Citizen Strategies to Confront Mistreat and Negligence in Mexican Public Institutions of Health and Justice

At this time, Mexican public institutions of health and justice are more closely monitored than before by civil society, Human Rights associations and international organizations. However, cases of abuse, negligence and omission continue to be frequent among patients and victims when approaching public institutions to obtain medical care or to report a crime that affected them. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to expose the different strategies of citizens when they try to respond to institutional mistreat. First, we will argue that abuses, negligence and omissions of public institutions constitute a particular kind of violence that mixes complex bureaucratic processes, inadequate infrastructure, and insufficient and not well-trained staff. This kind of violence could often hide or diminish the responsibility of institutions, making people believe that health or justice are being denied because of a human error or because it is usual to wait a lot of time to obtain it. When people notice that it is not normal and if they do not fear of reprisals (which happens very often, unfortunately), they could deploy a repertoire of strategies (some of them very aggressive and some others very clever) to defy these institutional obstacles to obtain health and justice rights.