Mexico & Nafta - December 2006 (ISSN 1741-444X)

On 17 November, the government of President Vicente Fox published a 800-page report on the Dirty War, which took place in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s when the government fought leftwing guerrillas. The report, by a special human rights investigator, is entitled Informe Histórico a la Sociedad Mexicana 2006 and is published on the internet. Human rights activists said that the report was "disappointing" and "fraudulent". They point out that there was no fanfare for the report suggesting that even its authors realise that it is inadequate. The report appeared on investigators' internet site on 17 November. 

Less partisan commentators note that for the first time the Mexican government has unequivocally admitted that past governments (run by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional) carried out a covert campaign of murder and torture against dissidents and guerrillas under successive governments stretching from the later 1960s to the early 1980s. The report directly accuses three presidents of involvement in the Dirty War. 

Human rights activists argue that the report only skates over the surface of what happened in the Dirty War. They say that the report is significantly inferior to similar reports commissioned by the governments of Argentina and Uruguay. Rosario Ibarra, a leftwing senator and noted human rights activist (who coincidentally took a prominent role at the "inauguration of the legitimate president" Andrés Manuel López Obrador on 20 November) dismissed the Fox's government's effort as "worthless; a complete fraud because the investigator has done nothing to get at the truth." One of her sons was "disappeared" during the Dirty War.

Ibarra said that she did not have "any respect" for Ignacio Carrillo, the special investigator appointed by President Vicente Fox. Carrillo headed the Fiscalí­a Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Polí­ticos del Pasado (Femospp). Ibarra claimed that Carrillo's whole approach was to try to divert the investigation and cover things up rather than to unearth new evidence which could be used to prosecute people who had committed human rights abuses. Carrillo's team has spent five years working on the report, most trawling through government and army archives. The report documents 1,650 cases of torture that took place either in prisons or what the investigators call "concentration camps." The report also documents massacres; "disappearances" and other crimes committed against leftwingers. 

The Femospp found that "the authoritarian regime" as the Fox government terms PRI governments "at its highest levels" broke the law and committed crimes against humanity. According to the report, "the highest levels" of government authorised the use of the army, rather than the police, to deal with internal law enforcement and to investigate and combat crimes. The report said that the most serious episodes occurred during the governments of Presidents Gustavo Dí­az Ordaz (1964-70), Luis Echeverrí­a (1970-76) and José López Portillo (1976-82). The two big events were the massacres of students, at Tlatelolco in 1968 and then, on Corpus Christi, in 1971.

The report accused Echeverrí­a and López Portillo, (who is now dead) of being the two presidents who used the army and secret police in its counter-insurgency strategy, in Guerrero and Mexico City. Carrillo had tried to prosecute Echeverrí­a and various senior police and army officers, but the courts threw out all the allegations on the grounds that the crimes were covered by a statute of limitations.

In South America, "disappearances" are not covered by a statute of limitations. Either the disappeared were murdered which means that their murderers can be prosecuted because there is no statute of limitations for murder; or else they are still alive so the crime is continuing. The Mexican courts took a different, more conservative view. A representative from the "Comité de Ví­ctimas del 68", Marín del Campo, said that the committee rejected the government report because it did not "get to the bottom of the issues and did not punish those directly responsible for the Dirty War."

On the other hand, independent historians of modern Mexico say that Fox and Carrillo have broken new ground. "The Mexican government has never officially accepted responsibility for these crimes," Kate Doyle, the director of the Mexico project of the National Security Archive, a private research group at George Washington University, told The New York Times. 

The report has lengthy chapters on the 1968 and 1971 massacres and the campaigns in Guerrero against Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, a guerrilla leader, and his supporters who operated in the mountains for years. The report confirms that the military tortured villagers who were suspected of succouring Cabañas and his men. Some villages were destroyed in a deliberate effort at a scorched earth policy to weaken Cabañas. The report names the military officers responsible for various atrocities, both in Guerrero and in the massacres in Mexico City.

Some successes

One area where the Femspp did make some progress was in identifying bodies of the disappeared. On 14 November, the Femspp identified the bodies of two guerrillas who had been killed by the army in 1974. The two were Lino Rosas Pérez and Esteban Mesino Martí­nez. Both were rural teachers. 

The Femspp confirmed that both men had been killed violently, though it did not specify how. One appears to have been shot in the head. The bodies of both men were exhumed from their graves in Tecpan de Galeana.

Both men were, apparently members of Lucio Cabañas Barrientos's Partido de los Pobres. They were probably killed on 2 December 1974, when Cabañas was killed in a shoot out with the army in El Otatal. Villagers then buried them, not knowing who they were in the public cemetery. The bodies were exhumed in 2005.

The Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (CNDH), has confirmed, after 11 years of research, that 532 people were "disappeared" in the Dirty War. It is still studying evidence in another 200 cases.