The vicious circle of impunity

A news story published by El Universal, Mexico City’s newspaper, documents one of the main problems afflicting Mexico today: impunity.

Using the equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act, El Universal found that 95 percent of the drug war-related deaths were not under investigation. This means that out of more than 22,000 deaths registered between 2006 and today, there are only 1,200 investigations currently going on.

What happens with the rest of the cases?

Who knows, but for sure, the criminals are walking down the streets without fear of facing any justice.

Impunity is not a new problem at all. Mexicans have been suffering the consequences of this problem for a long time, and some figures illustrate the evidence of this: It is estimated that only 3 percent of Mexico’s judicial trials ended up with a sentence. And according to official estimates, criminals have only a 3 percent chance of being detained after committing a crime.

Impunity is the product of corruption and the resulting lack of trust in the judicial system. It can be framed as a vicious cycle--people decide not to report crime because they don’t trust the system, and because people don’t report them, criminals feel free to do whatever they please.

Luis de la Barreda, director of the Instituto Ciudadano de Estudios Sobre la Inseguridad, a non-profit organization that studies issues of public safety, has said that eight out of each 10 homicides committed in Mexico are not punished.  In comparison, countries such as Japan or Spain have a rate of nine people penalized for every 10 homicides.

Mexican officials have promoted a judicial reform to solve some of these problems, however, the proposed measures don’t look enough to change the current culture of impunity and corruption and to create a sense of trust in the judicial system. The key is to recover citizens’ confidence in their authorities, but when things are so deteriorated as they look now in Mexico, that simple objective could be extremely difficult to achieve.

What could be worse for a country than to have crime out of control?. A problem such as this, not only erodes the social fabric, but also breaks the rules of peaceful coexistence among human beings.

Until now, Mexicans have learned how to live with this problem without it affecting their peaceful coexistence, but during times when criminality is surpassing the ability of the state to control it, the day of an eye-for-an-eye justice will not be very far away. And that would be the worse scenario in front of us.

 

 

Comments

[Jennifer]

Using the words "Mexico" and "Justice" in the same breath is a joke.

Mexico hasn't just tolerated rampant corruption at every level, it's part of the national tradition.

For decades the rich owned the corrupt government exclusively, so there was an artificial state of parity. Everything ran relatively smoothly, the rich families cornered all money and wealth, the government got their share and the people were kept in their place or encouraged to go to the US if they didn't like things at home.

The new mega-wealth of the drug cartels upset this crooked system. They out-bribed the old rich for the government favor (or a critical portion of it) or used violence to get their way. Petty criminality ceased to be policed and the entire social order is terrorized in a battle of money and firepower.

Mexico is far beyond just the wheels coming off the bus. The bus has crashed and is headed down a steep cliff towards disaster.