Maureen Meyer: In Mexico's Justice System, Guilty Till Proven Innocent Maureen Meyer - CNN
go to original June 5, 2013

An inmate peers through the bars of a cell at the Federal District Penitentiary in Mexico City. (CNN)

Yanira Maldonado, a U.S. citizen and mother of seven children, was released late last week after spending more than a week in a prison in Nogales, Mexico, accused of trying to transport marijuana aboard a bus. Unfortunately, not everyone is as lucky as Maldonado.

... As the Mexican government has stepped up its efforts to combat drug trafficking, the number of people who have been detained and accused of crimes related to drugs has dramatically increased. But they must struggle to defend themselves with often poor, or no, legal representation.

A 2012 survey of the prison population by the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics in eight of Mexico's federal prisons found that the majority of the prisoners, 60%, were in jail for drug crimes. Of these prisoners, more than 43% said that they did not have a lawyer present when they presented their testimony before the public prosecutor's office, 44% said their lawyer did not explain to them what was happening during the trial, and 51% said their attorneys did not give them any advice.

Just as telling is the small number of cases that are ever brought to trial.

Read the rest at CNN

Maureen Meyer directs the Mexico program at the Washington Office on Latin America, a nonprofit group promoting democracy and human rights in that region. Her work focuses on U.S.-Mexico security policies and their relation to organized crime-related violence, corruption and human rights violations in Mexico.

We invite you to add your charity or supporting organizations' news stories and coming events to PVAngels so we can share them with the world. Do it now!