Mexico: Flawed Inquiry on Soldiers’ Killing of Child

(Mexico City, August 28, 2024) – The Mexican attorney general’s office has failed to properly investigate allegations that soldiers shot and killed a 4-year-old girl in August 2022, Human Rights Watch said in a report and visual evidence [LINK] published today.
The attorney general’s office failed to take basic steps to corroborate the military’s version of events, despite irregularities in the evidence presented by soldiers and inconsistencies between the military’s timeline and video evidence from the night of the shooting, Human Rights Watch found. The authorities also failed to follow up on a ballistics test result that showed a possible but inconclusive match between the bullet that killed the young girl and one of the weapons carried by a soldier that night.
“Nearly two years after Heidi Pérez’s killing, the attorney general’s office has done next to nothing to examine the serious inconsistencies in the military’s story about what happened on the night of August 31, 2022,” said Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The attorney general’s office should not just passively accept the Defense Ministry’s claims that soldiers had nothing to do with Pérez’s death. That is a recipe for impunity.”