We don’t need no stinkin’ rule of law

There could be a huge problem coming out of the Michoacan arrests.  Except on the grounds that the accused have rights to a fair trial, no one is going to defend corrupt officials… BUT…

Miguel Angel Rivera of La Jornada  translated by Kenneth Edmunds in The [Mexico City] News):

“…  there’s the question of whether it’s required by the Constitution of Michoacán to proceed first with the desafuero of the mayors.”

…  And there’s the inevitable political angle: What if some or all of the accused are freed on technicalities, but not until after the July 5 elections?

Desafuero may be an odd concept to those familiar with Ango-American jurisprudence, but it is meant to protect the elected official from the whimsy of the ruler. While it hasn’t historically been a problem in the United States, Latin America, especially, is full of examples of popularly elected local leaders being “punished” for political inconvenience, by leaders using the excuse of minor (or major) criminal behavior.   The most notorious was the attempt in 2004-05 to unseat Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador as Jefe de Goberierno based on his allegations that he improperly violated a land-owners’ rights in the District’s acquisition of an access road for an emergency room for the ABC Hospital.

A criminal indictment disqualifies one from seeking public office, and it’s not clear that the Federal officials checked whether or not Michaocan’s own laws require disafuero for municipal officials.

This issue is coming up just as Amnesty International’s Annual Report on Human Rights (via “Gancho Blog“) highlights these specific problems with the Mexican federal legal system:

Serious human rights violations committed by members of the military and police included unlawful killings, excessive use of force, torture and arbitrary detention. Several journalists were killed. Human rights defenders faced threats, fabricated criminal charges and unfair judicial proceedings.

Patrick Corcoran, at Gancho Blog (who seems to be a bigger fan of the Calderon Administration than I am) writes:

But, knowing what we know now, the suggestion that the government should have waited until after the elections to execute the arrests is silly. In six weeks time, the offending politicions might have destroyed evidence and covered their tracks. They also almost certainly would have continued supporting murderous criminal organizations for another a month and a half. That could well have meant several tons of cocaine safely smuggled through the state, and several dozen dead bodies thanks to the gangs that these officials were protecting. Six days would have been one thing, but six weeks is quite another.

That sounds to me like the U.S. defenses of torture based on the “ticking time bomb” scenario… the bad guys (first accepting that the accused ARE the bad guys) COULD continue their nefarious plans while the niceties of the law are observed.  And, the elected officials arrested may have been crime victims, rather than active participants — forced to pick their security secretaries by the narcos under threat of violence — according to a story in today’s Latin American Herald Tribune.

Given the track record of Federal prosections in Michoacan in arresting people, making the news and then later saying “oops, we nabbed the wrong guys” (as followed the bombings in Morelia last Independence Day), the suggestion is not at all silly.  Nor unreasonable.