40% Of Inmates at Mexican Prisons Are Behind Bars Without Being Convicted PVDN
go to original September 6, 2022

Update: 2,685 Prisoners Released Under Amnesty Law, Security Ministry Says (Mexico News Daily)

300 people enter prison every day in Mexico. That figure has caused a rapid growth of the prison population in the country; however, it does not indicate that impunity has been abated or that the violence has been halted.

Four out of 10 people who are in prison in Mexico remain detained under the legal figure of preventive detention, according to the activist Saskia Niño de Rivera.

Although that 40% of the prison population is not deprived of their liberty under the figure of informal preventive detention, it is a “sample of the abuse of this resource” by the authorities, explains the activist.

According to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), there are cases in which some defendants have spent up to 17 years in preventive detention without receiving a sentence. One example is that of Israel Vallarta, one of the suspects in the Florence Cassez case, who has been in pretrial detention without a sentence since 2005.

Diego Valadés, former Attorney General of the Republic, assures that the problem is not the agents of the Public Ministry or the judges, but rather that the conflict lies in the fact that the justice institutions do not have the capacity to attend to “so many requests” a day.

Mexico’s justice system is overwhelmed even at a time when INEGI reports that only 10% of crimes are reported in the country, and 98% of those crimes reported never see a conviction.

“What happens is that the number of agents of the Public Ministry in relation to the number of crimes that are committed in the country, and are reported, have no proportion.

“It is materially impossible to demand that they have other types of results if the State itself keeps them in conditions of enormous disadvantage and, therefore, when they are accused, they are unjustifiably accused,” Diego Valadés explained in an interview with El Financiero.

Read the rest at Vallarta Daily News

Related: 4 SCJN Justices Reject Proposal to End Mandatory Pretrial Detention (Mexico News Daily)

Related: Mexico’s Federal Prisons a ‘Five-Star’ Hell (Anadolu Agency)

Related: UN Experts: Mexico Should Overturn Mandatory Pre-trial Detention (OHCHR)

Related: Mexico Debates Its No-Bail Policy for Nonviolent Suspects (Associated Press)

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