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Amlo’s National Guard and the torture crisis in Mexico

More than a 100 NGOs have made a plea in Geneva for the end of sexual torture in Mexico under its new left president, writes LUPITA VALDEZ

BECAUSE of the gravity of the violence crisis in Mexico, more than 100 organisations working to preserve human rights have joined forces in a collective report on torture presented this week at the 66th session of the The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner Human Rights (OHCHR) for committee against torture (CAT) in Geneva.

This session becomes the first big test for president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a brand new ally of Jeremy Corbyn in Latin-America.

Amlo, as he is known, took office last December as the first official left-wing president of Mexico in the last 80 years.

With his government, the Latin-American pink tide finally reached the northern country at a time where the worsening crisis of violence had been decimating the trust of the population on the right-wing governments in turn.

The need of a new agenda on security, one that worked, had heavy influence on people’s decision to take a chance on Amlo, who won with a mandate of 30 million-plus votes.

The inherited crisis in Mexico, though, has not solely been caused by drug cartels but also by the previous government’s militarisation of the country with the “war on drugs,” declared in 2006 by then president Felipe Calderon.

The “war on drugs” became indeed an internal low-intensity conflict without proper accountability mechanisms to limit the use of force by the military and police. This, along with the state’s systematic concealment of crimes committed by security forces made the perfect recipe for chaos.

Now, Amlo has inherited the responsibility of providing a better alternative to tackle both the illegal activities of drug cartels as well as the generalised illegal and violent practices of security forces.

The Alternative Report on Torture 2012-2019 presented this week by civil society organisations at Geneva speaks loud about the long overdue need to implement accountability mechanisms as well as a prevention policy and reparation to victims.

Specially, human rights organisations have warned that if immediate action is not taken, the recently created National Guard, proposed by Amlo as the future organisation in charge of public security, faces the risk of becoming another tarnished security force by merely replicating illegal practices of the military and the police.

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment has repeatedly reported that torture is a generalised practice in the Mexican judicial system. It is, in fact, discriminatory since it affects disproportionately those with lower income or from indigenous communities.

When torture takes place, sexual violence is often used as a mean to degrade and control the victims as well as to obtain false confessions. Official figures in a national survey from 2016 suggest that 8 out of 10 women detained were tortured in some way by security forces, being the marine and the army the forces with the most cases.

It’s worth mentioning that torture and ill treatment has followed a pattern to legitimate past security policy. Women are often charged by judges based solely on confessions obtained through violent coercion, and Amnesty International has pointed to evidence suggesting that torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment have been most commonly used when the victim could be turned into a scapegoat of crimes that fell within the public security strategy of the “war on drugs.”

Hence, torture became an instrument strategically used to politically legitimise the “war on drugs.” But this practice does not have the sole objective to improve figures of justice procurement, in fact torture is intrinsically about power.

Since power over the female and the feminine has been historically one of the preferred indicators of dominance in patriarchal cultures, sexual torture practised by security forces is, then, another extension of the ever-increasing culture of violence towards women.

In a report from 2016, Amnesty delved into the experiences of women victims of torture. Monica Esparza, for example, was 26 years old in 2013 when she was gang raped by policemen in front of her husband and brother in the northern state of Coahuila, with soldiers present as silent witnesses.

In 2011, in the southern state of Tabasco, Korina and Denise were taken from their home by marines who kept them captive at an unknown place for almost 30 hours while they tortured them with asphyxiation, rape and electrical shocks, before turning them to the ministerial authority.

Another example of police abuse took place in 2006, after an operation to relocate 60 flower vendors in San Salvador Atenco, which led to civil unrest and the detention of almost 300 people. Twenty-five women filed complaints of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the police.

Ever since, Atenco has become an emblematic case of abuse of power by Mexican security forces as 11 of the women who initially filed complaints took on the long and arduous journey to raise their voices and to find justice.

After their complaints were ignored and mocked, they took their collective case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), and although to this date no-one has been formally charged for the crime, in December 2018 the IACHR made a resolution making the Mexican state responsible for the sexual torture of the women and ordered a public act of recognition of responsibility and apologies, as well as reparation measures to the victims and their families.

Last, but not least, the IACHR requested Mexico to investigate police forces and further up the chain of command to find the culprits.

However, 12 years later, Atenco women are still waiting for proper justice, even though they have been one of the most internationally known cases of torture in the last decade.

To better understand the extent of the problem, the report recently presented in Geneva explains that “sexual torture of women includes rape; the threat of rape; touching and/or electric shocks to breasts, buttocks and/or genitals; forcing the victim to perform sexual acts,” as well as “beatings, suffocation, cuts, burns, mock executions, threats to rape their children and witnessing the torture and execution of other people.”

A work published recently by the Centro Prodh, documented “three miscarriages as a result of directing physical torture at the womb of pregnant women for the purpose (presumed and sometimes explicitly announced) of ending the pregnancy.”

Finally, Amnesty International, for example, has documented sexual torture extensively and has found that these practices are so common, that officials often know how to avoid leaving traces, for example, by hitting the ears to avoid visual marks, by using latex gloves to touch the genital area of their victims or by using objects in rapes.

The amount of pain inflicted by these practices is unmeasurable. They not only affect permanently the physical and emotional wellbeing of the victims and their families, but it also breaks the social tissue and weakens the state, since torture is terror.

When Mexican citizens were asked by Amnesty International if they feared torture in case of detention, 64 per cent said yes. The sentiment is clear, people distrust security forces.

The case of the 43 disappeared students from Ayotzinapa, in Guerrero, has not been unstained from practices of torture and other inhuman treatments. In fact, it depicts very well the pervasiveness of the problem so entrenched in security forces.

On the fateful night, one of the few students found in the scene after the attack, Julio Cesar Mondragon, showed clear signs of torture according to forensic experts, as his face was skinned to the bone.

Then, a report from OHCHR called “Double Injustice” documented more than 30 cases of possible torture during the investigation and detention process in the aftermath of Ayotzinapa.

Allegedly, torture and other coercive methods increased along with the urgency to solve the crime because of international pressure. Although, this practice has really been endemic of the Mexican judicial system and can be traced way back to the Dirty War of the 1970s against students and activists.

But with Calderon rushing to militarise public security back in 2006 without implementing working mechanisms of accountability, the marines and the military consistently gained power and leverage throughout the years, as well as a bigger slice of the public budget.

Now that Amlo is shaping its new government, the military has had visible influence on the leader.

On his last visit to London in September 2017, just before he started his presidential campaign, I remember asking him if as president he would stop the systematic concealment of crimes committed by the army, and if he would accept and act upon the recommendations from international organisms on human rights matters.

His face was complacent as he mentioned that he will indeed encourage input from IOs in order to help achieve justice, truth, and peace, but his response regarding the military was even more revealing, he praised the army as one of the most valuable institutions of the country and assured that his mission would be to keep it untarnished by implementing a zero tolerance on unlawful behaviour.

“No more concealing their crimes?” I asked again. “No more, that will be over,” he replied slowly. With this in mind, the report submitted by NGOs to the UN CAT this week seems like a very good guide for Amlo to start working decisively on its policy of zero tolerance to human rights violations by security forces.

Lupita Valdez is a campaigner with Justice Mexico Now and PhD candidate at University College London. 

For more on Justice Mexico Now, check out their Facebook page and follow them on Twitter via @JusticeMexicoUK

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