MEXICO CITY - Ines Fernandez Ortega was with her four children, drying meat on her patio, when three soldiers entered her home in a small indigenous village in southern Guerrero state. They accused her of stealing the meat.
The 27-year-old Fernandez, a Tlapaneca Indian, didn't answer because she speaks little Spanish. The soldiers raped her, then took the meat.
Two years later, they remain unpunished.
Amnesty International, in a report released Tuesday, cites the assault on Fernandez as one of dozens of rapes, executions, cases of torture, kidnappings and disappearances committed by members of the Mexican army in Guerrero since 1996.
"More than 140 disappearances, at least nine rapes, untold illegal detentions, torture and repression have been documented since 1996," Mario Patron, a Guerrero lawyer who's working with the human rights group, said at a news conference.
Officials in President Vicente Fox's office declined to comment, saying they hadn't seen the report.
Guerrero state, best known for the tourist resort of Acapulco, has long had a reputation for violence. Of the more than 500 people who disappeared in Mexico during the so-called dirty war of the 1960s and '70s, most came from Guerrero, according to the National Commission of Human Rights.
Two decades later, Amnesty said in its report, "Mexico: Indigenous Women and Military Injustice," that cases involving Mexican soldiers weren't investigated or prosecuted.
The report details nine cases of women allegedly raped by soldiers and calls for reforms to allow military human-rights abuses of civilians to be tried in civilian courts. It also notes that rape isn't a crime under Mexico's code of military justice.
"Unless there are legislative reforms, the military doesn't care about civilian allegations," said Monica Costa, of Amnesty International's Mexico research team. "Otherwise, there's no justice in military rapes and disappearances."
In 2001, Fox proposed judicial reforms that included trying members of the army charged with crimes in civilian courts, but legislators rejected that clause.
About 3,000 Mexican soldiers operate in Guerrero, largely because of its thriving drug industry. More than 60 percent of Mexico's poppies, the raw material for heroin, are grown there. But Amnesty charged that the army's "operations are also linked to gathering intelligence on indigenous communities and identifying what they perceive to be subversive elements."
The report said the lack of action against soldiers accused of wrongdoing fell particularly hard on women and indigenous communities. Women who report rapes are ostracized by their communities and their husbands, brothers and uncles.
After Fernandez told her husband of the March 2002 rape, they went to the local public ministry, but the military claimed jurisdiction, the Amnesty report said. In February 2003, a military prosecutor recommended that the case be closed because Fernandez didn't show up for a hearing. Amnesty said the prosecutor hadn't specified a date.
Amnesty said it feared many other rapes in the state hadn't been reported "since the consequences of reporting bear heavily on the women and their families."
Amnesty said rape wasn't the only abuse taking place in Guerrero.
"Delegates learned of a range of abuses against indigenous communities by the military, as well as various police forces," the report said. "Women, fearful of soldiers, are often forced to remain inside, and children are kept from school. Roadblocks are set up and men, primarily, are arbitrarily stopped ... accused of growing drugs and supporting armed groups."
