Civil Society, Crime & Justice, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

MEXICO: Attempt to Revive Death Penalty Doomed

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Dec 12 2008 (IPS) - A proposed constitutional amendment introduced in the Mexican Congress to reinstate the death penalty stands virtually no chance of approval. But it has generated a broad public debate that is expected to grow more heated.

Fed up with the wave of violence currently sweeping Mexico, where nearly 5,400 murders were committed this year alone, between 65 and 75 percent of the population, according to opinion polls, is in favour of reinstating capital punishment, which was not formally abolished in this country until 2005 but was last carried out in 1961.

The proposed constitutional amendment went to the committee on constitutional matters in the lower house of Congress Thursday, which will begin to discuss it early next year, sources at the legislature said Friday.

The initiative was presented by the governor of the northeastern border state of Coahuila, Humberto Moreira, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

The governor said the debate should not be about whether or not to apply the death penalty, but about “how we are going to kill them: by shooting them, cutting their throats or hanging them, or something more ‘light’ like lethal injection.”

But the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón, his National Action Party (PAN) and the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) have all made it clear that they are opposed to the proposed amendment.


The PRI, on the other hand, argues that the initiative merits debate because it represents the viewpoint of a majority of the population.

Moreira’s proposal to adopt the death penalty for the most egregious crimes and hardened criminals, which is supported by the Coahuila state legislature, where the PRI holds sway, is “opportunistic and aimed at political gain, and is sure to be voted down,” human rights analyst Fabián Sánchez told IPS.

Spokespersons for the Catholic Church and local human rights groups, and the representative of the local branch of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Alberto Brunori, expressed similar views.

“Putting the debate on the table is definitely negative,” said Brunori, who clarified, however, that “for the time being, there is no chance that capital punishment will be reestablished in Mexico.”

Mexico’s small Green Party, however, said it openly supports the death penalty for rapists and kidnappers who kill their victims.

The party, whose charter states that it “defends the right to life,” has paid for dozens of billboards and signs calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty to be put up all over the country.

Sánchez, a former director of the Mexican Commission for the Defence of Human rights, said that both the PRI and the Green Party are seeking to capitalise politically on the public’s mood.

Studies have clearly demonstrated that capital punishment does not lead to a reduction in violence, said Sánchez, who argued that the state cannot lower itself to the level of killers.

An average of 15 people a day were killed from January to November in drug-related killings. And in the two years since Calderón took office, more than 8,100 people have been killed, many of them tortured, decapitated or burnt, in the war among drug traffickers.

Public frustration is rising, and people can frequently be heard commenting in cafés, on the bus, in parks or in social gatherings on the need to bring back the death penalty to fight the wave of violence.

Jesús Silva-Herzog, a columnist for the Reforma newspaper, called the governor of Coahuila, the PRI and the Green Party “penal populists.”

Silva-Herzog said the term refers to politicians who “add their voices to the collective outrage and become its carriers, trying to convince us that outraged policies are the solution to our worries.”

The leaders of the PRD, the PAN, the Catholic Church and human rights groups say Mexico cannot go back to the death penalty, which it has committed itself to eliminating by signing international treaties like the American Convention on Human Rights and the Facultative Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

“Instead of disqualifying a priori a proposal that I believe is aimed at responding to the gravity of the problem, it should be discussed and debated, and the final decision about what to do should be based on what society thinks, wants and demands,” said Chihuahua Governor José Reyes, who belongs to the PRI.

Reyes and Moreira govern two of Mexico’s most violent states.

In Reyes’ view, the fact that Mexico has signed international conventions promising not to apply the death penalty and to promote its abolition around the world is not a hurdle to reviving capital punishment.

“Laws are transformed by the social reality, which is what should gradually mold legal norms, even the constitution and international treaties,” he said.

The local branch of the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International said in a statement that proposals and initiatives seeking a facile solution to the current situation in the country merely exacerbate the climate of social vengeance.

The organisation warned that there is a risk, not only of justifying the use of the death penalty, but of justifying other serious human rights violations like the use of mistreatment, torture, executions or arbitrary arrests.

The death penalty has proven useless and ineffective as a dissuasive factor against crime in a wide variety of countries, Amnesty adds.

What Mexico requires to fight crime is an effective justice system and a professional police force, say human rights groups.

Sánchez said the country would be committing a serious violation of international law if capital punishment were approved. But he added that “I believe it is very unlikely that this will happen.”

An estimated 98 percent of crimes in Mexico go unclarified and unpunished due to corruption and ineffective law enforcement efforts by the police, investigators and judges, and because only a tiny proportion of victims dare or bother to report crimes.

Political scientist José Woldenberg, a former president of the Federal Electoral Institute of Mexico, urged the public not to ask the state to lower itself to the level of criminals.

“When you hear the news about the appalling crimes committed by kidnapping gangs, you ‘naturally’ feel an urge for vengeance. Those wretches – you think – don’t deserve any kind of consideration. It’s comprehensible, but not justifiable,” he said.

The state “is there to keep the impulse for vengeance, for bloody revenge against the criminals, from becoming the route for wreaking justice,” he said.

“The state is supposed to be above those passions; it has the obligation not to exacerbate them. The state must be completely detached from these social impulses because justice cannot be synonymous with revenge,” argued Woldenberg.

 
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