MADRID, 5 Nov. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) has begun its first process with the United States as the country accused of the death of a Mexican migrant, Anastasio Hernández, who died due to the intervention of US immigration agents in 2010 in San Diego.
The victim’s relatives demand “truth and justice” after the case was closed in 2015 despite the fact that there were videos and witnesses showing that Hernández was beaten to death.
The United States maintains that there was an investigation “by experienced federal prosecutors who determined that the evidence was insufficient to bring criminal charges.”
However, María Puga, Anastasio’s wife, told the IACHR commissioners that she found out from an officer that her partner was in the hospital, brain dead, on May 29, 2010, but “nobody explained to us what had past”. “I found out the details later, the day of his funeral,” she said. When she was at home, a television “began to broadcast a video, I heard my husband’s cries of pain.”
Two years later, when he had access to a second video, “I saw the images of how my husband was surrounded by agents, beating him, torturing him.” “They put the stun gun on him, they humiliated him, they took his clothes off him,” he said. There were about thirteen subjects who attacked him and it is presumed that they were agents of the Office of Customs and Border Protection, the Service of Immigration and Customs Control and Border Patrol.
Puga explained that by requesting the IACHR to review the case, the aim is for “the officials involved and the government to apologize to the family for having murdered my husband, for there to be changes in these policies on the use of force that they have done so much suffer”.
During the hearing, representatives of Anastasio’s family, the International Human Rights Legal Clinic of the University of Berkeley and Alliance San Diego denounced the “cover-up” by the US authorities.
They indicated that although the victim did not represent a threat to the agents’ safety, they used disproportionate force. “The United States has neither refuted nor responded to these allegations. In fact, it attempts to justify the agents’ use of force and the Justice Department’s decision to conclude the criminal investigation by arguing that Anastasio was combative and assaultive.”
Thomas Hastings, interim representative of the United States to the Organization of American States (OAS), has stressed that they have differences of opinion about the IACHR admitting this case. The Government in an agreement “paid one million dollars (to the family) to resolve all types of claims for the acts or omissions that gave rise to the case,” he recalled.
