Rights Group Disappointed in Fox

Defenders of human rights continue to be harassed and threatened, while past abuses of activists go unpunished during President Vicente Fox’s first year in office, Amnesty International said Monday.

In its report, “Daring to Raise Their Voices,” Amnesty cited 15 cases of abuses, mainly by officials at the state and local levels, under the Fox administration. In all, the report described 35 cases of harassment, torture and other abuses against rights activists in Mexico since 1996.

Fox has made respect for human rights and the rule of law central themes for his government, which ended the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. He has vowed to end the culture of impunity that fed rights violations, corruption and organized crime.

Although it acknowledged that many of the cases had occurred under the former government, the report said that responsibility for prosecuting those accountable for past abuses lies with the current government. Failing to act reinforces the very culture that Fox has pledged to end.

This was the second international report critical of Fox’s efforts within days. Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based group, last week reported that the army continues to carry out rights violations against civilians, especially in the violence-prone state of Guerrero. “The government has failed to investigate and punish alleged abuses,” it said.

The Amnesty report applauded the Fox administration’s initiatives to promote human rights, especially its willingness to open up access to Mexico for outside observers. The former PRI government often severely limited or even expelled human rights activists, especially from turbulent areas such as the state of Chiapas.

The study, however, released at a news conference in Mexico City, said: “Patterns of widespread harassment of human rights defenders in Mexico continue.”

Kerrie Howard, Amnesty’s coordinator for protection of rights defenders in Latin America, said that “while the action at the top is welcome and very useful, there have to be mechanisms to get it filtered down to the state level.” She said that Fox had taken “very, very small measures in comparison with the magnitude of the problem.”

Often, state officials have used the judicial system itself against rights defenders, bringing “spurious” charges against them to undermine their work, the report said.

For example, in the state of Tabasco, a priest who was also president of a human rights group was charged with murder in a traffic accident in 1998. The family of the victim, alleging that officials had coerced them into accusing the priest, later filed a charge against officials. A Mexican human rights commission probe found the case full of delays and irregularities.

The state stopped pursuing the case, but the priest, Francisco Goita Prieto, is not sure the case has been formally dropped, according to the report.

Other abuses include the use of public smear campaigns by government officials or their surrogates, the study said. The Nayarit state government attacked as “terrorist” the Jalisco Support Assn. for Indigenous Groups, which defended the Huichol indigenous people and opposed uncontrolled logging.

Several cases were reported of government surveillance, phone tapping and even theft of information from offices, cars and homes of rights activists.

The worst case under the Fox administration was the slaying in October of rights lawyer Digna Ochoa, a prize-winning activist who was found gunned down in her office. The government has called it a political crime. The Mexico City government said Monday that no arrests have been made.

But Amnesty International also cited other cases of torture or ill treatment of rights defenders, such as the detention of Oaxaca state rights lawyer Israel Ochoa in 1996. Federal judicial police picked him up, held him overnight, beat him and simulated his execution. He had defended Zapotec Indians accused of supporting a guerrilla movement in the Loxicha region.

Juan Antonio Vega, technical secretary of the Full Rights for All rights network who received an e-mailed death threat recently, said that after a year of having Fox in power, “we see continuing acts of torture, arbitrary detentions, cases of disappearances--and this is a worrying trend.

“And these grave violations are not being confronted with new measures of investigation, punishment of those responsible and prevention,” he added. “So the promise that this new government would give high priority to human rights has still not been translated into concrete measures.”