Mexican government finally admits responsibility for 2-decade-long dirty war
Juan Forero, Washington Post
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - Mexican authorities have quietly released an 859-page report that describes how three Mexican governments killed, tortured and disappeared dissidents and political opponents from the late 1960s until 1982.
The release of the "Historical Report to the Mexican Society" marks the first time that Mexico has officially accepted responsibility for waging a dirty war against leftist guerrillas, university students and activists. It includes declassified government records, photographs and details about individuals who were killed under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the authoritarian party that ruled the country for 71 years before being ousted in 2000.
"The authoritarianism with which the Mexican state subjected dissidents led to spiraling violence that led it to commit crimes against humanity, in crime after crime," the report says.
Special commissions designed to dig up the truth about Latin America's dirty wars have detailed state terror in better-known conflicts such as those in Chile and Argentina, where military regimes ruled through murder and intimidation during the 1970s and '80s. But the report in Mexico offers chilling detail about how the state, with orders from up high, carried out a brutal offensive that included using electrical shocks, rounding up villagers and burning down villages in regions that authorities considered dangerously subversive.
"This was state policy," said Jose Luis Contreras, spokesman for special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, whose office conducted the investigation. "The hypothesis is that they knew about the abuses, the executions and the disappearances."
(There is more, here.)
TM comment: I studied in Mexico in the early 70's. The students knew all about this and described in detail, for example, the 'massacre' at the U. of Mexico just prior to the '68 Olympics. None of this made the Mexican press, of course, but it was common knowledge among students and was instrumental in discrediting the PRI.
BOGOTA, COLOMBIA - Mexican authorities have quietly released an 859-page report that describes how three Mexican governments killed, tortured and disappeared dissidents and political opponents from the late 1960s until 1982.
The release of the "Historical Report to the Mexican Society" marks the first time that Mexico has officially accepted responsibility for waging a dirty war against leftist guerrillas, university students and activists. It includes declassified government records, photographs and details about individuals who were killed under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the authoritarian party that ruled the country for 71 years before being ousted in 2000.
"The authoritarianism with which the Mexican state subjected dissidents led to spiraling violence that led it to commit crimes against humanity, in crime after crime," the report says.
Special commissions designed to dig up the truth about Latin America's dirty wars have detailed state terror in better-known conflicts such as those in Chile and Argentina, where military regimes ruled through murder and intimidation during the 1970s and '80s. But the report in Mexico offers chilling detail about how the state, with orders from up high, carried out a brutal offensive that included using electrical shocks, rounding up villagers and burning down villages in regions that authorities considered dangerously subversive.
"This was state policy," said Jose Luis Contreras, spokesman for special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, whose office conducted the investigation. "The hypothesis is that they knew about the abuses, the executions and the disappearances."
(There is more, here.)
TM comment: I studied in Mexico in the early 70's. The students knew all about this and described in detail, for example, the 'massacre' at the U. of Mexico just prior to the '68 Olympics. None of this made the Mexican press, of course, but it was common knowledge among students and was instrumental in discrediting the PRI.
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