The MacArthur Foundation first began making grants in Mexico in 1986 and opened an office in Mexico City in 1992. The Foundation's current areas of emphasis in the country are population and reproductive health and human rights. Its human rights grantmaking focuses on efforts at the national level to build up leading human rights organizations, strengthen the system of public human rights commissions, and promote work in the area of police reform. There is also a special emphasis on human rights work in the states of Guerrero and Jalisco to help implement model reforms and programs and redress local human rights problems. The Foundation's population and reproductive health grantmaking in Mexico focuses on helping to reduce the highest maternal mortality ratios in the country, concentrating on the rural and indigenous women in three states, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca, and to reduce abortion-related maternal death.
In a landmark case, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recently found that Mexico failed to adequately investigate the disappearance of a dissident during the country’s “dirty war,” a period from the 1960s through the 1980s when the government was accused of killing and disappearing thousands of people. The decision marks the first time an international court has ruled against Mexico in a human rights case stemming from that period. In 1974, Rosendo Radilla, 25, was allegedly detained by soldiers in the city of Atoyac, Guerrero, before he disappeared. MacArthur grantee Comisión Mexicana por la Defensa y la Promoción de los Derechos Humanos litigated the case before the Court, which ordered Mexico to pay damages, publicly recognize its responsibility, and reform laws on “forced disappearances” to conform to international standards.
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