Guillermo Trejo: Why Mexico Needs an International Commission Against Impunity Guillermo Trejo - Animal Politico
go to original October 8, 2015

The Observers Direct: The missing students of Ayotzinapa (The France 24 Observers)

One year after the disappearance of 43 students from Ayotzinapa, their parents have petitioned President Enrique Peña Nieto to ask for the cooperation of the United Nations (UN) in creating an International Commission against Impunity in Mexico (CICIM), following the example of the CICIG in Guatemala. As they note, an international commission would be critical in overcoming the serious crises of impunity, corruption, and human rights across the country.

Are the parents of those students correct in suggesting that Mexico needs international cooperation to end a crisis that does not appear to have bottomed out? To answer that question, we need to understand the CICIG, the conditions that justified its creation, and why the inquiry emerging from the heart of Ayotzinapa is representative of a national phenomenon.

The CICIG is an institution sponsored by the UN that, at the invitation of the Guatemalan President and Congress, in 2007 appointed a team of international experts to support the country's public prosecutor in the difficult work of investigating, prosecuting, punishing, and dismantling the networks of corruption and criminality that had prostrated the country before a wave of unprecedented violence. These illegal networks linked paramilitary groups from the Guatemalan civil war with state institutions and organized crime, and were protected by political and judicial influence. This web of complicity made it virtually impossible for the state to investigate and punish itself.

Given the paramilitary and criminal colonization of important state sectors in Guatemala, the CICIG has led a surgical reconstruction of the Guatemalan state. It provides protection to prosecutors who have chosen to go after state agents colluding with organized crime and has helped them develop judicial capabilities for dismantling many networks of corruption and criminality, involving hundreds of state actors at all levels, including the notorious case of President Otto Pérez Molina.

Mexico needs an institution like CICIG because there is ample evidence of collusion between drug traffickers and different levels of government, the judiciary, and security forces. The Ayotzinapa case has laid bare the association between organized crime and government and the Iguala municipal police; it operated under the blind eye or informal protection of the police, state and federal agencies, and the armed forces.

Read the rest at Mexico Voices

Related: Mexico Human Rights: UN High Commissioner Says Impunity Widespread: Rejects “Virulent Personal Attacks” on International Observers (Mexico Voices)

Translated by Nina Shield

Mexico Voices is a blogging endeavor aimed at raising the awareness of U.S. citizens regarding the destructive impact of the U.S. economic policy and the War on Drugs on Mexico — on its people, their economic and physical security and their human rights, on the nation’s dysfunctional justice system, and on the rule of law and Mexico’s fragile democracy. Visit the website at MexicoVoices.blogspot.mx

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