Silenced for decades, understood as a series of attacks against political dissidence, a new image of the Dirty War is taking shape in Mexico. This Friday, the Mechanism for Historical Clarification (MEH) of the commission that investigates the counterinsurgency apparatus of the PRI state, all-powerful during the second half of the last century, presents its first collection of findings. There are almost 5,000 pages that aspire to change the idea that society has of the last decades of the 20th century in the country, specifically from 1965 to 1990, the central years of repression.
The collection, posted early this morning on the MEH website, is based on a main idea, that the counterinsurgency apparatus was a multifaceted monster, whose interests transcended political dissidence. In addition to peasants, workers and students in the guerrilla’s orbit, the monster attacked everything that threatened its idea of development and order, from neighbors who defended their homes against new constructions, to Guatemalan refugees fleeing genocide in the neighboring country, critical journalists, homosexuals, transsexuals, or devotees who strayed from the path of official Catholicism.
The report maps little-known geographies and reports 46 massacres, with no less than 385 fatalities. It also reports death flights in regions whose existence was unknown, such as Chiapas. This information complements previous governmental and independent efforts, a paradigmatic case of the Attorney General’s Office created by President Vicente Fox, of the PAN, at the beginning of the century, focused on repression against political dissidents. That experience ended badly, with the investigators facing the Government, which did not recognize their results. Now, the focus is moving away and offers a more complete vision of state repression.
“The State’s coercive means were not only put at the service of its political ends, but also at the service and defense of an extractive economic development model, of capital accumulation, in which the State participated in the criminal economy,” the report states, regarding its main idea. “Each governor, each police corporation, each military commander ended up interpreting what or who was a communist, who represented a threat, how to repress dissidents, discipline the population and guarantee autocratic governability for the permanence of the single-party political regime,” it adds.
Another idea underlies the thousands of pages of the report, a notion of permanence, that the repressive hydra, far from disappearing, was transformed and survived political reforms, from the earliest, signed during the six-year term of José López Portillo (1976-1982), to the loss of hegemony of the PRI and the arrival of the PAN, at the end of the century. “The knots of impunity were created in the period of the Dirty War and remain active today,” argues Carlos Pérez Ricart, one of the four members of the MEH. “The patterns of violence may be different, but there are elements that unite one violence with the other, the fact, for example, that the perpetrating institutions of the past, police, prosecutors, judicial system, were not renovated.”
Signed by three of the four MEH commissioners, Abel Barrera, David Fernández and Ricart himself, the collection lists the names of 8,593 victims of serious human rights violations, including execution, torture, forced disappearance, etc. This is an incomplete figure. The fourth commissioner, Eugenia Allier, who has been working alone for months, will present her own collection in the coming weeks, focusing on the classic political victims, guerrillas, students and trade unionists, which predicts an increase in this figure. Her numbers and the picture she presents of the persecution of political dissidents will provide the most complete picture that Mexico has ever had of the Dirty War.
It remains to be seen how the government will fit the two reports together. The MEH is only one of the five mechanisms of the organization, whose official name is the Commission for Access to the Truth, Historical Clarification and the Promotion of Justice for Serious Violations of Human Rights Committed from 1965 to 1990 in Mexico, COVEHJ. Before the change of government on October 1, the Undersecretary of the Interior, headed by Arturo Medina, must take the reports submitted by Ricart, Barrera and Fernández, Allier’s report, combine them as it decides with the work of the other mechanisms and present everything in a single document. At the moment there is no date for its release.
From massacres to the Prosecutor’s Office
The failure of Fox’s prosecutor’s office, the famous Femospp, went beyond the final uproar. After the work carried out over the years, the judicial results were minimal. Now, one of the challenges of the COVEHJ is to convert the information gathered over the years into investigations that the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) can eventually bring before the judge. “There is a work plan for the FGR to take on some cases. They began working with the Femospp archives, which are 200 or so investigation files,” says Pérez Ricart. “What we hope is that they take note of what we did so that they can continue with the legal investigation of our work of historical clarification.”
The expert points out three points that, in his opinion, are fundamental: “the issue of death flights, massacres and human rights violations, in which there are clearly identified perpetrators.” Death flights, a military practice that consisted of getting rid of the bodies of victims of reprisals by throwing them into the sea from airplanes, has been in the news these weeks due to the publication of an unknown document, a letter that an alleged military officer sent 20 years ago to the leader of a group of relatives of missing persons, indicating the names of 183 victims of the flights. The informant gives the names of the perpetrators. Other documents and testimonies about this practice could help the FGR build a case on the subject and present it to the judge.
The report documents massacres about which little was known and which could end up in ministerial files, such as the Monte Chila massacre in Puebla in January 1970. At that time, soldiers and judicial police killed at least 50 peasants, part of the “peasant movement of land petitioners.” Testimonies and documents show how the authorities arrived in the area, in the northern mountains of Puebla, to carry out a “raid of thugs.” The thugs turned out to be peasants fighting to obtain a piece of land. When the military stopped them, the peasants fired their shotguns. Several soldiers died. The response was brutal.
The massacres share space with findings of unknown death flights, such as in Chiapas. In 1980, the military used this tactic to eliminate the leaders of the population in the Huitiupan area, where the government planned to build a hydroelectric plant. To carry out this project, the Army imposed a military cordon on an estimated 14,000 people. The community leaders of the affected ejidos, indigenous people of Batsi Vinik or Tsotsil origin, were disappeared and executed in death flights, as we have documented through testimonial sources,” the report states.
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