Mexico City police abuse continues
Mayor had campaigned on end of corruption, declared it over
MEXICO CITY — Juan Carlos García Cortés was running errands in Mexico City on his moped when a taxi cut him off and two men jumped out. They shoved him in the back, threw a jacket over his head and began beating him.
García’s abductors weren’t street-level criminals — they were members of Mexico City’s newly created elite police unit tasked with combating kidnapping and extortion, the very crimes inflicted on García.
After beating García, the officers threatened to charge him with homicide if he didn’t pay them about $2,500, according to depositions from the García family and a formal complaint filed with the attorney general’s office. It was more than he earned in eight months at a taco stand where he worked.
Mexico has long had major problems with corruption within its police forces. However, Mexico City’s ambitious mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, a top contender to succeed the country’s president, made stamping out official corruption in her own force a priority.
In June 2020, just over a year and a half after taking office, she declared victory. “All of those practices involving torture, illegality, et cetera, have been totally eliminated,” Sheinbaum said at a news conference.
Yet García’s ordeal happened in 2021. The episode is among thousands of misconduct claims reported by Mexico City residents against the capital’s main police force in recent years, despite the mayor’s declaration. Even senior police officials say corruption hasn’t been eradicated from the force of more than 81,000 officers. The numbers bear that out.
Interviews with current and former police officers, government records and documents reviewed by the involving illegal arrests and abductions show Sheinbaum’s police force has, in some ways, gotten worse since she took office.
Instead of curbing physical abuse and false arrests, police and city officials have turned a blind eye, current and former police officials say — often leaving victims, many of them poor, with little recourse after enduring violent human rights abuses.
In the nearly four years since Sheinbaum took office, the city’s human rights commission has received more than 5,000 reports against the police classified as acts of bodily harm and violations of personal liberty — incidents that include illegal arrests, torture and death threats.
There were more than 1,900 such reports just in 2021, the highest number in a single year since 2004, when the commission first started publicly categorizing the types of claims made against government employees.
Allegations of torture, according to the commission, include electric shocks, strangulation, simulated executions and sexual assault. In the first six months of this year, the commission fielded more reports compared with the same period last year.
The commission — led by an official elected by Mexico City’s Congress — reviews every report and then refers it to the relevant department for investigation. A police spokesperson told the Times that since 2019, 477 officers have been dismissed for not upholding the force’s principles or for failing a background check.
The increase in reports of misconduct could be a sign that residents have more ways to report abuse than they did under the previous mayoral administration, said Pablo Vázquez Camacho, a deputy secretary of the city’s main police force.
“There is greater opportunity to file reports by residents,” he said. “It is likely that more investigations are being opened because we are investigating more.”
Vázquez, however, disagreed with Sheinbaum’s view police corruption, including extortion of citizens, had ended. “It is not very realistic to say that it has been eradicated completely,” he said. “But we are in the process of eradicating it.”
The police abuses heavily target low-income residents who often cannot afford legal representation, according to current and former police officers.
“They target these vulnerable groups because they believe they don’t have the knowledge or the education to defend their rights,” said a former Mexico City police officer, Jaime Ramón Bernal García, who was accused of disobeying an order and fired in 2014. He said his dismissal came after he had demanded better labor conditions for officers.
Still, Sheinbaum’s office reaffirmed the mayor’s achievements.
“All practices of torture and illegal arrests have stopped occurring,” the mayor’s office told the Times in a statement in March. Last month, the office told the Times the force had bolstered its human rights training this year to address behavior cited in the most common cases of police misconduct.
“We want citizens to know that we will not permit nor tolerate these actions,” Sheinbaum’s office said.