Report Accuses Mexico of Crimes Against Humanity in Drug War

Elisabeth Malkin, The New York Times

6 June 2016

Image: Jorge Parral Gutiérrez and Alicia Rabadán Sánchez at their home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Jorge Antonio Parral Rabadán, their son, was kidnapped by a criminal gang and then killed by soldiers in a raid in 2010.CreditAdriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

MEXICO CITY — Two days after Jorge Antonio Parral Rabadán was kidnapped by a criminal gang, the Mexican Army raided the remote ranch where he was a 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 communiqué about the event asserted that soldiers had returned fire and killed three hit men at the El Puerto ranch on April 26, 2010.

But Mr. Parral had fired no weapon.

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 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 Rabadán Sánchez, Mr. Parral’s mother, pulling 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 Mr. 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 more rare.

But 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 works on criminal justice reforms around the world, argues that they are not. Instead, the study says, they point to a pattern of indiscriminate force and impunity that is an integral part of the state’s policy.

And in the framework of international law, the study argues, the killings, forced disappearances and torture constitute crimes against humanity.

The evidence is “overwhelming,” said James A. Goldston, the executive director of the New York-based Justice Initiative, which will release the report on Tuesday. “In case after case, army actors and federal police have been implicated.”

But 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,” Mr. 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, Mr. Goldston said, because under the lens of international law, an investigation would seek to determine the chain of command behind the policy.

The government of President Enrique Peña 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. “InMexico 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 President Felipe Calderón and the first three years of Mr. Peña 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 concludes.

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.

But 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,” Mr. Goldston said. The Justice Initiative has been working in Mexico for more than a decade.

But the investigations “simply haven’t happened because in our view the political will is not there,” Mr. Goldston said. The report “explains how we have reached this state of impunity,” said José Antonio Guevara, the director of the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights. 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,” said Santiago Aguirre, the deputy director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Center for Human Rights. 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, to 538 last year from 1,450 in 2012.

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 will 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, said Mr. Aguirre, the impunity will continue. “What’s the incentive for a prosecutor to be independent? None,” he said.

Without real investigations, there are thousands of parents like the Parrals, who trudge from one government office to another in search of answers. It was only through a case file number that appeared on an army document 10 months after their son disappeared that they found his body. Tucked into the archives at the state prosecutor’s office was their son’s government ID, which had been found at the ranch.

But his body had been tossed into a common grave. An army investigation dismissed the case, and it languished with federal prosecutors before it was turned back to state prosecutors. “We think the army is hiding something to protect the commanding officers from the atrocities they carry out,” said Mr. Parral’s father, Jorge Parral Gutiérrez. “We can see that the prosecutors are not free to act.” “The message is that the army …,” began Mr. Parral. His wife finished the sentence: “ … has obstructed justice in every way.”