Snapshot
MEXICO
Between 1929 and the present day, the Mexican people have experienced periods of authoritarian governance, economic inequality, immense political corruption and widespread human rights abuses. In some cases, human rights violations were perpetrated by government authorities against political opponents. During Mexico’s “Dirty War,” for instance, which lasted from 1965–1990, real or perceived opponents of the ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), were subjected to torture, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearances, SGBV and forced exile.[i] The government and the security forces were not the sole perpetrators of violations, however. Organized criminal networks are also responsible for significant violence against civilians, both historically and during the present time. The United States government has additionally contributed to human rights abuses through the so-called “war on drugs,” which has killed more than 250,000 people since 2006.[ii]
More significant change seemed to be on the horizon when Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the left-leaning Movimiento Regeneración Nacional was elected in July 2018. López Obrador spoke repeatedly about his commitment to victims and his desire to achieve peace by addressing the socioeconomic roots of violence.[i]
This hope proved to be short-lived, however, as López Obrador has maintained many of the state practices that led to violence and abuses in the past. He has maintained the National Guard, a police force controlled by the military, and given them authority over development megaprojects in indigenous territories.[ii] His government has also cooperated with the United States to hold migrants in Mexico, where they are at higher risk of widespread violence, including from organized criminal networks, than the Mexican population. Throughout, López Obrador has maintained ties with Mexico’s political elites, who have consistently supported authoritarian policies regardless of the party in power.[iii]
Mexico continues to experience widespread violence with one of highest rates for homicide and enforced disappearances in the world.[iv] The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNOHCHR) reports that more than 100,000 people were registered by friends or family as forcibly disappeared between 1964–2022, with about 95,000 of those disappearances occurring after 2006.[v] About a quarter of all the disappeared are reported to be women.[vi] Human rights advocates have observed that these official statistics almost certainly undercount the true number of disappearances.[vii] The United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances made an official visit in November 2021, after which it observed that Mexican army and police forces as well as organized crime groups are responsible for the violence, and that “impunity and revictimization prevail.”[viii] Further, the National Registry of Torture Crimes has reported 14,243 cases of torture in the last five years.[ix]
Despite the ongoing violence, there has been progress toward preserving memory and seeking justice. In June 2021, the Mexican Supreme Court issued a ruling recognizing that the recommendations of the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances were binding, and Mexico agreed to an official visit by the Committee in November 2021.[x] López Obrador issued a decree establishing the Commission for Access to Truth, Historical Clarification and Promotion of Justice Regarding Gross Human Rights Violations Committed from 1965 to 1990 (CAVEHJ) in October 2021.[1] The CAVEHJ expects to produce a final report in 2024. In March 2022, the Grupo Interdisciplinario de Expertos y Expertas Independientes for Ayotzinapa released a new report on the forcible disappearance of 43 students in 2014, finding that military authorities altered the crime scene, suppressed evidence and tortured detainees to produce false confessions.[xi] In August 2022, a preliminary report from the CAVEHJ affirmed this finding, the first formal acknowledgment that the government was involved.[xii] A few days later, the former attorney general of Mexico, Jesús Murillo Karam, was arrested for his role in the mass disappearances and subsequent cover-up.[xiii]
Memory
The Mexican government has taken preliminary steps to support historical memory. In November 2022, the secretary of the Interior released the draft General Law on Public Memory[1] which, if adopted, will require public policies related to memorialization projects and reparations for victims, as well as the creation of a National Center for Memory and Human Rights.[i] The Commission on Human Rights in Congress also announced in December 2022 that it was drafting a memory law related to the period of the Dirty War[2] (Ley sobre la Memoria en México, de 1965 a 1990) to “recognize the moral reparation of people in the social struggle who fought to democratize the country and to clarify that they were not criminals, but activists.”[ii]
These draft laws may represent a new governmental willingness to search for truth and uphold memory. Critics have noted, however, that victims and their communities were not consulted when the draft was being prepared and have also suggested that the government is supporting memory initiatives to relieve pressure to deliver justice.[iii] Activists and human rights defenders such as the Huellas de la Memoria collective point out that memory initiatives mean little if those who committed atrocities continue to benefit from impunity.[iv]
In the absence of comprehensive government efforts to preserve memory, CSOs, victims and survivor communities have taken the lead. Organizations and collectives have erected unofficial “anti-memorial” and “anti-monuments” in public spaces, including the “Antimonumenta” erected in several cities since 2019 to demand justice for femicides.[v] Other organizations working on historical memory include Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Sociedad Civil Las Abejas, Museo Memoria y Tolerancia, Sitio de Memoria Circular de Morelia and Tlaxcoaque, Sitio de Memoria.[vi] In addition to large public memory projects, human rights groups and collectives often support intimate memory initiatives, such as Mother’s Day or Christmas celebrations to honor the disappeared.[vii]
Many organizations are actively working to preserve or create documentation related to past and ongoing violations. The Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Centre for Human Rights (Centro Prodh) has memorialized human rights violations of vulnerable populations by collecting testimonies, public commemorations, research publications and videos.[viii] The Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, one of Mexico’s oldest NGOs, coordinated with a wide network of CSOs to document forced internal displacement during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.[ix] Institutions are also playing a role in preserving memory. In 2020, the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Iberoamerican University, the College of Mexico and the Center for Research Libraries created the Repository of Documentation on Disappearances in Mexico, whose purpose is to collect, store and make available government and non-government documentation related to disappearances from the 1960s to date.[x]
Justice
Mexico has a long history of impunity, corruption and stagnancy in the justice system.[i] Efforts to achieve justice or accountability in the face of violations have often been undermined by state officials and often result in reprisals against reformers, whistleblowers, journalists and activists. For instance, as of September 2021, the state had achieved only 40 convictions for forcible disappearance, despite tens of thousands of complaints.[ii]
The Mexican government is currently operating two truth-telling mechanisms: the Truth Commission on the Ayotzinapa Case, (CVAJ), established on December 6, 2018 and the CAVEHJ, established in December 2021. Final reports from both commissions are still pending. The CAVEHJ is Mexico’s primary truth-telling mechanism, first convened in December 2021 with a mandate to investigate and issue reports on human rights violations, promote justice and reparations, uphold the right to memory and connect justice and victim support mechanisms within the government.[iii] The Commission operates through five main branches: the Historical Clarification Mechanism; the Committee for the Promotion of Justice; the Special Search for the Disappeared Program; a Special Reparations and Compensation Program; and a National Memory Center for Human Rights.[iv] It is expected to release its final report in 2024.
Observers and human rights organizations have expressed concerns about whether the Commission will produce unbiased, comprehensive results. Six of the CAVEHJ’s 11 members are senior government officials, raising questions about impartiality given the involvement of the Mexican government in many of the incidents under investigation.[v] Additionally, the CAVEHJ is only mandated to investigate gross human rights violations during the so-called “Dirty War” period, which excludes some of the most intense periods of violence in the late 1990s, such as the Zapatista Rebellion that began in 1994 and the U.S.-backed war against drug cartels that intensified in 2006.[vi]
The CVAJ is mandated to investigate an incident in 2014, when 43 students were forcibly disappeared from the state of Iguala, Guerrero. Their bodies have never been recovered, but it was widely suspected that both organized criminal groups and Mexican security personnel were involved. The CVAJ released a report in August 2022 confirming that the government of Mexico was complicit in the disappearance of the students.[vii] The next day, former attorney general of Mexico Jesús Murillo Karam was arrested and charged for his role in covering up the disappearances.[viii] Despite this progress, observers of the cases remain concerned that the CVAJ is being used as a smokescreen to “absolve military institutions while pursuing high-level federal officials from the previous government.”[ix] The report from the Ayotzinapa Truth Commission includes 38 highly redacted pages, was used to delegitimize previous investigations by the victims’ families and journalists and contains no recommendations on transitional justice.[x]
In addition to the truth commissions, the Mexican government is taking early steps toward justice through other mechanisms. The Comisión Ejecutiva de Atención a Víctimas del Estado de México (CEAV), a government entity coordinating the work of the State Registry of Victims, the Immediate Attention and First Contact Unit and the Specialized Ombudsman for Victims and Victims of Crime, plans to conduct an open public consultation in 2023 to assess access to truth, justice and reparations.[xi] This effort builds on the obligations established in the General Law on Torture and the General Law on Forced Disappearances in 2017, which required the government to address these violations. The impact of the CEAV and its public consultation remains to be seen. Mexican governing bodies have also adopted new laws and policies that explicitly break with the past; for example, as of October 2022, 32 Mexican states had voted to legalize same sex unions.[xii]
Communities, NGOs and informal collectives are extremely active in Mexico, both as advocates for justice and as justice actors themselves. Despite the adoption of the General Law on Forced Disappearances in 2017 and the subsequent creation of the Extraordinary Forensic Identification Mechanism in 2020, forensic justice remains elusive due to insufficient staff, inadequate training and a lack of independence.[xiii] As a result, relatives of the missing and disappeared often must become the primary investigators of their loved ones’ disappearances, supported by informal networks of other families who have gone through the same experience.[xiv] Women take on the heaviest burden of this work, doing everything from compiling dossiers to excavating suspected burial sites.[xv] For instance, Sabuesos Guerreras, a collective of 850 women and three men, found 190 bodies, 18,860 incomplete remains and 55 living disappeared people between 2017–2021.[xvi]
Education
Mexico’s history curriculum has been manipulated by many successive governments, including the current administration.[i] For example, the government published a new history of Mexico in 2022 to be distributed to schools across the country. The book’s publication was celebrated by López Obrador, who said it would tell the stories of those Mexicans excluded from previous official accounts. While it did include sections on indigenous resistance to colonization, Mexicans of African descent and the feminist and anti-femicide movements, the book contains no mention of the Dirty War, the war on drugs, the migrant crisis or the epidemic of the disappeared.[ii]
Another important element of education for truth, memory and justice in Mexico is civil society-led programming to train the next generation of human rights defenders and activists. Some of the most recognized organizations contributing to this kind of education are the Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Francisco de Vitoria, which operates the School for Young Human Rights Defenders; the Comité Cerezo México, which runs both the General School of Human Rights for Truth, Memory and Justice and the School for Popular Educators on Human Rights; and the Proyecto de Derechos Económicos Sociales y Culturales (ProDESC), which founded the Transnational Justice School in 2017. These schools primarily train frontline human rights defenders, but they also train trainers who take the curriculum back to their communities.
Notes
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Recommendations
The Mexican government should facilitate an inclusive, participatory consultation with historically marginalized communities to inform the substance of the memory laws currently being drafted.
State and federal governments in Mexico should consult with educators and affected communities to develop a history curriculum that includes the experiences of Indigenous Mexicans, Mexicans of African descent, women and other marginalized groups.
The Mexican government should pause amnesty and reconciliation processes until it has a companion strategy for holding accountable the perpetrators of serious human rights violations that adheres to national and international standards.
Mexican CSOs, including victims and survivors groups, should continue to undertake locally led memorialization, documentation and archiving efforts in the service of truth-telling as well as accountability.