Mexican army instructed to provide information on criminal suspects killed

Mexico’s transparency agency said it had instructed the Defense Secretariat to research and provide information on the number of criminal suspects killed by army soldiers over two periods since 2000.

In a statement Wednesday, the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Protection of Personal Data, or INAI, said it had requested information from the periods 2000 to 2006 and September 2012 to November 2015.

The agency also instructed the secretariat to indicate the municipality where each suspected criminal was killed and the reason for the individual’s death in each case.

The INAI commissioner in charge of the case, Joel Salas Suarez, said the army was authorized to use force as long as “a rational need exists” and officers act within the “principle of proportionality.”

Military personnel who use force must provide reliable proof of their actions and prepare a detailed report to the corresponding military authority, Salas said.

A private citizen initially requested that information from the secretariat for the period ranging from 2000 to November 2015 but turned to the INAI after only receiving data from the start of 2007 to August 2012.

New Yorkbased Human Rights Watch says on its Web site that Mexican security forces “have been implicated in repeated, serious human rights violations including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture in the course of efforts to combat organized crime.”

The current administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto “has made little progress in prosecuting those responsible for recent abuses, let alone the large number of abuses committed by soldiers and police since former President Felipe Calderon initiated Mexico’s ‘war on drugs’” after taking office for his sixyear term in 2006, the rights watchdog says.