Adam Isacson

Defense, security, borders, migration, and human rights in Latin America and the United States. May not reflect my employer’s consensus view.

Archives

Justice Systems

WOLA Podcast: Mexico’s Constitutional Reforms: a Setback for Checks and Balances

Mexico has changed its constitution to allow direct election of judges, placement of a militarized National Guard under direct Army control, and other changes. Stephanie Brewer of WOLA and Lisa Sánchez of México Unido contra la Delincuencia explain what this means, in a new WOLA podcast episode.

Here’s the text from WOLA’s podcast landing page:

In September 2024, Mexico’s legislature quickly approved a series of constitutional reforms at the behest of outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The revisions, among other things, fundamentally change the nature of the country’s judiciary and fundamentally and permanently change the role of the armed forces in public security.

Under the overhaul of Mexico’s judiciary, citizens will now directly elect all judges, increasing the likelihood of eroding the judicial branch’s independence. That, in turn, could complicate accountability for organized crime activity, corruption, and human rights abuses.

Another reform places the National Guard, a recently created internal security force whose members are mostly former soldiers, directly within the Defense Ministry. This further cements significant increases in military participation in internal security, immigration control, public works, and the economy during the López Obrador administration.

These changes pose likely setbacks to the struggle to hold people and institutions accountable for human rights abuse and corruption, and they threaten to weaken the quality of Mexico’s democracy.

In this episode, WOLA’s director for Mexico, Stephanie Brewer, and Lisa Sanchez, the director of México Unido Contra la Delincuencia (MUCD), explain the constitutional reforms and their likely consequences.

“This particular constitutional reform fully militarized public security at the federal level by turning the National Guard into a fourth armed force,” said Sánchez. “What we did was to fully and permanently militarize public security at the federal level in Mexico for good.”

While these reforms are not a “fatal blow” for Mexico’s democracy, Brewer pointed out, they create even more adverse conditions for “victims, survivors, family members, civil society, NGOs, and others” working for rights and justice in the country. “They really need our attention, and our support from the international community. We need to be listening to their voices.”

Download this podcast episode’s .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

Lawless Lands: Where Colombia’s Justice System Has Not Arrived

Colombia’s judicial system has 9.65 judges per 100,000 inhabitants of the country. In the 170 barely governed municipalities hardest-hit by the country’s armed conflict, which the 2016 peace accord selected for investment in “Territorially Focused Development Programs” (PDET), the number falls to 7.70 judges per 100,000 inhabitants.

That’s one of hundreds of findings of a thorough September 25 report on fulfillment of the 2016 FARC peace accord’s commitments, published by the Peace Committee of Colombia’s Congress together with the Bogotá-based Ideas for Peace Foundation. The report paints a mixed but often disappointing picture of accord compliance overall.

It notes that 9.65 judges (or fewer) is really bad: “in the other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries, the average is 65 judges per 100,000 inhabitants.”

In some of the PDET zones, the lack of judicial presence is especially dire.

Sur de Córdoba 3.18 - Número de jueces: 9

Catatumbo 3.61 - Número de jueces: 7

Alto Patía y Norte del Cauca 4.32 - Número de jueces: 36
Southern Córdoba, left, is where soldiers, apparently posing as FARC dissidents, were caught on video last month threatening a town’s inhabitants. Catatumbo, center, is Colombia’s number-one coca-growing region. Northern Cauca, right, is notorious for human rights defender killings and has seen very frequent recent combat incidents. The absence of the justice system has consequences.

Under those circumstances, who settles disputes for people, enforces rules, and imposes sanctions when those rules are broken? Sometimes, the answer is “nobody,” but more often, the answer is “armed and criminal groups.”

Delaying Tactics Threaten Justice in March 2022 Colombian Military Massacre Case

In March 2022, Colombia’s Army staged an early-morning attack on a large, hung-over gathering of participants in a “community bazaar”—including a few armed-group members, who fired back—in a rural zone of Putumayo, in the country’s south. The soldiers killed several civilians, including a pregnant woman and an Indigenous community leader.

Top defense officials in the government of President Iván Duque insisted that the troops did nothing wrong and that no human rights or international humanitarian law violations took place. Colombian journalistic investigations found otherwise.

Colombia’s civilian Chief Prosecutor’s Office (Fiscalía) looked into the case, and agreed with the journalists. The Colombian magazine Cambio reported on August 20:

the Prosecutor’s Office deployed an interdisciplinary team that included ballistics experts, forensic doctors, topographers and prosecutors from its Human Rights Unit. The material collected, as CAMBIO was able to verify, reveals that the indigenous governor Pablo Paduro died as a result of a rifle shot by one of the uniformed officers and that the weapon found near his body was never fired or manipulated by him, but was planted on him with the intention of diverting the investigation. In addition, there is incontestable evidence: the dead were 11 and the weapons found were 5, so at least 6 of them did not have the means to shoot at the Army.

The prosecutors, though, are being held up by delaying tactics. Defense attorneys for the accused military personnel made a last-minute appeal to have the case heard in Colombia’s military justice system. The military system is meant for disciplinary infractions (“acts of service”), not human rights abuses; when it does get jurisdiction over a crime against civilians, it almost never convicts. For such cases, it is an impunity factory.

Cambio explained the legal machinations:

The indictment hearing was scheduled for the first days of August, but in an unexpected decision, the 106th judge of Military Criminal Instruction of Puerto Leguízamo [Putumayo] accepted the request of the soldiers’ lawyers and sent the process to the Constitutional Court to resolve a jurisdictional conflict. The judge’s decision has been criticized because a month after the operation, in May 2022, the same Military Criminal Court sent the process to the Prosecutor’s Office, arguing that the possible human rights violations could not be considered acts of service.

The Constitutional Court has yet to decide whether the Alto Remanso massacre case will go to the military justice system, where justice is unlikely, or the civilian system, where prosecutors and investigators have done thorough work and are ready to go. Colleagues at Human Rights Watch just sent an amicus brief to the Constitutional Court asking it to slap down the military attorneys’ gambit, and move the case back to the civilian justice system.

The military attorneys may be happy just to run out the clock. Cambio warns, “For now, the legal process is suspended and waiting for the Constitutional Court to define the conflict of competences. The clock is ticking, and the ghost of the statute of limitations’ expiration is haunting the investigators’ work.”

The Constitutional Court must act quickly.

WOLA Podcast on Mexico: “Demilitarization is not going to happen from one day to the next. But there needs to be that commitment”

I recorded a great podcast yesterday with the director of WOLA’s Mexico program, Stephanie Brewer. It’s about a report they published last week about the growing power of Mexico’s armed forces, and how hard it is to hold them accountable for human rights abuse even as they confront, and arrest, thousands of people per year while carrying out policing missions.

Here’s the language from WOLA’s podcast landing page.

A new report from WOLA dives deeply into the growing power and roles of Mexico’s military, and what that means for human rights, democracy, and U.S.-Mexico relations.

WOLA’s Mexico Program published Militarized Transformation: Human Rights and Democratic Controls in a Context of Increasing Militarization in Mexico on September 6. The report voices alarm about the Mexican armed forces’ growing list of civilian tasks, and civilians’ diminishing ability to hold military personnel accountable for human rights abuse and other illegal behavior.

In some new findings, Militarized Transformation reveals official data showing that the military isn’t even reporting its arrests of civilians to civilian security authorities and oversight bodies. The report updates and group together various indicators regarding the justice system and respect for fundamental rights by the security forces, with a focus on the armed forces and the National Guard, as well as the differentiated impacts and situations faced by women. And it makes a series of short-term and long-term recommendations for needed reforms.

This podcast episode features the report’s principal author, Stephanie Brewer, WOLA’s director for Mexico. Brewer discusses the report’s main findings, conclusions, and recommendations, along with a general view of Mexico’s democracy, civil-military relations, and U.S. policy.

“We recognize militarization is is the reality we’re currently working in,” Brewer concludes. “But while that’s going on, what possible reason could there be for the country to want the armed forces not to be operating under effective civilian control or not to be transparent about things like their use of force? Or not to be fully giving information to Congress? That would have to be something that that is in everybody’s interest in the short term.”

Download the podcast .mp3 file here. Listen to WOLA’s Latin America Today podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. The main feed is here.

Militarized Transformation is the latest of several WOLA reports examining the military’s growing power in Mexico and its human rights and democracy implications. Among them:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.