Mexico: a native tortured 21 years ago wins his case against the army

MEXICO CITY (AP) — The 20-year prison sentence handed down to a Mexican soldier is for his victim, an indigenous activist Me’phaa, a victory over military power and an ineffective justice system in a country where soldiers increasingly occupy in addition to space in safety work.

Inés Fernández, from Guerrero, a state in southern Mexico, announced on Wednesday, the same day as International Women’s Day, that one of the 11 soldiers who sexually tortured her nearly 21, when she was 25, will eventually go to jail.

“This March 8, I want to say that a Me’phaa woman won the battle against military power,” the woman exclaimed during a press conference held at the Miguel Agustín Pro Human Rights Center Juarez in Mexico City.

Inés’ sentence is relevant because, according to the Center for Human Rights of the Mountain (CDHM), in Tlachinollan, his case is one of the first in which a specific and effective sanction has been pronounced against a member of the Mexican army. .

The AP requested a response from the Department of National Defense, but there was no immediate response.

Vidulfo Rosales, a lawyer at the CDHM, reported that on March 1, the Second District Court in the state of Guerrero handed down a 20-year prison sentence to Hugo Humberto García de León, one of the soldiers who tortured Fernandez. .

On March 22, 2002, when she was 25, Inés was sexually abused by 11 members of the Mexican army. According to what she says, by denouncing, she faced discrimination as a woman and an indigenous person and the inefficiency of the Mexican authorities.

Having failed to obtain justice through criminal proceedings, Inés took her case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (CoIDH), which on August 30, 2010, declared the Mexican State guilty of having exercised institutional military violence against him. The body ordered him, among other things, to try by civilian courts and not by a military court all cases in which elements of the army have committed human rights violations.

Following this, the Mexican government reinstated the process of the attack on Inés and in 2013 two of her alleged attackers were arrested. One died in Campo Militar prison on the outskirts of Mexico City, and the other, García, was sentenced to prison in 2023.

“The sentence integrates the standards of judgment with a gender perspective, the evaluation of evidence in cases of violence against women, the intersection of discrimination that the judge must evaluate in the case of indigenous women and who live in a context of social exclusion”, he says Rosales.

“It is relevant that the judge assessed the evidence that was presented to the Inter-American Court. It is an unprecedented pass in legal terms for a judge here in Mexico to assess evidence that has been released in an international process.”

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Mexico also applauded that an international sentence was demanded at the national level. “The conviction recovers the State’s obligation to act with due diligence against violence against women. This gives enhanced value to victims’ testimony, which is highly justifiable in rape contexts,” said Alan García, head of the UN office’s Serious Human Rights Violations Unit.

For Rosales as for García, this sentence comes in a political context in Mexico of accentuated militarization where there is a debate on the question of whether the armed forces should have more legal powers to carry out public security tasks.

“The case of Inés Fernández Ortega showed us what happened when the army received these powers,” said the CDHM representative. García added: “If attention had been paid to a case like that of Inés with the due attention, with the necessary powers of surveillance and inspection, probably today Mexico would not be faced with this context. of insecurity and violence framed in an equally generalized context of impunity”.

Although she thinks a 20-year sentence is “a very short time”, given that she had to fight for 21 years to get “some justice”, the activist told The Associated Press that she was happy and ready for any appeals or protection that may be filed.

“At first I thought I was the only woman who went through this situation, but during my fight I met many others. The government must change the laws, the authority must listen and all women need to make their voices heard. It’s not fair that they go unpunished. I don’t want another woman to be sexually assaulted by the military, I don’t want another woman, neither his daughters nor my daughters are going through what I went through,” Fernández said.