The Case That Shows How Far Indigenous Mexicans Are from Achieving Equality

No justice in Mexico
The case typifies the lack of justice that indigenous people face in Mexico.

The figures are bleak: 98 percent of reported crimes go completely unpunished in Mexico, according to various government and independent counts, and tens of thousands of people serve months or even years in jail while awaiting a formal trial, suffering a lack of legal counsel, family visits, and medical attention.

The United States has for years tried to help Mexico upgrade its justice system through high-stakes funding campaigns such as the Mérida Initiative, but Amnesty International denounces the country’s flagrant human rights violations year a after year.

Following expressions of outrage from indigenous groups and human rights organizations, the charges against Jacinta were eventually dropped and she was released — on Mexican Independence Day — in September 2009, more than three years after her unlawful arrest. Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered the release of her two co-defendants the following April.

It was the first time that a Mexican citizen held the government accountable for a wrongful incarceration and was awarded reparations and a public apology.

“We live in a country that is extremely discriminatory towards indigenous people,” Martha Sánchez, coordinator of indigenous affairs at the Simone de Beauvoir Leadership Institute, told VICE News. “Indigenous women are continually viewed as criminals, and in the courts they are not provided with interpreters.”

Outrageous offenses are routinely committed against indigenous women in Mexico.

In May, an indigenous woman was forced to give birth in the bathroom of a hospital because doctors refused to admit her to an emergency room. It was the latest in an astonishing string of reported cases of indigenous women being denied adequate medical attention at public hospitals in Mexico.

A Primer on Plan Mexico

Escrito por Laura Carlsen | 5 / May / 2008
Updated July 10, 2008

On June 30, President George W. Bush signed into law the “Merida Initiative”—better known as Plan Mexico—just days after it passed Congress as part of the Iraq supplemental funding bill. The measure had to go through several versions before finally being approved by both houses, as legislators went back and forth with the Bush administration and Mexico President Felipe Calderón’s government over human rights conditions.

In the end, even the weak conditions that had been placed on the bill were largely removed. Both administrations proclaimed themselves satisfied with the deal, and Congress hailed a new era in binational cooperation. But with human rights relegated to the sidelines, Mexican society and U.S.-Mexico relations face a militarized future in which the unchecked power of abusive security forces adds to, rather than resolves, the alarming violence of organized crime.

The final aid package of $400 million differs little in content and conception from the original version presented by President Bush on Oct. 22 of last year. According to the Bush proposal and authorization by the House of Representatives, the entire three-year package could allocate up to $1.6 billion to Mexico, Central American, and Caribbean countries for security aid to design and carry out counter-narcotics, counter-terrorism, and border security measures.

Mexico and the United States face a joint challenge in decreasing transnational organized crime and they must cooperate to strengthen the rule of law and stop illegal drug and arms trafficking over the border. But in the rush to tag Plan Mexico on to the Iraq supplemental and demonstrate support for Mexico to Latino voters, many legislators paid little attention to the specifics of the measure. The initiative contains fatal flaws in its strategy. Its military approach to counter-narcotics work will escalate drug-related violence and human rights abuses and result in an inability to achieve its own goals.

Although presented as an unprecedented effort to fight burgeoning drug trafficking and violence related to organized crime in Mexico, the “Regional Security Cooperation Initiative” goes far beyond stopping the flow of illegal drugs. It fundamentally restructures the U.S.-Mexico binational relationship, recasts economic and social problems as security issues, and militarizes Mexican society.