Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Conditioning, Suspending Aid
Human Rights Watch is calling for a suspension of Mérida Initiative handouts until military abuses are subject to civilian trials rather than military discipline. HRW painstakingly detailed the reasons that civilian authorities should be handling such cases here, and it's hard to argue with their logic. As long as military judges who owe their jobs to the secretary of defense are overseeing cases of abuse, cover-ups will be hard to avoid. However, I think the tactic HRW suggests is a wrong-minded. The question is whether or not a suspension of aid will make Mexico more likely to address military abuses. I don't imagine it will; instead, it will spark an outbreak of the sort of self-righteous nationalism that has thankfully been rare in recent years, at least in the realm of security. An aid suspension stemming from a foreign uproar over military abuses would actually make life harder on the would be reformers among the Mexican military and political class. American concerns would be better addressed behind closed doors.
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I dunno, the problem is that the State Dept. has to actually certify Mexico's compliance with the conditions attached to the contingent 15%. One of those conditions was the fuero militar v. civil issue. Especially in a generally deteriorating human rights situation, I don't see how State can possibly certify Mexican compliance. In fact, doing so would send the worst message of all: the inclusion of the contingency was purely political and non-fulfillment carries no real penalty. Not that a storm of nationalism is fun, but so be it.
Yeah I hear you. I take that more as a sign of our certification processes being counter-productive. I agree that the State department has ample reason to de-certify Mexico's compliance with humanitarian rights, but I just think doing so wouldn't necessarily lead Mexico to address those concerns, and would almost certainly cause a huge rupture in the relationship. For me that's more than anything an argument for scrapping certification in its current form.
That's also tricky because it could lead to not taking humanitarian concerns into account at all. I don't know, there's no easy answer.
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