A United Nations report has placed Mexico among the worst 30 countries in the world for human rights abuses, with Venezuela being the only other Latin American country on the list.
UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said Mexico offered a “cruel example of how criminal violence could threaten hard-earned democratic gains.”
The report was presented on Monday before the Human Rights Commission in Geneva. The UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Mendez, wrote that “torture and ill treatment during detention are generalized in Mexico, and occur in a context of impunity.”
The report recommends that the military is removed from the security role it is granted under the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto. The strategy was started back in 2006, when former President Felipe Calderon launched an offensive against drug cartels.
The number of complaints of torture made to the National Human Rights Commission climbed from an average of 320 a year before the offensive to 2,100 in 2012. They have fallen by a third since Peña Nieto took office, but the report notes that the “tolerance, indifference or complicity,” of many prosecutors and judges remains.
The report emphasized that there were only five convictions for torture in Mexico between 2005 and 2013, and concluded that: “the safeguards are weak, particularly in the detection and prevention of torture in the initial moments, as well as in ensuring its rapid, impartial, independent and exhaustive investigation.”
Mexico’s representative in Geneva said the report’s conclusion that torture is widespread “does not correspond to reality, or reflect the huge efforts in my country to consolidate respect for human rights.”
Mexico’s human rights record came under the international spotlight following a wave of domestic and international protests demanding the return of 43 students who were disappeared by local authorities in the city of Iguala, Guerrero state, last September.
Al Hussein noted that this incident “was a long way from being an isolated case,” but “challenged the authorities to take decisive action to end impunity and avoid such crimes in the future.”