The Special Prosecutor’s Office investigating past abuses in Mexico could fail unless the government takes immediate and decisive action, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 29-page report, “Justice in Jeopardy: Why Mexico’s First Real Effort To Address Past Abuses Risks Becoming Its Latest Failure,” examines the shortcomings of the Special Prosecutor’s Office and concludes that its main problem has been the inadequate support it has received from the government.
President Vicente Fox created the Special Prosecutor’s Office in November 2001 to investigate and prosecute human rights violations committed under previous governments. A year and half later, the office has yet to produce significant results, and there is discouraging evidence that it lacks the powers and resources necessary to manage the task it has been assigned.
“When President Fox was elected three years ago, he promised a new era of accountability and respect for human rights in Mexico,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Executive Director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. “But unless his government moves quickly to support the Special Prosecutor’s Office, that promise will go unfulfilled.”
The Fox administration has repeatedly expressed its commitment to ending the climate of impunity that allowed egregious human rights violations to go unpunished in Mexico for decades. These violations included the massacres of student protesters in 1968 and 1971, and the torture, execution, and forced disappearance of hundreds of people during the country’s “dirty war” in the 1970s and early 1980s.
Under international law, Mexico has a duty to investigate and prosecute these crimes. But, instead of fulfilling this obligation, government officials closed ranks to impose what one prosecutor has labeled “the big silence.”
The government’s lack of support is evident in several areas:
- Limited access to government documents: Access to declassified documents has been seriously impaired by the way the government archives have been administered;
- Limited military cooperation: The Mexican military has not provided information requested by the Special Prosecutor’s office, and has interfered with the special prosecutor’s work by pursuing overlapping investigations and prosecutions of some of the same cases;
- Limited resources: Investigators and prosecutors within the Special Prosecutor’s Office have been operating without the material and human resources they need, given the large number and the difficulty of the cases they are handling.
The Special Prosecutor’s Office also faces a major legal hurdle that could limit its ability to prosecute the cases it is investigating. Mexican courts may find that many of the crimes can no longer be prosecuted due to the expiration of statutes of limitations. One judge has already rejected the office’s first and only request for arrest warrants on precisely these grounds. And President Fox himself confirmed this danger when he said, in November 2002, that the time allotted by statutory limitations had probably run for most of the cases under investigation.
The predicament of the Special Prosecutor’s Office illustrates a more general problem with the Fox administration’s human rights goals. The report charges that the Special Prosecutor’s Office is a typical example of the kind of “half-steps” that Mexico is making in human rights. The creation of the office represented an important breakthrough for accountability in Mexico. Yet the existence of a “special” entity may have merely made it easier for the state’s “regular” institutions to duck their responsibilities, Human Rights Watch said.
“The Special Prosecutor’s Office cannot be made a scapegoat for the justice system’s failure,” said Vivanco. “Although it could still have a very positive impact, this will require the full and active engagement of the government and, above all, leadership from the top.”
The report makes recommendations designed to salvage the Special Prosecutor’s Office, including steps to ensure that:
- Declassified documents are readily available to the Special Prosecutor’s Office, as well as to the general public;
- Military officials provide all requested information and cease to assert jurisdiction over cases under investigation by the Special Prosecutor’s Office;
- Investigators and prosecutors within the Special Prosecutor’s Office receive adequate resources and training.
The Human Rights Watch report also urges President Fox to convene a task force or commission of distinguished jurists to examine the legal hurdles facing the prosecution and reach a consensus about how best to overcome them.
“The Fox government has taken human rights more seriously than its predecessors,” said Vivanco. “But real change will only come when it is willing to follow through on its own initiatives. The time for doing that may be now or never.”
