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RIGHTS-MEXICO: Soldiers Involved in Policing Accused of Abuses

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Sep 21 2007 (IPS) - Using the army for police work has left a trail of human rights violations in Mexico, including unwarranted house searches, illegal arrests, thefts, torture, rapes and murders committed by soldiers sometimes under the influence of drugs.

“It’s time the government produced a plan to get the armed forces back to the barracks and stopped sending them on missions they are not trained for, for the sake of human rights and the army’s own good,” the president of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), José Luis Soberanes, said Friday.

He was speaking at the launch of a lengthy report in which the CNDH, a government body, documented crimes committed by the military in recent months. “The serious nature of the crimes reported requires a public response from the executive branch, which should adopt urgent measures to deal with the issue,” Soberanes said.

Fabián Sánchez, head of the non-governmental Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH), told IPS that “the report is a realistic outline of the situation, but it is tardy and somewhat hypocritical, because the CNDH did not initially protest and condemn the use of the army in policing.”

In the face of the increasing power and violence of the drug mafias, which are more than a poorly-trained, corrupt police force has been able to cope with, the government of rightwing President Felipe Calderón, who took office in December, called out the army to help.

This had been done before by his predecessors, but not to the same extent.

The Mexican constitution provides for resorting to the army in the case of severe internal security problems, in an article that was upheld by the Supreme Court in a March 1996 ruling.

“But soldiers aren’t trained to be police officers. They go into action without waiting for a warrant from a judge, and that’s why they have trampled roughshod over so many civilians’ rights,” said Sánchez.

A number of observers are in favour of using the army because they regard it as the only force that can deal with the hardened drug traffickers. However, they also blame the government for failing to take the proper steps to professionalise the police.

The CNDH report describes four cases of human rights violations in which the military were directly involved, three of which took place during the present administration.

The other case took place on Jul. 11, 2006, shortly after the presidential elections won by Calderón, when Vicente Fox (2000-2006) was still president.

According to the CNDH, on that date a group of soldiers in the state of Coahuila, one of the areas notorious for drug trafficking, went to a club where women provided erotic entertainment and raped 14 of them.

“One of the women was gang-raped, and another woman who was pregnant suffered a miscarriage,” the report says. As a result of this case, eight soldiers are in prison, three are fugitives, two were discharged from the army, and one was acquitted.

Another case occurred in May 2007, under the Calderón administration, when soldiers went to a rural area in the state of Michoacán, after five of their comrades-in-arms had been killed in an ambush, apparently by drug traffickers.

On the pretext that they were looking for the killers, the soldiers beat and tortured several people, raided houses without a warrant, and allegedly raped four underage girls, the CNDH report says.

Also in Michoacán and in the same month, soldiers illegally detained several people and took them to a barracks where they were tortured. Meanwhile their fellow soldiers raided houses and stole cash, cell-phones and jewellery, according to the report.

The fourth case described was the June murder of three children and two women travelling in a pick-up truck in a rural area in Sinaloa, another state notorious for drug trafficking. The women and children were shot by soldiers.

Several of the 19 soldiers who fired on the pick-up had smoked marihuana, and one had taken cocaine. The CNDH document says that in order to cover up the crime, the soldiers planted marihuana in the truck and claimed that the occupants were armed, but this was discovered to be false.

All of the accused are in prison.

“These are a few cases that have been documented, but we know of others that will come to light,” said Sánchez. “The armed forces are not trained to fight crime, that’s not their role. That’s why these abuses are occurring, and that’s why there will be more cases of a similar nature in the future.”

Lawmakers and human rights organisations are calling for President Calderón to stop using the armed forces in the fight against drug trafficking. But many governors and other local authorities want even greater military involvement in law enforcement.

Meanwhile, opinion polls indicate that the majority of the population supports military operations against drug traffickers.

In July, killings and other acts of violence blamed on drug traffickers began to decline. So far this year 1,000 people have been killed in drug-related murders, most of them members of drug cartels.

But the reduction in violence has been attributed not to military and police action or intelligence work, but to agreements apparently reached between drug trafficking bosses at a secret meeting.

The meeting, reported by local and U.S. newspapers quoting anonymous tips and intelligence sources, is thought to have taken place in an undisclosed part of Mexico in June, and to have resulted in a truce.

Soberanes has been speaking out since May, saying that if the armed forces are incapable of respecting human rights in the fight against drug trafficking, they should return to the barracks.

But the Calderón administration does not appear to have any plans to send the soldiers back to their quarters. Nor has there been any progress towards the aim of resurrecting the police force as a well-trained, respectable institution.

The country’s 350,000 police officers are divided into a number of different forces that have no central coordination. They are poorly paid, poorly trained, and easily outmanoeuvred by the tactical capability and firepower of the drug traffickers.

According to opinion polls, most of the population regards the police as corrupt, while the armed forces enjoy high levels of social support and respect.