MEXICO: Prominent Human Rights Attorney Assassinated
Attorney Digna Ochoa Provided Legal Defense for Zapatistas
Miroslava Flores
La Voz de Aztlan
Los Angeles, Alta California - October 22, 2001 - (ACN) Digna Ochoa was finally assassinated after numerous death threats. Her body was found in her office in Mexico City on Friday with a shot to the head. She had been previously beaten and her home and office broken into. Mexican authorities failed to protect her or properly investigate the numerous threats against her.
The threats began on February 1995 when she was representing individuals accused of involvement with the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas. She had successfully defended a number of individuals, winning acquittals in a number of highly publicized cases. In several of these cases, she alleged that her clients suffered torture and due process violations at the hands of the police and prosecutors.
Back on October 28, 1999, Attorney Digna Ochoa, head of the legal division of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Center for Human Rights (PRODH), had been attacked in her home, and PRODH’s offices broken into. In a nine-hour ordeal beginning late in the night of October 28, 1999, Digna Ochoa was assaulted in her home in Mexico City, rendered unconscious, blindfolded, tied up, threatened, harshly interrogated on activities of her and her colleagues, and pressured to sign papers by at least two unidentified individuals, who seemed to be recording her answers on a portable computer. They insistently questioned her on insurgent organizations in southern Mexico. She was left tied up near escaping natural gas. Her phone line was cut. She later discovered files, apparently left behind by her assailants, that had been taken from her during her attack and abduction by unknown assailants on August 9, 1999.
On the morning of October 29, 1999, PRODH staff found that their offices had been broken into and desks in the legal area ransacked. They discovered a death threat scrawled on a file folder. On October 13, 1999 an anonymous written communiqué containing a bomb threat was discovered in the area of PRODH offices where the legal staff works. Several members of the legal staff, including Ms. Ochoa, had just returned from a two-day trip to the southern state of Guerrero for legal defense of imprisoned clients.
On October 5, 1999, Ms. Ochoa had found in her home identity papers that had been stolen from her during the August 9, 1999 attack. The identity papers appeared at her new address even though they contain a former address, suggesting her whereabouts were being tracked.
On the morning of September 14, 1999, PRODH staff found two written death threats in a desk drawer of PRODH offices. The attacks, threats and harassment had been intensifying since early August 1999 despite Mexico City District Attorney Samuel Del Villar's promises in late September 1999 that the incidents would be vigorously investigated by law enforcement officials.
The assassination took place while President Vicente Fox was in China. The incident will call into question the ability of the new PAN government to deal with renegade counter insurgency forces operating in Chiapas and other parts of Mexico.
Direct violent attacks and harassment against human rights advocates are frequent in Mexico. Non-governmental organizations estimate that more than 100 human rights advocates received death threats and/or were subject to harassment, kidnappings, disappearances, rapes, and robberies in connection with their work between 1995 and 1997. These attacks are often the responsibility of State agents or their proxies. They are seldom appropriately investigated by State authorities; and a climate of impunity prevails.
Threats and attacks against human rights advocates and the failure to vigorously investigate them and prosecute those responsible violate the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders, adopted by the UN General Assembly in December 1998, which provides that everyone has the right to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms and requires States to adopt all necessary legislative, administrative, and other measures to ensure that the rights of human rights defenders are effectively guaranteed.
The threats and attacks against lawyers violate Principle 16 of the United Nations' Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers, which provides: "Governments shall ensure that lawyers are able to perform all of their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference." In addition, Principle 17 provides: "Where the security of lawyers is threatened as a result of discharging their functions, they shall be adequately safeguarded by the authorities." The Basic Principles are an important source of authority, intended by the United Nations to provide specific substance to the due process guarantees recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which Mexico is a party to.
