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.
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