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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | March 2006 
Mexico to Close Office of Special Prosecutor for 'Dirty War' Crimes
 E. Eduardo Castillo - Associated Press
| | Mexican special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto listens to a question during a news conference in Mexico City Wednesday, March 1, 2006. Carrillo Prieto spoke about a leaked draft of an official report on Mexico's 'dirty war' alleging the government ordered soldiers to torture, rape and execute people as part of a counterinsurgency campaign from 1960 to 1980, saying the government will announce their own formal report April 15. (AP/Gregory Bull) |
Mexico City – Mexico will close a special prosecutor's office dedicated to investigating atrocities committed by the government during its two-decade campaign to weed out suspected guerrillas and leftists, the attorney general said Monday.
President Vicente Fox took office in 2000 vowing to punish those responsible for the brutal campaign, but the office failed to secure convictions – or even successful indictments – against all but a few former government officials.
“It's an office that had an objective, which was to investigate the past,” Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said Monday. “Having concluded its principal investigations, the office should close.”
He said it could cease operations as soon as April 15, after a final report from the special prosecutor that is expected to conclude Mexican presidents from the late 1960s to the early 1980s orchestrated a systematic campaign in which anti-government activists were detained without cause and soldiers carried out summary executions, raped women, and set entire villages on fire.
According to a leaked draft of the report, the most brutal period allegedly occurred under President Luis Echeverria's term from 1970-76, when military bases served as “concentration camps,” and hundreds of suspected subversives in the southern state of Guerrero were killed or disappeared.
The investigations of the special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo, led to the arrests of a few former officials from the federal government as well as Guerrero. But most of his tenure has been characterized by unsuccessful efforts to seek arrest warrants on genocide charges for Echeverria, and to try him and top members of his government for killings in 1968 and 1971.
Carrillo has accused Echeverria, during his tenure as interior secretary, of masterminding an attack on student protesters who filled Mexico City's Tlatelolco Plaza just before the capital hosted the Olympics in 1968. Officially, 25 people were killed; human rights activists say that number may be as high as 350.
Echeverria was president in 1971, when a team of elite government operatives killed 12 students during a peaceful anti-government march. |
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