Rumblings: Abort mission

José Luis Soberanes, the national human rights czar for most of the PAN era, has officially crossed the line from "controversial" to "embattled."

He seems to like it that way.

His samurai mentality should be an asset for a National Human Rights Commission president. The job description, after all, is to advise government officials when their actions violate somebody or everybody's human rights. Since government officials seldom appreciate this kind of advice, the ombudsman (as the position is often called) has to be ready to rumble on occasion.

Soberanes can get down with the best of them.

In recent weeks he's torn off letters blasting anyone who dares to criticize him in print — including Carlos Monsiváis and (through an underling) the UNAM law professor John Ackerman. Earlier, he scolded former top federal cop Eduardo Medina Mora for ignoring his recommendations.

He also invited the growing chorus of critics to "pull up a chair and get comfortable" because he never, ever, is going to resign.

But here's what's noteworthy about the fighting side of José Luis Soberanes: With some exceptions, such as the now forgotten Medina Mora incident, his offensive has not been aimed at the usual target of a federal human rights president, i.e. the federal government. Instead, he's been going after the critics of the Calderón administration and of the military that Calderón commands.

It's gotten to the point where non-government human rights groups, the major opposition party (the PRD), and a host of commentators such as Monsiváis and Ackerman are convinced that Soberanes is doing the government's bidding — exactly the opposite of what the head of the supposedly autonomous CNDH is supposed to do.

"He has placed himself at the service of Calderón," said UNAM political science professor emeritus Octavio Rodríguez Araujo. "He has usurped functions that don't correspond to him."

Even early in his tenure Soberanes showed signs of, shall we say, an unorthodox set of priorities. Once he claimed that secular public schools violated the human rights of children by denying them religious instruction. The statement was baffling, but it served to clarify where he stands on the church-state divide and why some legislators tried to make his alleged Opus Dei membership an issue at his confirmation hearing.

Critics base their current concern mostly on two recent actions. In April, Soberanes issued an opinion that soldiers had not raped an elderly indigenous woman in the Veracruz mountains as she had claimed with her dying words.

It's not unusual for an ombudsman to find that a human rights violation had not taken place. But it is unusual for him to exhume a body to oversee a second autopsy that conveniently fails to find the semen traces that the first autopsy did find, and then inform the president, before issuing any report, that the victim had died of gastritis.

Anyone inclined to believe that the CNDH was helping Calderón protect the military now had more reason to believe it.
More unsettling for the nation's political stability in the coming months was Soberanes' move to challenge the Federal District's recently liberalized abortion law before the Supreme Court. The court will hear the case. That guarantees, regardless of the outcome, a full future schedule of highly emotional political battles carried out in all kinds of venues, including the streets.

Soberanes had no business getting involved with the DF abortion law. That was essentially confirmed by a recent Supreme Court finding that the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), and by extension all autonomous quasi-governmental bodies, including the CNDH, have no authority to challenge legislation before the Supreme Court.

But Soberanes' action has served its purpose by framing the abortion issue as a human rights concern -- not women's rights to control their bodies but the "human rights" of the "product of conception."
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court challenge will be led by the other plaintiff, the federal Attorney General. That person is none other than Eduardo Medina Mora.

Why are Calderón and the PAN bothering with the abortion fight? Part of it is ideological. Most panistas are staunchly pro-Church and maybe even genuinely anti-abortion. They don't want to see the liberalization trend spread outside the PRD-controlled DF.

But the real reason, as usual, is politics. Though most capital residents support a woman's right to choose, the nation as a whole is pretty much split 50-50. But those who would deny a woman that right to choose feel stronger about the issue than pro-choice voters. With the PRI now in the pro-choice camp, the PAN is in a position to own that hard-line 50 percent.

For the PRD, Soberanes's behavior confirms their contention that the nation's institutions have been compromised. From their point of view, the 2006 presidential election exposed the post-2003 IFE and the Electoral Tribunal as accomplices in a plot to keep them out of Los Pinos, now and forever. Now the CNDH is helping a PAN effort to prevent the PRD from enacting reforms even where they do slip into office.

You can accept or deny the validity of that thinking. But it exists, and it's worrisome. An opposition that feels it has no recourse but the streets will take to the streets.

That's what we're all trying to avoid, isn't it?