Human rights in Mexico
The problems include torture, extrajudicial killings and summary executions,[2] police repression,[3] sexual murder, and, more recently, news reporter assassinations.
It also states that Mexican security forces commit unlawful killings of civilians at an alarmingly high rate and widely use torture including beatings, waterboarding, electric shocks, and sexual abuse as a tool to gain information from detained victims.
[8] Violence against the media is a serious issue because while it seriously threatens the livelihood of members of the press, it also creates an “environment of fear” where free information is stifled, negatively affecting healthy democracy, and hinders freedom of expression.
[9] Though the exact figures of those killed are often conflicting,[10] press freedom organizations around the world agree through general consensus that Mexico is among the most dangerous countries on the planet to exercise journalism as a profession.
[11][12][13] The Human Rights Watch states that Mexican authorities are ineffective in their attempts to investigate criminal actions against journalists.
[14] Information and the press was often controlled in Mexico by chayote, or one-off payments, or embute, regular pay-offs given in return for twisting the stories journalists put out so they portray whatever side the bribing party prefers.
[9] Nearly 100 media workers have been killed or disappeared since 2000, and most of these crimes remained unsolved, improperly investigated, and with few perpetrators arrested and convicted.
[21] Local activists believe that these cases often remain unsolved, blaming the police for a lack of interest in investigating them and for assuming that gays are somehow responsible for attacks against them.
"[28] In September 2014, several Mexican human rights groups and International Federation for Human Rights, had filed a complaint with the office of the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, asking it to investigate the “systematic and widespread” abuse of thousands of civilians by the army and the police in their fight against organized crime.
[29] On 26 August 2022, the Human Rights Watch reported that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s planned to formally transfer control of the National Guard—the main federal law enforcement agency charged with public security operations—from the Public Security Ministry to the Defense Ministry.
Some factors that enable rape in a militarized border zone are the wide discretionary power that border enforcements have while performing their job, ineffective and misguided hiring which leads to inefficient and questionable staff members, the failure to enforce and abide by law enforcement standards, a lack of reporting on these crimes by other militarized border zone officials owing to a “code of silence,” and warlike characteristics being forced onto a geographic region that makes human rights violations easier to commit especially in an area of high militarization.
In recent years they've been related to the Mexican drug war, but also include prison riots, political motivated massacres, and conflicts in regional areas.
Although the Seguro Popular de Salud program worked to provide universal health insurance to those who did not have it, a stark rise in homicides slowed life expectancy gains for women.
Because these women come from impoverished backgrounds, they do not have the financial resources to avoid public transport and walking alone late at night in dangerous areas.
[38] Scholar Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos asserts that state and country security authorities fail to fulfill their sworn duties to prevent and punish the murder of women, and this creates an environment of impunity concerning female homicides.
[34] Dr. Howard Campbell, a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso, argues that women at the top of the social structure may be empowered and liberated by participating in the drug trade, but notes that women at the bottom face considerable violence, stress, and anxiety while enjoying little of the benefits of participating in the drug trade.
The problem is especially pronounced in northern border areas such as Tijuana, where police are engaged by drug traffickers to protect and enforce their illicit interests.
