Ciudad Juarez.- Between 1975 and 1976, girls, boys and adolescents (NNA), pregnant women and adult men from southern Chihuahua were victims of serious human rights violations perpetrated within the framework of the DN-PR-I Plan of the Mexican Army and the then Attorney General’s Office (PGR).
As part of the chain of command that is identified as those responsible for crimes such as obstetric and reproductive violence, deprivation of liberty, arbitrary detention, torture, internal forced displacement and even extrajudicial executions, the current Attorney General of the Republic, Alejandro Gertz Manero, who at that time served as the chief officer and coordinator of the anti-narcotics campaign of the Attorney General’s Office, is mentioned on several occasions.
The facts were recently published in the Final Report of the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification “It Was the State (1965-1990)”, which describes findings of serious human rights violations against various population groups, including inhabitants of areas where drug trafficking was fought and, in this particular case, people from the Northern Zone of the country, including Chihuahua.
These were cases collected from residents of Guadalupe y Calvo and surrounding areas, from people who requested anonymity from the Mechanism.
There is, for example, the case of Hector and Veronica (fictitious names used for fear of reprisals). According to Veronica, she and the women of her community were forced to work as cooks for soldiers in anti-narcotics operations, of which, as we know from the document, 1,500 were deployed throughout the Golden Triangle area under the plan of the National Defense Secretariat in coordination with the PGR as part of Task Force Condor I, the first phase of Operation Condor in which more than 25,000 elements of the regime participated.
The soldiers, the document states, went to the different towns of Guadalupe and Calvo to break into houses, ask for money in exchange for not torturing, or to torture so that the detained people (mainly men) would declare where they had firearms (even if they did not have any).
Fearful, the villagers were careful: they recommended to each other that they run into the mountains to hide before the arrival of the military, pay 500 pesos (now it would be five thousand) so that they would not “give them water,” and drown them in puddles of clean water or sewage until they told them where the weapons were. If they were unlucky, they were even taken in Armed Forces helicopters to a prison in Badiraguato, Sinaloa, where they were held incommunicado for long periods.
“With the intensification of anti-narcotics operations in the region, which were also carried out at night, men were forced to leave their homes and hide in the nearby hills and mountains. Some people in the community were forcibly displaced when they were forced to leave their place of residence to escape the violence and its effects,” the text explains. Hector, for his part, said: “No! People were very scared! Some ran to (another distant community)! Others ran away from their homes because they were afraid.”
Veronica witnessed how federal agents shot Hector’s brothers, minors at the time and already elderly, who feared the presence of the militia, just for running.
In another case, Miguel (also a fictitious name) and Isabel, the daughter of the first, spoke.
“They grabbed them (arbitrarily detained them, explains the Mechanism) and took them to the stream and then, yes, they put my father in the water. They (the soldiers) climbed on top of him to demand things from him,” Isabel said in the document.
In another encounter where they detained another group of men to torture them by drowning, “the wife of one of them (…) was days away from giving birth and she miscarried there. In other words, she died because there was no way to go to the doctor or anything and she died,” Isabel commented.
This was the common practice. Soldiers would grab any peasant who crossed their path to ask about poppy or marijuana crops or about the alleged presence of firearms in the community.
Another case was that of Erika, who said that on one occasion a helicopter with soldiers came to her community, they got off and demanded that Mariana, Erika’s mother, tell them where the opium gum was, and when she didn’t answer, “they took her away. They drove around, who knows where, over there, who knows where. And from there they came and brought her back. Well, just to scare them, I think, to see what they could get out of you.”
They took Mariana and Helena, Erika’s teacher. Everything was witnessed by the five students, who “almost died of fright,” said the person interviewed by the Mechanism.
Within the chain of command of those responsible for this type of act, the PGR points out Pedro Ojeda Paullada, attorney general from 1971 to 1976 (died in 2012), and “his senior officer and coordinator of the anti-drug campaign Alejandro Gertz Manero (1975 to 1976)”, as well as Félix Galván López, Army general and commander of the Fifth Military Zone until the arrival of General Juan Arévalo Gardoqui.
Based on this document, El Diario reported yesterday that the fight against drug trafficking between 1970 and 1990 was one of the contexts in which elements of the Mexican State perpetrated serious human rights violations, and in which networks of protection against drug trafficking were created instead of confronting it, as documented by the Mechanism.
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