Mexico army tortures in drug war surge rights body

By Mica Rosenberg

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexican soldiers fighting a war against drug cartels have arbitrarily detained suspects, beating and torturing them with electric shocks, a senior human rights official said on Wednesday.

Mauricio Ibarra, a top investigator at the National Human Rights Commission, said complaints of army abuses have spiked since 10,000 troops surged into Ciudad Juarez, the country's most violent city on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Soldiers charged with patrolling drug hotspots have detained suspects in military barracks -- sometimes for up to 12 hours -- and beaten them to solicit information before turning them over to police investigators, Ibarra said.

"They give them electric shocks on different parts of the body ... testicles, arms, legs, buttocks," Ibarra told Reuters.

"Some complain they have been hit on the soles of their feet with bats," he said, detailing 22 formal accusations presented to the army by the commission since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006 pledging to combat drug gangs.

Some 6,300 people were killed last year as rival cartels attacked each other and security forces. The drug violence is worrying the United States, which is giving hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Mexico's security forces.

The army acknowledged some abuses have occurred, but denied the worst allegations and said the public overall welcomes the troop deployments in Ciudad Juarez, which has succeeded in cutting the number of drug killing dramatically.

Reports of arbitrary detention by the army collected by the commission, Mexico's official human rights watchdog, jumped in the first three months of this year to 172 compared to 311 complaints for all of 2008, the bulk around Ciudad Juarez in the northern state of Chihuahua.