The Latin America Working Group (LAWG) is a coalition of over 60 U.S. nongovernmental organizations working together to coordinate education and advocacy efforts on U.S. foreign policy toward Latin America. The coalition has a subgroup made up of representatives of the participating organizations interested in U.S. foreign policy with Mexico. In recent years, this subgroup has been dedicated to increasing the profile of human rights issues in the official U.S./Mexico bilateral dialogue.

Over a year and a half, the Mexico subgroup of the Latin America Working Group undertook a project to document implementation of the Leahy Law in Mexico. The Leahy Law, which, in different forms covers U.S. foreign assistance and defense programs, states that the U.S. cannot provide training or other assistance to units of a foreign military credibly accused of human rights abuses until action is taken against the accused. U.S. embassies worldwide are responsible for implementing the law and for vetting potential trainees and weapons recipients to ensure that weapons and training are not being transferred to units of the host nation’s military that might be implicated in human rights abuses. If action is taken against the accused, training and other assistance could then be given. The U.S. Embassy in Mexico uses both a database to vet potential trainees as well as a review process that involves different sections of the embassy.

The subgroup has a long-term relationship with a number of nongovernmental human rights groups in Mexico. For a few years, we encouraged these organizations to be in touch with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico about cases of human rights violations involving the military. While implementation of the Leahy Law was a priority for the subgroup, local organizations had their own priorities and, over time, it was our assessment that the local human rights groups did not regularly provide the embassy with this information. The subgroup had no way of knowing what information the embassy had obtained on human rights violations involving the military or how they were responding to that information. Different members of LAWG’s Mexico subgroup had participated in meetings with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico and discussed the Leahy Law, but we needed to find an accurate way to test the embassy’s claims that the law was being implemented.

During the course of the investigation, LAWG compiled information on over sixty cases of human rights violations allegedly involving the Mexican military and submitted that information to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. The process of submitting the information to the embassy and their responses are documented below.

At the end of our investigation, we concluded that while the U.S. Embassy had a mechanism to implement the Leahy Law, the embassy was not trying very hard to collect the information needed to make the law work. LAWG staff felt that the subgroup’s effort did push the embassy to make a greater effort to implement the Leahy Law in Mexico; however, implementation of this law in the long term cannot and should not depend on the work of nongovernmental agencies like LAWG. The embassies must be pressured to implement the law much more systematically.

CHRONOLOGY

November, 1999: The first task was to present the U.S. Embassy in Mexico with a list of cases where the Mexican military was the party accused of a human rights abuse. The first problem was that no human rights group in Mexico was systematically tracking human rights violations involving the military. There was no one place to go to collect the information, so a LAWG staffer was sent to Mexico City to compile an initial list of cases along with the basic documentation on those cases. LAWG staff worked with human rights groups in Mexico City compiling information on well-known cases documented by these groups and the press. The initial list consisted of 12 cases, all high-profile cases, including the El Charco massacre and the imprisonment of two environmentalist campesino leaders. Our assumption was if the embassy were performing the most basic tracking of human rights cases involving the military, these cases would appear in the embassy’s database used to vet applicants for military training.

May 31, 2000: The LAWG sent a letter to Brian Nichols, the deputy political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and the official responsible for implementing the Leahy Law. The purpose of the letter was to present an initial set of 12 cases and to “gauge the effectiveness of the Leahy Law in Latin America.” The letter asked the following questions,

Do these cases appear in the U.S. Embassy’s database compiled to track human right abuses in Mexico?

Were the units allegedly involved in these cases ever trained or otherwise assisted by the United States?

What further information does the embassy have regarding the military’s involvement in cases in which a specific unit is not identified?

What is being done in these cases to prosecute the accused, and how does this relate to Leahy Law implementation (i.e. have accused units been cleared to receive assistance because steps to prosecute them have been taken)?

November 7, 2000: Mr. Nichols responded with a letter to the LAWG, confirming that 7 of the 12 cases were included in the database, that three were under further investigation, and that two have been excluded due to insufficient information. Mr. Nichols states that the Defense Department, “does not train Mexican units, but rather individuals,” and that according to the embassy’s Military Liaison Office and the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas, none of the 14 names mentioned in the cases presented had received training.

This letter raised a number of questions, including how the eEmbassy was collecting information on cases, whether individuals or units were being vetted and who was already in the database. The LAWG’s Mexico subgroup did not feel that they learned enough from this communication and so undertook the compilation of more cases to present a more complete picture.

LAWG contracted a person in Mexico to follow local press reports, review human rights reports from local, state and national level human rights NGOs and government human rights bodies and gather the documentation on older and less prominent cases. Once again, LAWG did not independently investigate any cases, but merely gathered documentation collected by human rights groups, the press and the government’s own National Human Rights Commission.

February 16, 2001: The LAWG submitted a second letter to Mr. Nichols at the Embassy, then the political officer. This letter presented 30 more cases, including some cases that went back to 1996. This was done because in our view past human rights violators would not be caught by the vetting process if the older cases were not included in the vetting database. This is particularly important because there were a number of human rights abuse cases involving the Mexican military that dated from the mid-1990s.

The list submitted this time included a number of cases where the government’s own National Human Rights Commission had reviewed and made recommendations upon (by law the Commission cannot sanction). These cases should have been easily identifiable by the U.S. Embassy and would logically be eligible for the database.

To determine what embassy staff were doing to gather information on their own, we asked how many of the cases from the first set we submitted were in their database prior to our providing the information.

We also sought further clarification of the vetting process with respect to units versus individuals. At the beginning of the investigation we believed that while individuals were trained, the vetting process considered the units in which the individual had participated. The vetting process with respect to units and individuals became less clear as the investigation continued.

The letter asked the following questions with regard to the embassy’s response to the first letter:

Were the cases reported to be included in the Leahy database there before we presented the information to the embassy?

What was the outcome of the three cases under investigation?

Why had the embassy decided not to include two of the cases? (Both had been documented by a human rights group)

Can the embassy determine if any of the units a Mexican soldier has belonged to in the past have been involved in human rights violations? If so, does the embassy deny training to a soldier who was in a unit when that unit committed a human rights violation?

Is there a standard procedure for making a determination as to the validity of each case, which warrants inclusion in the database?

With respect to the new list of cases, we asked:

Are they in the database?

Do you have information on the alleged aggressor(s) for cases where the alleged aggressors’ individual identities are not indicated?

Do the units allegedly involved contain soldiers that have been trained or otherwise assisted by the United States? Do you have sufficient information to make that determination?

Does the embassy know what, if anything, is being done in these cases to prosecute the accused or implement CNDH recommendations, and how does this relate to Leahy Law implementation (i.e. have accused units been cleared to receive assistance because steps to prosecute have been taken)?

CONGRESSIONAL RESPONSE

At the end of this process, LAWG staff met with and delivered the findings from its study to Senator Leahy’s staff. The Senate Appropriations Committee’s report accompanying the FY 2002 Foreign Aid Appropriations bill included the following language that addressed some of the concerns raised by this investigation. The language states:

The Committee has again included a provision, identical to last year, which seeks to ensure that U.S. assistance does not go to units of foreign security forces whose members have been credibly implicated in human rights violations, unless the foreign government is taking effective measures to bring the individuals responsible to justice. By effective measures, the Committee intends that the individuals face impartial criminal prosecution or appropriate and timely disciplinary action in accordance with local law. The purposes of this provision are to reduce the chance that U.S. training or equipment goes to human rights violators, uphold the rule of law, and promote accountability for political crimes of violence. The Committee is aware that some U.S. embassies have expressed confusion about the meaning of ‘‘unit’’ for purposes of this provision. The Committee intends that ‘‘unit’’ is to be construed as the smallest operational group in the field that has been implicated in the reported violation. The Committee notes that in order to implement this provision, it is necessary for U.S. embassies to know which units are to receive U.S. assistance and to have in place the necessary agreements and mechanisms to monitor their use of the assistance.

The Committee is concerned about the failure of some U.S. embassies to put in place effective mechanisms for collecting evidence and implementing this provision, and therefore believes that a centralized system is clearly needed. Specifically, the Committee requests the Bureau for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor to establish and maintain an electronic database of credible evidence of gross violations of human rights by units of foreign security forces. Each U.S. embassy should designate an appropriate official to collect and submit data to the database from a wide range of sources on a regular basis. Such a database would be one important depository of evidence for making determinations regarding the implementation of this provision, and should be accessible to other appropriate government departments and agencies and the Congress.

LAWG’S ASSESSMENT OF ITS OWN INVESTIGATION

During this year-and-a-half investigation, LAWG presented 62 cases to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City in an attempt to assess the implementation of the Leahy Law. Our general conclusions were the following:

While the U.S. Embassy in Mexico had a process in place to implement the Leahy Law—a database and a practice of consulting with various embassy and State Department offices—they had not collected the basic information needed to implement the law. If only four of the first dozen cases that we presented were in the database prior to our presentation of the information, we have little confidence that many of the other cases we compiled were recorded by the embassy prior to our research. While the structure for implementation was present, successful implementation of the law could not happen because the information that proposed trainees should have been vetted against did not exist.

Furthermore, the standard for including cases in the Leahy Law database was never entirely clear. We had vetted the cases that we provided to the embassy and eliminated any that did not have sufficient information from a credible source to back them up. Even then, a number of the cases were presented were not included in the database. And this does not appear to be because action was taken by the military against the accused. In only a handful of cases does anyone appear to have information about action taken against the accused.

While embassy staff had good relationships with a number of the Mexican human rights groups, they were not seeking out the information needed to build an effective database.

Embassy staff reported that they never asked the Mexican military for information about prosecutions. Without this information, the law could not be fully implemented.

Embassy staff’s assertion that the vetting process had landed them “no hits” was not shocking, considering how little the database seems to have contained.

By continuing to provide the embassy with information, LAWG took it upon itself to encourage the embassy to implement the law. However, this was not a long-term solution. This law cannot be implemented based on the investigation and presentation of information by an outside source like the LAWG.

WHAT TO WATCH OUT FOR CARRYING OUT A SIMILAR INVESTIGATION ON ANOTHER COUNTRY

Is the Leahy Law implementation a priority for local human rights groups?It likely won’t be, which will require more work on the part of the U.S. NGO.

Is the embassy proactive in collecting data?

Is the embassy “actively retroactive” in collecting case information?

How is “unit” defined?The intended definition as explained in the above quoted Committee Report should be monitored.

Does embassy staff contact the military to determine what unit might have been involved in various cases or to see whether or not cases had been prosecuted by the military?

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ATTEMPTS TO TRACK LEAHY LAW IMPLEMENTATION IN OTHER COUNTRIES

Coordinate your work with local human rights organizations.Having someone on the ground to collect and track information is indispensable.However, don’t assume that the local organizations will give implementation of the Leahy Law the same priority you do.This is a U.S. law and it is the responsibility of U.S. citizens to see that it is implemented.It may also be dangerous for local organizations to track implementation of the Leahy Law, and these risks must be carefully considered.

Try to ascertain the extent of information included in the Leahy Law database before you begin. This may not be possible. If not, try to assess how much new information you are providing for the database.

Collect a list of cases, present them to the U.S. Embassy in said country and ask if these cases are present in the database. Prior to presenting cases you should check the Foreign Military Training Report from the Departments of Defense and State covering 1998 to 1999, and 2001 to 2002. These were the years that the document did not classify information on the foreign units trained. If you are familiar with units that have been accused of abuse, look to see if they were trained. Monitor other annual editions of the Foreign Military Training Report for information on units trained.

Ask how many “hits” the database has received. Ultimately you have to determine if lack of hits has to do with an inadequate database, because there are not many human rights violations, because the interpretation of unit is very restricted or because the host nation military is not requesting training for questionable units.
Inquire about the interpretation of the Leahy Law being employed. Is the database set up so that it checks both unit and individual. Are units or individuals being vetted?

The Leahy Law covers security forces, military as well as police forces. Our research was limited to cases involving the military. If possible, form your research and inquiry to address both.

Try to write airtight questions. For example, in our first inquiry we asked if the cases we presented were in the database. We should have asked if the cases we were presenting were in the database prior to presentation of the information, and then ask which cases were added to the database, and if cases were not added, why.