US Should Cut Mexico Security Aid Over Atrocious Human Rights Record, Activists Say Roque Planas - The Huffington Post
go to original April 5, 2015

U.S. law requires the State Department to regularly assess the Mexican government’s progress on human rights. Congress can elect to withhold up to 15 percent of the Mérida Initiative’s funding based on that assessment.

Human rights defenders, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have long called for the State Department to be tougher in its evaluations of the Mexican government, and for Congress to withhold the entirety of that 15 percent.

Congress has twice temporarily held back the funds based on the State Department's human rights assessments, once in 2010 and once in 2012, according to a Congressional Research Report from last year.

Researchers at the Washington Office on Latin America, a group that tracks U.S. security assistance to Latin America, argue that the State Department's most recent "15 Percent Report," published last year, is grounds for once again freezing the Mérida funds.

“What’s interesting about last year’s report is that it basically said there was enough progress to allocate the funds,” Maureen Meyer, an associate at WOLA, told HuffPost. “We, and several other organizations, beg to differ on that.”

Meyer says it appears that Congress has yet to disburse all of the money that is contingent on the 2014 human rights assessment. A much larger portion of the security assistance is still held up from previous years because the Peña Nieto administration has reworked the security strategy of its predecessor.

The State Department did not answer requests to specify how much funding Congress has tied up.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post

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