Winning students Ricardo Juanes Laviada and Fernando Ruz Dueñas with their professor, Jorge Carlos Toledo Sauri.
As Mexico lives through “its worst human rights crisis since 1968,” in the words of a Human Rights Watch official, two Mexican students are in the international limelight for their achievements in the same field.
Marist University of Mérida students Ricardo Juanes Laviada and Fernando Ruz Dueñas won the Latin American Human Rights Competition on Friday in Colombia, at a time when Mexico could do with some good news on the subject.
The competition uses a hypothetical human rights case, designed by a committee of experts on the subject, in which students are assigned the roles of representatives of a victim on one side and the hypothetical state on the other. They present their cases before a tribunal that simulates the Inter-American Human Rights Court.
The Mérida students advanced to the finals on Wednesday along with teams from five universities from Colombia, Argentina and the Dominican Republic.
The win was their third in two months. They won a national debate on human rights in Mexico City in September and, along with four other students, took first place in another human rights contest at the Autonomous University of Mexico just days before leaving for Colombia.
The Colombia win was not the first for a Mérida team: the school took first place at the 2012 competition.
Next up for the two winners is a trip to Geneva, Switzerland, where they will form part of a team of observers at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Then next May they will compete at the Inter-American Human Rights Competition, the oldest and most important of all.
Only two Mexican universities have won that event, Veracruz and Mérida.
Recent events have put Mexico in the human rights spotlight recently, and last week the executive director for the Americas of Human Rights Watch had strong words to say on the subject.
José Miguel Vivanco told El Universal that the Iguala massacre of September 26 indicates “a profound degradation in Mexico in areas such as justice, violence, observance of human rights, corruption and impunity.”
He said the crisis began during the administration of the last president, Felipe Calderón, and is the most serious since the Tlatelolco massacre, in which hundreds of students were killed by federal forces in Mexico City in 1968.
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