Mexico’s government on Friday denied that soldiers were given standing orders to kill criminals days ahead of an alleged massacre of gang suspects last year.
The military faced allegations of committing extrajudicial killings after reporting on June 30 last year that troops had killed 22 suspects in a shootout in a warehouse in central Mexico state, while only one soldier was wounded.
The Prodh human rights center on Thursday released military documents dated June 11 last year showing that one of 37 instructions for the 102nd Battalion was “taking down criminals in dark hours.”
Photo: AFP
The Spanish-language word abatir, or take down, has been used as a euphemism for killing by Mexican authorities for years.
However, Roberto Campa, the Mexican Secretariat of the Interior’s top human rights official, said the word used in the military document can have various meanings.
“The word abatir has many definitions and none means to deprive of life,” Campa told Radio Formula, noting that the military documents also clearly order soldiers to respect human rights.
The lopsided toll in the warehouse in Tlatlaya fueled suspicions about whether all the suspects had really died in a shootout, as the military reported.
A survivor later emerged to say that soldiers killed the suspects after they had surrendered, including her 15-year-old daughter.
The attorney general’s office has charged three soldiers with the murder of eight people in the Tlatlaya case, while four others, including an officer, were accused of violating their public service duties.
However, the governmental National Human Rights Commission said in October last year that between 12 and 15 people were extrajudicially killed.
Amnesty International and a UN expert on extrajudicial executions urged the Mexican government to take the military documents into account in the investigations.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion