‘Permission to Kill’: Book shines a light on murders in Mexico’s drug war

Innocent Civilians have been murdered in the name of Mexico’s war on drug cartels by military officials eager to show results, according to a new book that claims the killings amount to war crimes. The two journalists and a human rights specialist behind “Permission to Kill” investigated more than 1,800 killings under three presidents since 2006, including the outgoing leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. The aim was to show the “systematic” nature of killings allegedly involving members of the security forces, said co-author Daniel Moreno, director of the news website Animal Politico. “It’s not a collection of anecdotes,” he told AFP.

“There is a constant in these three governments of attacking civilians and leaving the attackers unpunished,” Moreno said. Investigators identified 494 such alleged crimes — mostly killings and forced disappearances — during Felipe Calderon’s presidency from 2006 to 2012, 808 under his successor Enrique Pena Nieto (2012 to 2018), and 489 during Lopez Obrador’s first four years in office. But those are not all the cases, they say. The Defense Ministry, which oversees the military, did not respond to an AFP request for comment on the allegations against it. More than 450,000 Mexicans have been killed and tens of thousands have disappeared since Calderon deployed the army against drug cartels in 2006, according to official figures.

Under a policy he calls “hugs, not bullets,” Lopez Obrador has pledged to prioritize tackling the root causes of crime, such as poverty and inequality, over waging war on cartels. During his presidency, “there has been less violence and more respect for life,” Lopez Obrador said Sunday in his final state of the nation report before he is replaced on Oct. 1 by his ally Claudia Sheinbaum.

Parallels with Colombia

Co-author Paris Martinez sees similarities with the more than 6,000 killings and disappearances that researchers say the Colombian military committed between 2002 and 2008 to make its fight against guerrilla groups seem more effective. The book, also written by human rights expert Jacobo Dayan, argues that there has been a repeated failure to investigate or punish those responsible, some of whom are still active or have been promoted. “They arrested the people who fired the shots, not the people who devised the strategy,” Moreno said.

Of the more than 1,800 cases investigated, only 133 resulted in convictions, the authors said. Human rights group Amnesty International said in a report released in April that Mexican military forces last year “continued to use unnecessary and excessive force and carried out extrajudicial killings.”

“Impunity for these crimes and human rights violations continued,” the report said, citing the case of five men allegedly killed by soldiers in the northern border city of Nuevo Laredo in February 2023. The book’s authors will hand over their work to the local office of the Hague-based International Criminal Court, which investigates war crimes and crimes against humanity, Martinez said. — AFP