President Andrés Manuel López Obrador spoke on Wednesday about the recent proposal to restore the death penalty in Mexico.
” I don’t believe in the death penalty and I don’t think it’s an option, an alternative,” he said in his press conference.
The statement of the president is given after the Green Party proposed on Tuesday to submit for discussion the 4th Amendment of Mexico’s Constitution and the withdrawal of two international treaties to restore the death penalty in the country.
The national leader, Carlos Puente, and the coordinator of his parliamentary group in the Chamber of Deputies, Arturo Escobar, also suggested that the Supreme Court should determine the cases of capital punishment.
They said they propose the death penalty for those who commit the crimes of femicide and manslaughter to children under 18. The measure, according to the initiative, would be temporary “until Mexico returns to times of peace and tranquility.”
Last week, PAN Senator Víctor Fuentes Solís proposed to discuss the measure, this after the feminicides of Ingrid Escamilla and a girl in Mexico City that resulted in protests around Mexico.
Ricardo Monreal, coordinator of the senators of Morena, who described it as a “barbarity” was against the measure.
“One cannot, due to the circumstance and the crisis in which the country has lived in recent years, establish such barbaric penalties,” he said.
The death penalty was abolished in the country in 1929. Mexico also signed the American Convention on Human Rights, known as the ‘Pact of San José’, in 1969.
In its fourth article, which deals with the Right to Life, it states that “the death penalty will not be restored in the states that have abolished it.”
