And more broadly, if Calderón and the military brass are sick of the complaints, making a public show of punishing the offenders is the best way to deal with that, not denying the basis of the denunciations.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Whining
Calderón complained yesterday that the "broken record" of complaints about military abuses were tiring, and said that they were false. I agree that some of the comments about the army are over the top and unbalanced, but how can Calderón say that all the complaints are untrue? They have been documented by HRW, Amnesty International, and numerous media sources. Is Calderón arguing that the dozens of complaints, documented in great detail and with first-person accounts, are all lies?
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8 comments:
Calderon seems to genuinely not realize how far out of sync with the region Mexico is. Not that other countries don't have severe impunity problems with security force rights abuses, but in most other places such issues became major problems years ago and the issue of how to address such violations have gradually entered the discourse as a "normal" topic of contention. Presidents, including lefties but especially righties, still customarily jerk their knees toward placing obstacles in the path of redress, but the Calderon-style whiny outright denialism is anachronistic. I'm seriously not sure he realizes how foolish this all sounds to the international human rights community.
Although he may be a little too eager to dismiss the complaints as false, i wouldn't put much stock in HRW or Amnesty documentation. When's the last time an HRW or Amnesty researcher actually went anywhere in Mexico to document an allegation of rights violation firsthand? Probably shortly after Fox was elected. The two organizations don't know anything – they just read press clippings from La Jornada and regurgitate that. So although they might have the voice of authority that comes with being an international organization, they don't really know what they're talking about.
I know there's a lot of that from AI, but those are usually the source of news releases, not the deeper investigative reports, right? It's been a while since I've read it, but I definitely had the impression from the HRW report that came out last year that it was based primarily on first-person accounts.
RE Calderón, I think the frustrating thing is that he doesn't have to cede much ground at all in terms of his strategy to address this. He and his government can reign in the abuses, such as they are, without changing the overall strategy substantially.
Calderón had a strategy? He had a notion that militarization would detract from his deficiencies in economics and social development, maybe, and end questions about his legitimacy in office, perhaps... but no strategy -- a plan of action to achieve a military aim -- beyond a vague "kill the bad guys" theme, no strategy that most of us can fathom.
I use "strategy" as a synonym of "policy", not "a list of goals and priorities and an integrated plan for achieving them". As it pertains to the latter definition, agreed.
PC, you're correct, it's important to distinguish between AI and HRW. Malcolm, I don't think you've read HRW's reports on impunity in the Mexican military if you think that. They are quite scrupulous in investigating the acts that are denounced, which is why they base their reports on specific incidents rather than overall reported numbers. Nor do you particularly understand the place of HRW in Latin American politics, if you dismiss them as coming from the Jornada wing. Jose Miguel Vivanco, the longtime Americas section head, is despised by the Jornada-heads for having the nerve to repeatedly report on and speak about Chavez's dismemberment of Venezuelan democracy. I know this sounds like sockpuppetry, but what can I say, I work in human rights and would work with HRW any day, whereas I'd trust AI only at certain moments, in certain countries, and on certain issues. But the real issue remains that the Mexican military remains very well shielded from scrutiny and punishment, which makes Calderon's complaints ring totally hollow. Do some comparative analysis on the boundaries of the fuero militar in Mexico versus, say, Colombia or Peru (both of which are far from perfect!), as well as the records of investigation and punishment for denounced abuses and you'll see how poorly Mexico comes out.
JD, point taken. HRW is far better than AI. I have to admit i haven't read their stuff in the past year or so, so will check it out. I do know that in 2007-2008 they were falling far short of investigations though, doing very little original research and relying on press clippings for most of their reports.
if you have any good recent reports by HRW, please could you put them up here in response? i'd love to read them
cheers
malcolm
Sure Malcolm, this is the most relevant HRW report on the subject at hand:
http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/04/28/uniform-impunity
There is a "note on methodology" at the end of the executive summary that details the research process.
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