(snip) MEXICO - Prisoner of conscience
Gerardo Demesa Padilla, a leading member of the Committee for the Unity of Tepoztlán (CUT), a civil rights organization, was sentenced to eight years' imprisonment on 19 September 1997. AI believes that the reason for his conviction is his peaceful opposition to a large tourism development, including a golf course, in Morelos State. He is a prisoner of conscience.
The Morelos development project is sponsored by the state's central government, some of whose members reportedly have connections with the private investors involved in the project. Local people claim that the project will damage their community's environment and cultural heritage, and have therefore rejected central government plans to impose the project.
Gerardo Demesa Padilla was convicted of killing a supporter of the project in December 1995, despite witnesses' accounts and forensic evidence substantiating his claims of innocence.
The people of Tepoztlán have suffered brutal repression for their opposition to the government project. In April 1996, scores of people were seriously injured when the Morelos state police violently dispersed a peaceful demonstration against the project. One member of the community, CUT activist Marcos Olmedo Gutiérrez, was shot and wounded by the police, who took him away. His body was discovered the following day with a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Although several members of the state police were reportedly dismissed, the authorities have failed to prosecute the officers who ordered the attack.
(snip/...)
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGNWS220061997?open&of=ENG-ARE(Isn't it amazing that people are getting killed, tortured, erased from the face of the earth, and our gummint will simply look the other way, when their countries are on our "ally" list?)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~By 1998, Morelos had "progressed" to this level of behavior by the police:
(snip) On January 28, 1998, Federal Highway Patrol officers discovered the commander of the Morelos state Special Anti-Kidnapping Group and two state judicial police officers disposing of the tortured body of Jorge Nava Avilés.238 The victim, who had been kidnapped the day before, reportedly died during a torture session. The Morelos law-enforcement officers tried to dump the body in Guerrero state, along the highway between Iguala and Cuernavaca. The case, which received widespread press attention, led to the downfall of many Morelos public officials, including the governor of the state, who resigned. After investigating the Nava Avilés case, the CNDH described the extent of the involvement of Morelos state officials in crime and cover-up:
In the state of Morelos, some members of the justice system have generated a climate of public insecurity, a product of the wave of kidnappings, homicides, torture, abuse of authority, and other illegal acts, committed by or consented to by those members. This has caused a climate of corruption and impunity that benefits the intellectual and material authors of these crimes. This situation has resulted in thejustice system not carrying out its appropriate functions, such as investigating and prosecuting crimes.239
The federal government quickly took control of the case under anti-organized crime laws; the state attorney general and head of the state judicial police were charged with trying to covering up the Nava Avilés torture and murder.240 While it is encouraging that federal authorities acted so quickly in the case, it is equally noteworthy that they had failed for years to pay attention to evidence that Morelos police agents were engaged in kidnappings, “disappearances,” and torture. Press reports from Morelos often repeated accusations made by victims and their family members regarding the involvement of police officials in such illegal acts. Indeed, at the time of the Nava Avilés murder, federal authorities had been engaged in discussions about the “disappearance” in early 1997 of José Alberto Guadarrama from Morelos—and its concomitant exposé of the problems in Morelos—with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
“For at least two years it has been clear that the justice system was rotten,” says Morelos state congressman Juan Ignacio Suárez Huape.241 “There were protests, but on the state level, the leaders were involved with the criminals. On the federal level, there was no response, given the influence of
Jorge Carrillo Olea. Despite the evidence, the investigations went nowhere.” In December 1997, Suárez Huape organized a roundtable discussion on “disappearances,” torture, and impunity.242 Only after the Nava Avilés killing however, did prosecutors use the documentation he had long collected to prosecute state officials.
Prior cases had long gone uninvestigated because the very state officials responsible for doing so were involved in many of the kidnappings. One such case involved José Alberto Guadarrama García, a former state judicial police officer inMorelos state, who was detained in Emiliano Zapata city on March 26, 1997, by members of the state judicial police anti-kidnapping squad.
(snip/...)
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/mexico/Mexi991-07.htm#P945_259594
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