Reforma: Ana Laura Magaloni Kerpel*
Translated by: Joel Cloke
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) made their report about Mexico public. The diagnosis is the same thing we have heard from various international organizations and from the U.S. government: Mexico is immersed in a human rights crisis. The government’s reaction couldn’t wait. According to theSecretariat of Foreign Affairs, Secretariat of Government Relations and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), the report was created “from interviews about specific topics and in focused places”; it’s a report that is “biased”, that does not take into account the “advances of the past 50 years” and that “does not reflect the country’s general situation”.
Beyond the quality of the report or the political conflict between the IACHR and the federal government, the one thing true is that the official rates and the specific cases are alarming: 26 million people missing and we don’t know how many of them are forced disappearances, out-of-court executions in Tlatlaya and Tanhuato, the cases in Ayotzinapa and Tierra Blanca, 2,420 reports of torture in the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), high impunity rates, hundreds of murdered journalists, etc.
The government can criticize the methodological rigour of the IACHR’s report, what they can’t do is ignore reality. In various regions throughout the country, with distinct levels of intensity, the security crisis has created a human rights crisis. Peña Nieto’s administration doesn’t have a narrative that makes sense out of what’s happening and, therefore, his public policy actions are unfocused and reactive.
The human rights crisis has its origins in local governments. If we analyze the cases of Michoacán, Veracruz, Morelos, Guerrero, to mention a few, we’ll see that the common denominator is that criminal organizations took over, little by little, local and municipal institutions. Due to the fieldwork that I’m doing with various colleagues, I have the impression that the old client-based political system [granting of public benefits and services in exchange for political support] was the vehicle that criminal organizations used to control territories and cities. The mediators who were dedicated to managing the circulation of public resources in low-income areas in exchange for electoral support and social control stopped being under the service of the State and have been co-opted by criminal networks through distinct ways.
The provision of public services and aid programs to these populations has become stuck between clientelism and organized crime. The helplessness of these people is absolute. The abuses that police and armed forces commit to try to recover territorial control are the other side of the weakness of the Mexican State to stand up to a complex and devastating reality. The federal government should call to account by name those governors who were disrespectful and who were accomplices in the deterioration and the cooptation of their institutions. Michoacán, Guerrero and Veracruz give them lots of material to do that.
However, I see the most important void of Peña Nieto’s administration being in the lack of a narrative that can explain what’s going on and from that a group of actions that can bring to a stop and correct the political and social deterioration throughout various regions in the country. For that, one must abandon the idea that the problem of insecurity is a strictly police issue. It’s not true. Insecurity is a product of the weak public administration in its totality.
The institutional heft needed to get local bureaucracies to provide quality public services (not only police ones) to people that live in poverty doesn’t exist. It’s necessary to take away or to stop the association between criminal organizations and the client-based system that sets conditions on and defines who has access to and who doesn’t have access to said services. We therefore need government policies that link poverty, security and human rights in an articulated form. As long as this doesn’t take place, the federal government will continue carrying out isolated and reactive projects in each of these areas without much success. Spanish original
Ana Laura Magaloni Kerpel, Doctorate in Law, Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain); Research Professor, National System of Researchers at Center for Research and Economic Teaching (CIDE). Research Areas: Supreme Court and Comparative Constitutional Justice; Empirical Studies of Institutions of Justice; Institutions of Prosecution and Enforcement of Justice.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) made their report about Mexico public. The diagnosis is the same thing we have heard from various international organizations and from the U.S. government: Mexico is immersed in a human rights crisis. The government’s reaction couldn’t wait. According to theSecretariat of Foreign Affairs, Secretariat of Government Relations and the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), the report was created “from interviews about specific topics and in focused places”; it’s a report that is “biased”, that does not take into account the “advances of the past 50 years” and that “does not reflect the country’s general situation”.
Beyond the quality of the report or the political conflict between the IACHR and the federal government, the one thing true is that the official rates and the specific cases are alarming: 26 million people missing and we don’t know how many of them are forced disappearances, out-of-court executions in Tlatlaya and Tanhuato, the cases in Ayotzinapa and Tierra Blanca, 2,420 reports of torture in the Attorney General’s Office (PGR), high impunity rates, hundreds of murdered journalists, etc.
The government can criticize the methodological rigour of the IACHR’s report, what they can’t do is ignore reality. In various regions throughout the country, with distinct levels of intensity, the security crisis has created a human rights crisis. Peña Nieto’s administration doesn’t have a narrative that makes sense out of what’s happening and, therefore, his public policy actions are unfocused and reactive.
The human rights crisis has its origins in local governments. If we analyze the cases of Michoacán, Veracruz, Morelos, Guerrero, to mention a few, we’ll see that the common denominator is that criminal organizations took over, little by little, local and municipal institutions. Due to the fieldwork that I’m doing with various colleagues, I have the impression that the old client-based political system [granting of public benefits and services in exchange for political support] was the vehicle that criminal organizations used to control territories and cities. The mediators who were dedicated to managing the circulation of public resources in low-income areas in exchange for electoral support and social control stopped being under the service of the State and have been co-opted by criminal networks through distinct ways.
The provision of public services and aid programs to these populations has become stuck between clientelism and organized crime. The helplessness of these people is absolute. The abuses that police and armed forces commit to try to recover territorial control are the other side of the weakness of the Mexican State to stand up to a complex and devastating reality. The federal government should call to account by name those governors who were disrespectful and who were accomplices in the deterioration and the cooptation of their institutions. Michoacán, Guerrero and Veracruz give them lots of material to do that.
However, I see the most important void of Peña Nieto’s administration being in the lack of a narrative that can explain what’s going on and from that a group of actions that can bring to a stop and correct the political and social deterioration throughout various regions in the country. For that, one must abandon the idea that the problem of insecurity is a strictly police issue. It’s not true. Insecurity is a product of the weak public administration in its totality.
The institutional heft needed to get local bureaucracies to provide quality public services (not only police ones) to people that live in poverty doesn’t exist. It’s necessary to take away or to stop the association between criminal organizations and the client-based system that sets conditions on and defines who has access to and who doesn’t have access to said services. We therefore need government policies that link poverty, security and human rights in an articulated form. As long as this doesn’t take place, the federal government will continue carrying out isolated and reactive projects in each of these areas without much success. Spanish original
Ana Laura Magaloni Kerpel, Doctorate in Law, Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain); Research Professor, National System of Researchers at Center for Research and Economic Teaching (CIDE). Research Areas: Supreme Court and Comparative Constitutional Justice; Empirical Studies of Institutions of Justice; Institutions of Prosecution and Enforcement of Justice.