Pubdate: Mon, 14 Apr 2008
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A09
Copyright: 2008 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post Foreign Service
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Mexico (Mexico)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Felipe+Calderon
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Merida+Initiative

IN MEXICO, WAR ON DRUG CARTELS TAKES WIDER TOLL

Military Campaign Draws Accusations of Rights Abuses

NOCUPETARO, Mexico -- Plastic sacks give Norberto Ramirez chills.

On the May night last year when his nightmare began, Ramirez said, 
Mexican soldiers pulled a plastic sack over his head and cinched it 
around his neck while he lay inside a dark bar in this desolate 
village. He gagged. They pulled off the sack, he said, then put it 
back and cinched again.

It went on like that for hours.

"I thought I was going to die, and I wanted to die," said Ramirez, 
44, whose recollections match details in a human rights commission 
report authorized by the government and in interviews with more than 
a dozen villagers.

Ramirez's ordeal occurred during one of the most volatile moments in 
Mexico's military campaign against drug cartels, a war that has 
ranged from the U.S.-Mexican border to Gulf ports to insular rural 
outposts such as this, and that pits the country's demand for 
security against its stated commitment to human rights.

A village of 3,000 mostly small-plot farmers, Nocupetaro is among a 
constellation of communities where the military has been dispatched 
to take on the cartels in one of the largest domestic deployments in 
Mexican history. President Felipe Calderon has sent more than 25,000 
soldiers and federal police across the country over the past 16 
months in response to drug-related violence that has killed more than 
5,300 people since 2006.

According to government figures, major army operations in nine states 
have led to more than 22,000 arrests and the seizure of 50 tons of 
cocaine and 40,000 weapons. The operations, government officials say, 
have shaved $9 billion a year from the cartel's roughly $23 billion drug trade.

But in nearly every state where the army has deployed, residents have 
accused soldiers of grave human rights violations that now number in 
the hundreds. Here in the western state of Michoacan, Calderon's home 
state, more than 100 such violations have been alleged, including the 
fatal shooting Jan. 12 of a 17-year-old boy at a checkpoint.

In an anti-narcotics plan now before Congress, President Bush has 
proposed sending the Mexican military $205.5 million in equipment in 
2008, more than 40 percent of the proposed outlay for the year. The 
Merida Initiative, as the program is known, designates a portion of 
Mexico's proposed $950 million package for 2008 and 2009 for human 
rights training for police, prosecutors and prison officials, though 
none for the army.

"The military is committing excesses, and that is a reminder of the 
Dirty War," said Sergio Aguayo, founder of the nonprofit Mexican 
Human Rights Academy, referring to the period in the 1960s and '70s 
in which government troops are accused of having killed hundreds of 
student protesters and civil rights activists. A few government 
officials were briefly jailed, but there have been no major convictions.

A report issued in September by Mexico's government-sponsored 
National Human Rights Commission gave details of three cases that 
occurred during Calderon's military campaign, including in 
Nocupetaro. The commission concluded that 59 people here were 
subjected to "cruel and degrading" treatment at the hands of 
soldiers, including "arbitrary and illegal detentions," torture and looting.

The commission's head, Jose Luis Soberanes, urged Calderon to "get 
the armed forces back to the barracks and stop sending them on 
missions they are not trained for."

Mexico's army opened its first department-level human rights office 
this year. But the office is authorized only to pass on complaints, 
not initiate investigations on its own. Gen. Jose Antonio Lopez 
Portillo, who heads the office, said the military's human rights 
record during the deployment has been "satisfactory."

Of the 421 human rights complaints his office received between 
December 2006 and February 2007, he said, more than 100 have been 
dismissed for insufficient evidence. No soldiers have been convicted, 
he said, and only the case of a shooting in June at a checkpoint in 
Sinaloa state that killed two women and three children has reached 
the military courts. He declined to discuss the Nocupetaro case specifically.

"The message is clear," Lopez Portillo said. "There are very few complaints."

A Deadly Ambush

On May 1, the day before Norberto Ramirez said he was beaten, 
suspected drug cartel assassins ambushed an army convoy patrolling 
trafficking routes near his remote village. Five soldiers, including 
a colonel, were killed in the attack, which local residents contend 
was intended as a show of force by the cartels.

Most homes in this village, sprawled between craggy ranges in 
Michoacan's Tierra Caliente, have no telephones. Cellphone signals do 
not reach here, and the only Internet connection is in the mayor's office.

Because of its isolation, the village became an easy-to-protect 
headquarters of the small Nocupetaro cartel in the 1980s and '90s. 
Local officials estimate that half the town was once involved in the 
drug trade, mostly peasants tending plots of marijuana. But the 
village also hosted cartel leaders and other big drug traffickers, 
whose organization has outlived some of them.

In the late 1990s, the government moved against drug-trafficking in 
Michoacan, and the economic effects on the small-time growers and 
businesses they sustained were swift and devastating. The town 
emptied, with as many as a third of its residents heading to the 
United States during harvest seasons.

"It was like a huge factory closed," said the then-mayor, Marco 
Antonio Garcia Galindo, now 36. "It was better before the drug trade 
left because there was money, but it was also worse because this 
place was much more violent."

The trade soon returned to the region, taking a more violent turn 
that would peak in May.

A Swift Response

The army responded swiftly to the deadly ambush, pouring hundreds of 
troops into Nocupetaro and the surrounding region.

Over two days, soldiers ransacked houses, strapped villagers to 
wooden posts and robbed homes, according to human rights reports and 
interviews with more than a dozen villagers. Mexico's human rights 
commission cited physical evidence that four girls, all under 18, were raped.

The night the soldiers were killed, Ramirez, a wiry father of five 
with sad, sunken eyes, had gone to bed in his three-story concrete 
house in Caracuaro, a small town outside Nocupetaro. He had built the 
house himself with money earned during 27 years of migrant labor -- 
building highways in Texas, driving forklifts in Indiana, packing 
perfume in New Jersey.

In November 2006, tired of the months away from home, he said, he 
began buying cars in the United States for resale in Mexico. Just two 
days before the hooded soldiers roused him from sleep last May, he 
had cleared $500 on a 1990 Chevrolet Cheyenne pickup.

"You're coming with us," he recalled the soldiers telling him.

After taking his money, Ramirez said, the soldiers drove him to La 
Estrellita bar on the edge of Nocupetaro. They pounded his stomach 
and back with their rifles, placed his head inside the plastic sacks 
and jabbed him with electric cattle prods, he said. All along, he 
said, he told them he knew nothing about the ambush.

At the same time that Ramirez says he was being tortured, Garcia 
Galindo, the mayor, said he counted at least 300 soldiers in the 
village. The national human rights commission report said villagers 
described seeing men tied to posts and "asphyxiated by being 
submerged in basins of water," accounts corroborated in interviews 
conducted here recently.

Garcia Galindo, an articulate entrepreneur who owns a water 
purification plant, was overwhelmed. His police chief had only an 
elementary school education, no law enforcement experience and had 
been a migrant laborer until just before he took office. The village 
judge was the dentist.

With no sense of his legal options and the army in the village 
streets, Garcia Galindo said, he started calling government agencies.

No one returned his calls.

A Life Demolished

Ramirez said he was taken to a military prison where he was held for 
several days, then released without charge.

He returned home doubled over in pain, he said. Medical exams, the 
results of which he provided during an interview, showed severe 
damage to his liver and intestines. He underwent surgery but was 
hospitalized again later because of complications.

Each day, it seemed, a new bill arrived. The receipts are stuffed in 
two backpacks: $300 for medicine on Sept. 4; $450 on Sept. 5; $1,500 
on Sept. 8. There are months' worth of them. Unable to keep up, 
Ramirez sold his little rental house in December. It was to have been 
the future home of his 12-year-old son, Heriberto Ramirez.

Soon, he said, he plans to leave because he cannot find work. But the 
green card that allowed him to work in the United States was taken by 
soldiers, he said, and he doubts he will be able to secure a new one.

If he cannot, Ramirez said, he has another plan. He'll jump into the 
Rio Grande and swim. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake