The Mexican Military's Torture

In "Mexico Accused of Torture in Drug War; Army Using Brutality To Fight Trafficking, Rights Groups Say" the Washington Post's Steve Fainaru and William Booth do an impressive job of getting at some of what the Mexican military has been up to. It's surely not an easy story to report.

The Mexican government faces an extremely difficult situation, where they are on the verge of essentially losing control over parts of the country. I don't think they're torturing many people just for the heck of it; they really think they're doing what is necessary to get information on the cartels. Of course, torturing people is not going to work.

The U.S. has a fairly big amount of leverage over Mexico. When we authorized the "Merida Initiative" in 2008, providing hundreds of million of dollars in funding toward the Mexican government, congress attached human rights provisions (after extensive lobbying from Amnesty International and other groups) saying a portion (15%) of the funding was dependent on Mexico's human rights performance (the Post article reviews this). If that sound symbolic, it's because it is, but it's an important symbolic.

If anyone in the executive or Congress tries to say Mexico is passing the test, that'd be silly. Withholding part of the funding -- even though it doesn't really matter that much in the scope of Mexico's military operations -- would be a significant rebuke. And it could get Mexico to change it's action. Paternalistic, yes, and that's a critique from some of the Mexican left. Yet this is paternalism that could save lives.

The history of US-Colombia relations in the last decade or so is different, but relevant. The actions of the Colombian government are still awful, yet not as awful as they were before. All of the pressure from the human rights groups and some congressional Dems didn't stop all of the killing, but it certainly made a difference.