In Brad Will case, Mexican government moves ahead with its farce

Brad Will was an American citizen who was murdered in Mexico in 2006.

He was, as Rolling Stone put it, the "revolutionary who filmed his own murder." He was filming for Indymedia in Oaxaca during the uprising, or whatever you want to call it.

I last wrote about the story in October, when Mexican prosecutors announced they had found the two men responsible -- despite overwhelming evidence that Will's killers were in fact two different men, men affiliated with the government (see that post for much more of the story).

The news last week was that one of those two men has now been sentenced to prison time. Back in October, the NYT noted that every other murder prosecution from the Oaxaca events had been dropped.

In other words, the Mexican government -- likely at the highest levels -- is going well out of its way to make a show of justice in the Will case, something it doesn't do with most murders. The audience for this justice is not Mexican, of course, but American.

But it is a show of justice based on an obviously-flawed hypothesis -- a fake case. The question is, what will the American audience say? Will we look at the analysis of Mexico's National Human Rights Commission and other groups who have pointed to very deep flaws in the investigation?

Unfortunately, the response from Washington is still mostly one of avoidance. Several members of Congress, including Senator Durbin, have admirably raised the issue (Brad's parents live in Illinois; he grew up in Kenilworth). But from so many others there's just silence. Obama did not express the concern that Durbin did. Brad lived in Brooklyn, but his Senators looked the other way.

Now Clinton and Obama are in power, and nothing has visibly changed.

Will one of them finally speak out publicly about the Mexican investigation and say "we don't want fake justice, we want real justice!" ?

For all the Barack or Hillary fans out there, think of Brad when you think of them.