"It’s a gesture of humanity", welcomed Ricardo Monreal, the leader of the majority party in the Mexican Senate, after the vote on Monday April 20 of an amnesty law aimed at relieving congestion in prisons to avoid contagion. The Covid-19 crisis accelerates the release of thousands of convicts for minor crimes. The initiative caused an outcry in the opposition while the violence did not abate despite the confinement.
Masks, visors, gloves … The senators had not sat for twenty-seven days with the health emergency against the Covid-19. Mexico had 9,501 confirmed cases and 857 confirmed deaths on Tuesday. The text, voted the day before, excludes homicides, kidnappings, human trafficking and other uses of firearms. Only detainees who are not repeat offenders will be released for crimes of "theft without violence", "production, transportation or possession of drugs, without intent to distribute" and "voluntary termination of pregnancy". Abortion has been legal only in Mexico City since 2007 and in southwestern Oaxaca State since 2019. Elsewhere, a woman who has an abortion can risk several years in prison. The amnesty also concerns members of indigenous communities who did not have access to a fair trial.
"Foci of infection"
"Prisons are hotbeds of infection for prisoners and the staff who work there," hammered, Monday, Mr. Monreal, senator of Morena, the party of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ("AMLO"), majority in Congress. Six cases of Covid-19 have been detected inside two prisons in the states of Mexico (center) and Yucatan (southeast). Twenty-four others are suspected in a penitentiary in Tamaulipas (northeast), according to the Mexican Human Rights Commission (CNDH), which is alarmed by prison overcrowding.
Scheduled for 170,000 prisoners, the prison system accommodates almost 210,000. In total, 63% of prisons do not meet hygienic standards, according to the CNDH. "In these conditions, physical distancing and confinement are practically impossible", worried Michelle Bachelet last week. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights supported the Mexican initiative.
The opposition does not share its opinion. "They release drug traffickers!" ", alarmed Damian Zepeda, senator of the National Action Party (PAN, right), on Monday. The day before the vote was the deadliest day of the year, with 105 homicides. The voluntary containment of the population, decided on March 23, does not stop the violence of the cartels in a country which recorded 34,608 murders in 2019, a record since 1997.
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