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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | March 2006 
Mexican Presidency Says It Does Not Endorse Draft Report On Country's 'Dirty War'
 E. Eduardo Castillo - Associated Press
| | Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca (L) and Mexican special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto hold a news conference in Mexico City March 1, 2006. Carrillo confirmed the authenticity of a leaked draft of a report on the Mexican government's 'dirty war' against leftists between the 1960s and 1970s but said it was only a snapshot of a final report due to be presented to President Vicente Fox next month. (Reuters/Henry Romero) |
Mexico City – The Mexican presidency said Tuesday it does not endorse a leaked draft of a government report on Mexico's “dirty war” alleging the government ordered soldiers to torture, rape and execute people as part of its counterinsurgency campaign from 1960 to 1980.
President Vicente Fox's spokesman, Ruben Aguilar, told a news conference that the administration could not support the report because it is an unedited draft and not an official text.
Based partly on declassified Mexican military documents, the report was prepared by a special prosecutor assigned to investigate alleged atrocities by soldiers, but it has not yet been officially released.
It was leaked to several prominent Mexican writers and published Sunday in the Mexican magazine, Erme-Equis, and posted on the Web site of the National Security Archives, a private, Washington-based research group.
Aguilar said the government is investigating who leaked the draft.
“We can not endorse a working document, a draft that has not been discussed nor had a final edit,” Aguilar said.
Aguilar said special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo, will finish the investigation and present the final report in a few weeks to Fox.
The unedited draft alleges the crimes were committed during the administrations of presidents Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Luis Echeverria, Jose Lopez Portillo, and Adolfo Lopez Mateos.
The most brutal period occurred under Echeverria's rule from 1970-76, when military bases allegedly served as “concentration camps,” according to the report, and the government “implemented a genocide plan that was closely followed during his reign.” During that time, guerrillas were blamed for a series of kidnappings and attacks on soldiers.
Hundreds of suspected subversives in the southern state of Guerrero were killed or disappeared.
Under Echeverria's so-called “Friendship Operation” launched by the military in 1970 in Guerrero, the report says it has evidence the army conducted “illegal searches, arbitrary detentions, torture, the raping of women in the presence of their husbands, and the possible extrajudicial executions of groups of people.”
“With this operation, a state policy was established in which all authorities connected to the military – the president ... the presidential guard, the commanders of Guerrero's two military regions, officers and their troops – participated in human rights violations with the justification of pursuing a bad fugitive,” the report said.
Jose Luis Contreras, spokesman for the special prosecutor, said Carrillo planned to make changes to the draft, including removing the words “concentration camps.”
Fox has vowed to prosecute Mexico's past crimes, but has done little so far.
Carrillo's office has unsuccessfully sought to bring genocide charges against Echeverria for mass killings committed during two anti-government protests of mostly university students, in 1968 and 1971. The former president has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
The report for the first time names soldiers and cites telegrams from the Defense Department describing exactly who would be targeted in Mexico's war against guerrilla leaders Lucio Cabanas and Genaro Vazquez.
Jose Sotelo, one of the researchers contracted by the special prosecutor, told Radio W in Mexico City that he had handed in a final report in December and that its context was “basically” the same as the leaked version.
“There's no fundamental difference,” he said. |
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