Key Latin American Human Rights Group Faces Serious Funding Crisis David Agren - The Guardian
go to original June 14, 2016

Fake money sacks and signs reading ‘Let’s save CIDH’ in front of Mexico’s foreign ministry as part of a campaign highlighting lack of funding for the IACHR (Spanish abbreviation CIDH). (Yuri Cortez/AFP/Getty Images)

In late 2014, the Mexican government asked a group of experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) to provide technical assistance with its investigation into an attack on 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher training school. The experts delivered https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/20/mexico-43-killed-students-devastating reports, which dismantled the government’s official investigation – especially its insistence that the students’ bodies had been burned in a funeral pyre.

For families of the students – farmers from impoverished Guerrero state – the IACHR’s intervention offered the opportunity to keep alive a case causing enormous embarrassment for the image-conscious government. The IACHR also “provided a complete picture of the shortcomings in the Mexican justice system”, says Santiago Aguirre, deputy director of the Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Centre, which worked with the students’ families.

The government thanked the experts for their work, though it disputed many of the findings, and clung to the fire theory. Government officials responsible for the case skipped the report’s official presentation. The IACHR experts said they were subjected to a smear campaign.

Since then, Mexico has not contributed to the IACHR, according to the commission’s list of donors (pdf).

The government disputes any suggestions of non-support or that it is seeking retribution, and says it paid $2m  for the experts’ work on the Ayotzinapa case.

But Mexico is not the only country in South America and the Caribbean apparently wavering in its support for the IACHR, which has confronted governments often reluctant to address human rights issues and increasingly uncomfortable with scrutiny of press freedom, political violence and infringements on indigenous people’s land.

The commission is now facing a financial crisis that could result in the loss of 40% of its personnel by the end of July, which would have a devastating impact on its work.

Read the rest at The Guardian

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