Two days after Jorge Antonio Parral Rabadan was kidnapped by a criminal gang, the Mexican Army raided the remote ranch where he was held prisoner and killed him. As he instinctively raised his hands in defense, the soldiers fired over and over at point-blank range.
A brief army communique about the event asserted that soldiers had returned fire and killed three hit men at the El Puerto ranch on April 26, 2010.
However, Parral had fired no weapon.
Illustration: Mountain People
He was a government employee, the supervisor of a bridge crossing into Texas, when he and a customs agent were abducted, according to a 2013 investigation by the Mexican National Human Rights Commission. The case, which is still open, has volleyed among prosecutors, yet his parents persist, determined that someone be held accountable.
“Tell me if this looks like the face of a killer to you,” said Alicia Rabadan Sanchez, Parral’s mother, pulling out a photograph of a happy young man from a plastic folder.
In the years since the Mexican government began an intense military campaign against drug gangs, many stories like Parral’s have surfaced — accounts of people caught at the intersection of organized crime, security forces and a failing justice system.
They are killed at military checkpoints, vanish inside navy facilities or are tortured by federal police officers. Seldom are their cases investigated. A trial and conviction are even rarer.
However, are these cases just regrettable accidents in the course of a decade-long government battle against drug violence? A new report by the Open Society Justice Initiative, which promotes criminal justice reform around the world, argues that they are not. Instead, they point to a pattern of indiscriminate force and impunity that is an integral part of the state’s policy, the report said.
The study argues that in the framework of international law, the killings, forced disappearances and torture constitute crimes against humanity.
The evidence is “overwhelming,” said James Goldston, the executive director of the New York-based Justice Initiative, which released the report on Tuesday. “In case after case, army actors and federal police have been implicated.”
However, in all but a few cases, the allegations languish, are dismissed or are reclassified.
“The impunity is a loud signal that crimes against humanity are being committed,” Goldston said.
The Justice Initiative report is the first time an international group has made a public legal argument that the pattern of abuses amounts to crimes against humanity.
The finding is significant, because under the lens of international law, an investigation would seek to determine the chain of command behind the policy, Goldston said.
The government of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto rejected the conclusions.
“Based on international law, crimes against humanity are generalized or systematic attacks against a civilian population which are committed in accordance with a state policy,” the government said in a statement. “In Mexico, the immense majority of violent crimes have been committed by criminal organizations.”
The report does not dispute that last point. Its analysis, which covers the six-year administration of former Mexican president Felipe Calderon and the first three years of Pena Nieto’s government, also looks at the Zetas, the most violent of Mexico’s drug gangs. Their brutal actions constitute crimes against humanity as well, the report said.
The government said that in the “exceptional cases” in which public officials have been shown to be involved in the use of excessive force, human rights abuses or torture, they have been tried and sentenced.
However, human rights and international organizations have argued for years that these cases are not exceptional.
Rather than ask the International Criminal Court to begin an investigation, the Justice Initiative proposes that the crimes be investigated at home.
“One of the things that we have learned is that Mexico is rich in financial resources and human capital in these issues,” Goldston said.
The Justice Initiative has been working in Mexico for more than a decade.
However, the investigations “simply haven’t happened, because, in our view, the political will is not there,” Goldston said.
The report “explains how we have reached this state of impunity,” Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights director Jose Antonio Guevara said.
The government’s “understanding at the highest level is that what they’re doing is the right thing to weaken organized crime,” he said.
The commission was one of five Mexican groups that helped prepare the Justice Initiative report.
To break that impunity, the report proposes that Mexico accept international help from outside prosecutors with the authority to investigate and prosecute atrocities and corruption cases.
Mexico’s human rights crisis has commanded international attention since 43 students from a local teachers’ college were abducted by local police officers working with a drug gang in the southern city of Iguala in September 2014 as the federal police and military stood by.
“The impunity in Mexico and the circuits of corruption are such that they generate pacts so solid that international intervention is needed,” Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Center for Human Rights deputy director Santiago Aguirre said.
One model for what the report suggests is in neighboring Guatemala, where independent prosecutors uncovered a customs fraud scheme that brought down the president last year.
The Mexican government rejected the idea.
“Our country has the capacity and the will to meet human rights challenges,” it said.
The government pointed to the drop in complaints to the National Human Rights Commission, from 1,450 in 2012 to 538 last year.
It also described recent changes designed to reduce abuses, including proposed laws and protocols to prevent torture and investigate disappearances. A new law for victims is in effect, and this month courts are to begin to switch from written to oral trials.
Critics are skeptical that the changes will make much of a difference unless they are carried out effectively.
As long as prosecutors in Mexico remain subject to political power, the impunity will continue, Aguirre said.
“What’s the incentive for a prosecutor to be independent? None,” he said.
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