Few Expect Mexico’s Government to Suffer at Polls, Despite Outrage Over Abductions

Azam Ahmed, The New York Times

25 April 2016

Video: Mexico’s deputy attorney general and an independent panel of investigators spoke on Sunday about the investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students.

By REUTERS on Publish DateApril 25, 2016. Photo by Yuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

MEXICO CITY — In a drab white tent along Reforma Avenue here, across from offices of the attorney general, a small group gathers each day to maintain the vigil for the 43.

The tent bears their black and white images: forty-three students from a teachers college, seized by the police in the city of Iguala in September 2014 and never heard from again; literal and figurative reminders of their absence.

The same street once teemed with hundreds of thousands of protesters, whose collective anger helped turn the disappearances into a global indictment of the impunity gnawing at Mexico, and a symbol of the tens of thousands of people who have vanished during the nation’s drug war.

Yet that rage, like the crowds themselves, has dissipated, raising fears that in spite of its handling of the case, which was recently criticized by an international panel of experts, the government will face few political consequences.

“Just like any social movement, the tide goes out,” said Rodrigo González, 22, a student in Mexico City and one of the volunteers who has lived on-and-off in the tent for the last year. “People have jobs, run out of money, they get distracted. The government bets on this exhaustion, and the forgetting, but what we are here for is to remind society that they should never forget.”

Public pressure has been building in recent days, as it became clear that the international panel, brought in to uncover what happened to the missing students, was unable to do so after a sustained campaign of government stonewalling, including the refusal to hand over information or grant interviews with certain officials.

The panel’s final report, issued Sunday, detailed the failings of the government’s investigation, saying it was based on confessions obtained by torture. The departure of the foreign investigators has left the families of the missing students devastated. They had come to trust the panel as a credible interlocutor between them and the government.

Without the experts, or an outpouring of popular outrage, the families wonder if their cause is lost. “We have seen the support from society drop, perhaps because many people do not think it important and others believe the government,” said Bernabé Abrajan Gaspar, the father of one of the students, Adan Abrajan.

Other families interviewed Monday expressed similar dismay, and a belief that they will never know what happened to the young men.

And though it will likely define the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, his political party, the P.R.I., may not suffer. In past elections, the party has managed to outperform its rivals in the face of controversy, and some in and outside of government say the discontent, frustration and grief over the students will do little to dampen the party’s status as the dominant political force in the nation.

“Will that harm the P.R.I.? I’m not convinced of that,” said Pamela Starr, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes inMexico. “The P.R.I. still has a powerful base, and the opposition is in complete disarray.”

“It should hurt them, and if it was the P.R.I. against two united opposition parties, it might,” she added.

Mr. Peña Nieto’s approval ratings plummeted after the disappearances and a political scandal that involved his wife. But last year, the party managed to win the midterm elections anyway. And recent polling suggests that the party is expected to retain majority control in governors’ elections in June.

“The P.R.I. strategists understand very clearly that the levels of rejection and disapproval won’t have an effect on electoral results,” said Alfonso Zárate, a political analyst and consultant.

Still, the government faces a renewed wave of international condemnation over its handling of the case, even as Mr. Peña Nieto has been trying to project Mexico as an emerging economic power. As he flies across the world, signing trade agreements and visiting dignitaries, the case of the missing students, and other domestic troubles, have tarnished the image his government has cultivated from its arrival in 2012.

“They know they have lost the battle for international public opinion, but they think they can win the domestic public opinion battle,” said Jorge Castañeda, a political analyst and former foreign minister. “They may be right. There may be no serious consequences domestically.”

Commenting on the panel’s report, the United States State Department said in a statement Monday that it trusted that “the Mexican authorities will carefully consider the report’s recommendations, evaluate suggested actions to address the issue of forced disappearances, provide support to the victims’ families, and continue their efforts to bring the perpetrators of this terrible crime to justice.”

In part, the frustration stems from the government’s insistence that its initial conclusion is correct: that the students were abducted by the local police and handed over to gangs who killed them and incinerated the bodies in a dump in the city of Cocula.

Despite experts who testified that such a fire could not have taken place where the bodies were said to have been burned, the government has defended its inquiry and criticized the experts for not solving the case after a year. Officials cited a separate panel that indicated a fire might have occurred at the site.

“There are certain levels of the government that have the clumsy idea that if you talk about the economy and spend a lot on advertising, it will all disappear,” Mr. Zárate said. “But I think that their image depends on what they are doing and not what they say they are doing.”

If that is true, the strategy is not playing well abroad. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights recently issued a scathing report on the use of torture by the security forces in Mexico. And the United Nations special envoy on torture in Mexico, Juan E. Méndez, made similar criticisms last year.

Mr. Mendez said that torture in Mexico was “generalized,” a finding that was disputed by the Mexican government. He said in an interview Monday that such responses did not help the state.

“Though these things happen in other countries, it is more serious because Mexico looms so large in the international arena and because Mexican citizens have the right to expect better after decades of exclusion,” Mr. Mendez said. “It is about time that a serious democracy starts delivering.”

____________

by

by