Mexico City – The Mexican government said Friday that it will discipline any police officer found to have committed abuses in the course of quelling what amounted to a popular uprising last week in a town north of this capital.
Two days of clashes in San Salvador Atenco between flower vendors and their supporters, on one side, and police on the other left one young man dead, dozens injured and 189 people under arrest.
Mexico’s deputy secretary of public safety, Miguel Angel Yunes, said Friday that the 3,000 federal and state police sent to put down the disturbance in the town had been instructed not to carry firearms.
“At the bottom of this issue, a group of people want to commit violence, want to subvert order and want the police to stand by with their arms folded,” Yunes told La W radio.
Asked about charges that some police sexually accosted women during the events of May 3-4, he said that as of now, “there is no formal accusation.”
“If there were to be a concrete charge about a specific act and it is borne out, the person responsible must be severely punished,” the official said.
He went on to urge the National Human Rights Commission, a state-funded but autonomous entity, to act with “responsibility” and “prudence” as it investigates allegations of police misconduct in Atenco.
Rapporteurs from the CNDH, as the commission is known, have been taking statements from some of those arrested, who said they suffered arbitrary arrest, beatings and robberies, among other abuses, at the hands of police.
The head of the CNDH team, Susana Thalia Pedrosa, told EFE Friday that it will be up the attorney general’s office in the state of Mexico to determine if any of the women detainees were molested by cops.
She noted, however, that several different women had provided accounts of sexual assault that “coincide in time, form and place.”
Attorney Barbara Zamora, who is representing some of the Atenco detainees, said in an interview with Mexican radio that the reason for the lack of formal charges against police is that some of the victims remain behind bars pending payment of their bail.
“I have knowledge of four (cases), but I believe there are more,” Zamora said of the purported rapes.
The CNDH is expected to issue its preliminary report on the San Salvador Atenco episode within the next few days.
A judge ordered earlier this week that 28 alleged ringleaders stand trial for kidnapping police officers and blocking roads during the Atenco uprising, in which authorities faced more than 400 peasants armed with machetes, sticks, stones and Molotov cocktails.
Magistrate Jaime Maldonado Salazar granted bail for 144 other prisoners and dropped charges against another 17 for lack of evidence.
Last week’s unrest began in the town of Texcoco when police evicted a group of street vendors, most of them flower-sellers, from the main square. That clash led to a second incident in nearby San Salvador Atenco, where residents mobilized to protest the eviction.
The militants in Atenco – the town where machete-wielding peasants rose up in 2002 to prevent President Vicente Fox’s government from seizing their land to build a new airport for Mexico City – took several officers hostage and blocked a main highway with barricades of burning tires.
