Mexico gets drug-war money despite abuses

updated 8:16 p.m. ET June 27, 2008

HUETAMO, Mexico - Victor de la Paz was riding back from school on a January evening with a friend, just three blocks from home, when uniformed men emerged from the darkness and motioned for them to stop.

Moments later, a soldier opened fire with an assault rifle. De la Paz, 16, slumped to the ground in his bloodied school uniform, already fatally wounded as the soldiers wrestled his body from the car.

The army said the boys ignored commands to pull over, but Victor's father said shots were fired without enough warning.

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission has documented 634 such cases of alleged abuse by the military since President Felipe Calderon sent more than 20,000 soldiers across the nation to take back territory controlled by drug traffickers.

But $400 million in drug-war aid just approved by the U.S. Congress doesn't require the U.S. to independently verify that the military has cleaned up its fight, as many American lawmakers and Mexican human rights groups had insisted.

Instead, the money comes with few strings and no yearly evaluations — exactly what Calderon wanted.

"The U.S. government has finally recognized that this is a shared problem, a bilateral one," Interior Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino said Friday.

Mexico's ruling party had complained that tying the money to a U.S. evaluation of Mexico's human rights record would violate national sovereignty. And many citizens defend the military, arguing that soldiers can't be hamstrung by fears of human rights investigations as they risk their lives confronting drug traffickers.

"The enemy is not very respectful of human rights," said Mexico City banker Roberto Gutierrez.

The drug cartels that supply cocaine to U.S. consumers have killed more than 4,000 people since Calderon took office in December 2006, including more than 450 police, soldiers, prosecutors or investigators.

Crime has dropped in some areas since soldiers arrived, and Calderon's bare-knuckles fight has helped make him the second-most popular president in the Americas behind Colombia's Alvaro Uribe, according to a Mitofsky poll this month.

Reports of human rights abuses by military
But human rights groups say the military operates with impunity, torturing and killing innocents and pillaging homes. And while the army says it punishes soldiers when internal investigations prove abuse, it rarely shares details with the public.

Michoacan, a largely rural state whose Pacific coast and rugged mountains easily hide marijuana plantations and cocaine shipments, has seen the most abuse allegations. It is Calderon's home state, and the first place he sent soldiers after taking office.

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