Human rights groups expose gross abuse of Mexican orphans and disabled

[Hannah Bell]

Human rights organizations have accused the Mexican government of Felipe Calderon of violating anti-torture conventions in the treatment of mentally disabled adults and abandoned children who are institutionalized.

The report, issued on November 30 by the Washington-based Disability Rights International (DRI) and the Mexican Commission to Defend and Promote Human Rights (CMDPDH, Comisión Méxicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos) exposed conditions at government institutions that are inhumane in the extreme.

The report was based on visits to 20 public and private institutions—shelters, orphanages and mental hospitals—in Mexico City and in the States of Mexico, Jalisco, Puebla, Veracruz and Oaxaca in 2009...

Once they enter these public institutions, patients loose all civil rights. The institutions are understaffed and lack basic items such as toilet paper, towels, blankets and clean water.

Patients are left unattended most of the day, many of them tethered to walls and wheelchairs. Many are overmedicated and, in some cases, lobotomized without their consent.

Children are routinely lost in the system — the DRI report suspects that many are trafficked into slavery and prostitution.

Such is the degree of understaffing that in many cases patients themselves are recruited — but not paid — to work at these institutions...

Fully 9 pages of the 63-page report provide detailed evidence of how the treatment of the patients including practices that have become routine in many of these facilities—binding, tethering, neglect, physical and even sexual abuse—meet the international legal definition of torture...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/mexi-d11.shtml

[Systematic Chaos]

1. And as PEMEX's oil production continues its slide into the abyss,

this is only going to get orders of magnitude worse.

I truly believe our border is going to become a full-on war zone within the next ten years, because everyone on both sides is going to be broke and desperate, and these drug cartels are about as psychotic as you could ever imagine.

[truedelphi]

2. Yet our "knowledgeable" and "expert" politicians insist tthat legalizing drugs

Would make it worse.

I have no idea how they can come to that idea. But one thing legalizing drugs would do is end the flow of the Big Monied, Cleaned Up Bank Owners who hire American politicians with their laundered money after their cartel relatives send them stateside.