 |
| President Peña Nieto receives second annual report of the President of the National Commission for Human Rigths, Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez. Photo. José Antonio López |
Translated by Alejandro Aceves
In presenting his second annual report to President Enrique Peña Nieto, the president of the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), Luis Raul Gonzalez Perez, said there is only one truth regarding the Iguala [Ayotzinapa] case. It cannot be manufactured or negotiated and science should be what guides the investigation in its rather more complex technical and controversial aspects.
Getting to the bottom of what happened to the 43 normal school students, the ombudsman added, should, as in all cases, “necessarily” be deduced from the evidence and convincing elements in the investigation, evaluated and articulated as a whole, “and not in an isolated assessment”. Iguala remains an “open investigation.”
Gonzalez Perez spoke yesterday to President Enrique Pina Nieto and all those responsible in the federal government with being somehow involved with what happened between the 26th and 27th of September 2014 in Guerrero. The Secretaries of the Government Relations, Miguel Angel Osorio Chong; National Defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos, and the Navy, Admiral Vidal Francisco Soberon; as well as the National Security Commissioner, Renato Sales, and the Attorney General Arely Gomez, among other members of the federal cabinet, were in attendance.
They heard the president of the CNDH say:
“Society each time expects less and becomes more distrustful of [government] institutions. The country and Mexicans cannot allow impunity.”The ombudsman presented his second annual report yesterday at Los Pinos [The Pines, presidential residence and offices]. He stressed that the investigations on the whereabouts of the 43 normal school students must be supported by scientific evidence, must respect the commitments made to international agencies and must address the recommendations made by the CNDH last year in July.
His warnings were given five days after the report on the third expert study of the Colcula garbage dump, accomplished by approved experts and presented by the Attorney General’s Office, in response to which the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI) denounced the breach of the terms signed by the federal government for disseminating the results of that work.
Society's lack of confidence in the government is being enlarged, he added, by an environment where poverty and prevailing levels of inequality, as well as problems of violence, insecurity and deprivation, are realities that transgress all logic of a democratic state and the rule of law.
Then he criticized the application of solutions outside the law, such as what led the government to resign, “in the realm of events”, their basic function of providing security to the population and delegated that task to armed civilians [self-defense groups] to reduce crime and violence. “Michoacán has been an unfortunate proof of this”, he charged.
Gonzalez Perez stressed that the events that occurred in Chalchihuapan [state of Puebla, where a thirteen year-boy was killed by a police tear gas canister in July 2014], Tlatlaya [State of Mexico, where soldiers summarily executed arrested civilians in June 2014], Iguala and Apatzingan [Michoacán, where federal police shot and killed protesting, unarmed rural police] have tested the institutions of the Mexican State, including the CNDH. All showed the shortcomings and lack of response, for many years, by authorities of the three branches of government to various social problems, such as the weakness of the rule of law in several regions of the country.
The ombudsman insisted that all of these cases have to do with objective and scientific elements being dealt with in a fair, timely, and comprehensive manner, with clear and credible investigations that don’t accommodate speculation and unfounded questioning.
He affirmed that, given the current condition of fundamental rights in Mexico, there are only two ways ahead: resignation or transformation, but he said that tolerating violations of human rights is betraying the future.
He reported that in 2015, 327 investigations were opened into the disappearance of 453 people, but only in 11 cases was there sufficient evidence to process charges of forced disappearance. The most recorded cases were in Guerrero, Coahuila, Tamaulipas, and Veracruz.
He said that there are no acceptable levels or figures of torture, forced disappearances, arbitrary executions or attacks on journalists and civil defenders, as just one case is too much.
To close, he lamented the recent acts of Tierra Blanca and Papantla, Veracruz [where young people were disappeared by police], because
“they seem to reiterate that we still do not learn, evaluate and make sense of the many lessons that the pain and suffering of the victims of our country have given us.”The true enforcement of human rights urgently demands undertaking, with total urgency, responsibility for the abatement of corruption, a problem that has much to do with the lacerating impunity that has weakened the foundations of our rule of law, he also pointed out.
The ombudsman warned President Pena Nieto that there are many pending issues, unmet demands and unresolved social expectations, which are based on essential aspects of a democratic environment, such as compliance and enforcement of the law and the abatement of impunity and corruption. These are tasks that are still pending, he said. Spanish original