Friday, June 18, 2010

A Tragedy and Another Chance

The CNDH reported that the Mexican army is responsible for the April deaths of two children after it opened fire on a Tahoe carrying a family in Tamaulipas. It rejected the military's findings that non-military gunmen had fired the bullets that killed the children, aged 5 and 9 years. The military has a few weeks to accept or reject the findings.

Every incident like this presents the opportunity for the military and its political bosses (who frankly don't act as such) to begin to address the abuses of which the army has been periodically accused. This of course seems more like an accident than outright abuse, and the most worrying allegations involve forced disappearances and extra-legal executions, but the army seems to have been at fault here, the result was no less tragic, and the response, that instinctive denial of responsibility, is worrying as ever.

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