Mexico slams abduction claim

Mexican government officials on Monday rejected a recent UN report that quotes unofficial figures that more than 3,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in the country since President Felipe Calderón took office in 2006.

Speaking at a news conference, Calderón's deputy chief of staff Felipe de Jesús Zamora and Juan Manuel Gómez Robledo, deputy foreign minister, challenged the UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights to reveal the source of these figures. Both officials acknowledged that forced disappearances may have happened, but refuted the figure of 3,000 quoted in a report issued by the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID). At the end of March, the group concluded a visit to Mexico and released a preliminary report calling on the government to take a battery of steps to eradicate the problem. The recommendations include reforms to human-rights laws and keeping official statistics on the number of disappearances.

"The WGEID notes that there have been a number of problems identified in investigations into cases of enforced disappearances, including omissions, delays and lack of due diligence," the report states. "Many prosecutors refused to receive a complaint on enforced disappearance agreeing only to issue a prosecutorial certificate but not to initiate a proper criminal investigation."

The working group also stated that it "received a variety of information concerning the number of enforced disappearances." It said that civil human-rights organizations estimate 3,000, adding that Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) reports that complaints have increased from four in 2006 to 77 last year.

Gómez Robledo said that there is a difference between allegations made by citizens and actual complaints lodged with different organizations. "They even say that they had heard the 3,000 figure but the group only received 283 complaints, of which 124 were reported in 2010," he said.

Inquiry demanded

At the same time, Human Rights Watch asked federal authorities in Mexico to "take over the investigation" into the possible forcible disappearance of four civilians by police officers in Ciudad Juárez. HRW said that the four men in their twenties were stopped by police on the night of March 26 when they were traveling in a pickup truck, witnesses reported. Family members found the truck miles away from where the men had been detained and went to the police, who denied they had them in custody. The license plates were missing and the keys were on the floor of the truck, HRW says.