Mexico – Victims Join in the Litigation Against the Arms Industry
A plural group of academics, activists, victims and civil organizations joined the litigation against the large U.S. arms companies, through the figure of an amicus curiae, considerations of fact and law on the impact of this industry on lives lost.
At the initiative of the determined group of lawyers from the Foreign Ministry who designed the litigation strategy against the large U.S. arms companies, a plural group of academics, activists, victims and civil organizations joined this important judicial process by presenting, through the figure of an amicus curiae, considerations of fact and law on the impact of this industry on lives lost.
Much has been written about the significance of the action taken by Mexico. The implications of this litigation from the perspective of corporate responsibility for human rights violations have also been rightly highlighted. More specifically, one of the signatories, Carlos Pérez Ricart, has delved with precision into the contents and implications of this amicus and its relevance.
As one of the civil human rights organizations that joined this effort, Centro Prodh contributed with information on cases and situations that give a face and concreteness to the impact of violence caused by firearms in Mexico. We referred, for example, to the murder of Francisco Javier Barajas Piña, killed on May 29, 2021 in Salvatierra, Guanajuato state. Javier was killed because he and his brave family, in the face of governmental negligence, took charge of the search for his sister Guadalupe Barajas, who disappeared in the same state in February 2020. A year later, in 2021, Guadalupe's body was identified in one of the largest clandestine graves in the state, where around 80 bodies have been found. But three months later, upon returning to Salvatierra, Javier was shot and killed. When the alleged murderers were later arrested, they were in possession of a firearm that was expertly proven to be the same as the one that fired the cartridge casings found at the scene of Javier's murder. The weapon turned out to be of recent North American manufacture.
Stories like Javier's and his family's can be counted by the thousands in our country. These are not numbers. They are about entire families - men, women, grandfathers and grandmothers, brothers and sisters - who experience firsthand the ravages of gun violence. Not a statistic, but people with names, identities and dreams.
Violence is multi-factorial and its main causes are undoubtedly located on this side of the border: the persistence of a centralized and militarized security model promoted by the Federation; the negligence and incapacity of state and municipal police; a broken justice system that only seeks impunity; the collusion between authorities and organized crime, which in some regions means not knowing where one begins and the other ends; the progressive dehumanization that has stripped life of its sacred and unavailable character.
Even with regard to the arms trade, the pending issues are also on our side because, as we have pointed out in this space, cases such as the illegal distribution in some states of the Republic of German-made Heckler & Koch rifles, occurred with the connivance of corruption networks in which the Army is involved, without the military involved having been investigated so far.
But it is
not necessary to ignore this reality to emphasize, simultaneously, that the
flow of arms from the United States is also the cause of our crisis of
violence. In particular, the senseless tolerance of virtually free and
unrestricted trade in assault rifles and powerful weapons, which then easily
cross our porous border to cause irreparable damage while the arms industry
increases its profits, has contributed to the quantitative and qualitative
increase of our never-ending crisis of violence.
Because of this and because of stories like Javier's - whose courageous father and mother, who are still fighting for justice, authorized the amicus brief - we decided to support the Chancellor's novel action. Human rights, which in essence vindicate common dignity and life wherever it is threatened, cannot remain indifferent to any attempt to control an industry that only generates violence.
Source: Centro Prodh
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