Alex Neve: It's Time for Canada to Get Serious About Torture in Mexico Alex Neve - Toronto Star
go to original September 19, 2014

Honduran human rights activist Ángel Amilcar Colón Quevedo (right), who is being held and allegedly tortured in a Mexican prison, with the author, Alex Neve from Amnesty International Canada. (Amnesty International)

See full Amnesty International report: Out of control: Torture and other ill-treatment in Mexico (PDF)

Outside the Mexican city of Tepic, I arrived at the sprawling prison complex known as the Centre for Social Rehabilitation Number Four. Our Amnesty International delegation then went through the most extensive prison security checks I’ve ever experienced (and I’ve visited Guantánamo Bay three times).

And then we sat down to interview Ángel Amilcar Colón Quevedo.

Given the intense security, one might expect that he was a notorious drug cartel kingpin. Far from it. Ángel Colón is a prisoner of conscience. He has been imprisoned because of a toxic combination of torture, racial discrimination, migration and a broken justice system.

Ángel isn’t Mexican. He was a leading human rights activist within his Afro-descended Garifuna community in Honduras. But he embarked on the perilous migrant’s journey known to so many Central Americans. He hoped to reach the United States and earn money to pay for cancer treatments for his seven-year-old son. Tragically his son later died, six months after Ángel was imprisoned in Mexico.

Looking for drugs or arms, authorities raided the “safe” house in Tijuana where Ángel was waiting until the coyote, the people smuggler, took him across the border into the United States. He was arrested during the raid.

His nightmare of torture and racism began almost immediately, including terrifying instances of being smothered with plastic bags over his head, unrelenting beatings and the degrading humiliation of being forced to lick clean the boots of other prisoners.

More than five years later, he is still locked up; accused of being part of a criminal gang. The justice system has failed him at every turn. Only now — with tremendous support from the Mexican human rights organization, Centro Prodh, and campaigning by Amnesty International members worldwide — are Mexican authorities giving his case a closer look. The Attorney General’s office will decide how to proceed in late October.

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