Mexico weaponises human rights

Critics are silenced as government officials are seen to rule in their own self-interest.

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It got so bad that even the person who’d sued for the punishment asked it be cut short. Too late, said Mexico’s Electoral Tribunal. Its verdict was final and unappealable after it had found Karla Estrella, described across the Mexican media as “a housewife,” guilty of political gender violence. Her crime had come in the form of a social media post where she implied that a congresswoman from the ruling coalition had only got the job because her husband is a high ranking member of the government.

If the punishment wasn’t cruel, then it was certainly unusual:

Estrella would have to return to X, the social media platform where she’d published the offending post, and apologise profusely and publicly every single day for a month to Karina Barreras, the congresswoman in question.

But, by day six, congresswoman Barreras was asking for the sentence to be cut short…

Mexico is a rather progressive place when it comes to the high status it gives to human rights. It has one of the most gender balanced governments in the world. “We’ve had a 30 year trajectory of incremental reforms to increase women’s political presence,” Carin Zissis, a former Wilson Center Fellow who covered the paradoxes of Mexico’s gender parity laws, “and during that time, a series of laws focused on gender based violence were passed. So those two things went hand in hand.”

During that time Mexico became a staunch defender of LBGTQ+ rights both at home and abroad. It has also sought to become a place of asylum for migrants.

Off paper, things are a different matter. Impunity is rife and many of the well-meaning laws to defend human rights of all sorts often go unenforced. Mexico is infamous for its feminicides and ranks second in the world for the murder of trans people despite its claims of support. Its treatment of migrants is also less than stellar when the defense of their human rights clashes with demands from Washington.

Until recently, Mexico could have been defined as a country with an inept State whose heart was ultimately in the right place. That seems to have changed recently though, as the government has increasingly turned to weaponise laws meant to defend the weak, using them instead to punish and silence critics.