UN: torture in Mexico occurs with 'impunity' at hands of security forces

A scathing UN report has sharply rebuked Mexico for its widespread problem with torture, which it said implicates all levels of the security apparatus in the context of the government’s efforts to combat crime.

“Torture and ill treatment during detention are generalized in Mexico, and occur in a context of impunity,” the UN special rapporteur on torture, Juan Méndez, wrote in the report he presented on Monday before the Human Rights Commission in Geneva.

The report was based on a fact-finding mission Méndez made to Mexico last spring, and says methods used include beatings, electric shocks, suffocation, waterboarding, forced nudity and rape, as well as threats and insults.

Méndez’s report links torture in Mexico to government efforts to combat the country’s drug cartels, saying the majority of cases he studied involved victims detained for alleged links with organized crime. He also implicates local, state and federal police in the practice, as well as the armed forces.

The army and navy’s role in public security operations escalated dramatically when President Felipe Calderón launched a major offensive against organized crime at the end of 2006. His successor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, has made few major changes to the strategy since he took office at the end of 2012.

The number of complaints of torture made to the National Human Rights Commission rose from an average of 320 a year before the offensive to 2,100 in 2012. They have fallen by nearly a third during the Peña Nieto administration, though the report notes that contributing factors remain largely unchanged, including the “tolerance, indifference or complicity” of some doctors, public defenders, prosecutors and judges.

Highlighting that there were only five convictions for torture in Mexico between 2005 and 2013, the report concludes: “The safeguards are weak, particularly in the detection and prevention of torture in the initial moments, as well as in ensuring its rapid, impartial, independent and exhaustive investigation.”

As well as recommending the withdrawal of the armed forces from its current domestic security role, Méndez urges the elimination of the law allowing Mexican authorities to hold suspects for a period of 40 days prior to bringing charges as investigators seek to build cases against them, often with the help of forced confessions.

Mexico’s representative in Geneva said the report’s conclusion that torture is generalised “does not correspond to reality, or reflect the huge efforts in my country to consolidate respect for human rights”.

In an interview with the newspaper La Jornada, Jorge Lomónaco said: “Mexico identifies a series of challenges it needs to attend to ensure the complete eradication of this practice.”

The report comes in a context of rising global attention to human rights abuses in Mexico sparked by the disappearance of 43 students in the southern city of Iguala on 26 September, after they were attacked by municipal police allegedly working with a local drug gang.

The federal investigation concluded that the students were killed on the same night, though some reject this version’s reliance on confessions made by detained officers and alleged cartel members.

The student case cast a shadow over President Peña Nieto’s state visit to the UK last week that was greeted by protests, including one organised by Amnesty International.

The group’s Americas director, Erika Guevara-Rosas, said Monday’s UN report “highlights a culture of impunity and brutality that we have been campaigning about for years”.