Photo Credit: Flickr user Andrea Farias
A flurry of new reports has shed light upon potentially serious security sector abuses in several Latin American countries. Human rights organizations and media outlets have recently condemned severe human rights violations being committed by state police, police-linked vigilante groups, and the military in Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. While security force abuses are sadly nothing new in Latin America, these three states have in recent years escaped the notoriety of Colombia, Venezuela, and Guatemala, among others, as places rife with such abuses. However, in each case the facts are grim.
In Brazil, an alarming Human Rights Watch report chronicles police killings in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo states. According to the report, over 11,000 people have been killed by police in those two states since 2003. In 2008 alone, there were 1,137 “resistance killings,” or killings committed supposedly in self-defense, recorded in Rio de Janeiro state. Human Rights Watch details substantial evidence that a large portion of these “resistance killings” were in fact extrajudicial executions covered up by the police. Police officers also commit abuses through their off-duty involvement with the country’s many death squads and militias, which are known for their ruthlessness. Where police abuses are concerned, impunity remains the norm. The public security challenge faced by police forces in Brazil is inarguably a difficult one; in 2008, there were more than 10,000 victims of intentional homicide in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo combined, and violent crimes committed by drug traffickers and criminal gangs often include high-powered weapons. However, the use of lethal force against civilians is governed by rules that must be respected. Moreover, legal and moral problems aside, high levels of police killings only exacerbate and complicate Brazil’s security crisis. Thus far, the government response to the killings has been inadequate. For a country whose economic gains have received such acclaim, this type of publicity is unwelcome. Whether the government responds defensively or, instead, takes determined action to end such abuses will be revealing in terms of the country’s attitude toward the rule of law.
In the case of Peru, police violence has also surfaced as a polemical issue. The possible existence of a death squad operating in Trujillo, along with a possible police cover-up of the story, made headlines immediately after the story of the supposed human fat-harvesting gang operating in the Amazon surfaced and gained broad international exposure. However, once the public and the media realized that an article detailing a series of executions allegedly committed by a police death squad in Trujillo was published in Poder at the same time that the fat-harvesting story made headlines, the government, and especially the Interior Ministry, was bombarded with accusations that the outlandish story about the fat-thieves was meant to serve as a cover-up of the death squad report.
In the Poder article, Ricardo Uceda contends that police executed 46 criminals in Trujillo during 2007-2008, allegedly in a systematic attempt to rid the city of miscreants. Uceda notes that “during the investigation for this article, which included confidential conversations with active and retired police…versions of the story that a policy of social cleansing had begun to be conceived by the police of Trujillo were picked up by then [2006], although no one provided evidence.” The police responsible for the deaths are reputed to belong to a death squad led by Colonel Elidio Espinoza, the Leader of the East Emergency Squadron. As is the case in Brazil, the police officially reported that all these killings were committed in self-defense. Uceda writes that “in a typical case of the official version, the members of a police patrol-by coincidence or through a third-party tip- surprise and assault two or more thieves. The thieves flee, shooting at the police, who then…. kill them. Subsequently, ballistic tests show that the delinquents were armed and that their arms were fired.” Such an account absolves the police from responsibility under Legislative Decree 982, which came into force in July 2007. The Public Ministry has investigated each of these recorded police killings, but archived the 21 cases it considered last year and decided to bring indictments against police in only 2 of the 16 files it is processing this year. This scandal serves as another reminder that the professionalization of Peru’s police force and justice system remains stagnant, a charge that rights groups have been leveling for years. The police and justice systems are simply not adequate to the task of handling crime and social conflict, as the Bagua incident also revealed. Unfortunately, the instinct of top officials seems to denial of the problems or postponement of comprehensive solutions.
Finally, a recent Amnesty International report brings attention to egregious human rights abuses being committed by the Mexican military. According to Amnesty, the military has carried out numerous acts of forced disappearance, torture, extrajudicial killings, and arbitrary detention against civilians since being deployed to stop violence by drug traffickers. The number of abuses has increased drastically since 2007, coinciding with a major surge in violent crime (15,000 drug murders have been reported since December 2006), and Calderon’s increasingly aggressive offensive against drug trafficking networks. In 2008, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) received 1,230 complaints against the Ministry of Defense—a huge increase from the 367 in 2007.
The situation is especially alarming in Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. Since the beginning of 2009, at least 44 people have allegedly been arbitrarily detained and tortured by the military in Tijuana. The practice of arresting before investigating and charging, known as arraigo, has become the norm, along with the torture of detainees, which now “forms part of a generalized practice…a general rule as to how the authorities are operating….” In Ciudad Juarez, cases of military assassinations, forced disappearance, and torture abound. According to CNDH president Raul Plascencia, the number of criminal acts committed by the military at the U.S. border has tripled since last year, and the State Commission for Human Rights in Chihuahua and the Municipal Office for Complaints received a total of 725 denunciations from January-September 2009. In cases of military human rights abuses, impunity is endemic, and the government response to this situation has been almost nonexistent. No state officer has been punished for abuses committed in Juarez, and Mexico’s judicial shortfalls, which are especially dire within the military justice system, are further complicated by the climate of insecurity faced by the victims and their families, who are constantly threatened and intimidated by military officials. All levels of government have shown little willingness to devote the necessary time and resources to investigate this problem and to constrain the excessive power and jurisdiction of the military. Mexican officials have even gone so far as to blame the people of Juarez for fueling the problem by creating the opening for organized crime in the first place.
There is no doubt that Brazil, Peru, and Mexico face daunting public security challenges, but these challenges can never negate the responsibility of the security forces to protect civilians from abuses. Two of these countries – Mexico and Brazil – see themselves as leaders of the region and the developing world, while Peru presents itself as a rapidly emerging nation. But with increased attention to positive developments will come higher expectations in all spheres, as well as attention to less flattering social issues. No one expects that progress will be easy, but demonstration that security force abuses will not be tolerated is as good a place as any to prove that these governments are acting in good faith and the interests of all their citizens.