The Mexican government’s human rights agency is accusing federal police of executing at least 22 people during a confrontation with suspected cartel criminals last year and then rearranging the scene by moving bodies and planting guns to support the official version of the bloodshed.
Twenty other people were killed during the incident at a ranch in the western Mexico state of Michoacan, while one police officer died, an imbalance that had raised questions about what happened on May 22 last year.
The Mexican National Human Rights Commission on Thursday said that in addition to 22 unjustified slayings, there were also two cases of torture and four more deaths caused by excessive force by federal police.
It said it could not establish satisfactorily the circumstances of 15 others who were shot to death.
“The investigation confirmed facts that show grave human rights violations attributable to public servants of the federal police,” commission president Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez said.
The Mexican government has said the dead were suspected members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel who were hiding out on the ranch in Tanhuato and accused them of starting the confrontation by firing at police first.
Mexican National Security Commissioner Renato Sales, who oversees the federal police, quickly disputed the rights agency’s findings.
Calling his own news conference before the rights commission had finished its own, Sales said federal police ordered the suspects to drop their weapons and surrender, but were answered with gunfire.
“The use of weapons was necessary and proportional against the real and imminent and unlawful aggression,” Sales said. “That is to say, in our minds they acted in legitimate defense.”
The rights commission questioned the government’s explanation of what led to the clash in the first place.
Federal police had said they encountered a truck and took fire from its passengers before being led to the ranch.
The commission’s report said the government did not produce evidence supporting that account and it said witness statements suggested 41 federal police had sneaked onto the ranch as early as 6am.
Officers started their assault at least an hour earlier than they maintained in reporting on the incident, the commission said.
It said two survivors of the bloodshed had been forced to watch three executions and were then tortured.
Police threatened their lives and the lives of their families, it said.
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