Reports describe human rights abuses by gov'ts in Haiti and Mexico

A report released by a Port-au-Prince-based human rights group says that nearly 2000 Haitians died unjustly during the interim government in place after the 2004 coup against Jean-Bertrand Aristede. The interim government “failed in its obligation to protect the rights of everyone” according to the National Human Rights Defense Network in its two years of power before the country’s new legislature swore in a new set of Cabinet ministers. (Earlier this year the head of the U.N.’s human rights agency condoned Haiti’s government for illegally jailing thousands of political activists).

Meanwhile, Mexico’s government published a report on Saturday implicating three former presidents for widespread human rights abuses from the 1960s to the early 1980s. The report stated that “the authoritarian regimes” of ex-presidents Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Jose Lopez Portillo, and Luis Echeverria were behind “massacres, forced disappearances, systematic torture and genocide to try to destroy a sector of society that it considered ideologically to be its enemy.”

Links- Miami Herald, The Latin Americanist (blog), People's Daily Online, Canada.com

Image- flickr.com (Jailed Haitians in 1997)

Tags- Haiti, human rights, Mexico