While Scolding the White House, Mexico Seeks to Curtail Citizens' Rights Azam Ahmed - The New York Times
go to original March 18, 2017

President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico with military officers (Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press)

Even as Mexico fumes over President Trump’s aggressive stance toward its people, the Mexican government is quietly trying to rip up basic legal protections for its citizens at home and gut longstanding efforts to fix the nation’s broken rule of law. Legal experts fear the move will set back human rights in Mexico by decades.

The tool is an innocuous-sounding bill, submitted last month by a close ally of President Enrique Peña Nieto — only a day after his government publicly chided the Trump administration to respect the rights of all Mexicans.

The governing party says the bill, labeled a reform to the criminal code, will make “adjustments” to Mexico’s new legal system, a linchpin of cooperation with the United States that was completed last year with more than $300 million in American aid. It is widely considered Mexico’s most important legal advancement in the past century.

But while the American-backed legal system is supposed to enshrine human rights in a nation desperately lacking them, this new bill heads squarely in the other direction. Legal scholars say it will broaden the power of the Mexican government to detain suspects for years before trial, enable the police to rely on hearsay in court and potentially allow prosecutors to use evidence obtained by torture.

Beyond that, the bill, which has not yet been approved by Congress, flips the very premise of modern justice on its head: Rather than innocent before proved guilty, it would require concrete evidence of reasonable doubt, essentially shifting the burden of proof to the accused.

“It is not only a counter reform, but it has reforms that contravene the right to a proper defense,” said Alejandra Ramos, a judge in the state of Chihuahua. “They want to pass this because it is easier to do than to train police officers and prosecutors, clean up the entire system and break the use of torture as the main tool of investigation.”

The legislation reflects a central contradiction of modern Mexico under Mr. Peña Nieto and his party: the version of the country that his government promotes to the world versus the reality it creates on the ground.

In promoting Brand Mexico, the government has fashioned the image of an ascending nation, a regional leader ready to take its place on the global stage, competitive on issues of trade, economics and culture. And yet, presented with mounting violence, vast inequality and a human rights crisis in which torture at the hands of security forces is “generalized,” in the words of the United Nations, the same government frequently runs roughshod over the rights it claims to defend.

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