Mexico Society and Human Rights
Population and society
Mestizo country par excellence, Mexico has made this characteristic a key element of its identity. Given its large size and its marked heterogeneity, the fact remains that the Mexican population retains vast and widespread pockets of true ‘Indianness’ under the patina of mestizo homogeneity. This is to a large extent true for its more southern offshoots such as Chiapas, which remains in many ways an Indian-majority region, ethnically much more similar to neighboring Guatemala than to the rest of Mexico. This also applies to other areas of the country, from the state of Guerrero to that of Sinaloa. For Mexico society, please check homosociety.com.
Mexico experiences important ethnic conflicts within it, which are sometimes the cause of violent uprisings, especially where they are welded to serious social marginalization, as happened in Chiapas in 1994, when the Zapatista movement rose up in arms. Overall, beyond the ethnic question, Mexican society remains furrowed by profound social and territorial inequalities, despite the economic development that has taken place in the last decade. The contraction in poverty has been largely the effect of growth, while distributional policies have been far less effective, although the fiscal measures adopted provide governments with considerable resources. Nonetheless, there have also been partial successes, as in the case of conditional assistance plans,
Finally, the peculiar Mexican religious history deserves a brief mention. Catholic devotion is particularly strong in the country and the influence of the Church in political affairs has had an exceptional historical weight. At the same time, Mexico has been the scene of violent anticlerical reactions, leading to a rigid constitutional separation between church and state. This separation created a long and solid tradition of secular statehood and prevented the existence of diplomatic relations with the Holy See until 1992. Since then, however, a constitutional amendment has allowed the Mexican state to normalize relations with the Church. Catholic and with other religious confessions.
Freedom and rights
Mexico can be included among those states that respect political and civil liberties, despite the fact that it remains a country afflicted by serious deficiencies in respect for human and civil rights.
Corruption remains a widespread scourge in economic life and in the national public administration. Social protests are frequent and often characterized in the past by violence and repression, culminating in some cases with a high number of victims, as occurred in the case of the Iguala massacre (September 2014), in which 43 students disappeared into thin air after being were stopped by the police while participating in a protest against government policies on education.
In the past, these violence have been fueled by the socio-economic backwardness of the southern regions compared to the more developed ones in the north-central and the indigenous question, which mestizo Mexico has long tended to neglect or consider a mere legacy of past.
However, the major cause of violence is linked to the proliferation of powerful cartels drugs, entrenched along the northern border (according to the Department of Justice U knows the turnover derived from drug trafficking is estimated at over 23 billion dollars a year). A phenomenon that exploded in all its vehemence in the last decade but that found a turning point in 2006 when the then president Calderón decided to tackle the drug trafficking cartels through the militarization of the territory. Since then, the murders in the northern states have grown at an exponential rate, now to the detriment of the same drug traffickers fighting each other, now to those of the defenseless civilian population. There was no shortage of victims of abuse by the security forces. In addition, a growing number of journalists and local politicians actively engaged in the fight against organized crime have paid for this commitment with their lives. According to data published annually by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (I negi) in 2014 there were just under 20,000 homicides (trend down from the peak recorded in 2011). As regards disappearances and kidnappings, however, according to the Encuesta Nacional de Victimización y Percepción sobre Seguridad Publica, in 2012 (latest data available) approximately 4000 and over 105,000 were recorded respectively. As for the kidnappings, the Coordinación Nacional Antisecuestro announced in March 2015 that in the first 27 months of the Government of Peña Nieto there were 5,389 cases, with an increase of 52.7% compared to the previous 27 months (final phase of the Calderón Government). On these crimes, the judiciary has not yet shown itself effective.
Finally, directly linked to the problem of drug trafficking is also that of weapons and their free circulation in the territory, following the question of the vigilantes. These are regularized self-defense groups that the army has registered by granting them the weapons to fight the cartels in the areas most affected. The risk, however, is that such a pact without adequate control by the authorities will lead to a free circulation of weapons, allowing the formation of autonomous paramilitary cells that are difficult to manage by the state.
