Rosario Piedra says Mexico’s human rights commission is transforming: “It is no longer Salinas’ CNDH”

Rosario Piedra used a commemorative forum to draw a sharp line between Mexico’s current National Human Rights Commission and the institution she says was inherited from earlier governments.

“Proudly, this commission is no longer Salinas’ CNDH, nor Carpizo’s or Gutiérrez Barrios’,” Piedra said while opening a discussion on legal advocacy, historical memory, democratic struggles and the profession’s public commitment. The event honored lawyer and human rights defender Marco Antonio Lanz Galera.

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Proudly, this commission is no longer Salinas’ CNDH, nor Carpizo’s or Gutiérrez Barrios’.

Piedra said the current commission does more than defend human rights. Its goal, she said, is to reduce violations and, if possible, eliminate them. She also criticized earlier periods, arguing that authorities simulated human rights protection through recommendations that were not binding.

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The objective is not only to defend human rights, but to reduce their violations and, if possible, eliminate them.

Her remarks included an attack on Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, whom she accused of responsibility for Lanz Galera’s killing and for the deaths of other Mexicans who dissented from governments of that era. She recalled that Lanz Galera was executed 73 years ago during the government of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines by personnel from the former Federal Security Directorate.

Piedra also defended the public-media broadcast of “Los Años Heridos,” a historical fiction series that the PRI reported to Mexico’s electoral institute as alleged government propaganda. She said the series draws on a book by Fritz Glockner and documented cases collected by an office investigating repression and forced disappearances linked to state political violence in the recent past. “It is commonplace to say that peoples who forget their past are condemned to repeat it,” she said. “Perhaps that is why those who would like nothing to change, those who would like to return to the past, work so hard to hide it and prevent it from being remembered.”

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It is commonplace to say that peoples who forget their past are condemned to repeat it. Perhaps that is why those who would like nothing to change, those who would like to return to the past, work so hard to hide it and prevent it from being remembered.