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VI. A Paradigmatic Case: Ciudad Juárez

The human rights story that has drawn the most local and international press coverage during the Fox administration has been the case of Ciudad Juárez, where, for over a decade, local law enforcement authorities failed to resolve hundreds of murders and “disappearances” of women.  The extensive coverage of the killings has been crucial both for drawing attention to the plight of the victims and their families and for raising much-needed awareness of the broader problem of violence against women in Mexico. 

Yet the tragedy of Ciudad Juárez also offers other important lessons that have received less attention—lessons that reflect the main themes of this report.  Chief among these is how abusive police practices undermine both human rights and public security, as well as how systemic reforms are needed to improve Mexico’s ability to promote both rights and security.   But in addition to showing what’s wrong with the system and what changes are needed to fix it, Ciudad Juárez also offers an important example of how Mexico can actually make real progress in bringing these changes about. 

Scapegoats:  How Abuses Undermine Public Security

Over the past thirteen years, more than four hundred women have been murdered or “disappeared” in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.  In a majority of the cases, authorities have not been able to determine who was responsible for the crimes against the women.³⁶¹  At least thirty-four of the victims remain unaccounted for today.³⁶² 

For years, local law enforcement authorities did little to address the problem.  Only when families of the victims began to mobilize, and the killings and “disappearances” began to draw extensive media attention, did state authorities begin to act.³⁶³  But instead of conducting serious investigations, the state prosecutor’s office resorted to the abusive tactics that regularly substitute for good police work in Chihuahua: they sought to convict scapegoats on the basis of coerced confessions.

Chapter 5 of this report detailed two cases in which local authorities used torture to obtain confessions and thereby “solve” the crimes against women.  One of them involved two bus drivers, Víctor García Uribe and Gustavo González Meza, who were tortured in 2001 until they confessed to having killed eight women.  Gonzalez Meza died in prison under mysterious circumstances, and García Uribe was declared not guilty by a judge in 2005.  The second case involved David Meza, who was tortured in 2003 and coerced into confessing he had killed his cousin.  His case remains pending, but there is no evidence against him, other than the coerced confession. 

These were not isolated incidents.  Chapter 5 detailed two other cases of torture by law enforcement agents in Chihuahua, and cited Chihuahua’s current attorney general, Patricia González, who told Human Rights Watch that during her twenty-four years as a criminal judge, she had encountered cases of torture “all the time.”³⁶⁴  Moreover, a 2004 report by the CNDH found eighty-nine instances in which the suspects in these crimes had “spontaneously confessed” before the public prosecutor, only to recant the confession before a judge, claiming that they had been subjected to torture.  In the same report, the CNDH observed that the use of physical or psychological violence to obtain confessions appeared to be a regular practice within the state prosecutor’s office.³⁶⁵ 

The reliance on coerced confessions did not solve the crimes nor address the family members’ claims for justice.  Instead, they most likely contributed to the problem, given that, as the confessed killers were presumably innocent, those guilty of the crimes remained at large.   Indeed, in 2004, the year after David Meza was jailed, the yearly homicide rate for women in Ciudad Juárez actually increased.³⁶⁶

Using Foreign Policy to Promote Local Change

After the Fox administration opened Mexico to international scrutiny, numerous international observers visited Ciudad Juárez to examine the situation there first-hand, meeting with victims’ relatives and local rights advocates to hear their concerns and complaints.  These observers included the Special Rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers (2001), the United Nations Committee Against Torture (2001), the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Women of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2002), two experts from the Committee Against the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (2003), and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (2003).  Several international NGOs, including the Washington Office on Latin America, Amnesty International, and the Latin American Working Group, also conducted onsight research and extensive advocacy work that served to reinforce local advocacy efforts aimed at ending the impunity for these crimes.

This international presence played a crucial role in generating pressure on Mexican authorities to act.  According to Mariclaire Acosta, former Under Secretary for Human Rights and Democracy in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, after the intense scrutiny by the international community, it became “impossible for the president and the members of his cabinet charged with law enforcement and public security to continue to look the other way.”³⁶⁷  For the Foreign Affairs Ministry, it was a casebook example of using international scrutiny to encourage government action on human rights within Mexico. 

Local rights advocates also told Human Rights Watch that the international attention had been decisive in forcing government action.  According to Luz Castro, who works with the Center for the Human Rights of Women (Centro de Derechos Humanos de las Mujeres) and with a group of victims’ families called Justice for our Daughters (Justicia para Nuestras Hijas), “After all the visits and reports by international organizations, the state had to recognize the problem.”³⁶⁸  Similarly, Marisela Ortiz, who works with the NGO May Our Daughters Return Home (Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa), another group of victims’ relatives told Human Rights Watch: “The opening was absolutely necessary.  Our cries for help wouldn’t have gotten a response if it weren’t for the international monitors.  The opening was what made it necessary for the federal and state government to do something.³⁶⁹

The Fox administration responded to the growing concern in 2003 by creating the National Commission to Prevent and Eradicate Violence Against Women in Ciudad Juárez (Comisión para Prevenir y Erradicar la Violencia contra las Mujeres en Ciudad Juárez).³⁷⁰  The Commission then engaged in a variety of activities, including helping to bring the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropólogía Forense, EAAF) to Chihuahua to identify the bodies of dead women.  In 2004, after a request by the Commission and Mexican NGOs, the EAAF prepared a report that evaluated the flaws in past investigations that had tried to identify bodies of dead women, and concluded that prior identification of bodies was unreliable.³⁷¹   Since then, the EAAF has worked under the auspices of the state prosecutor’s office in Ciudad Juárez to obtain samples from bodies and family members in order to match their DNA results.  By January 2006, the EAAF had obtained DNA samples from sixty bodies and 125 family members, and had suceeded in identifing thirteen bodies.

In addition to establishing the Commission, the Fox administration appointed a federal Special Prosecutor for the Homicides of Women in Ciudad Juárez (Fiscal Especial para la Atención de Delitos Relacionados con los Homicidios de Mujeres en el Municipio de Juárez, Chihuahua) in 2004.  The role of this prosecutor has been limited by the fact that most of the cases at issue fall under the jurisdiction of local courts and prosecutors.  Only twenty-four of the 377 homicides can be tried in federal courts, and those cases are currently being investigated by a division of the federal Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la República, PGR) charged with investigating organized crime (Subprocuraduría de Investigación Especializada en Delincuencia Organizada, SIEDO).³⁷²  Nonetheless, according to state officials, the Special Prosecutor’s Office has been helpful in identifying irregularities in past investigations by state authorities.³⁷³  For example, in its final report, the special prosecutor found that 177 public officials (i.e., over 35 percent of those that participated in investigations) had participated in acts that might warrant administrative or criminal sanctions.  According to the PGR, none of these public officials continue to work for the state attorney’s office.³⁷⁴ 

The Special Prosecutor’s Office has also actively participated in a joint effort of the federal and state governments to provide economic reparations to the families of the victims in these cases.  The federal government has contributed 25 million pesos and the state government 5 million (totaling almost U.S.$3 million) to a fund that has provided economic compensation to the families of sixty-three of the victims.³⁷⁵  (Some family members and local rights advocates have expressed grave reservations about the reparations program, fearing that it will serve as a substitute for prosecutions.³⁷⁶) 

In addition to spurring action by the federal government, the international attention has helped to spur action at the level where, given the nature of the problems, it was most needed: the state government.  After taking office in October 2004, Chihuahua’s new attorney general, Patricia González, made the cases a top priority of the prosecutor’s office and set about changing how the state approached these and other cases, increasing the emphasis on investigative techniques and strengthening the work of internal offices that sanction officers that commit abuses.³⁷⁷ 

By the end of 2004, the new approach appeared to be generating positive results.  The state prosecutors had obtained the arrest of fifty-two people accused of having committed these types of crimes against women, including eleven for crimes committed between 1993 and 2002.  State prosecutors completed investigations in 80 percent of the cases from 2005 involving homicides of women, and all these cases are pending before a judge that must decide whether they go to trial.³⁷⁸  Significantly, there were four complaints of torture by law enforcement agents during this time, and they led to three arrests of state agents.  This stands in contrast to the previous six years, during which there had been eighteen torture complaints, but not a single arrest warrant issued.³⁷⁹

Yet, as we showed in Chapter 5, the problem of torture being employed as a substitute for effective investigations is difficult to eradicate so long as prosecutors are able to use coerced confessions to convict suspects.  The state attorney general told Human Rights Watch that she had reached the same conclusion and, consequently, believed that the most effective way to curb the practice of torture was to reform the state’s justice system.³⁸⁰  Similarly, the president of the Chihuahua State Human Rights Commission told Human Rights Watch that a reform of the justice system was needed to remove the incentives that promote the use of torture and abuses to obtain confessions.³⁸¹ 

The views of these two officials were by no means isolated.  In fact, a consensus had emerged in the state that the justice system was in need of an overhaul.  In May 2005, the state judicial, legislative, and executive branches signed an agreement to reform the system.³⁸²  And in January 2006, the top officials of all three branches presented a reform proposal that would, among other things, tackle the problem of torture and coerced confessions.  Specifically, the proposal would establish that a confession made before a prosecutor (in the absence of a judge) could only have evidentiary value if it met certain specific conditions: the statement is videotaped and made in the presence of a defense attorney, and the accused has not been subject to illegal detention.

This proposed anti-torture measure does not go as far as the one proposed at the federal level by the Fox administration—and specifically Fox’s proposed amendment to the Constitution establishing that only confessions made before a judge would have evidentiary value at trial.  Yet there is a good reason why not: if the state reform did include such a restriction, it would most likely face a constitutional challenge on the grounds that it undermined the authority that the federal Constitution grants prosecutors to conduct criminal investigations.  Even if the proposed measures fall short of the ideal, they still could be very useful in curbing the practice of torture in Chihuahua.

The proposed reform in Chihuahua also addresses the issue of the excessive use of preventive detention.  And on this issue, it goes further than the Fox proposal, by striking entirely from the criminal procedure code the list of “serious crimes” for which preventive detention is mandatory.  Consequently, state judges would have the discretion to adopt the precautionary measures that are most appropriate for each case.  The proposal also limits the length of preventive detention to a maximum of twelve months.³⁸³

As this report went to press, the Chihuahua legislature had yet to vote on these measures.  Yet the fact that these much needed reforms are even on the table is due, in large measure, to the intense national and international exposure that the state has received in recent years—which, in turn, is due largely to Mexico’s new openness to international scrutiny.

The state attorney general told Human Rights Watch that, without the opening, the discussion currently underway in the state would never have taken place.  The international scrutiny “was absolutely necessary to bring change,” she said.  “It forced a recognition that something had to be done.”³⁸⁴  

The Lessons of Ciudad Juárez

The case of Ciudad Juárez offers several key lessons regarding human rights in Mexico today.  The most evident, and most widely reported, is that violence against women is a major problem in Mexico, one requiring urgent attention by state and federal authorities.  Human Rights Watch focused extensively on one aspect of this problem in our report, “The Second Assault: Obstructing Access to Legal Abortion after Rape in Mexico,” issued in March 2006. 

The other lessons of Ciudad Juárez, which have received less attention, are the ones related to the main themes of this report.  The first is that human rights and public security must be understood as complementary aims.  In Chihuahua, local authorities responded to a public security crisis by engaging in abusive behavior, using coerced confessions to jail scapegoats rather than conducting serious criminal investigations that might actually solve the crimes.  Instead of resolving the problem, in other words, they merely prolonged it, jailing presumably innocent people while the true criminals remained at large.

A second, related lesson is that, in order to improve both its human rights and public security practices, Mexico needs to reform the underlying deficiencies of the justice system—both at the state and federal levels—that give rise to abusive practices.  Chihuahua is on the verge of becoming one of the first states to undertake such a reform because experienced officials within the justice system have come to see why it is necessary.

A third lesson regards the value of international scrutiny for promoting real progress on human rights at the local level.  The repeated visits by international monitors to Ciudad Juárez proved crucial, not only in reinforcing efforts by local advocates to draw attention to the plight of the victims and their families, but also in helping to generate a broad consensus that the justice system was in need of reform. 

And herein lies a final critical lesson: the issues at stake here are not partisan ones.  Mexico’s human rights problems are by no means the province of any one political party—nor, for that matter, are their solutions.  In Chihuahua, the abusive police practices occurred during years when both PRI and PAN governors were in office.  And the state’s current justice reform proposal—which largely mirrors the one promoted at the federal level by a PAN administration—has been spearheaded by a PRI governor and his attorney general, who was, herself, ratified in her post by all the major parties in the state legislature.    

It is not clear at this point whether the reform proposal—and, specifically, the measures to curb torture and the excessive use of preventive detention—will pass in Chihuahua.   And even in the event that they do pass, for Mexico as a whole to make real progress in curbing these abuses, similar reforms will be needed throughout the country, not only in other states, but also at the federal level.