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 Editorials | Opinions | January 2007 
Mexican Injustice
 Chris Selley - Macleans.ca
| | Stephanie Pannozzi stands with her children following the funeral of her nephew Adam De Prisco, 19, who was killed while on vacation in Mexico, Thursday January 18, 2007. (National Post) |
"I thought things like this only happened in the movies," a recent visitor to Mexico told the Toronto Star last week. "I never thought I would experience anything like this."
Linda Leoni, a student at York University, was recounting a friend's unfortunate misadventure upon leaving Acapulco's Palladium nightclub. Her friend reportedly hopped in a cab, alone, only to be joined (at the driver's invitation) by two men who attacked him with a baseball bat, took his money and dumped him by the side of the road.
Palladium is the same nightclub outside which 19-year-old Woodbridge, Ontario resident Adam DePrisco was the victim of either a hit-and-run accident (if you believe Mexican and Canadian coroners' reports) or a brutal beating (if you believe a certain Acapulco "city official" and the DePrisco family, who claim the body was tampered with between autopsies).
On the weekend, Carmen DePrisco - Adam's mother - lashed out at what she saw as the Canadian government's inaction. "I hate being a Canadian because I haven't seen nobody, nobody from the government doing anything at all," she told reporters. "They don't care."
Days later, Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay called to express his condolences and assure her that he was, in fact, on the case. On Monday, he reportedly spoke to Patricia Espinosa, the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs, who promised to seek "a rapid and exhaustive investigation" into the case.
Canadians heard similar assurances in the case of Dominic and Nancy Ianiero - fellow Woodbridge residents who were murdered in their hotel room near Cancun in early 2006. But a MacKay spokesman stressed this week how unusual it was that such a senior Mexican official was handling the matter.
Unfortunately, the fact that MacKay's Mexican equivalent needs to be involved at all probably says something about the state of crime, policing and criminal justice in Mexico.
It is certainly not just in movies that bad things happen to tourists in Mexico, nor is it just in notoriously perilous areas such as Chiapas and Oaxaca. All travellers to Mexico are warned by a Foreign Affairs' travel report to "[b]e wary of persons presenting themselves as police officers," for example, as "[t]here have been instances of tourists becoming victims of theft, extortion or sexual assault by persons who may or may not be police officers."
In Cancun specifically, the travel report advises that "there have been cases involving legitimate police officers extorting money from tourists and arresting tourists for minor offences."
Fifteen Canadians have been murdered in Mexico since 2000, the Star reported on Monday, and nine of the cases remain open. But then, the total number of Canadians killed abroad over that time is in excess of 250. Thus, as The Globe and Mail argued in a recent editorial, "What happened to Adam DePrisco could have happened anywhere." And though reports suggest the Mexican tourism industry has suffered from a perceived increase in crime and violence, hundreds of thousands of Canadians visit the country without incident every year.
Nonetheless, the DePrisco and Ianiero cases have prompted outraged calls for an all-out boycott. "Something needs to be done about it," said Nancy Leoni, Linda's sister. "The only way we're going to get anyone to do anything about it is to get people to stop going to Mexico."
Mexicans themselves might take a dim view of such prospects. Because as tragic as the Canadians' cases are, they are but a tiny drop in the leaky bucket of Mexican justice.
According to Transparency International's 2006 Corruption Perceptions Index, which ranks nations according to how corrupt their citizens believe their public officials to be, Mexico is in dubious company - tied with such tourist-unfriendly nations as Senegal and Saudi Arabia. And despite much-publicized anti-corruption efforts, those perceptions are likely not in error.
Human Rights First's Mexico Policing Project details several harrowing - and no doubt extreme - cases of police abuse within the last 12 years. They range from Mexican environmentalists held without access to counsel and tortured, then convicted on coerced evidence and only released thanks to the intervention of the president, to officers sentenced to 50 years in prison for murdering an innocent airline pilot who fled police fearing he was about to be kidnapped.
Neither of those cases occurred in common tourist areas, and some police forces are obviously more professional than others. But less than two weeks ago, potential corruption among Mexican police forces was highlighted within walking distance of the U.S. border when - acting on orders from President Felipe Calderón - Mexican soldiers suddenly disarmed most of Tijuana's police force.
The reason? Officials want to test the officers' weapons to see if they were involved in the huge number of unsolved drug-related murders that have occurred in recent years. According to The New York Times, it has long been suspected that police officers are involved in smuggling drugs across the border.
For the average streetwise San Diegan on a day trip to Tijuana, this might be a calculated risk. But it seems very unlikely that a small decline in tourism would be the magic bullet in Mexico's decades-old fight against corruption - one Mexicans themselves have every reason to want the government to win on their own behalf. |
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