Translated by Marc McPherson
At almost the same time as the US State Department’s annual report on human rights around the world – highlighting the involvement of the police and Armed Forces in executions, tortures and forced disappearances as “one of the most significant problems” in Mexico – was released, a distrubing video of explicit nature began to spread through social media, showing a young woman suffering torture at the hands of an Armed Forces solider, an army officer, and a third man dressed in a Federal Police uniform.
The raw nature of the video is shocking, but it helps shed some light on the type of things we are talking about when we say that “widespread torture” exists in Mexico, as detailed in the report by UN rapporteur Juan Méndez [March 2015], before being the subject of extreme discredit from an official level, or when we talk about “Systematic Torture” as discussed in a previous UN report [May 2014] .
This single video of a young woman in a purple shirt justifies all of the reports, declarations, national and international inquests which focus on forced disappearances, tortures, and extrajudicial executions at the hands of those associated with the police or military as a serious problem in Mexico.
“Who is the damned María?” asks the soldier to the young tortured woman, as seen and heard in the video. “Have you remembered yet?...Or do you want the bag again?...Pain or shock?” he asks the desperate woman.The inexperience of the torturer is evident when he clumsily rests the barrel of his gun on the girl’s body, but she cannot see anything. The officer corrects him, and says “How about…without the bag”, making it clear that being a torturer requires an education.
Due to the impact caused by the circulation of this gruesome video in the past few hours, the National Defense Secretary released a press release yesterday, confirming that those who appear in the video, wearing military uniforms, do in fact belong to the military and are being prosecuted.
It is interesting to note that the Army only references the two military members, but never actually mentions the man in police uniform who took part in the torture. For those who have seen the video: he’s the person who first tries to fix the girl’s hair, and then places a plastic bag over her head to suffocate her. For some reason, this part is not mentioned in the Secretariat of Defense’s press release.
The Army has acknowledged that the event took place on February 4th 2015, in the municipality of Ajuchitlán de Progreso, in the Hot Country [lower Balsas River Valley], in Guerrero. It claims it discovered these actions in December of last year, and that an initial investigation had begun to bring legal action against those involved. Almost a whole year after the events, the findings were sent to the Attorney General’s Office “so that, within its own jurisdiction, it could determine who was responsible for causing harm to the civilian”.
In January, the Military Prosecutor carried out an arrest warrant for a captain and a military policeman as being presumed responsible for the “crime of disobedience”. In its statement, the Secretariat of Defense reported that the officer and the soldier are being detained in a military prison for military offenses, and that the fifth Military Judge would decide an appropriate course of action.
The rawness of the video has shaken a large part of Mexican society, who have seen there live torture and suffering, involving the use of barbaric methods by police and military forces to obtain confessions. “Who is the damned María?” will remain etched in the minds of the thousands who have seen this footage. To this moment, we do not know who this María is, nor what ever happened to the young tortured woman.
Nevertheless, the video links together the reports of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission [March 2016], that speaks of a “serious human rights crisis”; the State Department that points out: “the impunity, corruption and abuse committed by the security forces as the main human rights violations in Mexico in 2015”, and others that agree in recognizing that Mexico is in a critical condition regarding human rights.
In the video, everything has an impact – the torture, the suffering, and the barbaric methods. But nothing more so than the image of the Mexican flag stitched to the sleeves of the uniforms of the torturers.
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*Carmen Aristegui F. is a journalist. A graduate of the UNAM, she is a radio and TV host and commentator. A lecturer and author of books, she has been awarded the National Journalism Award, the Iberoamerican Prize, the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, and the Order of the Legion of Honor by the French Government. She is a Reforma columnist and moderator of the program "Aristegui" on CNN in Spanish. She directs the web portal Aristegui News. Until early March 2015, she was director of the First Edition (morning program) of MVS News (radio). She and her investigative team were fired for unclear reasons after they had exposed the purchase of the "White House" of President Peña Nieto's wife, Angélica Rivera, from the Higa Group, a major government contractor.