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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | November 2006 
Mexican Murders Admitted
 James C. Mckinley Jr. - theday.com
| | 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). |
Just before leaving office, the administration of President Vicente Fox has quietly put out a voluminous report that for the first time states unequivocally that past governments carried out a covert campaign of murder and torture against dissidents and guerrillas from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.
The 800-page report is the first acceptance of responsibility by the government for what is known here as the “dirty war,” in which the police and the army are believed to have executed more than 700 people without trial, in many cases after torture.
It also represents the fulfillment of Fox's vow to expose the truth about an ugly chapter in Mexico's history.
“The Mexican government has never officially accepted responsibility for these crimes,” said Kate Doyle, the director of the Mexico project of the National Security Archive, a private research group at George Washington University.
Doyle and other human rights experts said, though, that the special prosecutor who issued the report, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, had not succeeded in prosecuting the officials responsible for the crimes it describes in such detail, notably former President Luis Echeverria.
Instead of being announced at a public event, as is often the case, the report was posted on the Internet late Friday night. It was several days before its significance became clear to groups that monitor the issue.
The report relies on secret military and government documents that Fox ordered declassified.
It contains lengthy chapters on the killings of student protesters in Mexico City in 1968 and 1971, as well as a brutal counterinsurgency operation in the state of Guerrero, where military officers destroyed entire villages suspected of helping the rebel leader Lucio Cabanas and tortured their inhabitants.
The report offers considerable detail, including names the military officers responsible for various atrocities, from the razing of villages to the killing of student protesters.
It does not include orders signed by three former presidents authorizing the crimes.
Still, the document trail makes clear that the abuses were not the work of renegade officers, but an official government policy.
The events occurred during the administrations of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Jose Lopez Portillo and EcheverrIa. The federal security department kept the presidents informed about many aspects of the covert operations.
“At the end of this investigation,” the report said, “it has been proved that the authoritarian regime, at the highest levels of command, impeded, criminalized and fought various parts of the population that organized itself to demand greater democratic participation.”
The authors of the report, which was assembled by 27 researchers, go on to state that “the battle the regime waged against these groups — organized among student movements and popular insurgencies — was outside the law” and employed “massacres, forced disappearances, systematic torture and genocide, in an attempt to destroy the part of society it considered its ideological enemy.”
Carrillo Prieto told reporters this week that there was no doubt that the former presidents were aware of the campaign. “This was not about the behavior of certain individuals,” he told The Associated Press. “It was the consequence of an authorized plan to do away with political dissidents.”
Still, the courts have repeatedly thrown out Carrillo's indictments against Echeverria, the only one of the three accused former heads of state still living. Echeverria, 84, steadfastly denies any wrongdoing.
In July a federal judge threw out genocide charges against Echeverria, ruling that a 30-year statute of limitations had run out. The charges stemmed from a massacre of student protesters at the Tlatelolco housing complex in Mexico City in 1968, when he served as secretary of the interior. |
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