On Friday, Mexican officials announced that three members of a drug cartel had confessed to burning the bodies of 43 students who were abducted in Iguala, a town in the southern state of Guerrero, on Sept. 26 and then killed. The mayor of Iguala and his wife are in custody, accused of ordering the seizure of the students by local police, who then handed them over to the drug gangs. The discovery, during the search for the students, of other mass graves in the area has reinforced the picture of a catastrophic local breakdown of law and order.
But this is much more than the story of a small town, or even a country, in thrall to drug gangs. The response to the Guerrero abductions over the past six weeks underscores the central problem that President Enrique Peña Nieto now needs to tackle: Mexico’s criminal justice system cannot properly investigate atrocities, and it lacks the institutional checks needed to rein in endemic corruption, abuse and incompetence.
Last month, for example, federal police officers involved in the Guerrero investigation stormed a mining village near Iguala. Backed by low-flying helicopters, agents burst into houses and beat and abused inhabitants, eight of whom were reportedly taken away, their families given no information as to their whereabouts.
This followed closely another fiasco: In June, military forces executed at least 12 people in the State of Mexico. For weeks federal prosecutors went along with a questionable military claim that the deaths had resulted from a shootout, before finally assenting to treat the incident as a criminal matter.
The killings have turned into a major political crisis for the president, undermining his administration’s claims of progress in the war against narcotics-related violence. Fearing popular outrage over the handling of the case, he has pledged to address the systemic failures that the crisis has made all too apparent.
Since Mr. Peña Nieto took office at the end of 2012, official statistics indicate a decline in killing, after eight years in which there were over 100,000 murders, tens of thousands of disappearances and countless cases of torture. But how reliable are these numbers when newfound mass graves suggest that many of the disappeared may have been killed? Even if killings have dropped, there has been little justice. The authorities have yet to reform a law enforcement system that remains largely dysfunctional.
In Guerrero, where other mass graves have been discovered since 2006, police officers and prosecutors are not selected, organized or trained to solve such crimes. Indeed, they are often perpetrators themselves. The state human rights commission found evidence of government involvement in 64 forced disappearances from 2005 to 2012. It has received dozens of complaints of torture by state authorities. The deeply politicized state prosecution service oversees the police, the forensics unit and witness protection. Not surprisingly, no prosecution in Guerrero for enforced disappearance or torture has gone to trial. Torture remains a primary and, in many cases, the only investigative technique.
The police and prosecutors have little incentive to change. In April, a YouTube video showing three police officers in Acapulco abusing a detainee sparked outrage (the police officer who filmed the video subsequently disappeared). When, under pressure, prosecutors charged the Acapulco police chief with assault and enforced disappearance, a state judge dismissed the case. The only working official check on official misconduct in Guerrero had been the state human rights commission. But in January, Gov. Ángel Aguirre, who recently went on “leave” in the aftermath of the Iguala disappearances, illegally appointed an ally to lead the commission, which has been all but mute ever since.
The federal government, which will name a new attorney general for the state, following the incumbent’s recent resignation, is no more effective at countering this climate of impunity. Mexico’s federal security agencies are staffed and structured to react with force to crime, not to prevent or investigate it. At both the state and federal levels, services essential to professional and independent law enforcement — forensics, expert witnesses, witness protection — are under the control of prosecutors, who frequently rely on criminally obtained and unreliable confessions. The results are predictable. There have been only four convictions ever at the federal level for torture, and only six convictions for enforced disappearances, despite thousands of complaints filed with the National Human Rights Commission.
The events in Iguala have roused Mexico. The challenge is to transform a justice system that has long served criminals into one where law prevails. Mr. Peña Nieto has said he will convene politicians, security forces and civil society groups in an effort “to undertake fundamental change, strengthen our institutions and ensure full respect of the rule of law in our country.”
His leadership will be critical if justice is to come to the parents of the disappeared in Iguala, or other grieving families across the country.
James A. Goldston is a human rights lawyer and executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.