Mexican Military Human Rights Violations

Last Tuesday, the Human Rights Commission released a report summarizing the results of its investigation on a June 2014 shoot out between the Mexican Army and gang suspects in Tlatlaya in the State of Mexico that left twenty-two people dead. The Commission’s report indicated that between twelve and fifteen of the deaths were carried out by six soldiers following the firefight. The shooting began following an assault on a military patrol on the morning of June 30th while investigating a guarded warehouse. The assault left twenty-two gang suspects dead and one soldier injured, making it one of the bloodiest military-gang battles in recent history. The event itself, however, did not warrant significant attention given Tlatlaya’s proximity to Guerrero, a Mexican state with high violence rates and cartel activity. The event only received media coverage once the Human Rights Commission began an independent investigation on federal involvement following accusations from the mother of one of the battle’s victims.

The investigation uncovered evidence suggesting that the military took measures to cover up its involvement in what the commission calls “extrajudicial killings of alleged gang members”. The resulting report claimed that the majority of the bodies were moved into more aggressive positions, and weapons were laid next to all the corpses. It further claims that one of the captured gang member’s neck was twisted beyond its breaking point, four members were severely beaten with blunt instruments, and three had been shot execution style in the back of the head while unarmed.

Further outrage occurred when the Commission determined that the civilian prosecutors for the State of Mexico responsible for investigating the killings waited months before beginning the investigation and used substandard evidence in compiling their report. The Human Rights Commission also determined that three of the women who

had survived the assault were physically assaulted and intimidated while in state custody.

The extent of the brutality and authoritative mismanagement lead Human Rights Commission president Raúl Plascensia to denounce the killings as one of the most serious human rights violations that can be committed.

This is not the first instance of the Mexican military incurring international ire for the mistreatment of civilians and unarmed prisoners. The Felipe Calderon presidency justified the deaths of nearly three thousand civilian deaths by claiming they occurred during “attacks against military personnel”. These attacks, however, only accounted for the deaths of less than two hundred soldiers. Since Enrique Peña Nieto assumed the presidency in 2012, over six-hundred cases of civilian deaths have been attributed to military personnel.

These high levels of violence placed on the military are symptoms of the larger crisis Mexico faces from relying on its military for police actions. In 2006, then president Felipe Calderón sent thousands of soldiers from the Mexican army into Michoacán, a state in southwestern Mexico, to root out drug cartels that had became entrenched in the state. The use of soldiers in domestic territory began the practice of the sending military personal to combat cartels in places where the police where either unequipped or too corrupted to serve as effective bulwarks against the cartels’ violence and influence.

After a decade in Michoacán, the soldiers have proven ineffective at thwarting the cartels, allowing them to become more entrenched and numerous. The army’s lack of effectiveness in combating the cartels such as Knights Templar, encouraged civilians throughout Michoacán to take up arms against organized crime. The self-defense militias have enjoyed a surprising rate of success in pushing cartel forces out of rural towns and farms and have begun coordinating with government soldiers in the state.

Unfortunately, the rise of the citizen militia has done little to stem the high civilian casualty rate in the Mexican war on drugs, which is estimated to have exceeded 60,000 people.

Public trust in the Mexican military continues to erode as it charged for a growing number of human rights violations. A strong parallel can be drawn with public trust in the police forces, which recently suffered a significant drop following accusations that cartel-paid police officers kidnapped over forty students in the state of Guerrero.

As public faith in the Mexican military and police forces drops, more citizens could be incentivized to join the self-defense militias that have become increasingly common in rural areas. Should the militias’ numbers swell, or should public faith in Mexico’s public forces fall any further, Mexico could find itself primed for large scale civil unrest.