WUNRN
MEXICO: Indigenous
Rape Victims Fight Military Impunity
By
Diego Cevallos
MEXICO CITY, May 29 (IPS) - The aberrations of Mexican
justice were clearly visible in the cases of rape and torture allegedly
committed by soldiers in 2002 against two indigenous women, Inés Fernández and
Valentina Rosendo. But their experiences are not exceptional in rural areas of
the southern state of Guerrero.
However, Fernández and Rosendo, both 23, who have suffered
death threats and have been stigmatised by neighbours and even by their
husbands as rape victims, are not giving up. This month Fernández managed to
take her case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and Rosendo may
achieve the same in the near future.
Abuses by the military and police are a permanent feature of
life in rural areas in Guerrero, and reporting them to the Mexican justice
system has had little to no effect, according to human rights organisations
that have documented the cases.
The state security forces are deployed in Guerrero to fight
drug trafficking and small guerrilla groups, the authorities say.
"Under the pretext of security concerns, the
authorities are rampantly violating the human rights" of campesinos (small
farmers) in Guerrero, most of whom are indigenous people, and what happened to
Fernández and Rosendo is a clear example of this, Vidulfo Rosales, the legal
coordinator at the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Centre, told IPS.
Fernández, of the Tlapanec people, was raped in March 2002
when soldiers came to her house, demanding to know where the beef she was
cooking had come from.
Just 17 years old, Fernández did not reply because she does
not speak Spanish. Furious, the soldiers burst into her home and one of them
raped her there in front of her four small children, said Rosales, her lawyer.
Rosendo, another Tlapanec woman who was also under 18 at the
time, had gone through a similar ordeal a month earlier. She was washing
clothes when she was approached by a group of soldiers who tried to question
her but got no reply because she, too, did not speak Spanish. One of the soldiers
then raped her.
Both cases were reported to the local police and justice
authorities. The prosecutions that followed were marred by obstacles like
indifferent treatment by experts, a marked lack of interest in securing
evidence, and discrimination against the victims, "things that, as we well
know, are not at all unusual here in Mexico," Rosales said.
After several months of fruitless procedures, the civil
justice authorities handed both cases over to the military courts, which in
2006 closed the investigations on the grounds that there was insufficient
evidence to prove that the soldiers concerned had committed "breaches of
military discipline."
The 1933 Code of Military Justice, sanctioned by the
constitution, is applied when crimes "against military discipline"
are committed by active members of the forces while on duty. Breaches of
military discipline, a broad term, may include anything from insubordination to
rape.
If crimes are committed in complicity with civilians,
accused soldiers are automatically dealt with by the civil justice system.
The military justice system has been harshly criticised by
activists and victims, who complain that impunity is the all-too-frequent
outcome and the system does not meet international standards. Although
legislators and government authorities acknowledge that it must be reviewed,
there are no firm plans to do so.
Rosales, the legal coordinator at the Tlachinollan centre,
which has offices in Tlapa, a town in Guerrero surrounded by rural areas, said
that when they failed to obtain justice in Mexico, the two rape victims took
their cases to the Washington-based Inter-American Commission of Human Rights,
part of the Organisation of American States (OAS) system.
Rosendo's case is still being processed by the Commission,
but Fernandez's was referred in early May to the Inter-American Court of Human
Rights, based in Costa Rica, after the Commission determined that the Mexican
state was still failing its obligation to grant justice to the victim, in spite
of the Commission's exhortations and recommendations.
"What we are hoping is that the Court will do justice
by these women and that the rapists will not go unpunished. We also hope for a
sentence that will help bring about change in the military justice system,"
Rosales said.
Human rights groups report that military abuses in Guerrero
have increased since June 1988, when soldiers killed 11 indigenous people in
the rural settlement of El Charco.
The official version of the incident was that the people
were killed when soldiers discovered a guerrilla meeting taking place in the El
Charco schoolroom, and the insurgents fired on the soldiers.
But the survivors of the massacre deny that they are
guerrillas and say no one had any weapons or offered any resistance when the
soldiers ordered them out into the school yard where, without provocation, they
executed 11 people.
The bodies of two indigenous activists who belonged to a
human rights organisation and were documenting abuses by the military were
found last February, not far from El Charco and the places where Fernández and
Rosendo were raped.
They were Raúl Lucas, 39, and Manuel Ponce, 32, leaders of
the Organisation for the Future of Mixtec Indigenous Peoples. On Feb. 13 they
were arrested by alleged police officers, in front of several witnesses. Eight
days later their bodies turned up with signs of torture.
Their killers, like the men who raped the women in 2002 and
those who have committed other murders and abuses, remain unpunished.
The list of human rights violations against indigenous
people in Guerrero is a long one, and the alleged perpetrators are invariably
soldiers or the police.
For instance, Felipe Arreaga and other campesinos in
Guerrero spent time in jail and were persecuted for their activism against
deforestation.
Arreaga was accused of murdering a logger's son and spent 10
months behind bars in 2005, while his companions Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro
Cabrera were imprisoned between 1999 and 2001 on charges of weapons possession
and illegal crop cultivation.
Arreaga was arrested by the police and the other two by the
army. Human rights groups said they were tortured and framed on trumped-up
charges. Arreaga was released for lack of evidence, and his companions were
amnestied by former President Vicente Fox (2000-2006).
The militarisation of the state of Guerrero – governed since
April 2005 by Zeferino Torreblanca of the leftwing Democratic Revolution Party
(PRD) - began in the 1970s, when a guerrilla group named Party of the Poor,
founded by Lucio Cabañas, a rural schoolteacher, was operating there.
The group gave rise to the Marxist-Leninist Revolutionary
People's Army (EPR), which has been active intermittently since 1996 and,
according to the authorities, has little real power.
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