Freedom in the World 2004 - Mexico

Political Rights: 2
Civil Liberties: 2
Status: Free
Population: 104,900,000
GNI/Capita: $5,530
Life Expectancy: 75
Religious Groups: Roman Catholic (89 percent), Protestant (6 percent), other (5 percent)
Ethnic Groups: Mestizo (60 percent), Amerindian (30 percent), white (9 percent), other (1 percent)
Capital: Mexico City

Overview

As President Vicente Fox Quesada reached the halfway mark of his six-year presidency in 2003, his greatest achievement remained having bested the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 2000 presidential contest. Mexicans complained that they saw little progress in addressing the problems of poverty, corruption, and unemployment the charismatic rancher-politician had promised to fix. A July 2003 midterm election resulted in a stunning loss of congressional seats for the Fox's National Action Party (PAN), which already lacked a working majority in the legislative body, and striking gains for the opposition PRI, itself in the midst of internecine warfare, as well as for the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).

Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1810 and established itself as a republic in 1822. Seven years after the Revolution of 1910, a new constitution was promulgated under which the United Mexican States became a federal republic consisting of 31 states and a federal district (Mexico City). From its founding in 1929 until 2000, the PRI dominated the country by means of its corporatist, authoritarian structure maintained through co-optation, patronage, corruption, and repression. The formal business of government took place mostly in secret and with little legal foundation.

In 1999, the PRI nominated, in first-ever open-party competition, former interior minister Francisco Labastida, hailed by some as the politician's return to the helm of a party ruled during the three previous administrations by technocrats. In September, the PAN nominated Vicente Fox, governor of Guanajuato. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas took leave of the Mexico City mayoralty and announced he would again lead the PRD's national ticket. Despite election-eve polls suggesting Fox would lose, on July 2, 2000, he won Mexico's presidency with 42.5 percent of the vote. Labastida won 36 percent, and Cardenas, just 16.6 percent. By nearly becoming the largest party in the lower house of congress, the PAN won enough state governorships to put the long-ruling PRI in danger of becoming a regional party.

Following his election, Fox selected an eclectic cabinet whose new faces signaled an end to the revolving door of bureaucrats in top positions, and included leftist intellectuals, businessmen, and, as attorney general, a serving general – the latter choice bitterly opposed by human rights groups. The business-oriented Fox also announced plans to overhaul the notoriously corrupt and inefficient law enforcement agencies, breaking the political ties between the police and the presidency. In his inaugural address, Fox pledged to make Mexico an international leader in human rights, saying he would "protect them as never before, to respect them as never before."

In 2003, Fox was able to maintain his personal popularity even as the PAN suffered the consequences of the government's inability to deliver on millions of promised jobs, a migration accord with the United States, and serious economic reforms, including labor-market restructuring and privatization of the country's electrical sector. At the same time, inflation was reduced to just 4 percent; interest rates dropped 11 percent, to 6 percent, in three years; and a surge in investor confidence suggested that the country was on the verge of an economic takeoff. In the run-up to the July 2003 midterm legislative elections, Fox's supporters pointed to a string of achievements, such as serious anticorruption initiatives, the opening of secret government files and investigation of past political crimes, and the capture and imprisonment of a number of once-elusive drug kingpins. However, as Mexico's drug cartels were decapitated, a new breed of crime leaders came to the fore whom experts say are less violent, but also more efficient.

The July elections not only reaffirmed the dominant roles of opposition parties in both houses of congress, but also resulted in the PAN's losing the governorship in the prosperous industrial state of Nuevo Leon, long a party stronghold. The PAN's congressional vote dropped from 38 percent in 2000, to 30.5 percent, while the PRI won 38 percent and the PRD received 18 percent. The PRD not only increased its own congressional representation, but also consolidated its hold on Mexico City, the Western Hemisphere's largest urban area, winning the presidency of 14 of the city's 16 boroughs. The elections, in which 11 parties spent more than $500 million, were the most expensive in recent memory, but yielded a record low voter turnout. Fox was also criticized for spending millions of dollars on a media blitz touting his achievements in the immediate run-up to the elections.

Despite post-election promises by Fox to work harder to collaborate with the opposition on a reform agenda, the PAN's bickering with Fox over indigenous rights and fiscal reform, combined with jockeying within the unreformed PRI for the party's 2006 presidential nomination, made that possibility seem remote. The inability to achieve a meaningful reform of immigration policy with the United States, and the continued marginalization of Mexico's indigenous peoples added to concerns about whether Fox could achieve his goals. With its new international prominence as a nonpermanent member of the UN Security Council, the Fox government was unable to escape the limelight for its refusal to support military intervention by the United States and its allies in Iraq. The economic slowdown in the United States and increased competition from Asia continued to hurt Mexico's economic recovery.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

Mexicans can choose their government democratically. In 2001, 2002, and 2003, opposition parties made gains in state and municipal contests in elections that were generally considered to be free and fair. The president is elected to a six-year term and cannot be reelected. A bicameral congress consists of the 128-member Senate elected for six years, with at least one minority senator from each state, and the 500-member Chamber of Deputies elected for three years, 300 directly and 200 through proportional representation. Each state has an elected governor and legislature. In 2003, serious consideration was being given to a proposal to allow as many as one million Mexicans living in the United States to cast absentee votes in Mexican elections.

According a recent study by the Mexico chapter of Transparency International, some $2.3 billion (approximately 1 percent) of the country's economic production goes to officials in bribes, with the poorest families paying nearly 14 percent of their income in bribes. Corruption at the state-owned petroleum giant Pemex alone is estimated to cost the company more than $1 billion a year. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that between $25 billion and $30 billion of illegal drug money is laundered each year in Mexico and says that the country's financial, political, military, and judicial institutions facilitate those crimes. In November, the Mexican Senate approved a legislative package designed to prevent and detect terrorist financing by clamping stricter reporting requirements on financial institutions and setting down strict penalties for violations of those rules.

The media, while mostly private, largely depend on the government for advertising revenue. In 2000, President Vicente Fox pledged to end the PRI practice of buying favorable stories and vowed to respect media independence. Despite the improvements, however, violent attacks against journalists continue, although with a lower frequency than in past years. Reporters investigating police issues, narcotics trafficking, and public corruption remain at particular risk. Radio and television stations still operate under a law that allows the government to grant broadcast licenses at its discretion, rather than on the basis of professional criteria. In 2002, Mexico enacted its first freedom of information law, which expressly prohibits the government from withholding for any reason information about crimes against humanity or gross human rights violations. The law went into effect in June 2003. The government did not restrict Internet access, which was widely available across the nation, although much less so among the poor and the elderly, due to economic constraints or lack of computer literacy.

The constitution was amended in 1992 to restore the legal status of the Roman Catholic Church and other religious institutions. Priests and nuns were allowed to vote for the first time in nearly 80 years. Fox himself is the most conservative, fervently devout Mexican president in recent memory and was fined after the 2000 election for breaking election laws prohibiting the use of religious symbols. In 2003, a Roman Catholic cardinal who oversaw Vatican spending in Mexico was investigated in the wake of allegations he was using drug money to build churches. The government does not restrict academic freedom.

Constitutional guarantees regarding political and civic organizations are generally respected in the urbanized northern and central parts of the country. Political and civic expression, however, is restricted throughout rural Mexico, in poor urban areas, and in poor southern states. Civil society participation has grown larger in recent years; human rights, pro-democracy, women's, and environmental groups are active. In June, Fox signed legislation that banned all forms of discrimination, including that based on ethnic origin, gender, age, or religion.

The maquiladoras (export-processing zones) have fostered substantial abuses of workers' rights. Most maquiladora workers are young, uneducated women who accept lower pay more readily, with annual labor turnover averaging between 200 and 300 percent. Workers have no medical insurance, holidays, or profit sharing, and female employees are frequently the targets of sexual harassment and abuse. In 2003, Amnesty International released a report that criticized investigations by Mexican police to resolve the murders of at least 263 women and the disappearances of 4,587 more in Ciudad Juarez along the U.S. border. The report said that police in the state of Chihuahua used false evidence, torture, and inadequate forensic tests to investigate the killings of the women, who mostly worked in maquiladoras.

The justice system is based on the cumbersome nineteenth-century Napoleonic code, in which judges decide cases by reading documentary evidence. There is virtually no body of law governing juvenile justice. In most rural areas, respect for laws by official agencies is still tenuous at best, particularly in towns and villages that receive large influxes of dollars from relatives involved in narcotics trafficking in the United States. Lower courts and law enforcement in general are undermined by widespread bribery, despite efforts by the Fox administration toward reform. Torture, arbitrary arrest, and abuse of prisoners persist in many areas, although an investigation released in April by the Boston-based Physicians for Human Rights, conducted with the support of the Mexican government, said that torture was probably not as pervasive as it had been five years earlier. In a recent positive development, the Supreme Court of Mexico ruled in November that the "disappearances" of leftist activists in the 1960s and 1970s were kidnappings not subject to the statute of limitations. The decision paved the way for the arrest of former senior officials implicated in the rights crimes.

The role of the military in internal security – ostensibly to combat domestic terrorism, drug trafficking, and street crime – has contributed to grave human rights problems, particularly in rural areas. Because Mexico has no foreign enemies, the military, which operates largely beyond public scrutiny, serves mainly as an auxiliary police force. In places such as the states of Chiapas and Guerrero, army counterinsurgency units, moving through local civilian populations like an occupying force, continue to cause numerous rights violations. The military justice system allows for soldiers accused of rights violations to be tried in secret, and the outcomes of their trials are only occasionally made public. After the 2003 elections, informed observers said that it was much less likely that Fox would continue to make an issue of corruption and human rights violations committed under the PRI, given the need to cultivate the former ruling party's congressional delegation and Fox's reluctance to anger its powerful military allies.

Mexico's soaring crime rate and lack of effective law enforcement, characterized by an entrenched culture of bribery and disrespect for the law, are serious barriers to economic development. In Mexico City, approximately 80 percent of crimes go unreported because the notoriously underpaid police are viewed as either inept or in league with the wrongdoers; only about 6 percent of reported crimes are solved. Ten percent of all extortive kidnappings in Mexico are believed to be carried out by former or serving police officers. While Colombia is still the hemispheric leader in kidnappings, those are primarily political in nature; experts say that Mexico may hold the world's record for abductions for money. In early 2001, Fox announced a crusade to clean up Mexico's law enforcement system, urging Mexicans to report common crimes and announcing a citizen program to make the police more accountable by making their files more accessible to the public. In 2002, the center-left mayor of Mexico City announced he was hiring former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a security consultant, a move questioned by rights activists familiar with the New York City Police Department's record during the 1990s.

Dozens of labor and peasant leaders have been killed in recent years in ongoing land disputes, particularly in the southern states, where Indians constitute close to half the population. Most Native Americans are relegated to extreme poverty in rural villages lacking roads, running water, schools, and telephones. Indian groups said that a 2001 constitutional reform designed to strengthen their rights fell far short of addressing their concerns.

Domestic violence and sexual abuse remain serious problems, although the Fox government has pledged to fight a problem that some experts say affects 50 to 70 percent of women. Mexico is a source country for trafficked persons to the United States, Canada, and Japan, and a transit country for persons from various places, especially Central America and China. Internal trafficking is also a problem. In 2003, women held only one cabinet ministry, no governorships, and 23 percent of the seats in the lower house of congress.