within our homes—“where human rights begin.”
Concluding Reflections
The Quijano case as it developed was just the tip of an iceberg, which allowed me, together with Mexican colleagues, to bring a case in which we documented how PJF agents were involved in repeated instances of torture and other abuses of fundamental human rights. Yet, rather than being investigated or prosecuted, the perpetrators were transferred around the country, and even sometimes sent to serve on UN peacekeeping missions. The case created a scandal when the revelations were made public to a U.S. congressional committee holding hearings on the possibility of the signing of NAFTA and to the UN Committee Against Torture, which subsequently issued a scathing finding.75 Other outrages also surfaced around the same time with respect to the PJF. Eventually, the then–attorney general of the country, Ignacio Morales Lechuga, stepped down and was replaced by the then-director of the National Human Rights Commission, Jorge Carpizo MacGregor. The PJF agents named in the report were suspended or fired, if not fully investigated or sanctioned for the abuses they had committed. In terms of broader reform, the National Human Rights Commission instituted a policy of tracking all agents allegedly involved in human rights abuses, which it continues to do to this day.76 Of course, torture and abuse by the PJF did not stop there; indeed, over the years with increasing drug-related activity in Mexico, it may have increased. But that is the constant challenge of human rights work, and it does not mean that holding some officials to account and changing policies is meaningless. Far from it; it shows us that incremental changes are possible—and, as I argue throughout this book, these incremental advances can trigger further changes and open different spaces that lead to new struggles, often with different sets of actors, but also can lead to greater transformation.
During the years I lived in Mexico, Rosa slowly began to piece together fragments of her broken world. She and her husband moved out of Mexico City to a resort community. They opened a business renting jet skis and diving equipment to tourists. She got pregnant and had a child. Nothing would ever be the same again, but she managed to reestablish a kind of equilibrium. If someone met her in later years, it might not even occur to them that Rosa had not always been this woman who engaged in easy pleasantries with her tourist clients, that there was a time when she had been a very different woman, with different dreams for her life. If anything, understanding what had happened to her family as an injustice and having it recognized and acknowledged publicly as a flagrant violation of fundamental human rights enabled Rosa to make meaning out of the horror, and in turn to move on.
I got to know another family who was denied even that level of emotional closure. My husband and I lived in Mixcoac—a working-class neighborhood of Mexico City, a block away from the Lucha Libre, the professional wrestling ring. It turned out to be the perfect neighborhood for a human rights lawyer. When PJF agents sat outside our door day and night, knocked out the streetlights and wiretapped the corner pay phone as well as our house phone (this was before cell phones), we acquired a certain status among the neighbors, all of whom had their own problems with the universally hated Mexican police. There were no washing machines at the time, and Gabriela came to Mixcoac to do our laundry once a week with her three-year-old daughter, Josefina, in tow.
Gabriela and her sister, Patricia, had had a tough life, growing up in an impoverished household often without enough food. Becoming domestic workers is often the only option for girls who grow up in the circumstances of Patricia and Gabriela. Armies of young girls across Latin America—and much of the rest of the world—work in conditions with almost no labor protections in practice. If they are fortunate enough not to be abused physically or emotionally, they can easily still end up being oppressed by their own insignificance in cruelly indifferent societies, as happened to Gabriela.
As we got to know each other, Gabriela increasingly confided in me about her abusive husband. Sometimes she would ask for a little extra money if she had to pay for a place for her and her daughter to sleep away from him for a night or two, and sometimes the results of an “argument” would be visible on her body. I urged her to move out on more than one occasion, but the reality was Gabriela could not afford to leave; she had no other options.
One week Gabriela failed to show up for work. Patricia called that night; she wanted to know if her sister had shown up. Patricia was worried. She said Gabriela had called her the day before saying that she was scared for her life; her husband had beaten her terribly and threatened to kill her. This was not the first time he had made such threats, and I tried to reassure her that Gabriela had likely taken Josefina away for a few days.
But Patricia’s worst fears proved to be correct. A few days later Gabriela’s body was found, having been beaten badly. Josefina was missing. Although we were told that there was physical as well as circumstantial evidence that pointed to him, Gabriela’s husband was never charged, an omission that seemed directly related to his being friends with the police in the district. Josefina was never located.
We stayed in touch, albeit sporadically, with Patricia and her daughter. I knew Patricia would never recover from the murder of the sister with whom she shared everything or from the disappearance of her niece. The years passed and Patricia dedicated herself entirely to her daughter, and she was as proud as any mother could be. But in some important way, the impunity in Gabriela’s murder and Josefina’s disappearance, and Patricia’s sense of powerlessness, had taken her life from her too; there was a background of grief that made her into someone she would otherwise not have become.
When I lived in Mexico, the impunity of the police and military for torture and other abuses, including homicides, was shocking. The security forces not only were not serving the protective functions they were supposed to fulfill in a democratic state but also had become predatory; it was largely the poor like Gabriela and others in the working-class neighborhoods such as Mixcoac, who suffered the toll of their abuses. Nevertheless, there is even greater impunity and, too often, public acceptance of poor people being mistreated in health facilities, and deprived of essential care. And despite tremendous advances, far too many women and children are subjected to abuse and neglect of all forms within homes—across not only Mexico but the world.
Applying a meaningful human rights framework to health requires transforming our narratives of people’s suffering, as well as transforming the ways in which power is exercised to deprive people of power and dignity, whether through acts or omissions and whether in public or private. In turn, as I discuss at length in later chapters, it requires identifying the contours of the state and societal responsibilities needed to transform those conditions, and the social, political and legal opportunity structures for different actors to do so.
Chapter 2
The Powerlessness of Extreme Poverty: Human Rights and Social Justice
Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made, and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings. And overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life.
—Nelson Mandela, BBC News, February 3, 2005
People used to say that it is awful, regrettable, or troubling that so many children go to bed hungry…. Today … we can now picture the poor not as shrunken wretches begging for our help, but as persons with dignity who are claiming what is theirs by right.
—Thomas Pogge, Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right
Around the world, it is the poor who suffer the vast majority of civil and political rights violations, including torture, in both public and private spheres. In the years I lived in Mexico, far more of the clients I worked with were like Gabriela, with limited choices and struggling to make ends meet—and not like Rosa, who was decidedly middle class. There was the teenager who
