Impunity Has Consequences for Tens of Thousands Lost to Mexico's Drug War Nina Lakhani - The Guardian
go to original December 8, 2016

Mexico: Land of Impunity (Al Jazeera English)

Ten years ago this week, Mexico’s then-president Felipe Calderón deployed thousands of troops to fight against organized crime, at the start of what became an all-out war on drug trafficking which has raged ever since.

Since then, more than a hundred of the country’s most wanted drug traffickers have been captured or killed. Billions of dollars have been spent, but the campaign has not ended the narcotics trade, or enforced the rule of law.

The human cost has been devastating: around 200,000 people have been murdered and at least 28,000 disappeared since 2007. Abuses by security forces are widespread.

Most of the victims have been men, but women also have been tortured, trafficked and targeted for particular brutality, with almost total impunity.

Official records indicate almost 7,000 women and girls have disappeared since 2007. But activists say the reality is much worse. The government register of the missing includes 164 women from Veracruz, yet a local observatory has documented almost 500 cases of girls and women who have vanished in the past three years alone.

Rupert Knox, Amnesty International’s lead investigator in Mexico until 2015, said: “In this climate of corruption and impunity – where security policies are determined by links between criminal networks, party politics and business interests – opportunities for targeting women and girls are closely connected with the knowledge that no one will do anything serious to protect them.”

Between 2007 and 2015, almost 20,000 women were murdered – a 49% increase on the previous decade, according to the National Statistics Institute (INEGI).

Read the rest at The Guardian

Related: Mexico's Crisis of Enforced Disappearances Hits Women Hard (teleSUR)

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