Mexico City, (EFE) .- Torture in Mexico is a “generalized practice that occurs in a context of impunity”, and that, replacing due process, “has been used, among other purposes, as a method of research, obtaining confessions and manufacture of guilty,” said the global torture index (IGT), presented this Thursday in the capital of the country.
In addition, by 2025, the IGT classified Mexico with a “high risk of torture and ill -treatment”, based on the data collected in 2023 and 2024.
Mexico is one of the countries that is part of the first edition of the IGT, an unpublished tool, created by the World Organization against Torture (WTO) that is based on data collected by more than 200 local organizations worldwide and analyzes the situation in 26 countries, in five regions of the world.
Olga Guzmán, responsible for WTO Americas, said in conference that “the idea is that year after year we can continue to expand more countries.”
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He explained that its purpose is to annually evaluate the risk of being a victim of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in each country and monitoring the rule of law, democracy and respect for human rights.
Informal preventive detention, favors the incidence of torture
In the case of Mexico, the report said that “certain legal figures” and institutions have favored the incidence of this phenomenon, including “arbitrary arrests, roots, informal preventive detention, and the lack of will and capacity of the State” to investigate and prosecute those responsible.
In Mexico “2,881 cases of torture whose events occurred between the years of 2019 and 2024, of which 3,506 victims have been denounced,” according to information from the Technical Secretariat of Combat of the Torture of the Federal Institute of Public Defender (IFDP).
In addition, the index identified that in Mexico “torture is widespread during the first moments of detention” and intimately related to “the manufacture of illicit tests,”
The report stated that according to the National Population Survey of Liberty of 2021 generated by the INEGI, “an important part of the acts of torture committed by the security forces occur during the transfer before the jurisdictional authorities.”
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Manufacture of guilty
He also explained that the manufacture of culprits “represents evidence of the existence of a rule of selective law” and that “affirm the existence of a state plan or policy to arbitrarily stop innocent people.”
Guzmán said that the Observatory against torture in its 2023 report reported that “at least there are 4.592 investigations initiated by torture and ill -treatment at the country level and there are only 18 cases that have been prosecuted or presented before a judge, that is, 0.1%”.
“Torture, a repeated practice in jail”
Lucía Alvarado, whose brother was deprived of liberty, said that “in any prison in the country the inmates suffer from infrahuman living conditions, where torture is a repeated practice”, but not recognized by the authorities and linked to the use of the punitive power of the State, of corruption, impunity and discrimination.
While Osvaldo Salvatierra, arrested by police in August 2002 and released in December 2016, suffered torture by the agents along with their father and other relatives who remain imprisoned for the manufacture of a crime.
“We live in a system so sick that it has been impossible to find freedom for all those involved,” he said.
The Mexican organizations that collaborate with the IGT are: Documenta, Analysis and Action for Justice AC, Fundar, Center for Analysis and Research, the Justice Center for Peace and Development AC and the National Network of Independent Experts and Experts against torture.
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