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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | May 2006 
Fox Criticized on Human Rights Record
 Lorraine Orlandi - Reuters
| | Naked female farmers protest with masks of President Vicente Fox in front Mexico's Interior Secretary in downtown Mexico City, Mexico, Tuesday, May 16, 2006. In recent years, the protests from the group 400 Pueblos - who fight for land rights for poor farmers - have become an annual event for city residents, as the men and women from rural southern Mexico stand naked or partially naked along the city's busiest avenues. (AP/Eduardo Verdugo) |
Six years after Mexican President Vicente Fox set in motion ambitious plans to end rampant rights abuse, he has barely dented chronic problems like police torture and impunity for once powerful leaders, Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday.
With his 2000 election win, Fox ousted the authoritarian party that ruled Mexico for 71 years. He took unprecedented steps to redress its abuses - inviting scrutiny by world rights monitors, declassifying millions of secret documents and making government more transparent for citizens.
But Fox, who leaves office in December, failed to follow through with political muscle to end widespread torture and other police abuse, punish former high-ranking officials for past atrocities, stop the murders of women on the U.S. border or overhaul a corrupt and creaking court system, the New York-based group said in a report.
"What's the feeling now, six years later? In a word, disappointment," said Daniel Wilkinson, deputy director of the group's Americas division. "Despite some real accomplishments, Mexico's chronic human rights problems have not changed."
In a 150-page assessment of Fox's term, Human Rights Watch urged the next president to push Fox's stalled initiatives such as justice reform while building on his gains in public access to information and government accountability.
Fox is prohibited from seeking a new term in the July 2 election, now seen as a two-way race between a leftist former Mexico City mayor and the candidate from Fox's conservative party.
"President Fox had a broad popular mandate for change and clear ideas for how to bring the change about," said Jose Miguel Vivanco, Human Rights Watch's Americas director. "What he lacked was a willingness to go to bat for those ideas."
NO CONVICTIONS
In what was hailed as a bold step toward ending impunity for public officials, Fox created a special prosecutor to investigate hundreds of deaths and disappearances under the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.
But, shackled by a lack of cooperation from the military, and by limited resources and legal constraints, the prosecutor has won few arrests and no convictions. Mexico's courts rejected bids to indict former President Luis Echeverria for his role in two massacres of student protesters.
Human Rights Watch called for creation of a truth commission to document the repression alongside criminal prosecutions. It said prosecutors need more legal tools, such as the ability to offer plea bargains for testimony, and the army and other agencies should be forced to cooperate.
Fox has failed to fix a deeply flawed justice system. Police brutality in putting down riots outside Mexico City this month, like the botched handling of more than 400 murders of women in Ciudad Juarez on the Texas border in the past decade, shows how police and courts can undermine the rule of law in the name of fighting crime, Human Rights Watch said.
"Instead of conducting serious investigations, they beat confessions out of people," Wilkinson said. "You have innocent people going to jail, while the real criminals go free. Ciudad Juarez is the classic example but it is in no way unique."
Still, recent progress in investigating the Ciudad Juarez murders and in modernizing local police and the courts provide hope for national reform, the report said. It urged passage of Fox's proposed justice overhaul that is stuck in Congress. |
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