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In Mexico, War on Drug Cartels Takes Wider Toll
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Mexico's army opened its first department-level human rights office this year. But the office is authorized only to pass on complaints, not initiate investigations on its own. Gen. José Antonio López Portillo, who heads the office, said the military's human rights record during the deployment has been "satisfactory."
Of the 421 human rights complaints his office received between December 2006 and February 2007, he said, more than 100 have been dismissed for insufficient evidence. No soldiers have been convicted, he said, and only the case of a shooting in June at a checkpoint in Sinaloa state that killed two women and three children has reached the military courts. He declined to discuss the Nocupetaro case specifically.
"The message is clear," López Portillo said. "There are very few complaints."
A Deadly Ambush
On May 1, the day before Norberto Ramírez said he was beaten, suspected drug cartel assassins ambushed an army convoy patrolling trafficking routes near his remote village. Five soldiers, including a colonel, were killed in the attack, which local residents contend was intended as a show of force by the cartels.
Most homes in this village, sprawled between craggy ranges in Michoacan's Tierra Caliente, have no telephones. Cellphone signals do not reach here, and the only Internet connection is in the mayor's office.
Because of its isolation, the village became an easy-to-protect headquarters of the small Nocupetaro cartel in the 1980s and '90s. Local officials estimate that half the town was once involved in the drug trade, mostly peasants tending plots of marijuana. But the village also hosted cartel leaders and other big drug traffickers, whose organization has outlived some of them.
In the late 1990s, the government moved against drug-trafficking in Michoacan, and the economic effects on the small-time growers and businesses they sustained were swift and devastating. The town emptied, with as many as a third of its residents heading to the United States during harvest seasons.
"It was like a huge factory closed," said the then-mayor, Marco Antonio García Galindo, now 36. "It was better before the drug trade left because there was money, but it was also worse because this place was much more violent."
The trade soon returned to the region, taking a more violent turn that would peak in May.
A Swift Response
The army responded swiftly to the deadly ambush, pouring hundreds of troops into Nocupetaro and the surrounding region.
Over two days, soldiers ransacked houses, strapped villagers to wooden posts and robbed homes, according to human rights reports and interviews with more than a dozen villagers. Mexico's human rights commission cited physical evidence that four girls, all under 18, were raped.
