Pubdate: Tue, 15 Dec 2009
Source: El Paso Times (TX)
Copyright: 2009 El Paso Times
Contact: http://www.elpasotimes.com/formnewsroom
Website: http://www.elpasotimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/829

MEXICO REBUKE: WOMEN'S MURDERS UNSOLVED

Mexico says it accepts a high court's condemnation for its handling of
brutal murders of young women; its government accepts being shamed.

It sounds like a proper rebuke. But now what?

It's not like this condemnation by the Interamerican Court of Human
Rights can do much other than embarrass Mexico for its lack of
diligence. And since Mexico's lack of diligence goes back some two
decades, what's to make the government start being diligent in solving
Juarez murders now?

Books have been written. Movies and documentaries have been produced.
And women continue to be killed by ... nobody seems to know. Either
that or some public entity is sweeping a lot of crime under a rug.

Confounding the situation of virtual killing fields in Juarez is the
mob-style war between two Mexican drug cartels. There have been some
4,000 murders in Juarez since January 2008. Both men and women have
been found slain, mob-style.

Through it all, Mexico has claimed to have uprooted crooked
law-enforcement officers and crooked members of its army. Some
4,000-plus troops in Juarez have done little to stem the battle for
control of the drug trade. So Mexico gets a public rebuke. The court
has found irregularities in the probes of three specific murders, and
that evidence in those three cases was mishandled ... and even that
innocent people were coerced into confessing.

Basically this court, based in San Jose, Costa Rica, has "ruled" what
persons on both sides of the border have been saying for years: Mexico
just doesn't have the expertise, or maybe it's the will, to solve the
cases of many hundreds of murdered women.

And the court says, too, that Mexico also fails to deliver justice to
victims' families. People who live here already knew that, too.

So this court has decreed Mexico should pay $800,000 in compensation
to the families of the three specific victims found in a 2001 "cotton
field" slaying.

Justice for three? Certainly nothing near justice for all. Mexico
deserves this black mark on its name. 
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