Mayor Announces Human Rights Course for Cops

(Acapulco, ElSur 20 May) Acapulco mayor Manuel Añorve Baños and Mexico’s assistant attorney general for human rights, Juan de Dios Castro Lozano, jointly announced Crime Prevention Days and a two-day course on human rights for all local policemen. Crime Prevention Days are community events to raise consciousness about law enforcement and crime reporting, including school and university level programs. The emphasis will be on avoiding the use of illegal substances, which lead to the commission of other crimes.

The course will be a two-day workshop on human rights emphasizing the principle that you cannot combat illegality with illegality; that is, the end, however noble, cannot justify every means employed to achieve it.

The municipal department of family services, headed by Julieta Fernández, the mayor’s wife, will be presenting several activities and programs directed at the prevention of addiction, which is the prelude to most crime. In the mayor’s opinion, preventing addiction is the most effective long-run method of combating organized drug gangs. The idea is to treat addiction as an illness, to be treated so as to reincorporate the addict into the larger society. “We cannot fight violence with more violence,” the mayor said.