MEXICO CITY (AP) — Lawmakers from Mexico’s ruling party on Wednesday re-elected the head of the National Human Rights Commission despite widespread opposition and her failure to call the government out on abuses.
Rosario Piedra’s re-election in a party-line congress vote appeared to be another example of the ruling Morena party’s attempts to weaken independent oversight bodies. Morena has proposed eliminating many other oversight, transparency and freedom of information agencies, claiming they cost too much to run.
Mexico’s civil rights and nonprofit groups are almost unanimous in their criticism of Piedra’s re-election.
“This is an undeserved award for a career marked by passivity, the loss of independence and the weakening of the institution,” the human rights center Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez wrote on its social media accounts.
A devoted supporter of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who left office on September 30, Piedra once confirmed that none of the deaths caused by the armed forces under his rule were illegal or unjustified. She shared the former president’s delight in attacking and criticizing other independent human rights groups.
Since her first election in 2019, Piedra has done little to investigate allegations of massacres or extrajudicial killings by soldiers and members of the militarized National Guard, to whom López Obrador has given sweeping powers.
Despite receiving more than 1,800 civilian complaints against the armed forces between 2020 and 2023, her commission made only 39 recommendations, and most of the few military cases her commission did prosecute involved abuses committed under previous administrations .
The rights commission has the power to make non-binding recommendations to government agencies. If they don’t agree to follow the recommendations, they are at least legally obliged to explain why.
Piedra has focused the committee’s work almost exclusively on issuing recommendations in cases where people have not received proper care in government-run hospitals. These recommendations achieve little because they do not address the central problem of underfunded, poorly equipped hospitals forced to treat too many patients.
Sometimes Piedra pretended that human rights violations no longer existed under López Obrador. In 2019, she expressed disbelief when asked about the killings of journalists, despite the fact that nearly a dozen were killed in López Obrador’s first year in office.
“Are they going to kill journalists?” she said with an expression of disbelief.
Piedra comes from a well-known activist family: her mother founded one of the first groups in Mexico to demand answers for families whose relatives were kidnapped and disappeared by the government in the 1960s and 1970s. But even her mother’s group, the Eureka Committee, did not support Piedra’s re-election.
“Her actions appear to support the impunity of perpetrators of government terrorism, and the government’s line of obedience and forgetting” of rights abuses, the commission wrote in a statement.
Piedra broke with two important traditions: she was a member of the ruling party when she was elected to her first term in 2019. The task usually went to impartial human rights experts.
And she has openly endorsed and supported the government’s policies and actions. Previous commission heads had a more critical relationship with the government.
Piedra also failed to make the final cut for candidates for the post this year during a congressional investigation into their qualifications, but was still placed on the ballot. She also apparently forged a letter of recommendation after a bishop and human rights activist said a letter she submitted in support of her re-election was not signed by him.
Piedra will serve under new President Claudia Sheinbaum, another devoted follower of López Obrador, who took office on October 1. On Sheinbaum’s first day as president, the military killed six migrants near the border with Guatemala; Ten days later, soldiers and National Guardsmen killed three bystanders in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo while pursuing suspects.
Sheinbaum’s third week as president ended with the killing of a crusading Catholic priest who had been threatened by gangs and a crooked encounter in the northern state of Sinaloa in which soldiers killed 19 drug cartel suspects but suffered no scratches themselves. That brought back memories of past human rights abuses, such as a 2014 incident in which soldiers killed about a dozen cartel suspects after they surrendered.
The ostensibly left-wing government has been quick to criticize human rights groups and activists who expose abuses.
In June, an outspoken volunteer advocate for missing people found an apparent dump of human remains in Mexico City, embarrassing ruling party officials who had done little to search for such clandestine graves. City prosecutors lashed out at her, claiming that “the chain of custody” of the evidence had been tampered with, which could lead to charges.
