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were enforced disappearances—meaning state actors likely participated in the crime. To
reach this determination, we relied on a range of official documents such as arrest reports,
detention registers, complaints filed by victims’ relatives, witness testimony, investigation
case files, press releases by officials, amparos, 2 and reports by government rights
commissions. 3 These documents were supplemented by additional sources of evidence
which pointed to the participation of state agents in specific cases—much of it gathered by
victims’ families, local human rights defenders, and journalists—including: security
camera surveillance videos, witness video footage, audio recordings by victims’ families of
meetings with officials, photographs of abductions, and maps of the signals emitted by
victims’ cell phones or radios. In the remaining 100 of the 249 cases, there was not
sufficient evidence to conclude that state actors had participated in the crimes, though
they may have.
In certain cases in this report, Human Rights Watch cites official confessions by individuals
accused of having participated in enforced disappearances. It is relevant to note that our
previous report, Neither Rights Nor Security, documented the systematic use of torture by
security forces in five states during the administration of President Felipe Calderón.
Oftentimes, these tactics were aimed at extracting forced confessions that not only
accepted guilt, but also a posteriori concealed the abuses by security forces leading up to
and during coercive interrogations. Given the prevalence of this practice, and the doubt it
casts on the truthfulness of confessions obtained by officials, this report only cites
confessions of alleged involvement in crimes when such statements are corroborated by
and consistent with other credible evidence—such as witness accounts, video footage, or
2 The amparo is a legal remedy designed to protect the rights recognized by the Mexican Constitution, as well as
international treaties, when government officials act in violation of these rights. An amparo can challenge laws, acts, or
omissions by the government or state officials that violate the rights of an individual or group. The purpose of filing an
amparo is to end to the violation of those rights or the unconstitutional application of a law. In the case of failure to act
(omission), the amparo seeks to compel the government and its representatives to comply with their legal obligations. An
amparo is a federal remedy and must be filed with the appropriate federal court, even if the responsible party is a local or
state actor.
3 Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, CNDH) was created in 1990 to
monitor the human rights practices of government institutions and promote increased respect for fundamental rights in
Mexico. Originally created as part of the Ministry of the Interior, the commission became a fully autonomous agency in 1999
through a constitutional reform, which granted it complete independence from the executive branch. Each of Mexico’s 32
federal entities has its own human rights commission. The commissions’ mandate entails investigating and documenting
human rights abuses, and then employing a variety of instruments to resolve the cases. The commissions are empowered to
receive formal complaints from victims (quejas) and issue recommendations (recomendaciones) directed at state agents—a
public document that details human rights violations and identifies steps that government institutions should take to
redress them.
15 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | FEBRUARY 2013