Although the Mexican government has signed several international conventions against torture, this crime against humanity continues to increase in the country without the authorities truly taking actions to eliminate it, said the Network of Civil Organizations All Rights for All.
In the context of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, which was celebrated yesterday, the seventy groups that make up the network across the country sent a message of solidarity to those affected by this crime and demanded that national authorities eradicate it completely.
''While the Mexican government has signed the major international treaties on torture and has been subjected to periodic evaluations by human rights agencies, recommendations made by these agencies are far from being implemented in the country,'' they lamented.Similarly, although constitutional amendments enacted in Mexico in recent years have provided an opportunity to eradicate torture, the country
''is far from having a regulatory framework in harmony with international standards on torture in all its states.''In addition, there are ''pieces and holes" in the relevant legislation, such as arraigo [detention of a person without the filing of formal charges before a judge], which allows for a period of little surveillance and high vulnerability for people detained by any authority, which often leads to acts of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Given the above, the network said,
''an increase in the practice of torture is witnessed in our country, as well as the impunity that continues around the cases that have been reported to the appropriate authorities.''For its part, Amnesty International (AI) reported that it has managed to collect more than 42,000 signatures of people from 120 countries calling on President Enrique Peña Nieto to combat torture and to ensure the rights of victims, with special emphasis on the case of Miriam López, who was tortured by the Mexican Army in Baja California in 2011.
The international organization said that another paradigmatic case of how this crime against humanity is often used by state security agents to incriminate innocent people is that of Israel Arzate Meléndez who, after being tortured and threatened, was accused of participating in the massacre in the Villas Salvárcar neighborhood in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua [in Jan. 2010, teenagers at a party were mistakenly murdered, apparently by a drug cartel].
On the same subject, the director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, José Rosario Marroquín, said that although an examination of Arzate using the Istanbul Protocol--an international method to verify that a person was a victim of torture--was carried out by the National Human Rights Commission with a positive result, the youth remains in detention, such that the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation (SCJ) will resolve the matter in the coming months. Spanish original