Tessie Borden
Republic Mexico City Bureau
Jul. 27, 2003 12:00 AM
MEXICO CITY - An old saying calls Mexico "the country of nothing happens."
It means that, despite pronouncements and investigations, nothing happens to
the rich, the protected and the well-connected.
Mexicans might have remembered that saying in recent days when they heard resolutions
involving a murder case, an electoral fraud investigation and a report on a
key government official.
Amid a chorus of incredulous protests, Mexico City police investigators said
on July 19 that their investigation of the shooting death of human rights attorney
Digna Ochoa y Placido showed she had staged a crime scene, then committed suicide.
Then, at the beginning of last week, the Mexican Attorney General's Office
said it was dropping most charges involving leaders of the state-owned oil company,
PEMEX, who had been accused of diverting millions in pension funds into the
failed campaign of presidential candidate Francisco Labastida.HamstrungAnd last
Wednesday, the watchdog group Human Rights Watch said the country's special
prosecutor on political crimes, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, is hamstrung by a lack
of power, resources and information. If the administration doesn't soon give
him more latitude, hundreds of investigations into disappearances and murders
from the country's "dirty war" and years of repression run the risk
of going unsolved, said Jos? Miguel Vivanco, head of the organization's Americas
division.
All three items go to the heart of what many consider a central, but neglected,
priority for the Fox government: reforming law enforcement.
"The fact of the matter is that nobody has any confidence in the justice
system in Mexico," said Laurie Freeman, Mexico specialist for the Washington
Office on Latin America, a human rights group. "If investigators continue
to conduct business in the same old way, they're not really going to get to
the bottom of any investigation."
When Fox was elected in 2000, his transition team put forward several justice
reform proposals. Among them were:• Defining more specifically the
role of the attorney general and all prosecutors offices so that it would no
longer play the role of both judge and accuser, as had occurred since the system
was set up.• Creating a Secretary of Security and Justice that would
have at its disposal a corps of professionally trained detectives, akin to the
FBI, to take over investigating federal crimes.• Taking all police
powers, like prison management and supervision of minor delinquents, from the
president's office and assigning them to the judicial system.
One of Fox's key aims was to depoliticize and demilitarize law enforcement
ranks.
Eric Olson, advocacy director for the Americas for Amnesty International USA,
said that, under the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party,
police and army forces had worked closely together and often carried out political
repression. Crime investigation was relegated to the background.
Thus, even major crimes in Mexico's recent history, like the assassinations
in May 1993 of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, in March 1994 of presidential
candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, and in September 1994 of ruling party leader
Francisco Ruiz Massieu, have never been definitively solved, despite the assignment
of several special prosecutors and armies of investigators.Police back into
crimeFox wanted to get police officers back into solving crimes, and he succeeded,
in part, Olson said. In 2001, he created the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI),
the FBI counterpart that he hoped would help professionalize crime-fighting.
But he failed to get the army out of law enforcement because the public and
the United States also demanded quick results in the fight against crime and
the war on drugs. His appointment as attorney general of Rafael Macedo de la
Concha, a former attorney general for the army, dismayed many.
Now, army influence has wrecked investigations like that of Ochoa's murder
and the work of Carrillo Prieto.
Ochoa, a high-profile Mexican human rights attorney, was found shot to death
in her office on Oct. 19, 2001. Police said there was no evidence of forced
entry and the gun used belonged to Ochoa. Early on, they posed the suicide theory.Local
bosses, armyOchoa's family said her work irritated local bosses, and recent
investigations delved into crimes by highly placed army officials.
"They were unwilling to do extensive and serious investigations into areas
that were politically sensitive," Olson said. "It's very difficult
to take on the military in Mexico."
In presenting the Human Rights Watch report, Vivanco said Carrillo Prieto has
been stymied by the army's decision to conduct its own investigations into possible
crimes by army officials during the dirty war, carrying out sham trials so that
officers could claim double jeopardy when called before the prosecutor.
The PEMEX decision reinforces Mexicans' sense that justice is skewed in favor
of the powerful in Mexico, Freeman said. In that decision, the attorney general
said that, because the diverted funds were not ill-gotten, only electoral rules
were broken and no major crime was committed.
"There's little surprise the cases have turned out this way," she said. "The government is going to have to work extremely hard to prove that (corruption) is not the case any more, but so far there's very little indication that things are changing."
Reach the reporter at tessie.borden@arizonarepublic.com.
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