Since posting the article immediately below, I've been researching the just filed (or just about to be filed) international criminal complaint against Mexican president Felipe Calderón. To my dismay, press accounts say that one of the principal sponsors of this maneuver is no less an esteemed figure than John Ackerman.
John Ackerman is perhaps unknown to many of you, but his name will be recognized by anyone who follows Mexican politics and legal matters. John is a professor and "legal investigator" at UNAM (Autonomous National University of Mexico), and is the editor of the Mexican Law Review as well. He was educated in the States -- according to his online biography he holds a doctorate in political sociology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. I've never met John, but I've seen or listened to recorded interviews of him a time or two, and he's natively bi-lingual Spanish-English. John is a frequent guest and commentator on television and radio programs in Mexico and the Unites States, and he regularly pens op-ed columns for influential Mexican newspapers as well. That's a highly condensed summary of John's professional CV, but for those of you who want more, just plug his name into any search engine.
A few weeks ago, when Mexico's Twitter Terror case erupted on the scene, John wrote a reasoned editorial condemning the nonsensical prosecution and the even more nonsensical chief prosecutor in Veracruz, where the case arose (that prosecutor resigned last week, fortunately). I wrote my own editorial piece, taking the same position as John and enthusiastically supporting his views (Read it here: http://mexicogulfreporter-supplement.blogspot.com/2011/11/mexico-should-proceed-with-caution-in.html). Because of that bit of recent history, I'm all the more disappointed - and surprised.
It amazes me that John Ackerman would lend his name to such utterly blatant political posturing. Moreover, as as a man trained in legal affairs, he fully understands that after a day or two of splashy headlines, it will all be over. The International Criminal Court in The Hague is no more going to indict Felipe Calderón for waging war against the drug cartels than it's going to indict me for conspiracy to murder Hồ Chí Minh.
In a post on Sunday (October 9), read and commented on by many of you, I said this: "We are all entitled to our own opinions, although we most assuredly are not entitled to our own facts." I stand by those words 100%. But the characterization of the elected president of Mexico as a "war criminal" is entitled neither to deference nor to respect. I believe it will be flatly rejected by responsible, thinking people, and on both sides of the border. In this case, John M. Ackerman has his facts wrong.
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