“...The reform is going badly,” José Ramón Cossío, a justice on Mexico’s Supreme Court, said in an interview. “There are many small problems that, taken together, are causing what I believe to be an important crisis.”
It is hard to overstate the significance of the restructuring. It seeks to turn the notoriously ineffective police into professional investigators. It strengthens the independence of judges. It provides more rights to defendants in a country where authorities have been known to demand bribes, extract confessions under torture and doctor evidence.
The U.S. government is deeply invested in the project, contributing more than $300 million since 2008 to equip courthouses and train police and legal personnel.
Even in rural outposts such as Ocotlan, the system has ushered in many trappings of high-tech justice: courthouses with surveillance cameras and fingerprint sensors; forensic investigators at crime scenes in latex gloves and protective footwear.
But the exacting new procedures have been grafted onto feeble, corruption-plagued institutions created decades ago by an authoritarian state.
Judges are demanding the kind of legal precision found in Washington or London, from police who sometimes can barely read and live in places that can feel like war zones.
“This is a baby that has just been born,” Rubio Gutiérrez said in an interview. “We are asking the system to run, and it is not possible...”
A U.S.-backed plan was supposed to fix Mexico’s justice system. It’s resulted in chaos. - Washington Post
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