Mexico rights watchdog says police torture persists
Mexican police and prosecutors still use torture and their tactics have grown more sophisticated, despite President Vicente Fox’s pledges to end such abuse, the national rights watchdog said on Tuesday.
Jose Luis Soberanes, president of the national human rights commission, said torture increasingly comes in the form of psychological rather than physical abuse.
“Unfortunately, torture is not a thing of the past,” Soberanes told reporters, urging the government to become more zealous in combating it. “Torture has been modernized.”
Threats, simulated executions, forcing the victim to hurt others or to watch others being tortured are among the psychological tactics, along with the traditional methods of beating, burning with cigarettes and near suffocation, according to the rights group.
The United Nations and other international organizations have repeatedly said Mexico’s justice system is rife with torture and called on the Fox government to overhaul it.
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In Mexico's Murders, Fury Is Aimed at Officials
VÃctor Javier GarcÃa still has a dozen marks across his abdomen and genitals from the burning cigarettes the police used to torture him into falsely confessing to being a serial killer.
It made no difference to a lower court judge that the DNA tests on the bodies identified as his victims were not conclusive. Or that a forensics expert testified that he had been ordered by his superiors to plant false evidence. Or even that witnesses retracted their testimony, saying the police had threatened them into making false statements.
Mr. GarcÃa was sentenced to
Concerns grow after journalist shot in Mexico
Mexico became Latin America's most dangerous country in which to be a journalist in 2005, the international watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said Tuesday.
The organization issued a statement expressing concern about the safety of journalists in Mexico a day after police in the southern state of Oaxaca announced that a radio news reporter had been shot and critically wounded by assailants.
In northern Mexico alone this year, six journalists have been killed and a seventh is still missing, according to Mexican newspaper editors.
In September, Mexican President Vicente Fox said he would appoint a special
Former Mexico City police chief named mayoral candidate
Mexico's leftist Democratic Revolution Party has nominated a controversial former Mexico City police chief as its candidate for mayor.
The party selected Marcelo Ebrard over Jesus Ortega, a former Mexican senator, in internal elections held yesterday.Ebrard was dismissed last year as Mexico City police chief after his officers took hours to respond to a mob attack that left two federal agents dead.Ebrard blamed the delay on traffic and insufficient forces.He later was appointed the city's social development secretary.
He resigned earlier this year to launch his mayoral candidacy.Ebrard in 2000 backed the successful campaign
Mexico says drug trafficking DVD won't cost federal investigators their jobs
Mexico's top anti-drug prosecutor will not lose his job despite doubts about whether federal agents were involved in the videotaped beating and torture of four drug hit men, a government spokesman said Monday.
Ruben Aguilar, chief spokesman for President Vicente Fox, said that no federal investigator was in danger of being fired in the wake of the recording, which has sent shock waves through Mexico's anti-narcotics efforts.
"It doesn't put anyone at risk" of losing their jobs, Aguilar said during his daily briefing with reporters.
But he refused to comment
Mexico criticised over lack of human rights progress
Mexican President Vicente Foxs record on human rights has been disappointing in spite of pledges to put the issue at the top of the governments agenda, a rights group said on Wednesday.
Under Mr Fox, whose six-year term ends in December, Mexico has yet to establish accountability for past atrocities or to make serious progress in curbing the abuses that continue to be committed on a regular basis, said US-based Human Rights Watch in a report.
The findings are almost certain to upset Mr Fox, who in 2000 ended 71 years of rule by the
Mexico peasant ecologist freed in murder case
A peasant fighting logging in Mexico's mountains was cleared of murder charges and ordered freed on Thursday after 10 months in jail in a case that sparked international outcry over corruption in the courts.
Felipe Arreaga, 56, who has been held in a sweltering jail on the Pacific coast since November, was exonerated in the 1998 murder of the son of a powerful local landowner, said a rights group working in his defense.
"They declared him innocent," defense lawyer Mario Patron told Reuters by telephone from the courtroom.
Rights workers worldwide had said the charge was
Media group urges Mexico to help find missing writer
The international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Tuesday urged Mexican authorities to find a radio and newspaper reporter missing in the northern border state of Coahuila.
Rafael Ortiz, 32, was last seen before dawn Saturday after leaving the offices of the daily Zocalo newspaper in the city of Monclova, about 135 miles from Eagle Pass.
We urge the Coahuila state authorities to do everything possible to find Ortiz quickly and to alert the new prosecutors office that specializes in attacks on the press, the New York-based media watchdog group said in a
Mexico: Plainclothes police gunned down
Four plainclothes police officers were shot and killed in the notoriously violent border town Nuevo Laredo by unknown gunmen, El Universal reported Friday.
The officers -- members of the intelligence branch of the Mexican Federal Preventative Police -- had their vehicle sprayed with gunfire, said witnesses.
Nuevo Laredo, along the U.S. border, is a known crossroads for drug smuggling from Mexico into the United States and has been the scene of several police killings in recent months.
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Mexico Lacks Clear Migratory Policy
The lack of a clear Mexican migratory policy puts it at a real disadvantage in defending the rights of its migrants that cross the US border against the northern nation´s repressive practices, La Jornada editorialized Thursday.
Referring to the US House-approved law that includes building a long wall and reinforcing border police, the daily pointed out that this will mean an increase in the already high number of people who die each year attempting to cross the frontier.
The Mexican government´s moral dilemma is how to demand fundamental rights of migrants when it applies similar repressive measures on
Mexico wary of rights violations on U.S. border
Mexico says it will be keeping an eye out for human rights violations after Texas Gov. Rick Perry pledged $9.7 million to step up security along the Mexico-Texas border.
In a statement sent out late Wednesday, Mexico said it understood that the fight against crime and violence along the border must be fought on both sides.
But the statement also called on the United States to allow more legal migration and respect the rights of Mexicans north of the border.
"Without a doubt, the security of both countries, especially along the border, would benefit from the
