Evidence mounts on human right abuses in MX(1)

Teachers and residents of  Asuncion Nochixtlan, Oaxaca clash with police on June 19, 2016.

By Ines Pousadela

Mexico is experiencing a monumental human rights crisis. There is abundant evidence of widespread human rights violations in the country, including torture, extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances and violence against journalists and human rights defenders.

As worrying as the hard data is, what’s even more worrying is the Mexican government’s continued refusal to acknowledge the situation. In the words of Yésica Sánchez Maya of Consorcio Oaxaca, a civil society organization, the State “is investing more efforts and resources in denying the existence of a problem that is apparent [to the whole world] than in actually solving it.”

Despite constitutional guarantees, the rule of law is incomplete and highly uneven in Mexico. In states such as Oaxaca, where protesting teachers recently met violent repression, or Guerrero, where 43 students from a teachers’ college were disappeared and are presumed dead since 2014, civil society organizations and activists face powerful restrictions. These include violence linked to drug trafficking, the infiltration of local governments by increasingly diversified organized crime operations, pervasive corruption, police repression, and severe human rights violations by the security forces.

In June, Oaxacan teachers took to the streets to protest what they see as questionable government “education reform”. Over the weekend of June 19 and 20, security forces killed at least nine and wounded dozens in attacks on the teachers and local residents. A statement cosigned by several Mexican civil society groups highlighted that Oaxacans live in a context of “generalized” violence in which social movements – especially those involving teachers – have been long criminalized by the courts, the security forces and the media.

Teachers’ union leaders often face judicial harassment, including arrest and detention. One such arrest took place on June 11, just as the protests climbed. The teachers denounced the arrest as a politically motivated act of judicial harassment, dismissing the alleged embezzlement and money laundering charges as mere excuses meant to deactivate the protest, therefore redoubling their ongoing road blocking strategies. In the days and hours before violence was unleashed, the authorities turned the area into a war zone: as tension increased, an air fleet overflew the area and large numbers of militarized police forces were deployed. Nothing but tragedy could result from the heavily armed security units facing the crowds.

The same old discussion ensued regarding the mobilized teachers’ moral virtues (were they peaceful enough?), their tactical choices (how legitimate is road-blocking, one of their preferred methods of disruption?), their policy preferences (were they right in opposing education reform?), and even their subjective reasons for rejecting the government’s proposed changes (were they afraid of losing their jobs if their performance was evaluated?). While policy choices are for Mexicans to discuss – and one of the main grievances expressed in the streets is that the government is trying to impose a reform rather than submit it to public discussion – there is no justification of the use of deadly force by state authorities.

Contrary to current best practices regarding the management of public assemblies, Mexico’s federal government and the state government of Oaxaca have once again resorted to punitive measures to maintain public order. They treated roadblocks, historically a part of social movements’ tactics of resistance, as serious crimes. They used the criminal justice system as a tool to both inhibit protests and punish protestors for engaging in them. The violent government reaction against social protest on June 19 and 20 therefore came as no surprise. According to the authorities, it was when the police tried to evict the protestors that unidentified gunmen, apparently not linked to the protest organizers, opened fire, and chaos followed. Following the incidents, eyewitnesses agreed that the protestors themselves had been unarmed.

Read Human Rights, Page 2.