Special Prosecutor’s Report on Digna Ochoa’s Death Highlights Continuing Weaknesses in Mexican Justice System

Mexican Special Prosecutor Margarita Guerra, who led an inquiry into the violent death of internationally recognized human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa, has stunned the human rights community by disparaging the activist’s human rights work, discounting any motive for her to have been targeted for murder, and concluding that her death was probably a suicide. The full report has yet to be released.

On October 19, 2001, Digna Ochoa was found shot to death in the waiting room of her Mexico City office. She had been shot twice, first in the leg and then in the head, with a pistol that was reportedly found beneath her body. A third gunshot was also fired and the bullet recovered from the crime scene.

Digna Ochoa had for many years worked for the promotion and protection of human rights in Mexico and had been recognized nationally and internationally for this work. Her death in 2001 was a great loss to the human rights community in Mexico and throughout the world, and a setback to the causes of justice and human dignity for which she stood.

The Lawyers Committee is concerned by the Special Prosecutor’s emphatic conclusion that Digna Ochoa’s death was “not a homicide,” a finding based largely on a contentious description and analysis of Ochoa’s personal life over the previous two decades. We are also perplexed by the tone and substance of parts of the Special Prosecutor’s report which appear intended to impugn the integrity and the dignity of the victim, while wholly discounting her contribution to the fight for human rights in Mexico.

In the circumstances, the Lawyers Committee finds the language challenging Digna Ochoa’s role as a human rights defender offensive and unfounded. Insofar as these views are presented as evidence that Digna Ochoa’s human rights mission could not conceivably have been a motive for her murder, the emphasis given to them represents a serious flaw in the investigation.

Although an in-depth critique of the Special Prosecutor’s report must await the release of the full report to the public, the initial summary of the report offers little basis for confidence in its findings. The Lawyers Committee will press for further investigation into the case.

Who was Digna Ochoa?

Digna Ochoa was a prominent and courageous lawyer and human rights activist. Her practice focused on the troubled southern states of Oaxaca and Guerrero, where she documented and challenged the worst excesses of the government’s counterinsurgency tactics and their devastating impact on the largely indigenous rural population. Among the cases she was best known for was the defense of a number of rural leaders who became known as the “peasant ecologists” when they were detained by the army, tortured, and jailed for opposing illegal timber cutting in the mountains of Guerrero.

From January 1998 to October 2000, Digna Ochoa was a staff attorney of one of Mexico’s leading human rights organizations, the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (PRODH). She had previously collaborated with PRODH since late 1990 or early 1991 on a part time basis. Digna Ochoa’s work made her powerful enemies and in the years prior to her death she and her colleagues received numerous death threats. Her public statements on the case of Guerrero’s peasant ecologists echoed around the world.

The Special Prosecutor’s Findings

Although the killing was initially described by public prosecutors and police spokesmen as murder, a special prosecutor assigned to the case subsequently pursued a line of inquiry into the possibility that it was a suicide intended to appear to have been murder. Ochoa’s family and human rights monitors said Special Prosecutor Guerra, who replaced the initial prosecutor, focused subsequent inquiries largely on this line of inquiry.

In a long press conference on July 19, Special Prosecutor Guerra ruled out murder, while disparaging Digna Ochoa’s work as a human rights defender and presenting a psychological profile of her going back to her school years that supported a theory of suicide.

The emphasis of the summary report was to highlight what was said to be evidence of the victim’s history of psychological problems, while leaving essential questions about the cause and circumstances of the killing and the threats to Digna Ochoa and her colleagues unanswered. Serious faults in the investigation, including the failure to secure the crime scene and mishandling of vital forensic evidence, and the failure to perform basic investigatory procedures in a timely manner, were not explored.

In describing Digna Ochoa’s work as a legal advisor with the organization PRODH, for which she received international recognition, and as a private practitioner, Guerra declared that “her participation [in cases] was limited and indeed in some cases null, providing no significant contribution to the defense.” As a consequence, she concludes, “there is no objective evidence to establish….that her legal work would have led to or caused injury to the interests of any person or authority” in a way that could have provided a motive to harm her.¹

The Special Prosecutor made no reference in her statement to the broad national and international publicity given Digna Ochoa’s statements in defense of human rights in the Guerrero case in 1999 and in other cases.

In discounting Digna Ochoa’s record as a human rights defender, Special Prosecutor Guerra concluded that she did not intend to question the legitimacy of nongovernmental organizations in the human rights field or their personnel—declaring that “this concerns a special case that should in no way detract from the praiseworthy development of the NGOs in Mexico.”

In a press account of her statements, Guerra is quoted as acknowledging that the world was not a safe place, “for true defenders of human rights,” while adding that this was not the case with Digna Ochoa^.2

In contrast, in a statement on July 19, Edgar Cortéz Moralez, PRODH’s director, stressed the organization’s respect for Digna Ochoa’s “work in the defense and promotion of human rights,” while a part of the PRODH team and independently. The director of the official Human Rights Commission of the Federal District, Emilio Alvarez Icaza, in a press statement the same day, protested Special Prosecutor Guerra’s impugning of Digna Ochoa’s life and work as an effort “to legitimize a conclusion by de-legitimizing her person.” “What she did in her life must be recognized. Her effort, commitment, and struggle serve as an example in the fight for the defense of human rights.”

In common with much speculation in some of the Mexican media, the report alludes to theories that Ochoa may have taken her own life as a result of personal problems and what is characterized as a history of psychological instability. The Lawyers Committee fears that adopting the theory that Ochoa committed suicide in the absence of clear material evidence to support that theory serves only to obstruct the impartial search for the truth that should drive such an inquiry. The extraordinary focus on this theory in the prosecutor’s conclusions tends also to distract attention away from material failures in the investigation previously identified by independent experts.

The Commission of Experts

After months of delay, an international team of experts from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights carried out a technical verification mission in January 2003 to consider technical aspects of the criminal investigation into the killing. Their report noted that gaps in recording the chain of custody of pieces of evidence collected at the crime scene detracted from their usefulness in a criminal investigation; that they were able to tell little from an examination of the crime scene because objects had been moved or removed; and that the initial investigation of the crime scene was poor, requiring a second investigation after the scene had been left open to interference.

The report of the team of experts also noted other weaknesses in the investigation like the failure to obtain telephone records because the request was made too long after the event. The general recommendations of the team were that there was an urgent need to improve criminal investigation techniques in Mexico so that such investigations might, in the future, enjoy the confidence of the public. The clear import of their report is that this investigation, like too many, fails the test of credibility.

Next Steps

In view of these findings by highly regarded international experts, the conclusion of the Special Prosecutor that Ochoa’s death was categorically not a homicide requires further investigation. More detailed comments and recommendations must await a review of the actual report of the inquiry when this is made public.

Federal District Attorney General Bernardo Bátiz Vázquez has declared that the case is not definitively closed, as the report of the Special Prosecutor would be reviewed and other proceedings continued. The rejection of a request by the family to provide additional evidence earlier this year has been appealed. Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador has also declared that the investigation must remain open so long as the finding of suicide was not established as “absolute truth.”

The Lawyers Committee is disappointed that the Special Prosecutor’s investigation into Digna Ochoa’s death has taken us little further toward knowing the truth of what happened on October 19, 2001. The failure to date of the Mexican justice system to carry out a credible inquiry into this tragic incident only reinforces the insecurity in which those who work to promote justice and human rights in Mexico must live.

When the system cannot or will not carry out a credible investigation then those who threaten and attack human rights defenders are free to operate with impunity. The Lawyers Committee calls on the Mexican authorities to take urgent steps to remedy the failures in this investigation so that justice may be done and be seen to be done for Digna Ochoa.