From Mexico's El Universal, Nov. 7 via Chiapas95:

GENEVA - The National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), embroiled in a conflict with the Attorney General's Office (PGR), will present a report before the UN human rights officials on Wednesday saying that torture in Mexico has increased 300 percent during the current administration.

Additionally, the report by the autonomous government-funded body points to the PGR as the judicial entity that most uses torture in Mexico.

Following a UN report in May of 2003 lambasting the widespread use of torture to extract confessions from suspects, PGR officials defended their office's practices, insisting torture was a punishable offense, and that the CNDH itself had the power to make sure that any police agent attempting to torture would not go unpunished.

But the CNDH, calling torture "the most extreme humiliation a person can receive," says that torture has been practiced three times as much during the Fox administration as during the previous administration of Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000).

In a broader view, the CNDH reports that it had received 2,166 complaints of torture between 1990 and 2004, most of them coming during arrests or while the suspect was being held by authorities before trial.

The particular irony of this hideous state of affairs, is that the escalation comes in the same years that Mexico has seen an historical reckoning with the military's 1964-1982 "dirty war" against leftist dissidents.

See our last post on the human rights crisis in Mexico.