A protest honoring Digna Ochoa

Rene Perez, a clerk at a downtown car rental counter in Tijuana, Mexico, grew apprehensive as police recently approached the door of his house in this rough-and-tumble border city.

Citizens interacting with police is hardly news. But this is Tijuana, an anything-goes city of 2 million and ground zero for North America’s long problem with illegal drugs. Ruthless gangs here fight each other and the authorities over dibs on lucrative international trafficking routes for cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines. Their allies: police compromised by millions of dollars in bribes, or intimidated by years of violent retribution by drug lords.

Yet the cops who swooped down on Perez had a much more mundane mission: returning a wallet snatched by a mugger and found at the scene of a subsequent drug shootout. Marvels Perez: “[The police] were actually investigating the crime.”

What Perez witnessed experts believe is the start of a sea change for Mexico. The anti-trafficking and anti-corruption reforms of Mexico’s maverick President Vicente Fox are taking root, even in places like Tijuana.

Unlike his administration’s more mixed human rights record, it’s the fight against drugs and corrupt officials where Fox can truly point to progress. In taking on this task, the president wields a key weapon: the Mexican military.

“The Mexican military is like a broad-spectrum antibiotic that’s being used now in Mexico to cure a variety of social infections,” said Oscar Rocha, a former liaison between the Mexican and U.S. militaries. “Unlike any other Latin American nation today, to see the military on our streets doing police work . . . is not a bad thing.”

The military’s influence can be found throughout this reform-minded government. Fox’s Attorney General, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, was previously the military’s chief prosecutor. Ranking Army officers and intelligence agents have also trained most of Mexico’s new – and so far clean – Federal Preventive Police and the Federal Investigations Agency, which mimics the FBI.

Fox has marshaled elite teams of Army commandos – probably Mexico’s least-corrupt law enforcers – into reliable narco-hunters who’ve moved quickly against several drug lords, with guidance from U.S. intelligence.

It was a cadre of these commanders who scored Fox’s crowning achievement to date: the beheading of Tijuana’s Arellano Felix organization, the richest and meanest of Mexico’s ubiquitous drug cartels.

The grave of Maria de los Angeles Tames

In a lightning raid last spring, Army commandos nicknamed the “snake eaters” arrested Benjamin Felix, brother of the cartel’s late enforcer, Ramon Arellano Felix. The raid was so secret that the commandos didn’t know their target until they were en route. Corrupt police had blown previous raids against drug lords.

But military analysts fear the military is being spread too thin. Besides fighting drugs, the Mexican Army today does everything, from cutting hair in poor Mexico City neighborhoods to planting millions of trees in national forests.

There’s concern that as long as the military works well as Mexico’s police force, Fox won’t move fast enough to fix civilian police institutions. And the longer soldiers are exposed to the drug scene, the harder it might for them to resist bribery.

Crime experts admire the Mexican military’s loyalty to whatever civilian authority is in place – a rarity among Latin American armies. But in recent years there have been flashes of spectacular corruption among military leaders: three former generals – including the nation’s former drug czar – are in jail on drug-corruption charges.

And despite the Arellano Felix organization’s downfall – and the arrest of dozens of other narcos – illicit drugs still flow across the border. The problem remains so bad that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has assigned 17 more agents to the Mexican border.

There’s also a nagging fear among American anti-drug agents that the Fox team might be slacking off after the score against the Arellano Felix brothers.

Nor is the military equipped to assist Fox with Mexico’s other longstanding bugbear: human rights. Though the president has ushered human rights advances into Mexico – like freeing environmental activists and accused indigenous rebels – he can’t escape the fallout of the probable murder of Digna Ochoa, one of Mexico’s most effective human rights lawyers. His much ballyhooed promise to investigate Mexico’s “Dirty War” – past government repression of student and political dissenters – has shrunk to a largely symbolic de-classifying of some intelligence and police records. There are also reports of continued torture at the hands of authorities, and sporadic disappearances of rural activists since Fox came to office two years ago.

Still, U.S. officials are convinced Fox’s reforms have had an impact. And average Mexicans tell pollsters they back his work, figuring it will take time to undo a bird’s nest of corruption, cronyism and criminal complicity created by the PRI.

A public call to fight corruption

“I have noticed a change in the attitude of public servants since [Fox] won,” said Rene Perez in Tijuana, as he walked around a car he was about to release to an American tourist. “Clean cops and a safer city will be good for my business … I can only hope it lasts.”

Ricardo Sandoval is an award-winning Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City, for THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS. He’s also co-author of “The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement,” published by Harcourt Brace. He previously worked as an investigative business reporter for THE SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS and THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER.

Sources: Amnesty International, BBC News, Human Rights Watch, New York Times, U.S. State Department Human Rights Country Reports 2001

Mexico’s historical struggle against human rights abuse is not unique to the region. Civil war, land disputes and military rule are just some of the factors that have affected human rights conditions in Mexico’s neighbors to the south in Central America.

To find out more about human rights in Central America and Mexico, click on the countries on the map.

1 Mexico
President Vicente Fox came to office in 2000 on a wave of popular support for reform. Among his campaign pledges was a clean-up of human rights. But has Fox delivered? The results have been mixed.

One of Fox’s first acts in office was to create a new cabinet position, deputy minister for Human Rights and Democracy. The release of police files pertaining to Mexico’s “Dirty War” against dissenters in the 1970s and 1980s has become more of a pro-forma declassification routine, according to newspaper reports. A special prosecutor has been appointed to investigate abuses during the Dirty War, but human rights organizations charge that this falls short of earlier promises of a truth commission.

Although reports of torture at the hands of police continue, pressure from international human rights organizations led Fox in the past eight months to release three political prisoners, a follow-up to earlier releases of jailed environmental activists and indigenous rebels.

Fox has also made some headway in battling disappearances conducted by the police and military. In June 2001 “disappearances” was added as a crime to the federal penal code and a year later the federal district made disappearances as a crime without statue of limitations. Amnesty International, however, reports that disappearances nonetheless continue — from December 2000 to June 2002 four people disappeared following detention by police and the army.

2 Belize
Belize’s human rights worries of late have largely centered around its border dispute with neighboring Guatemala. In 2000, Guatemala began international court proceedings to lay claim to half of Belize, territory that it claims as part of its inheritance from Spain.

The U.S. State Department’s human rights report documents a case in 1999 where Belize police officials along the Guatemalan border arrested and then allegedly tortured Guatemalan citizen, Hector Balcarcel. Thee police burned his genitals with a lighter and habaÒero peppers and forcing him to drink his own urine. An internal police investigation dismissed the allegations of torture as false, but a review by the Belize police department’s internal affairs office ruled in favor of Balcarel’s charges and dismissed police officers, Eli Salazar and Cardinal Smith, for their involvement in the case. Cardinal Smith appealed to the Supreme Court to be reinstated and won because he had not been told the grounds for his dismissal.

3 Guatemala
For 36 years, Guatemala was ravaged by a civil war that claimed some 200,000 lives. Human rights organizations began investigating reports of war atrocities after a peace agreement was signed in 1996. Three years later, the United Nations mission in Guatemala found that security forces were responsible for 93 percent of all the human rights atrocities committed during the civil war, including 626 massacres in Mayan villages.

Even with the war’s end, investigating human rights abuses in Guatemala can carry a high price. In 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi was murdered just two days after releasing a report on wartime human rights abuses. Nine witnesses were killed in the trial of three army officers that followed. A Guatemalan court later found the officers guilty of Gerardi’s murder and sentenced them to 30 years in prison – a landmark ruling in a country where official impunity for human rights abuses has been the norm.

But in other high-profile cases, the government’s response has been mixed. In December 2001, President Alfonso Portillo Cabrera issued a public apology and paid $1.6 million to the families of 226 victims of a 1982 army massacre in Las Dor Erres, in northern Guatemala. Prosecution of the massacre’s perpetrators, however, has yet to occur.

4 El Salvador
Along with reconstruction from the 2001 earthquake that left 55 percent of El Salvador’s population below the poverty level, this Central American republic must contend with human rights abuses committed during its 12-year civil war. At the top of the list are the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, executed by the army as suspected rebel supporters. In 1999, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights found the government responsible for violating the right to life of the victims and failing to conduct a thorough investigation into their deaths. But the government’s impunity for the crime still holds. El Salvador’s court of appeal has upheld a lower court’s 2001 decision that the statute of limitations has expired.

However, in the high-profile case of the murder of three American nuns and a lay colleague in 1980, the government has shown greater perspicacity. El Salvador’s Attorney General has challenged the parole of two of the convicted murders, and in October 2001 an appeals court reversed a lower court’s decision to grant parole.

5 Honduras
In 1981, Honduras elected its first civilian president in almost a century. After decades of military rule, setting limits on the actions of law enforcement agencies remains one of Honduras’s most pressing challenges.

According to human rights organizations, reports of extrajudicial killings by Honduras’s police, placed under civilian control only in 1997, are common. Casa Alianza, a non-profit group working with street children in Central America, found that 13 percent of the 603 murders of minors in Honduras between 1998 and 2001 involved police officers. The majority of the children killed were gang members, known as “maras”, who are often blamed for Honduras’s high crime rate. Vigilante groups -often with the consent or complicity of police — frequently use lethal force against these gang members. Honduras’s Inter Agency Commission on Extrajudicial Killings, created in August 2000, is currently investigating 300 of the 603 cases.

6 Nicaragua
Nicaragua’s 12-year civil war formally ended in June 1990 with the demobilization of the Contras or Nicaraguan Resistance (RN). However, rule of law has still yet to be extended to rural areas and, despite the government’s disarmament campaigns, many citizens are heavily armed. The Organization of American States has peace commissions in over 200 rural areas that lack government offices that help resolve disputes, monitor human rights abuses and serve as a general go-between for citizens to voice concerns to government officials.

Nicaragua also has a serious problem with torture, which according to the 2001 U.S. State Department human rights report, remains a common practice used by police to obtain confessions. In 2001 the Nicaraguan Inspector General has received 186 complaints of physical abuse by police and prosecuted 87 officers named in these cases.

7 Costa Rica
Unlike most of its war-torn Central American neighbors, Costa Rica has long been a stable democracy. Yet human rights issues such as child prostitution and the sale of children continues to be a serious problem. In a study conducted by the International Labor Organization in 1999, as many as 212 girls were found to be working as prostitutes within just four neighborhoods of the capital city, San Jose. The government has begun to tackle this problem with legislation that prohibits sex with children and imposes prison terms of up to 10 years for perpetrators and making frequent raids on city brothels. In one raid, police arrested five men involved with the Costa Rican Association of Pedophiles for sexually exploiting four children. Is the get-tough policy working? Opinion is divided, but convictions are up – 44 percent of those charged in 2001, as compared with 13 percent in 2000.

8 Panama
Under military rule from 1968 to 1989, Panama’s recent history has been pockmarked by multiple killings and disappearances, the legacy of political repression. In 2001, President Mireya Moscoso established The Panamanian Truth Commission in a step towards ending years of official impunity for wrongdoing. Among the cases under investigation is an unmarked grave on the grounds of a former military base near Panama City, believed to contain the remains of Heliodoro Portugal, a leftist leader. Former members of the National Guard have been linked to Portugal’s killing. In April 2002, the commission, released a report documenting 110 cases of murders and disappearances carried out by the Panamanian security forces. Punishment for these abuses is still pending.

Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

About the Film

Recently Mexico was startled by the murders of two young women lawyers, one from the political right and the other from the left. Both had fought to support human rights and legitimate protest, and to destroy the official and institutional corruption that has plagued Mexico for years — a system of bribes, debts and favors that has prevented the world’s tenth-largest country from fulfilling its political and economic potential. The election of President Vicente Fox in 2000 ended more than 70 years of single-party rule. This film examines the hopes that a new dawn has come in Mexico’s history, and the fear that graft and corruption are immovable.