MEXICO CITY — In a rebuke to Mexico, the United States has decided to withhold $5 million in drug war aid because of continued human rights violations, the State Department confirmed Monday.
The amount is just a small fraction of the overall aid that the United States supplies Mexico each year under a broad plan to train and equip its security forces and strengthen its criminal justice system. But the decision to withhold it offers a sharp message.
“This is unprecedented,” José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas division of Human Rights Watch, said of the decision, which was first reported by The Washington Post.
The State Department, he added, “has been systematically reluctant to use the leverage provided by law. What they have tended to emphasize is keeping the bilateral relationship as the principal objective, and human rights normally takes a back seat.”
Under the terms of the Merida Initiative, the program to help Mexico fight drug cartels and organized crime, 15 percent of the funds set aside for the Mexican police and military are conditional, based on improvements in Mexico’s respect for human rights.
In theory, the law was intended to encourage the Mexican government to take action, but in practice, the State Department typically reported each year that Mexico was complying, and the funds were released.
“The U.S. government has engaged in all sorts of contortions” to avoid offending its central allies — Mexico and Colombia — in the drug war, Mr. Vivanco said.
But after a year in which several highly publicized cases in Mexico, including the disappearance of 43 students, pushed the issue of human rights violations to the forefront, the State Department elected not to send a report. In the past, the funds had been delayed, but never withheld.
“This year, the department was unable to confirm and report to Congress that Mexico fully met all of the criteria,” said Mark Toner, a deputy spokesman for the State Department. “The 15 percent was redirected away from Mexico.” The money, amounting to about $5 million of the $195 million in approved Merida funding, went toward coca eradication in Peru.
The Merida Initiative was devised in 2007 to provide assistance to the Mexican government as it fought powerful drug gangs with seemingly infinite power to corrupt officials at every level.
Since then, Congress has appropriated about $2.5 billion in Merida aid. The money has gone to a wide variety of needs, including helicopters for the police and military, training for judges and prosecutors, forensic laboratories for investigators, and X-ray equipment for customs posts.
Mexico’s Foreign Ministry did not directly confirm the aid cut, but indicated the government’s displeasure with the decision in Washington.
“The U.S. government has recognized Mexico’s determination and progress to address particular human rights challenges,” the ministry said in a statement.
“Bilateral dialogue and cooperation are the appropriate ways to address the current challenges in this regard,” the statement added.
But Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who was responsible for the law placing the conditions on the 15 percent of aid, said, “The violence that infects large parts of Mexico, and the impunity for Mexican police and military officers who are corrupt or violate human rights, call into question the effectiveness of the current strategy.” Mr. Leahy added, “We have yet to see the political will necessary to effectively address these problems.”
Maureen Meyer, a Mexico expert at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group, said that Mexican officials regularly met with congressional staff members to convince them that Mexico was working to improve compliance on human rights.
“That only gets you so far when the reality on the ground is so different,” she said.
In addition, Ms. Meyer said, Congress had strengthened the conditions for the 15 percent of police and military aid since 2013, asking for evidence that the Mexican government was moving forward on eliminating torture and solving disappearances.
Repeated cases over the past year have cast a harsh light on the Mexican government’s failure to rein in the abuses of its security forces and to solve cases.
In particular, the disappearance of 43 students in the southern state of Guerrero in September 2014 has come to represent the yawning gap between Mexico’s public commitment to respecting human rights and the turmoil in the states subsumed in drug violence.
The government of President Enrique Peña Nieto said that the students had been attacked and abducted by corrupt local police officers, who handed them over to a local drug gang called Guerreros Unidos. Hit men from the drug gang confessed that the young men, who were training to become rural teachers, were transported to a remote garbage dump, killed and burned to ashes on a diesel-fueled pyre of tires and wood.
But an independent investigation by a group of experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights concluded last month that the students could not have been incinerated at the dump as the government described. The group also found that the military and the federal police were aware of the initial police attack on the students and did nothing to halt it.
In another high-profile case, soldiers killed 22 people, suspected of being members of a drug gang, in what the military and civilian authorities first described as a shootout last year. But Mexico’s national human rights commission later found that at least 12 of them had been executed.
Prosecutors initially charged seven soldiers and one lieutenant in the killings. After judicial rulings, only three soldiers remain to face trial in the case.
At the end of a recent visit to Mexico, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations commissioner for human rights, gave a stinging condemnation of the government’s failure to correct the violations and to prosecute crimes.
“For a country that is not engaged in a conflict, the estimated figures are simply staggering: 151,233 people killed between December 2006 and August 2015, including thousands of transiting migrants,” he said this month.
“Thousands of women and girls are sexually assaulted, or become victims of the crime of femicide,” he added. “And hardly anyone is convicted for the above crimes.”
Mr. al-Hussein also pointed to the 26,000 people who remain missing in Mexico. While organized crime groups are behind many of these disappearances, he said, security forces are believed to be responsible for many of the disappearances, extrajudicial killings and acts of torture.
Since taking office almost three years ago, Mr. Peña Nieto has promised to resolve those cases, but there has been almost no progress.
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