Actors and processes in the generation of change in the human rights policy of Mexico

The human rights project has developed slowly in Mexico. Even though Mexican diplomats were enthusiastic advocates of the introduction of human rights in the Charter of the United Nations, and made a significant contribution to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Mexican diplomacy did very little in support of the development of the international human rights project for most of the rest of the twentieth century. In spite of the country’s ratification of key international treaties since 1981, and even though the Mexican Constitution included a broad set of individual guarantees and social rights, domestically the country had significant deficiencies with respect to the defence and promotion of rights. In 1990, the federal government established a national network of human rights commissions; but these lacked autonomy and no other reforms or public policies on human rights followed. However, during the later years of the presidency of Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000), and particularly during the administration of Vicente Fox (2000–2006), the federal government adopted a different approach and implemented a series of reforms and initiatives pertaining to the human rights project, in both the international and the domestic arenas. Why did these two governments change the approach to human rights traditionally followed by the governments of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)’ This chapter will attempt to answer this question by focusing on the interaction between domestic and international actors and processes, while probing the now well-known hypotheses of “the boomerang effect” 1 and the “spiral model”.

Related Subject(s): Human Rights and Refugees

Countries: Mexico