Recent court cases whose verdicts have been overturned due to lack of evidence, including those of General Tomás Ángeles Dauahare, former deputy prosecutor Noé Ramírez Mandujano and the Frenchwoman Florence Cassez, have provoked a serious institutional crisis in Mexico. These cases demonstrate the enormous lack of professionalism in the judicial system, charged activists from social organizations.
Octavio Amezcua, attorney for the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, stated that these cases reveal the misuse of justice that occurred during the administration of Felipe Calderón by means of investigations directed against individuals the government deemed to be personas non grata.
"The justice system in Mexico has been terribly affected, not just by the fact that all arraignments and processes have been failing, but for all the damage caused by such illegal tools as the arraigo* and the use of protected witness statements. We are in a grave crisis," lamented the specialist.
*MVNote: Literally 'root', arraigo is a legal concept by which a suspect may be held without formal charges for up to 40 days; by court order, suspect may be held for another 40 days without charges.
To resolve this situation, Amezcua added, it is necessary to implement the new adversarial system* as soon as possible and to punish those officials who allow irregularities. Although it is a good sign that the current government admits the existence of abuses, it has yet to take concrete actions to generate true change.
*MV Note: The Mexican Constitution was amended in 2008 to change the trial system from an inquisitorial one--in which the prosecution and defense submit evidentiary documents to a judge who decides, in private, on the accused's guilt or innocence--to an adversarial system of public, oral trials in which the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and in which prosecution and defense present their arguments and witnesses testify. There are no juries. Judges continue to decide cases. By law the adversarial system is to be implemented by 2016; to date, however, it has been implemented in fewer than half the states.José Rosario Marroquín, director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, believes that the overturned sentences demonstrate the lack of professionalism in the entire chain of judicial inquiry, even in its most elementary stages, which involves both the police and judges, agents of the Public Ministry [Investigative Police] and prosecutors.
"There has been no decision by the government to reverse the situation; thus, not only are the rights of defendants and victims violated, but also the right of the entire society to know the truth," he declared.Given the persistence of torture, the lack of action by the authorities to correct their mistakes and the political intentionality evident in certain cases, such as with the so-called michoacanazo,* the only real solution is to restructure the judicial system altogether and go beyond good intentions, Marroquín emphasized. Spanish original
MVNote: In 2009, sixteen mayors in the state of Michoacán were arrested (i.e., the 'michoacan-strike') for alleged ties to drug trafficking; all were subsequently released; the arrests were widely regarded as a political act ('strike') by a PAN President against the PRD stronghold of Michoacán.