Sergio Alcocer Martínez de Castro, undersecretary for North America, met with officials of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, with whom he discussed the recent killings of Mexicans with excessive force by U.S. police.
In a press release, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE, by its Spanish acronym) reported that the official also had a meeting with lawyers from the Mexican Civil Rights Advisory Group to provide continuity for strategies, legal tools and policies to prevent incidents of this kind.
This is in view of the fact that, in less than one month, three Mexicans have been killed by police in different states of the neighboring country.
The first and most high-profile case was that of Antonio Zambrano Montes, who was shot dead by police in Pasco, Washington on Feb. 10 of this year.
That afternoon, the agricultural worker, a native of Michoacán, fled from uniformed police in a busy intersection, where he was throwing rocks at passing cars. A video posted on social networks showed the man, seeing that he was being pursued, raising his hands as a sign of surrender; when he turned around, he met a hail of police bullets that killed him.
On Friday, Feb. 20, Rubén García Villalpando, a 31-year-old welder originally from Durango, died after he allegedly disobeyed orders of a Tarrant County, Texas transit policeman, who shot him twice in the chest.
One week later, on Feb. 27, Javier Canepa Díaz lost his life to shots fired by officials of the police department of Santa Ana, California.
According to the press release, issued this Tuesday, the two meetings of Undersecretary Alcocer Martínez de Castro took place during a working visit that he made to Washington to follow up on bilateral agenda issues.
Those meetings made it possible to set further meetings with partners in political, educational, academic, and civil society areas.
The undersecretary participated in the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Council on Education, an organization focused on higher education, and which includes more than 1,700 U.S. institutions.
Facing presidents and directors of institutions of higher education in the U.S. and Mexico, Alcocer highlighted the gains and synergies created by the launch of the Bilateral Forum on Higher Education Innovation and Research.
The undersecretary also met with representatives of the Brookings Institution and the Mexico Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center, organizations which maintain a “close collaboration and dialogue” on the bilateral relationship, the role of Mexico as a global actor, and its development.
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