Henry Romero/Reuters
Mexico’s federal police killed 22 people during a ranch shootout last year, and then moved bodies and planted guns to back up their official story, according to the country’s human-rights commission. Police initially said 42 alleged cartel members were killed during the bloody gunfight last May in the western state of Michoacan, but now the National Human Rights Commission says at least half of those deaths were “grave human-rights violations attributable to public servants of the federal police.” The agency could not sufficiently establish the circumstances of death for 15 others who were shot to death, but they did find two cases of alleged torture and four more of deaths related to excessive-force. The large death toll suggests the police killed at random, the agency claims, and they question the official narrative of what led to a gun battle with supposed members of the Jalisco New Generation cartel.