Commissioners investigating the Dirty War document at least 10,000 victims in their official report

With the end of the six-year term just around the corner, government departments are rushing to work on the transition or closure, some assuming that there is no future beyond the change of command. This is the case of the commission investigating the Dirty War, the repressive apparatus that the Mexican State put in place in the second half of the 20th century, its victims and consequences. This week, three of the commissioners of the Historical Clarification Mechanism (MEH), the spearhead of the commission, delivered the bulk of their final report to the Government. Their plan is to release it in the coming weeks, when they complete the work, but they have agreed to give some details in the meantime to EL PAÍS.

The commission is thus taking its final steps. The Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador concludes its work on September 30, the date on which its work must be completed. There is no news that the incoming administration, which will be led by Claudia Sheinbaum, will renew its mandate. The austerity imposed on the other four mechanisms that make up the commission reveals a certain lack of interest, even on the part of López Obrador’s Executive, which initially celebrated its creation with great fanfare. “We have done this, against the interests of the Army and without the support that we would have wanted from the federal government,” says Carlos Pérez Ricart, one of the commissioners.

David Fernández, another member of the commission, points out that the main finding of the MEH points to the narrative, what was understood by the Dirty War, and what should be understood now, based on its work. “The counterinsurgency State in Mexico was established independently of the emergence of the socialist guerrilla. That is to say, we have discovered that the counterinsurgency also operated against all kinds of social organizations, dissidents of the regime,” he explains, and gives as examples peasants, indigenous people, gender dissidents, religious people, journalists, unions… “It is still difficult to know how many victims of serious human rights violations there were in total. We are talking about close to 10,000, half of them identified by name and surname, but there were certainly many more,” he adds.

The new report is titled It was the Statea nod to the Ayotzinapa caseas Pérez Ricart explains. “The central finding is that the State attacks different actors in Mexican society, beyond the counterinsurgency,” he explains. “The major human rights violations cannot be explained without state actors perpetrating them, so it is also a nod to the present, to the ‘It was the State’ of Ayotzinapa. The impunity of the past is explained in the present,” he adds. Fernández closes the argument and points out that “security institutions were created not to offer or administer justice, but to provide political security to the State.” In addition, he argues, “there has not been a process of deconstruction or fundamental reform of the counterinsurgency apparatus here.”

Commissioner Eugenia Allier qualifies the main argument of her colleagues and recalls that “the commission exists because there are organizations of families of victims, of survivors, for many decades, demanding justice, asking the State to recognize what it did. We must not lose sight of the fact that this is a period of political violence by the State, against opponents. There was systematic violence against political groups,” she adds, “an intention to exterminate, planned and systematic, which is one of the novelties we found.” Allier, who is still working on her part of her report, says that another development points to the “extension” of repression. “We knew about Oaxaca, Guerrero, Mexico City, Guadalajara, Sinaloa, Nuevo León… Those states were at the axis of political violence. But in reality it was much broader, maybe not in the same amount, but it also existed,” she argues.

The MEH has been one of the most active teams these years. His criticism of the Army and other State agencies, mainly the National Intelligence Center (CNI), has been constant. Guardians of vast archives on the repressive activity of the last century, commissioners have noted their inertia toward opacity, at best. In October of last year, coinciding with the presentation of the commission’s first report, the MEH said that the Army’s attitude had changed from “passive collaboration,” at first, to “active obstruction.” Before, in August, he indicated that the CNI, which managed its own collection in the General Archive of the Nation, was responsible for the disappearance of documents.

In the final report, its authors highlight the documentation of cases about which few details were known or which were practically unknown. Pérez Ricart points out, for example, the savage repression of leftist dissidents who came together in the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) in 1989. “It is one of the main findings, the murder of 662 PRD members between 1988 and 2002,” he says. The report includes more shocking figures, for example, the number of dead – at least 150 – left by Operation Condor, the drug eradication activities in the 1970s. The text also includes details of massacres about which little was known, such as the one in Monte Chila, in Puebla, which left between 30 and 300 dead. Allier also highlights the extrajudicial executions of trade unionists in Yucatán, which had not been previously reported.

The group hopes to deliver the final version of the report in the coming weeks. The other mechanisms of the commission, Search, Justice, Reparation and Memory, should do the same this summer, so that the Ministry of the Interior can publish its final comprehensive report before September 30.

Sign up for the EL PAÍS México newsletter for free and to whatsapp channel and receive all the latest news on current events in this country.

_