI report noted that in the first six months of 2009, Mexico’s independent National Human Rights Commission received 559 complaints of rights abuses committed by the army, on top of the 1,230 complaints filed last year.

Herrera said the rights violations “are frequent and in some cases routine” and that the perpetrators go unpunished in the majority of cases.

The five instances discussed in the AI document affect 35 people and occurred between October 2008 and August 2009.

Mexican academic Miguel Sarre called the AI report “rigorous and documented”.

He said that one of the virtues of the analysis is that AI “is not opposed, in and of itself, to the presence of the army in security tasks”, but it demands that soldiers always act “in conformity with the law”.

AI says that neither the federal executive branch nor Congress is interested in bringing the army to account for its actions, and they favour continuing to exclude the civilian courts from cases involving military personnel.

Since taking office three years ago, President Felipe Calderon has deployed 50,000 army soldiers and 20,000 Federal Police to 12 of Mexico’s 31 states in a bid to crush the country’s powerful drug cartels.

–EFE