Mexico & Nafta - 14 September 2004

One area where President Fox has delivered on his election promises is human rights. Unlike his predecessors, he is allowing the courts to settle the terms under which dirty war warriors should be prosecuted. The supreme court is currently considering an appeal lodged by the Procuradurí­a General de la República, to bring former president Luis Echeverria to justice for the massacres that occurred during his administration.

Echeverrí­a is accused of ordering genocide when hundreds of students were killed on 10 June 1971. Echeverrí­a was also interior minister when another, probably larger massacre occurred at Tlatelolco in 1968. While the supreme court is considering what to do about Echeverria, the government is going after other officials who carried out orders. Luis de la Barreda Moreno, a former head of federal security, now faces another charge over a disappeared person. The latest charge concerns José Barrón Caldera who disappeared in 1976; the other two cases involved Jesús Piedra Ibarra and Ignacio Salas Obregón. Ironically, Barreda's son, Luis de la Barreda Solórzano, was president of Mexico City's human rights commission: he is defending his father against the charges being brought. 

The most infamous accusation against Barreda Moreno is that he presided over the torture of villagers at El Quemado in Guerrero in 1972. The army was looking for sympathisers who supported Lucio Cabañas and his Partido de los Pobres guerrilla group. It is not clear exactly what happened or when it happened. The villagers say that the army came into the village at the end of August: they say that in the first sweep the soldiers planted incriminating evidence. After that the army established itself in the villages torturing whole families. Eight people were disappeared.

• The Procuradurí­a is also investigating whether the authorities used mental hospitals to house suspects during the dirty war. The health minister, Julio Frenk said that he had opened health ministry records to the Fiscalia Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Polí­ticos del Pasado. This agency is investigating what went on during the dirty war, which was fought mostly in the 1970s.
• The Mexican government said on 7 September that it would publish some of the background to the diplomatic row with Cuba which led to the government expelling Cuba's ambassador and withdrawing its own from Cuba in May. Traditionally, Mexican governments have been loathe to publish information about problems they have had. The decision to release the documents came after pressure from the newly created Instituto Federal de Acceso a la Información (IFAI). This agency was set up in 2002 to make Mexican government more open.

The IFAI said that it had received 17 applications for information about the spat with Cuba over Carlos Ahumada, a construction magnate close to the opposition Partido de la Revolución Democrática. Mexico accused Cuba of dabbling in Mexican affairs after Ahumada fled to Cuba and claimed that he had been inveigled by the federal government into a campaign to smear the mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. It is not clear which documents the IFAI wants to see published, though it appears to know about a 32-page briefing prepared for the interior ministry (gobernación) by the Centro de Información y Seguridad Nacional (Cisen). The IFAI stressed that it does not want information published which could reveal confidential or secret sources.