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Héctor Félix Miranda
April 20, 1988

Case: Héctor Félix Miranda



The Mexican Government’s Responsibility:

November 1, 1999
Ricardo Trotti

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Nearly four years after initiating the battle against the impunity that surrounds most crimes against journalists and more than two years since submitting to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) the case of the murder of Mexican journalist Héctor Félix “El Gato” Miranda, the IAPA can see light at the end of the tunnel.

That light was faint on March 11, 1997, when the IAPA filed a complaint before the IACHR against the Mexican government for its failure to investigate in-depth the murder of Miranda on April 20, 1988. The complaint charged the government with violating the rights to life, to personal safety, free speech, legal guarantees, equality under the law and the legal protection enshrined in the American Convention on Human Rights.

After a two-year review, on April 13, 1999, the IACHR found sufficient merit in the IAPA complaint to make its conclusions and recommendations public in Case N º11, 739. Such action is considered within the inter-American system to be the strongest sanction that the IACHR can impose on a state for violation of human rights.

The IACHR made three recommendations to the Mexican government: Conduct an investigation to determine the criminal responsibility of those who carried out the murder; conduct an investigation to determine if there is any cover-up and any offense against the administration of justice that prevented a full scrutiny of the facts, and provide adequate compensation to the victim’s relatives.

The IAPA’s Arguments

These recommendations followed the IACHR’s review of arguments presented by the IAPA and the Mexican government on the case. On the basis of information provided by both parties, the IACHR concluded that “the state violated, to the detriment of Héctor Félix Miranda …the right to freedom of expression …and to the detriment of his family members, the rights to legal guarantees and legal protection ….”

Nevertheless, the IACHR declared that “it has no convincing grounds ” to consider the Mexican government responsible for violation of the victim’s right to life, the right to personal safety or the right to be treated equally under the law.

Beyond this decision’s impact on Miranda, it takes on added importance because Mexico for the first time ever acted upon a recommendation of the IACHR. In late March 1999, in a decision that several international human rights organizations described as historic, the Federal District High Court in Mexico acquitted Manuel Manríquez San Agustín, an Indian musician who had been sentenced to prison in June 1990 after confessing under torture to committing two murders. Manríquez was freed from the Norte penitentiary on March 29 after being held for nine years.

As corroborative evidence, his defense attorney, Pilar Noriega, used an IACHR report similar to the one on Félix Miranda. The report recommended that the Mexican government “review the validity of the trial of Manuel Manríquez ”and pay him “due compensation for the violation of his human rights.”

This ruling of the Félix Mexican court, responding to the IACHR recommendation, is significant for the Miranda case (as it may be for the case of Víctor Manuel Oropeza Contreras, also filed by the IAPA) because it could become a legal precedent, as defined by Carmen Herrera, legal counsel of the Center for International Law and Justice (Cejil), one of three organizations that represented Manríquez in his formal complaint to the IACHR.


Héctor Félix Miranda chats with a group of police officers at the Tijuana racetrack.
Herrera commented (Proceso magazine, April 4, 1999) that “the court ruling signifies a first step in compliance with the recommendations of the IACHR and implies a recognition of the validity of these recommendations, as well as the need to comply with them in order to observe human rights in Mexico.We hope that this action will be used as case law in the area of human rights.”

IACHR Report

The following are the most important details of Report N º50/99 approved by the IACHR on April 13, 1999, on Case N º11,739:

II. PROCEEDINGS BEFORE THE COMMISSION

4. On April 23, 1997, the Commission requested from the State information relative to the petition and assigned Number 11,739 to it. The response was the object of observations from the petitioners. Thereafter, when extensions had been requested by both parties and granted by the IACHR, successive pieces of information were received until the procedure set forth in Article 48 of the American Convention could be completed.

5. On July 13, 1998 the Commission placed itself at the disposal of the parties to begin a friendly settlement procedure. The State reported that the authorities were “in the process of evaluating the offer,” to which end they “wanted to know what the petitioners had in mind.” In their reply dated July 29, 1998, the petitioners rejected the IACHR proposal,citing “the need for the facts in these cases to be investigated.”

III. ADMISSIBILITY

6. In its initial response, the State asked that the case be declared inadmissible on grounds that the statutory time limit had expired, and because it considered that no acts violating the American Convention had been discerned. Later on, in replying to the petitioners’observations, the State alleged that remedies available in Mexico’s domestic law had not yet been exhausted.

7. The State initially argued that the petition had not been presented within the six month period established in Article 46(1)(b)of the American Convention, and to that end cited the dates of the final sentences in the trials of Antonio Vera Palestina (March 27,1991) and Victoriano Medina Moreno (August 23,1989). The authorities also asserted that Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH) had opened a case file on September 10, 1990, the final conclusions of which had been reported to the representatives of the victim on July 17, 1992.

8. In this context, the IACHR observes that the petition does not refer to the punishment of Messrs. Vera Palestina and Medina Morena, but to the failure of the Mexican State in investigating the existence of an intellectual author or authors of the deed, despite the fact that -in the petitioners’opinion -there were ample grounds for doing so. Moreover, the State indicated in a later missive that “the authorities are continuing to investigate the possibility that a third party may have been involved,” as part of its argument that the remedies afforded by domestic law had not yet been exhausted. In the same message (which contradicts its earlier position), the State omitted any reference to its argument that the petition had been presented after expiry of the deadline stipulated for that purpose. The IACHR therefore rejects the respective objection presented by the State, and concludes that Article 46(1)(b) of the American Convention is not applicable to the instant case.

9. In its letter dated April 29, 1988, the State maintained that the petition failed to comply with the requirement in Article 46(1)(a) of the American Convention regarding exhaustion of the remedies afforded by the country’s laws. It offered the following argument in this respect:

“Given the importance which the country’s authorities and Mexican society place on complete clarification of any offense committed against a journalist, the investigation has not been closed...In the face of the perspicacity and doubts displayed by the petitioners when they contend that the individuals who have now been found guilty of the crime in question, [the authorities] have carried out a series of measures and activities designed to remove any doubt regarding the conclusions reached, not only by the investigations but also by means of the respective criminal proceeding itself.”

10. To pinpoint the position of the parties in the present case, the Commission observes that the petitioners have expressed their belief in no uncertain terms, as may be seen in the text of the accusation presented to the Mexican State:

“The fact that the investigation was suspended when the persons who had actually committed the deed were captured, and that there has been no investigation of the mastermind behind the crime...shows that a certain “tolerance ” was evinced by the government, a trend that has continued to prevail in recent years (sic). Even though the case has not officially been closed, no further progress was made toward solving the crime.”

11. One of the exceptions to the rule of exhaustion of internal remedies is precisely an unwarranted delay in rendering a final judgment under those remedies. Héctor Félix Miranda was murdered in April 1988, and over the ensuing three years the country’s jurisdictional bodies tried and sentenced the material perpetrators. But the fact that the investigation was kept open during a period as prolonged as the one that has transpired since the events took place until the present is not, per se, evidence of the wish to establish full-fledged responsibility or to solve the case ….

12. The State’s final argument in its request for the present case to be declared inadmissible is based on the absence of events violating human rights. As we have seen above, the allegations in this case are characteristic of a violation of several rights recognized and enshrined in the American Convention:a violation that was committed in connection with events which took place when the obligation to respect and safeguard the rights established in that instrument had already entered into effect for Mexico. In the absence of any grounds for a finding of inadmissibility, the IACHR has jurisdiction to hear and decide on the matters addressed in the complaint.

IV. ANALYSIS

13. Article 4(1) of the American Convention guarantees the right of all persons to have their lives respected and commands that “no person shall be arbitrarily deprived ” thereof. In the present case, the petitioners did not place direct blame for Héctor Félix Miranda’s murder on agents of the State; but they do consider that it resulted from the authorities’ failure to protect him.

14. In that connection,the petitioners allege that the Mexican State did not comply with its obligation to protect Mr. Félix Miranda, who had been the object of threats and feared for his life. The State’s response was that the victim “did not report to a competentauthority that he had been threatened and neither had he been


Pointing to the camera, Héctor Félix Miranda shares a joke with his friends.

physically attacked in any way, nor intimidated by any authority in his newspaper career, as may be seen in the communication presented by the petitioners.” Later statements on that subject from the claimants indicate that the offices of the weekly publication Zeta had been attacked a year before the murder; and this, according to the magazine’s director,“ could only have been motivated by an attempt to silence Félix Miranda because of the accusations and criticism which repeatedly appeared in his articles.”

15. The Commission considers that it is not clear, in the present case, that the authorities knew about the threats Mr. Félix Miranda had received,since they had not been apprised thereof by the competent bodies in order for the State to take the steps necessary for safeguarding the security and the life of the aforementioned journalist.Consequently, the IACHR concludes that the State cannot be held responsible -either for an act committed, or for one omitted -in the violation of Héctor Félix Miranda’s right to life.

16. In their observations relative to the State’s initial response, the petitioners cite the rights of Héctor Félix Miranda to have his physical integrity respected and to be given equal protection.

19. …it should be noted once again that the petitioners did not question the trial and sentencing of the material authors, but the failure to investigate the intellectual authorship of the murder. They consider that the crime was the direct consequence of publication of the column entitled “Un poco de algo ” (A Little of Something), in which the writer wrote “in a harsh and at times sarcastic vein, criticized and denounced private and public matters in connection with acts of corruption, crimes in general and drug trafficking.”

20. The petitioners go on to say that businessman Jorge Hank Rhon -whom they describe as “the son of one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in Mexico”-had been attacked by Félix Miranda on several occasions in his column in Zeta months before the murder. This petitioners consider this to be a relevant fact, since both Medina Romero and Vera Palestina were employees of the Tijuana racetrack owned by Hank Rhon’s family. Finally, presumed evidence had been found showing the payment of a substantial sum of money -from the track’s receipts -to Vera Palestina.

21. The State maintained, in response to that allegation, that “the investigations have not led to the determination of the possible intellectual authorship of any person, since under Mexico’s law, the mere suspicion of some felonious action has no legal weight; that notwithstanding, the investigations have been continued.” The State explained that Medina Moreno had confessed that he was “the intellectual and moral author of the murder,” in reply to which the petitioners made the following statement:

“In the presumed confession of Victoriano Medina Moreno, after he had been found guilty of the murder of Félix Miranda, [the subject] made the argument that he had been the object of criticism in the column written by the journalist. But neither newspaper reporters nor police ever found any mention whatsoever of Medina Moreno in his column.”

“A security guard at the Agua Caliente racetrack stated that Antonio Vera Palestina, after being tried for and found guilty of the murder of Félix Miranda, had on the very day of the crime received a voucher in pesos for a sum equivalent to ten thousand United States dollars -a matter which had not been duly followed up and investigated. The police centered their investigation exclusively on Medina Moreno and Vera Palestina: no attempt had been made to get to the bottom of the crime, which could have led them to the intellectual author thereof.”

“Police chief Gustavo Romero Meza, who had presumably been investigating the ties between Jorge Hank Rhon and the murderers -all of whom had some connection to the Agua Caliente racetrack, the majority shareholders in which were the family of Hank Rhon -suddenly declared closure of the investigation.”

22. The petitioners also emphasized that the investigation conducted by the State had been neither serious nor complete. To that end, they say that none of the agencies -not the Of fice of the Public Prosecutor (Procuraduría General de Justicia, hereinafter “PGJ ”) of the state of Baja California, not the CNDH and not the Office of the Human Rights Defender of the state (Procuraduría Estatal de Derechos Humanos) -had carried out a thorough investigation of Jesús Blancornelas, who at the time was the associate editor of the Zeta weekly. Finally, the petitioners state the suggestion of undue tolerance on the part of the public officials, inasmuch as the “intellectual author” had still not been investigated, despite the fact that the case continued to be “legally open.”

23. The State’s position in this regard is the following:

“The competent authorities have emphasized that the material perpetrators of the homicide have also been declared the intellectual authors; but to date there has still been no word about the evidence presented by private sources, or the steps taken by the investigating of ficials, the part played by a third party, or the existence of a mastermind behind the crime other than the persons already tried.”

24. Nevertheless, the State has declared that the investigation has not yet been closed “due to the importance which the authorities and Mexican society place on complete clearing up of any offense committed against a journalist.”

29. As seen above, the evidence presented by the petitioners -and not contradicted by the State -contains numerous items which point to the existence of an intellectual author: the payment made to the assassins, the inconsistency in the statement made by the confessed agents, the absence of a statement from Blancornelas and the abrupt closure of the police investigation, among others. The IACHR considers that effective legal tutelage in the present case should include a complete investigation of the murder of Héctor Félix Miranda. Such an investigation must ascertain all of the details relative to the intellectual authorship of that act, in a conclusive and definitive manner, pursuant to the rules of due process.

30. More than ten years have gone by since newspaperman Héctor Félix Miranda was murdered -a period which the IACHR has considered to be unreasonable -and the investigation to discover the intellectual author of the case is still open. The Inter-American Court on Human Rights has noted that the reasonable time period established in Article 8(1) “is not a concept of simple definition,”….

31. The information available in the record reveals that this is not an extremely complex case. That is because of the relatively short time in which the material authors were tried and sentenced -a situation confirmed by the lack of State arguments to that effect. The delay cannot be attributed in this case to the procedural inactivity of the interested parties, since the elements of conviction required to investigate the intellectual authorship were in the hands of the police officials responsible for the investigation. According to the petitioners, the State police inquiry came to an inexplicable standstill; the State made no reference to this in its letters. Lastly, turning to the diligence displayed by the judicial authorities, the State limited its action to presenting photocopies of the sentence of conviction, along with five missives exchanged in 1997 between the State of Baja California Attorney General’s Office of Human Rights and the Citizens’ Protection group, the judge of the criminal court and the State’s assistant attorney general. The end result of that exchange was the response from the last-named on July 18, 1997, the pertinent portion of which says:

“The case of the homicide of Mr. Héctor Félix Miranda cannot be considered to have been closed in regard to the possible intellectual authorship, given the fact that -insofar as the actual perpetrators are concerned -two persons responsible for the homicide are serving out their sentences of guilt, now that the legal remedies have been exhausted. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to determine anything in connection with the intellectual authorship, since no evidence has been found that indicate the existence of such a person or persons.”

32. In light of the foregoing information, the Commission confirms its preliminary assessment of the unreasonably prolonged duration of the investigation, which remains open without any further result whatsoever after more than ten years have elapsed since the events took place.

37. In its letters to the IACHR, the Mexican State has failed to address a number of important issues, such as the supposed existence of a cash payment to the material authors, linked to a person described as being very powerful, whose reasons for enmity with Félix Miranda were public knowledge. Neither did it refer to the inconsistency in Medina Moreno’s argument concerning the motives that impelled him to commit the crime, despite the fact that the supposed annoyance sparked by the publication of articles about his person had been denied; nor to the failure to question journalist Jesús Blancornelas, associate editor of the weekly newsmagazine Zeta, and a key figure in the investigation.

38. The State cited “the importance which the authorities and Mexican society attach to a complete clarification of any crime


Following Héctor Félix Miranda ’s murder,citizens staged protest demonstrations outside public buildings demanding the crime be solved promptly.

committed against a journalist.” The grounds for reaching a decision that are available in this case send a contrary message regarding the conduct of the responsible authorities: their lack of activity in the investigation, interrupted only by a few formalities of a bureaucratic and trivial nature, with absolutely no concrete results. In that connection, the information submitted by the petitioners is worth noting:

“In February 1996, the public prosecutor of Baja California in Tijuana, Jesús Alberto Osuna Lafarga, announced that the murder of Félix Miranda was considered an open case, but that the inspectors were unable to take action until the police could bring in some new information. The head of the Tijuana Police Force, Captain Antonio Torres Miranda, indicated that he no longer had anyone working on the case. “Judicially, the case against the people mentioned at the start of the investigation has been closed. We would need an order from the prosecutor to reopen it and then we’d have to start all over again, from the beginning.…Without statements from the men who have been found guilty, there’s nothing that would lead us to investigate further.”

39. On the other hand, the State did indeed devote ample space in its documents to addressing the question of the petitioners’conduct and the information they had sent to the IACHR.

The Commission believes that the intention of transferring to private sources the responsibility for providing proof of the charge of a mastermind behind the murder, together with the authorities’ lack of activity in that respect, clearly show that the State has eschewed the obligation to investigate imposed on it by the instruments of the inter-American human rights system.

40. The State has established on solid grounds in the present report that the Mexican State incurred an unreasonable delay in the investigation of Héctor Félix Miranda’s murder. Despite its exercise of the monopoly on criminal proceedings, the State declined to conduct the complete and serious investigation of the crime befalling the journalist as its own juridical duty, so that the judicial remedy available in Mexico has not been simple, rapid or effective. Consequently, the Mexican State violated -to the detriment of Héctor Félix Miranda’s relatives -the rights to a fair trial and to the judicial protection protected by Articles 8 and 25 of the American Convention in regard to the obligation to respect and guarantee those rights, as established in Article 1(1) of that international instrument.

49. The petitioners allege that the failure to investigate the intellectual authorship of Héctor Félix Miranda’s murder constitutes a violation of the right to freedom of expression. For its part, the State avers that “there is no relationship between the characteristics of a ministerial investigation and the juridical assumption set forth in Article 13 as cited ”.…

50. According to the State’s argument, the public does not have the right to be informed of the investigation. The IACHR finds it quite odd that the State should muster that argument in the present case, since the facts point precisely to the absence of an investigation pursuant to the parameters of international law, which leads to the lack of punishment (an “escape from justice”) for the intellectual authors. In any case, that is not the question under analysis in the present case. What we must establish here is whether the failure to investigate the mastermind that conceived the plot for murdering Héctor Félix Miranda constitutes a violation of the right of every citizen to be freely given “information and ideas of all kinds.”

51. While it has not yet been definitively and conclusively determined who were the intellectual authors of the crime -the issue which constitutes the central violation in the present case -the evidence shows that Héctor Félix Miranda was assassinated because of what he wrote in his newspaper articles. In point of fact, the confession of Victoriano Medina Moreno, admitting that he had committed the crime because he had been criticized in Félix Miranda’s column, was noted earlier in this text.

52. A State’s refusal to conduct a full investigation of the murder of a journalist is particularly serious because of its impact on society. And that is the case here, because the impunity of any of the parties responsible for an act of aggression against a reporter -the most serious of which is assuredly deprivation of the right to life -or against any person engaged in the activity of public expression of information or ideas constitutes an incentive for all violators of human rights. At the same time, the murder of a journalist clearly has a “chilling effect ”, most notably on other journalists but also on ordinary citizens, as it instills the fear of denouncing any and all kinds of offenses, abuses or illegal acts. The Commission considers that such an effect can only be avoided by swift action on the part of the State to punish all perpetrators,as is its duty under international and domestic law. The Mexican State must send a strong message to society that there will be no tolerance for those who engage in such a grave violation of the right to freedom of expression.

56. …the Commission concludes that the failure to investigate and punish the mastermind behind the murder of Héctor Félix Miranda, pursuant to the laws and domestic procedures of Mexico, goes hand-in-hand with a violation of the right to inform and to express one’s views freely and publicly. The IACHR also concludes that the killing of this journalist constitutes an attack on the duty to denounce arbitrary conduct and abuses against society, aggravated by the impunity of one or more of the intellectual authors. Accordingly, the absence of a serious and complete investigation of the facts in the present case generates the international responsibility of the Mexican State for violating Héctor Félix Miranda’s right to freedom of expression and that of the citizens in general to receive information freely and to learn the truth about the events that took place.

V. ACTIONS AFTER REPORT No. 42/98

57. On September 29, 1998, the IACHR adopted Report No.42/98 in this case, pursuant to Article 50 of the American Convention, and transmitted it to the Mexican State with its recommendations. The State forwarded its observations on December 2, 1998.

58. The Mexican State argued that the petition was time-barred, as well as failure to exhaust domestic remedies. Furthermore, the state held in its observations that in Mexico the Public Ministry has exclusive jurisdiction over the investigation and prosecution of crimes “as the sole organ of the state that has the attributes and autonomy required to carry out its work.” For this reason, it indicated, “the assessments or consideration of any person are not,of themselves, sufficient for the investigating authorities to act in a certain manner, when they are not credible nor made known to the authorities through the channels provided by law.”

59. The State also considered that this case was “based solely on premises whose veracity has not been shown,” such as the payment of US $10,000 that was alleged to have been made by the Tijuana race track, which was the employer of the material perpetrators of the journalist’s murder. It also called into question that the IACHR, in this report, should give weight to the confession of Victoriano Medina Moreno so as to “derive liability for the violation of the freedom of expression,” and that at the same time it should accord no weight to the fact that the same person incriminated himself as the mastermind. The State is of the view that this was a clear contradiction and that it “confirms that the material perpetrator and mastermind were one and the same, Medina Moreno.” It concluded with the assertion that “there was no assent or tolerance on the part of the authorities,” and that neither could one derive “the existence of a mastermind other than the persons convicted,” for which reason it requested “that the IACHR declare that the Government of Mexico has complied with the general obligation to respect and guarantee human rights,and that it is not responsible ” for the violations established in Report 42/98.

60. The Commission …does deem it necessary to develop two important issues: the weight of the evidence and the failure to investigate the journalist’s murder.

61. First, the Commission recalls that the procedure in the inter-American human rights system, as the Inter-American Court has held, “has its own particular features that distinguish it from domestic law procedure.” The State’s arguments during the processing of the case, and in its observations to Report 42/98, are based on the criteria for weighing the evidence provided for in Mexican domestic legislation to determine individual criminal liability, and are aimed at establishing that the authorities were not required to investigate who was the mastermind of the murder, since the evidence provided by the petitioners was not presented in the domestic jurisdiction.

63. …the Commission evaluated the available elements and established the following facts: journalist Héctor Félix Miranda regularly published news critical of the authorities and other major figures in Tijuana, especially the police; his murder was perpetrated by persons directly linked to a powerful local businessman who were convicted and sentenced for this act; later, an investigation was initiated to determine the responsibility of a “third mastermind ” (“tercer autor intelectual ”), which is still ongoing after 10 years, with no results. All of these facts derive from the information provided by both parties, and have not been refuted by the state. The indicia and presumptions mentioned by the Commission in this report were not used to establish those facts, but only to confirm them, in accordance with the criteria for weighing the evidence defined by the Inter-American Court.

64. The IACHR is not authorized to establish who was or were the masterminds of the murder of Héctor Félix Miranda, nor to determine the respective punishment, since this is a power and an obligation of the Mexican State. In contrast, the Commission is fully authorized to determine, in the processing of an individual case, whether a state party to the American Convention -through any of the ways in which public power is expressed, including the Public Ministry or the judiciary -has become internationally responsible, for example, by failing in its duty to carry out an exhaustive, independent and impartial investigation into the human rights violations committed in its territory. In the exercise of these powers, the Commission analyzed the facts mentioned in the preceding paragraph, confirmed by other elements, and developed the conclusions and recommendations of Report 42/98.

65. In the face of these facts determined by the Commission, the State provided no information about any measure aimed at establishing the full truth, at determining who were the masterminds, or at applying the respective sanctions. For example, the alleged payment of US $10,000 to the material perpetrators the day after the murder was never investigated. On the contrary, in the face of this specific lead, the state used several arguments in its effort to justify the failure of the authorities to investigate and to shift that obligation to an alleged negligence on the part of private persons. The investigation technically continues to be “open,” which manifestly contradicts the thesis according to which “the material perpetrators and masterminds were one and the same” that the authorities consider to be definitively established based on the confessions of the convicts. In view of the foregoing, the Commission considers it apparent that such an investigation lacks any meaning and is irremediably doomed to failure. Consequently, the state has renounced its obligation to carry out a serious and definitive investigation into the murder of journalist Héctor Félix Miranda.

VI. CONCLUSIONS

66. The IACHR has no evidence that allows it to establish in this case the responsibility of the Mexican State for the violation of the rights to life, to personal security and to equality before the law. On the other hand, the IACHR concludes that the State has -to the detriment of Héctor Félix Miranda and that of every citizen -violated the right to freedom of expression guaranteed by Article 13 of the American Convention; and -to the detriment of members of his family -the rights to a fair trial and to the judicial protection set forth in Articles 8 and 25 of that international instrument, cited in relation to the general obligation to respect and guarantee the rights set forth in Article 1(1) thereof.

VII. RECOMMENDATIONS

67. Based on the analysis and conclusions in the present report, THE INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS REITERATES THE FOLLOWING RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE MEXICAN STATE:

A) To conduct a serious,exhaustive and impartial investigation to determine the punitive responsibility of all the perpetrators of Héctor Félix Miranda’s murder.

B) To conduct a serious, exhaustive and impartial investigation to determine whether there have been instances of concealment and crimes against the administration of justice that have impeded a complete investigation of the incidents which give rise to the present report; and, if so, that it apply such pertinent penal, administrative and/or disciplinary measures as may be pertinent.

C) To provide members of Héctor Félix Miranda’s family with adequate reparation and compensation for the human rights violations established in this document.

VIII. PUBLICATION

68. On February 25, 1999, the Commission sent Report No.5/99 -the text of which is above -to the Mexican State and to the petitioners, in keeping with Article 51(2) of the American Convention; and it set a deadline of one month for the state to comply with the foregoing recommendations. On March 26, 1999, the State sent a communication containing observations on admissibility, the weight of the evidence, and the violation of freedom of expression in this case. In accordance with Article 51(2), the Commission, in this phase of the process, shall confine itself to assessing the measures taken by the Mexican State to comply with the recommendations and to remedy the situation under review.

69. The communication of March 26, 1999, contains no concrete information on measures taken by the State to comply with the recommendations issued by the Commission in Report No.5/99.

70. Accordingly, and pursuant to Articles 51(3) of the American Convention and 48 of the Commission’s Regulations, the Commission decides: to reiterate the conclusions and recommendations contained in Chapters VI and VII above; to publish this report, and to include it in the Commission’s Annual Report to the General Assembly of the OAS. Pursuant to the provisions contained in the instruments governing its mandate, the IACHR will continue to evaluate the measures taken by the Mexican State with respect to those five recommendations, until the State has fully complied with them.

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