Don’t ask (about the security budget), don’t tell (about torture)

This is disturbing:

Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission, known by the acronym CDHDF, called on the federal government Saturday to release a confidential United Nations report on torture in order to shed light on a crime that it says often goes unpunished.

A U.N. committee gathered evidence earlier this month on torture in prisons, migrant detention centers, and psychiatric wards. But the files cannot be opened without the government’s permission.

In the capital alone, the CDHDF has reported a total of 69 torture cases to authorities, but not a single city employee has been tried, the human rights agency said. “There is no clarity as to how investigative prosecutors define the crime of torture. We are in complete impunity,” commission official Alejandro Nuño Ruiz Velasco said.

He added that prosecutors have registered even more accusations of torture than the CDHDF, contributing to a backlog in investigations.

Torture is illegal in Mexico, but the Supreme Court has ruled that testimony obtained via torture can still be admissible as evidence.

(Nacha Cattan, The News )

Obviously, better police and prosecutors are needed (or better trained individuals, at any rate), but it’s hard to see how they’re going to come out of a budget with less funding for AFI agents and Public Ministers. There is however, a 50% increase in the “social communications” budget (the nice bureaucratic term for “propaganda) for the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, and for both the Secretaries of Public Security and Governance (“Interior Ministry”).

I guess selling torturers is a higher priority than hiring agents who can do their job without it.