Fox Falls Short in Human Rights Push, Report Says

The government of President Vicente Fox has lacked the political will to complete the ambitious program of human rights reform it first proposed six years ago, according to a report released Wednesday by Human Rights Watch.

Elected in 2000 amid great hope for reform after ending the 71-year rule of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, Fox is leaving an incomplete legacy as he approaches the end of his term, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth said at a Mexico City news conference.

“We had very high expectations for the Fox administration,” Roth said. “He did not show the leadership needed to see a historic effort such as this one completed.”

In 2002, Fox appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the “dirty war” crimes committed by the Mexican government and military against dissidents in the 1960s and ‘70s. But the prosecutor has failed to win a single conviction.

To protect the rights of the accused, Fox proposed reforms to Mexico’s judicial system in 2004. But like many others, the proposals died in Congress. Fox failed to expend the “political capital” to move the reform effort forward, the report said.

Torture and other forms of police and prosecutorial abuse remain common here, especially at the state and local levels, according to the report, titled “Lost in Transition: Bold Ambitions, Limited Results for Human Rights Under Fox.”

The Fox administration defended its record Wednesday and blamed Congress for failing to act on proposed legal reforms.

“Many of these problems could be resolved once the Congress approves the reforms proposed by the president,” Fox spokesman Ruben Aguilar Valenzuela told reporters. “We also think that we have made important advances in these past years.”

The report notes that confessions obtained under torture remain admissible as evidence in criminal trials, giving police an “incentive” to abuse suspects. And the number of people jailed without possibility of bail on relatively minor charges has increased dramatically, the report says.

As part of a get-tough approach to rising crime, many nonviolent and relatively minor crimes have been reclassified as “serious,” leaving suspects ineligible for release pending trial. In Yucatan state, for example, suspects charged with the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages can be held without bail. As a result of such laws, 40% of Mexico’s jail and prison population is made up of people who have not been convicted of any crime, the report says.

The human rights group’s assessment of Fox was not entirely negative. Jose Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch, praised the Fox administration and the Mexican Congress for adopting a government transparency law in 2002 that “is a model for the region.”

That law gives the Mexican people greater access to information about the federal branch of government. “This could be the most important legacy Fox leaves for Mexico,” Vivanco said.

Fox raised expectations after he appointed a special prosecutor to investigate past human rights abuses. Evidence uncovered by the inquiry led to the arrest and indictment of the former head of the secret police and three other security officials implicated in “dirty war” crimes.

“But these successes have been eclipsed by major setbacks,” the report says. The special prosecutor has filed charges in only 15 of more than 600 cases of forced disappearance, a rate the New York-based group called disappointing.

In 2001, the president ordered Mexico’s security services and military to release millions of pages of documents related to the “dirty war.” Millions of documents have been transferred to the National Archives here, but most are not indexed or cataloged, making it nearly impossible for researchers to find relevant material, the report says.

When Fox was elected in 2000, improving human rights and bringing to justice the military officers responsible for past crimes were a priority.

Now, as Mexican voters prepare to choose Fox’s successor this July, “human rights is absent from the political campaign,” Vivanco said.