Mexico: Officials apologize for rape of an indigenous woman
On Thursday, Mexico’s Interior Minister Alejandro Poire, apologized for the rape of indigenous woman Valentina Cantu by Mexican Soldiers. (Flickr: Gobierno Federal)
By MANUEL RUEDA
Channel: Latin American Affairs
Mexican officials, following the orders of an international court, held a public ceremony on Thursday to apologize for the rape of an indigenous woman in 2002.
Valentina Rosendo Cantu was only 17, when soldiers patrolling her village in Guerrero State beat her, raped her, and threatened to kill her after she tried to tell local authorities about the incident, forcing Cantu to flee her home in the municipality of Ayutla de los Libres.
On Thursday Cantu and Mexican interior minister Alejandro Poire, met at a small auditorium in Mexico’s recently inaugurated Memory and Tolerance Museum.
Poire walked towards the podium, and in front of some two hundred human rights activists, journalists, and supporters of Cantu, accepted responsibility for the soldiers’ crime.
“The state did not provide and seek justice for Valentina Rosendo Cantu,” Poire said. “The deviations of public servants that result in human rights abuses must be investigated and sanctioned, and reparations must be provided by the Mexican state,” he said.
Poire’s apology obeys a sentence imposed on Mexico by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an international tribunal based in Costa Rica, where Cantu presented her case with the help of human rights lawyers from Mexico and the U.S.
It is the third time this year that the Mexican government issues a formal apology on human rights abuses at the behest of the court. On Thursday Poire reiterated the government’s position on human rights abuses in Mexico, where more than 45,000 people have died from drug related violence since 2006.
“It is evident that these isolated cases do not represent in any way the policies of the Mexican state, which is oriented towards the promotion, respect, and guarantee of human rights,” he said.
Mexico’s Attorney General promised to investigate the crimes against Cantu, committed by soldiers who are still at large.
But even as officials take responsibility for some human rights abuses, tensions are increasing in Mexico between those who want international courts to get more involved in investigations, and government officials who prefer to have the local justice system deal with cases like Cantu’s.
In a highly publicized dispute, President Felipe Calderon recently threatened to sue a group of lawyers and activists who asked the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate if Calderon and top security officials have allowed Mexican forces to commit widespread acts of rape, torture, and killings that could qualify as crimes against humanity.
Calderon said that the lawyers who filed the petition at The Hague, were motivated by hatred and by politics, arguing that the Mexican legal system has the capacity to handle human rights cases on its own.
But in a letter to Calderon published today in Mexico’s Reforma newspaper, the activists struck back at the Mexican government.
“You have unleashed a war (against drug cartels), and this situation has plunged the country into a spiral of violence in which every day there is more deaths and injuries,” the letter reads. “If you don’t think that anyone in your government has committed crimes against humanity, then you shouldn’t worry about our request for an investigation,” it says.
