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 Editorials | Issues | November 2006 
Details of Mexico's Dirty Wars From 1960s to 1980s Released
 Juan Forero - Washington Post
| | The crimes detailed in the draft report were committed during the administrations of Presidents Diaz Ordaz (1964-1970), Echeverría (1970-1976) and López Portillo (1976-1982). |
Mexican authorities have quietly released an 859-page report that describes how three Mexican governments killed, tortured and disappeared dissidents and political opponents from the late 1960s until 1982.
The release of the "Historical Report to the Mexican Society" marks the first time that Mexico has officially accepted responsibility for waging a dirty war against leftist guerrillas, university students and activists. It includes declassified government records, photographs and details about individuals who were killed under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the authoritarian party that ruled the country for 71 years before being ousted in 2000.
"The authoritarianism with which the Mexican state subjected dissidents led to spiraling violence that led it to commit crimes against humanity, in crime after crime," the report says.
Special commissions designed to dig up the truth about Latin America's dirty wars have detailed state terror in better-known conflicts such as those in Chile and Argentina, where military regimes ruled through murder and intimidation during the 1970s and '80s. But the report in Mexico offers chilling detail about how the state, with orders from up high, carried out a brutal offensive that included using electrical shocks, rounding up villagers and burning down villages in regions that authorities considered dangerously subversive.
"This was state policy," said Jose Luis Contreras, spokesman for Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, whose office conducted the investigation. "The hypothesis is that they knew about the abuses, the executions and the disappearances."
The report, released by the attorney general's office late Friday at the start of a three-day holiday, comes five years after President Vicente Fox's government appointed Carrillo to investigate political crimes under the PRI. On Tuesday, the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University, posted the document on its Web site.
An early version of the report was leaked in February to the Mexican press, well-known intellectuals and the archive, against the wishes of Fox and Carrillo, who felt it was biased against the military and left out important facts. Under pressure, the government issued the much-awaited final draft.
The report includes the names of 645 people who were disappeared by the state security apparatus, along with the circumstances under which some of them vanished. It also includes the names of 99 people who were victims of extrajudicial executions and more than 2,141 cases of torture.
"They list the names of the victims of forced disappearances that they have been able to definitely confirm with the government's own records," said Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico project of the National Security Archive. "The impact of that is powerful - it's dozens and dozens of pages of the names of people picked up by the police and tortured and disappeared."
Still, the report has led to little in the way of concrete results. A handful of former government officials have been jailed but later released.
Carrillo's office said 500 cases are open. But no one is currently facing charges, said Human Rights Watch, the New York-based group, and no one has been tried and convicted.
"They haven't found one disappeared person. They haven't punished a single person responsible," said Rosario Ibarra, a senator whose son, Jesús Piedra Ibarra, disappeared in 1975. "For us, the report is useless."
Edgar Cortez, executive secretary of the National Network of Human Rights, a coalition of 56 groups, said the low-key release of the report - sharply contrasting with the fanfare with which Fox promised to dredge up the past - was troubling. He said he wonders whether it signals the end of the process, instead of the beginning of justice.
"It can be an advance," he said of the report, "but for us the problem is that in the end, it's a report with no guarantees."
The Mexican government had never admitted that there was a clear and comprehensive plan designed to root out enemies of the state and silence them. Officials have blamed rogue army units or overly aggressive military officers for abuses.
But the report says that governments "at the highest command levels" carried out crimes against opponents.
Among the more egregious abuses examined in the document was the 1968 massacre of dozens of people at the Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City, an assault prosecutors believe was engineered by Luis Echeverria, at the time the interior minister.
During Echeverria's tenure as president, which began in 1970 and ended six years later, the Mexican military carried out a vicious counterinsurgency campaign in the southern state of Guerrero that led to the deaths of hundreds.
The abuses outlined in the report took place during the administrations of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964 to 1970), Echeverria and José López Portillo (1976 to 1982).
Only Echeverria is alive, but efforts to try him for the crimes have failed. A judge threw out genocide charges this summer, saying a statute of limitations had run out.
Researcher Gabriela Martinez in Mexico City contributed to this report. |
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