Juárez was a “focus of attention” for the federal government due to the operation of the Communist League September 23 (LC23S) in the 1970s and one of the five cities in the country in which Operation Plan Number 1 Tracking was applied. which included the intention to “annihilate” the subversive organization and dozens of forced disappearances.
As part of this deployment, on this border the arrests of three people – not yet located – were recorded on November 7 and 8, 1977, of whom, after torture sessions with elements of the Federal Security Directorate ( DFS), led to other arrests in Mexico City. “Through interrogation and torture sessions, the DFS was able to establish appointments that the Juárez militants of the LC23S had with their counterparts from the capital, in this way they achieved arrests both in Ciudad Juárez and in the Federal District,” says the most recent report of the Mechanism to Truth and Historical Clarification, titled “Undeniable Truths, for a Mexico without Impunity”, recently released and with more than two thousand pages. It mentions that four other people also detained at this border in May 1978 – Cecilio Chavira, Florencio Coronel, Jesús Mendoza and Lorenzo Soto – continue without being located, adding up to 16 cases of forced disappearance perpetrated here between 1965 and 1990. About him counterinsurgency plan, the document indicates that it was coordinated between 1976 and 1978 by the Secretariat of National Defense and the DFS and, as on this border, it was applied in Culiacán, Monterrey, Guadalajara and, above all, in Mexico City, where The Special Brigade monitored wall pints and the so-called “repartizas”, in which members of the League distributed the newspaper “Madera” in factories and other work centers. Operations Plan Number 1 Tracking of the Special Brigade, the report adds, “implemented a project called Annihilation of the Communist League September 23,” with a campaign to disseminate photographs of the guerrillas and offer rewards of up to 100 thousand pesos for information that would lead to his capture. “From that moment on, the vast majority of the LC23S militants who were detained were not presented to the authorities. In this sense, as stated in the Operations Plan: the instruction was no longer to ‘dismantle’ the group, but to ‘neutralize’ it,” the document states. “The disappearance of members of the LC23S after being arrested proliferated at all levels of the structure, no longer just with the leaders. Although the Tracking Plan initially contemplated the League’s areas of action in the Federal District and the Metropolitan Area, the activities of the Special Brigade against the LC23S quickly spread throughout several regions of the country,” he says. The 1977 arrests on this border, thus, led to those of other militants in the following months in Mexico City, such as those of Chihuahuans Alicia de los Ríos Merino and Leticia Galarza. “Within the framework of the implementation of Operations Plan No. 1. Tracking, on November 7 and 8, 1977 in Ciudad Juárez, the arrests of Jorge Hermelindo Varela Varela ‘Miguel’, María Olga Navarro (who was not a militant ), Luis Benito Espinoza, Marcela Sánchez Fuerte and her husband Eduardo Sánchez Díaz. In addition, Salvador Vázquez Terán ‘El Champú’, Eduardo Sánchez Díaz ‘Raúl’, Luis Benito Espinoza ‘Ramón’ and Isela Arvizu ‘La Patita’ or ‘Cristina’ were executed,” the document says. “The detained people were transferred to Military Camp No. 1 in Mexico City. Those arrests made it possible for the White Brigade itself, the main executor of that violence, to be aware of the combatants’ upcoming appointments and to make more arrests in Mexico City. In January 1978, the arrests of Saúl Meza Enríquez and, later, Patricia Lara Contreras, Alejandro Mares, José Hugo González García, Leticia Galarza and Alicia de los Ríos Merino occurred. In the same context, César Antonio Solís was executed,” he adds. The location of the connections between the militants of the two cities, according to the testimony of De los Ríos’ daughter, the researcher and historian Alicia de los Ríos Merino, was “fatal” for the movement. “They are covering those events in Mexico City and in one of those… my mother and Saúl Meza Enriquez go… It was up to them to attend to those from Juárez (…) This is like the context in which my mother falls, one after another ”says De los Ríos Merino, cited in the document.
From Oblates to Juárez
Regarding Juárez, the report also explains that it began to be considered a “focus of attention” after Francisco Mercado Espinosa, a prominent militant who had joined the LC23S since 1973, when he was arrested, was arrested here on February 10, 1977. student of agronomy at the University of Guadalajara and, in 1976, he had managed to escape from the Oblatos prison, in that capital. “Once released, Francisco was incorporated into the political work of the LC23S among the proletariat of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, where he held an important place in the political and military structure of the organization, until his subsequent arrest and disappearance in February 1977.” , says the report. “In August 1977, the Special Brigade sent a detachment to Ciudad Juárez, with the purpose of continuing with the arrests of League militants in the border city, in addition to investigating their links with their counterparts who operated in Guadalajara and the City of Mexico,” he adds. Regarding the members of the DFS, the report delivered by the Mechanism to the federal Government includes a list of thirty “perpetrators and people involved in the repressive system” who were in this city. Among these, it is observed, Rafael Aguilar Guajardo, alleged founder of the Juárez Cartel murdered in 1993 and identified in the report as an “agent of the Department of Investigation and Foreign Information” on this border by said agency of the federal government. The Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification is one of the five organizations that make up the Commission for Access to the Truth, Historical Clarification and the Promotion of Justice for Serious Human Rights Violations committed from 1965 to 1990, created by presidential decree in 2021.
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