Mexico's human rights chief accused of ignoring powerful abusers

Mexico City As Mexicos national human rights ombudsman, Raul Plascencia Villanueva oversees a sizable corps of investigators who look into the atrocities and massacres that commonly put the country in the headlines.

The job has made Mr. Plascencia a raft of enemies, but they are not the crooked cops and corrupt politicians behind some of the abuses currently roiling Mexico. His fiercest foes are human rights monitors, who say he is inept, unconcerned about crime victims, and beholden to politicians.

They are battling Plascencias attempt to obtain another five-year term to lead theNational Human Rights Commission, a semi-autonomous entity that receives its budget equivalent of $115 million entirely from the federal government.

Led by a former Roman Catholic priest, Alberto Athie, some 80 groups advocating for human rights, social justice, and more effective government presented Congress with a demand last month that Plascencia be impeached from his post. They accused him of casting a blind eye on innumerable human rights violations in Mexico.

The movement against Plascencia began with the failure of the National Human Rights Commission to shed light on the late June killing of 22 civilians southwest of Mexico City that eventually was tied to Mexican soldiers by the news media. It intensified after the disappearance late last month of 43 student teachers whod been detained by police in Guerrero state. They remain missing.

The damage to the country is enormous. Rule of law is at stake, Mr. Athie says.

Nearly a quarter of a century ago, legislators created the National Human Rights Commission to fight the kind of impunity that allowed police and soldiers to routinely use torture, and let the government in the 1960s and 1970s launch a dirty war on leftists that left hundreds disappeared.

The commission has no judicial or police powers. It receives complaints, deploys investigators to probe them, and issues recommendations. But the ombudsman potentially has a powerful bully pulpit to ensure protection for victims of official abuse, to air cases in public, and to put a spotlight on officials or institutions that prey on the citizenry.

In certain ways, the debate swirling around Plascencia is emblematic of deeper concerns about Mexicos governance. Legislators create institutions to investigate or prosecute wrongdoing that look good on paper, but then appoint ineffectual leaders who respond to political interests and allow operations to unfold with little transparency and few results, allowing corruption and abuses to go on.

Mexico suffers from a disease impunity, says Ernesto Lopez Portillo Vargas, head of the Institute for Security and Democracy, a think tank on security reform. It is a system of impunity throughout the institutional establishment.

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Mexico's human rights chief accused of ignoring powerful abusers