Possibly contributing to the general view towards government in Mexico:
A rights group says Mexican soldiers get away with rape, abuse
Report: It calls for abuses of civilians to be tried in civilian courts, but lawmakers have rejected it in the past
By Susana Hayward
Knight Ridder News Service
MEXICO CITY - Ines Fernandez Ortega was with her four children, drying meat on her patio, when three soldiers entered her home in a small indigenous village in southern Guerrero state. They accused her of stealing the meat.
The 27-year-old Fernandez, a Tlapaneca Indian, didn't answer because she speaks little Spanish. The soldiers raped her, then took the meat.
Two years later, they remain unpunished.
Amnesty International, in a report released Tuesday, cites the assault on Fernandez as one of dozens of rapes, executions, cases of torture, kidnappings and disappearances committed by members of the Mexican army in Guerrero since 1996.
''More than 140 disappearances, at least nine rapes, untold illegal detentions, torture and repression have been documented since 1996,'' Mario Patron, a Guerrero lawyer who's working with the human rights group, said at a news conference.
Officials in President Vicente Fox's office declined to comment, saying they hadn't seen the report.
Guerrero state, best known for the tourist resort of Acapulco, has long had a reputation for violence. Of the more than 500 people who disappeared in Mexico during the so-called dirty war of the 1960s and '70s, most came from Guerrero, according to the National Commission of Human Rights.
Two decades later, Amnesty said in its report, Mexico: Indigenous Women and Military Injustice, that cases involving Mexican soldiers weren't investigated or prosecuted.
The report details nine cases of women allegedly raped by soldiers and calls for reforms to allow military human-rights abuses of civilians to be tried in civilian courts. It also notes that rape isn't a crime under Mexico's code of military justice.
''Unless there are legislative reforms, the military doesn't care about civilian allegations,'' said Monica Costa, of Amnesty International's Mexico research team. ''Otherwise, there's no justice in military rapes and disappearances.''
In 2001, Fox proposed judicial reforms that included trying members of the army charged with crimes in civilian courts, but legislators rejected that clause.
About 3,000 Mexican soldiers operate in Guerrero, largely because of its thriving drug industry. More than 60 percent of Mexico's poppies, the raw material for heroin, are grown there. But Amnesty charged that the army's ''operations are also linked to gathering intelligence on indigenous communities and identifying what they perceive to be subversive elements.''
Report is online
To read the Amnesty International Report online, go to
http://www.amnesty.org and click on ''Mexico: Indigenous women and military justice'' under the ''Latest reports'' section.
http://www.sltrib.com/nationworld/ci_2472342
