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Mexico’s President Lopez Obrador Is A Human Rights Disaster

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Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has been battling negative media coverage about his administration’s track record on human rights. Reporters Without Borders ranks Mexico as the most dangerous country in the world for journalists. The NGO Global Witness currently ranks Mexico as the most dangerous country in the world for environmental activists. Most killings of journalists and environmental activists in Mexico are never properly investigated. Lopez Obrador has, however, promised a swift and effective investigation into the high-profile disappearance of 43 students in 2014, an event that occurred during the presidency of his predecessor, Enrique Peña Nieto. The New York Times recently published an article criticizing Lopez Obrador’s management of the investigation, alleging that political pressure for a quick resolution was putting the validity of the investigation in jeopardy. Lopez Obrador’s response was predictable. Mirroring Donald Trump’s rhetoric and attitude, he lashed out at The New York Times. “It’s an article that came out in The New York Times. And, you already know what we think of these media outlets, right? Very famous, but also unethical and tied to political and business interest groups. Imagine, The New York Times is involved in this, helping torturers. What kind of journalism is that? It’s journalism for power. Just articles like this, to protect interest [groups],” he said. Lopez Obrador’s harsh words for The New York Times fit a familiar pattern where he labels all of his critics including feminists, environmental activists, journalists, and NGOs as “conservatives.” He has also accused the people behind the cancelation of his friend Donald Trump’s Twitter account of being “conservatives,” too. Lopez Obrador’s authoritarian intolerance for democratic discourse is worrisome especially considering the close ties he is cementing to Mexico’s military. In order to discuss the current political dynamic in Mexico, I reached out to Tyler Mattiace, a Mexico Researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Nathaniel Parish Flannery: Mexico's President Lopez Obrador has been forced to confront evidence that his government has spied on critics including investigative journalists and a human rights activist. Why are these allegations significant?

Tyler Mattiace: The recent allegations that the military has been using the spyware Pegasus—which was designed for governments to use to monitor suspected terrorist groups—to spy on journalists and human rights defenders are troubling on a number of levels.

First, it's clear that this surveillance was illegitimate. It was conducted without a court order and targeted at journalists and human rights defenders who were investigating abuses by the military, which would suggest its purpose was to protect the military’s reputation, not anything to do with law enforcement or public safety.

Second, it fits into a decades-long pattern of official intimidation and harassment of human rights defenders and journalists by the Mexican government. Under former president Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico was the biggest Pegasus user in the world. A 2021 investigation showed that the Peña Nieto administration had used Pegasus against at least 15,000 people, including the families of the Ayotzinapa victims. President López Obrador had promised a different approach. But, since taking office in 2018, he has used his daily morning press conferences to single out and publicly harass journalists and human rights defenders who are critical of the government. It’s worth nothing that Mexico is one of the most dangerous places in the world for journalists and human rights defenders

Third, it is worrying that the evidence suggests it was the military doing the spying but President López Obrador has said he was unaware that the military was using spyware. López Obrador has spearheaded a vast expansion of the military’s power, autonomy, and role in civilian life. He has called the military “incorruptible” and insisted it is subordinate to civilian authorities. But there is growing evidence that the military not only spies on civilians, but that it has had ties with criminal groups, has attempted to intervene in the legislature, and has attempted to pressure civilian authorities to avoid accountability.

Parish Flannery: Overall, what three words would you use to describe Lopez Obrador's approach to human rights?

Mattiace: It’s hard to summarize his approach to human rights in three words, because I don’t think he views the world in the lens of human rights. Maybe: “superficial,” “dismissive,” and “hostile.”

López Obrador has framed his political movement as a kind of righteous “transformation” of public and political life in Mexico. In that context, he accuses anyone who criticizes him, or who raises legitimate concerns about human rights issues, of being one of “the conservatives” or “the opposition,” a nebulous list of supposed adversaries which has grown to include human rights groups, feminists, indigenous groups, environmentalists, journalists, and more. There is not a lot of openness for real dialogue on human rights issues.

He has also often tried to deflect criticism of his own human rights record or avoid talking about the human rights records of other countries by citing the idea of sovereignty—suggesting that international organizations and foreign governments should not raise concerns about human rights abuses in Mexico or provide support or funding to Mexican human rights groups because human rights abuses in Mexico are somehow an issue of national sovereignty.

This is, of course, absurd. The entire foundation of human rights is that they are universal, that governments have a responsibility to protect them, and that the signatories to international human rights agreements have the responsibility to encourage each other to respect human rights and to speak out when those rights are violated.

Nathaniel Parish Flannery: What grade would you give Lopez Obrador for his policies and discourse regarding human rights?

Mattiace: López Obrador gets an F—not because he is worse than his predecessors, but because his policy has focused on denying that systemic human rights abuses exist, which makes it impossible to address their causes. Here are just a few key issues where López Obrador is failing on human rights.

Violent crime is out of control. The murder rate—28 per 100,000—is at its highest in decades. One reason for this is that the justice system is almost completely ineffective at investigating crimes or bringing justice for victims. The rate of impunity is around 98%; it’s incredibly rare for the perpetrators of crimes to be identified or convicted. But López Obrador seems profoundly unconcerned. He has cut federal support for local police and prosecutors and transferred many public security functions to the military, which has proven so far to be very ineffective at investigating crimes. His main response has been promote reforms that have made it easier for authorities to send people to jail without convicting them of a crime, which both increases the population in Mexico’s already overcrowded prisons and does nothing to address impunity for crimes.

Authorities continue to use torture widely, usually to extract confessions from those accused of crimes. In the most recent survey of incarcerated people conducted by Mexico’s national statistics office, nearly half of respondents said police or soldiers had subjected them to beatings, electric shocks, waterboarding, burns, asphyxiation or other physical violence while detained. The same survey showed that around 40 percent of those who had confessed to a crime only did so because authorities had beaten or threatened them. But López Obrador refuses to address torture and even publicly denies that it takes place. Mexico cannot address the failures of its justice system if the president refuses to acknowledge they exist.

The disappearance crisis continues. There are now 105,000 people missing. Around 85% of them have disappeared since the beginning of the ‘war on drugs’ in 2006, but thousands continue to disappear every year. Around 36,000 people have been reported missing under the López Obrador administration. Police and prosecutors almost never look for the disappeared. What is particularly concerning is that many of the disappeared were not hidden in the desert somewhere by cartels—they were placed in publicly run mass graves by officials at state and local morgues, who often don’t have the time, resources, capacity, or willingness to identify bodies or contact families. López Obrador appointed a respected human rights defender to run the National Search Commission, a tiny government agency that has been charged with attempting to find those already missing and she has done a remarkable job with the limited resources she has. But this is yet another ongoing systemic problem that can’t be solved without a coordinated effort to deal with the causes of disappearances.

López Obrador has also gone farther than any of his predecessors to collaborate with abusive US immigration policies aimed at preventing asylum seekers from reaching the US border. He has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers across Mexico to operate immigration checkpoints (which Mexican citizens must pass to travel within their own country). And he agreed to allow both Biden and Trump to expel hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers to Mexico under ‘Remain in Mexico’ and Title 42. Recently, he agreed to allow Biden to start expelling Venezuelans to Mexico although Mexico is not granting them any kind of residency or legal status.

And there are a dozen other issues I could mention: the environment, attacks on journalists and human rights defenders, judicial independence.

For more analysis on Mexico’s human rights emergency, check out Tyler Mattiace’s recent podcast interview.

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