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 Editorials | Issues | April 2007 
Alleged Rape at Center of Human Rights Controversy in Mexico
 David Ovalle - McClatchy Newspapers
In life, Ernestina Ascencio was an unheralded 73-year-old grandmother who lived quietly in a rural village 120 miles from here. In death, she's become the center of a controversy that's raising questions about Mexican President Felipe Calderon's commitment to human rights.
Political analysts say they're baffled by the uproar that's surrounded Ascencio's death since prosecutors charged two months ago that four Mexican soldiers had beaten and raped her in a field.
Allegations of abuse of Mexico's indigenous population by soldiers are hardly unprecedented - such criticism is a regular feature of human-rights group reports - and the Defense Ministry said it would use semen samples to track down the guilty parties. The governor of the state of Veracruz visited Ascencio's family and vowed to pump resources into her tiny village, Soledad Atzompa, in the mountainous Zongolica region.
Then last month, Calderon shocked Mexico's human rights community by announcing that new tests on Ascencio's recently exhumed body showed that she'd died of "chronic gastritis," not a brutal beating. Adding to the surprise was the way the president made the information public, as a seemingly offhanded aside at the end of a lengthy interview on an unrelated subject with the newspaper La Jornada.
"I've been tracking the case of the woman they say was murdered in Zongolica," he told the newspaper on March 13. "The (human rights commission) intervened and the autopsy showed she died of unattended chronic gastritis. There are no signs she was raped. Maybe you should, through your own means, access that information."
The controversy grew when the country's independent human-rights commission, which long has had a reputation for siding with indigenous groups against the government, confirmed the president's statement days later.
Ascencio died of bleeding in her digestive track, the National Commission on Human Rights reported. There had been no rape, semen samples didn't exist and the state's investigation - which relied on the initial autopsy and Ascencio's dying declaration to her family - was botched, the commission said.
Since then, all sides have flung allegations of wrongdoing. Veracruz state's top prosecutor, Emetrio Lopez Marquez, has defended his office's work, saying the president and the human rights commission rushed to judgment. He told Proceso magazine that there's no doubt Ascencio was raped, though he declined to give more details, citing an ongoing investigation.
The three doctors who did the first autopsy have been suspended temporarily, but one, Juan Pablo Mendizabal, has said he'll defend himself.
A presidential spokesman said Calderon's office couldn't comment on the case, out of respect for the ongoing dispute between Veracruz prosecutors and the human rights commission.
McClatchy couldn't reach a military spokesman. The Defense Ministry's office of communication said granting approval for an interview would take up to 20 days.
The head of the human rights commission, Jorge Luis Soberanes, has come in for unaccustomed criticism from the country's left. The muckraking Proceso featured his photo in a recent edition. The article's headline: "The Dirty Job. The Shadow of Ernestina Ascencio."
"It's really created havoc on the left," said Ana Maria Salazar, a Mexico City political commentator who once worked for the Clinton administration as a drug policy expert. "They are suddenly finding themselves attacking (Soberanes), who has traditionally been very critical of the federal government in quelling protesters."
Last week, defeated presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who lost to Calderon by half a percentage point in last July's election, accused the president and Soberanes of "impeding justice." On Monday, the Right Rev. Raul Vera, the Roman Catholic bishop of the northern city of Saltillo, blasted the human rights commission.
"We see the commission as an institution that is free and protects us. But it's not," said Vera, a fierce backer of indigenous rights who founded a human rights group in the tumultuous southern state of Chiapas in the 1990s.
As for Calderon, rights advocates worry that the controversy is an indication that he's abandoning his predecessor's interest in human rights as he stresses a growing role for the military in fighting Mexico's drug-trafficking cartels.
When Vicente Fox in 2000 became Mexico's first president in seven decades not to belong to the Institutional Revolutionary Party, he opened investigations into decades-old human rights violations and pledged new respect for political dissidents and indigenous groups.
He signed international human-rights treaties, released millions of once-secret documents and appointed a special prosecutor to investigate Mexico's "dirty war," a dark period in the 1960s, `70s and `80s when the military kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds in a campaign that fell heavily on indigenous groups and political dissidents.
Human rights organizers say that Calderon, who like Fox is a member of the National Action Party, hasn't made curbing and investigating abuses a priority. The dirty-war prosecutor's office was disbanded in January, less than two months after Calderon took office, and the president has dispatched army units to at least three states to combat drug trafficking.
Columnist Miguel Angel Granado Chapa said in an interview: "It shows that (Calderon) cares more about supporting the army than human rights."
Other political observers are less certain.
"Everything about this case is kind of bizarre," said Jorge Chabat, an analyst for the Center for Economic Research and Training in Mexico City.
Chabat admitted that the case smacks of the government "trying to change the version in order to protect somebody." But almost in the same breath he questioned that assessment. "It doesn't make any sense. What's the point of protecting two or three low-level soldiers?" he said.
John Ackerman, a legal expert at National Autonomous University of Mexico, called the case the government's "classic strategy of confusing the public."
"This is an indication of how much further we need to go in expanding democracy into the inner reaches of society," Ackerman said.
Meanwhile, soldiers have pulled out of the area where Ascencio died. The army first moved into Zongolica, which is inhabited largely by indigenous tribes, during the 1990s, when armed groups were active, though the need to have it there has faded, according to Jorge Luis Sierra, a military analyst who recently has written on the Ascencio case for the daily newspaper El Universal.
"It's inexplicable why the military is there," Sierra said.
Ovalle reports for The Miami Herald. |
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