Mexico Quakes Lead to Allegations of Police Torture

Four bodies found in the ruins of the building that contained the Mexico City prosecutor’s office were not like the thousands of others dug out after the devastating September earthquakes.

For one thing, they were bound and gagged. And people who saw the bodies said they bore bruises and burns not likely to have been caused by the rubble that fell on them.

These people, who asked not to be identified, concluded that the four, Colombians arrested in Mexico, were tortured while in custody.

The Mexican government has denied that the four were tortured. Yet a Colombian official here, who also asked not to be identified, said he has been told by a woman, the mother of one of the prisoners, that all four were tortured and were dead before the quake occurred.

The Colombian official said the woman was being held along with the four and that she survived the quake and is now in custody elsewhere.

The truth will probably never be known. Reporters and photographers were not permitted to see the bodies, which were buried in a mass grave along with those of scores of other quake victims.

Nonetheless, this incident, along with continuing international criticism of alleged human rights abuses in Mexico, has added fuel to a debate on the question of whether Mexican police officers commonly torture prisoners despite a constitutional prohibition against such practices.

The federal attorney general, Sergio Garcia, said this week that there have been numerous cases of police torture and vowed that the government will move to stop the practice.

“The government repudiates and will repudiate any form of violation of human rights, especially the most grave one of torture, whether it be physical or psychological,” Garcia said.

The Mexican Senate, led by members of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, is considering legislation that would punish any official convicted of torturing prisoners.

Human rights activists say that torture is committed frequently by Mexican security forces. Specific information is scarce, though.

Most cases involve people accused of common crimes who are tortured to extract confessions. But Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, also has reported the torture of political activists and peasant leaders in Mexico.

In some cases, torture is reportedly inflicted to force a prisoner or his family to pay a bribe for his release, on other occasions to provide sadistic entertainment.

“This is not a question of a few errant officials,” said Rosario Ibarra, a member of the Chamber of Deputies and a human rights activist. “It’s inherent in the system.”

The types of torture reportedly practiced in Mexico are varied and brutal. A 1984 Amnesty International report entitled “Torture in the Eighties” listed “severe and repeated beatings, including beating with cupped hands over the ear; submersion in water; introduction of carbonated water into the nasal passages; electric shocks applied to the most sensitive parts of the body; burning with cigarettes, and sexual violation and abuse.”

Mexican newspapers frequently report cases of police abuse, including torture used to elicit bribes. A police official in the nearby state of Mexico was reported to have set up a torture and rape cell in a bookstore in the center of a town.

Mexico prides itself on maintaining an image of civil liberty and public order. The government is embarrassed by the repeated mention of Mexico along with Guatemala, El Salvador and Chile as countries where the torture of prisoners is commonplace.

The Mexican government insists that in this country such practices are an aberration, not a policy.

“It is committed by those who do it on their own account, not on behalf of the government,” Atty. Gen. Garcia said.

Torture is just one of a series of civil rights issues that have surfaced in Mexico in recent years. Ibarra said that since 1970, about 475 political activists have disappeared, presumably at the hands of the police and the armed forces. Another 146 were freed after being taken into custody secretly.

Those numbers pale in comparison with statistics kept in Central America. Still, human rights activists here contend that it is a question of values, not numbers.

Illegal arrest is a common problem in Mexico. The chief prosecutor of Mexico City, Victoria Adato, admitted to legislators that the Colombian prisoners whose bodies were found in the rubble of her office building had been detained improperly.

The prosecutor’s office described the Colombian prisoners as members of a “dangerous band of thieves.” They had been held incommunicado for 17 days, although under Mexican law suspects may be held for no more than 72 hours before being arraigned.

According to human rights activists and foreign observers, human rights abuses have continued under the government of President Miguel de la Madrid, although the number has diminished. Of the 57 people reported to have disappeared in the first three years of De la Madrid’s term, 46 have been freed, according to Ibarra.

De la Madrid campaigned for office on a platform that promised “moral renovation,” including a cleanup of corruption and police abuses. Soon after taking office, he disbanded a plainclothes police agency, the Division of Crime Prevention, that had been linked to several disappearances.

The anti-torture proposal before the Senate would prohibit torture for any reason, including “unstable internal politics, urgency of investigations or any other public emergency.”