RIGHTS-MEXICO: A Blow to Dirty War Impunity

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Feb 19 2004 (IPS) - Although everything seems to indicate that the 532 people who disappeared during Mexico’s ”dirty war” against dissidents from the 1960s to the early 1980s were killed, their families believe they might still be alive – a hope fed by the arrest of a former intelligence chief.

Although everything seems to indicate that the 532 victims of forced disappearance from Mexico’s ”dirty war” against dissidents between the 1960s and the early 1980s were killed, their families believe they might still be alive – a hope that was fed by the arrest of a former intelligence chief.

The arrested police chief should ”speak, and say where our children are, and they should be returned alive, just as they were when they were taken away,” Rosario Ibarra, the head of the human rights group Eureka, which represents the families of people who were arrested and never heard from again, told IPS Thursday.

Miguel Nazar, former director of the now-defunct Federal Security Agency in the 1970s and 1980s, was arrested late Wednesday. He was the first former security chief in Mexican history to be arrested in connection with past atrocities committed against dissidents.

Nazar, who was imprisoned in a penitentiary in the southern state of Nuevo León Thursday, is charged with kidnapping Ibarra’s son, Jesús Piedra Ibarra, who was arrested in 1975, at the age of 21, for his alleged links to leftist insurgent groups.

”I don’t hate him (Nazar), but I do hope that he gives us information on where my son Jésus is, and that he pays for all of his crimes in prison, for the immense abuses he committed against my son and hundreds of other young people,” said Ibarra.

Nazar’s arrest ”is a small piece of a large perverse puzzle in which many people, from presidents to low-ranking police officers, took part,” added the 76-year-old Ibarra, whose activism has led her to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and as a presidential candidate for leftist parties, and who has twice held a seat in Congress.

From the 1960s to the early 1980s, 532 opponents of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governments that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000 were taken away by the security forces and never seen alive again.

The forced disappearances were the other face of governments that claimed to hold up the ideals of Mexico’s 1910-1920 revolution, supported Fidel Castro’s socialist revolution in Cuba, and gave asylum to thousands of political refugees fleeing the military dictatorships ruling many countries of South America at the time.

Nazar, 79, who received training from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) in the 1970s, claims to have known nothing about the dirty war, and says all of the accusations against him are false.

But according to witnesses and investigations by human rights groups, Nazar headed a police and military unit that infiltrated leftist insurgent groups and abducted and ”disappeared” activists.

Many of the victims were held in military prisons before they were killed and dumped into the sea from helicopters, according to a number of testimonies.

But Ibarra says she found out that her son was held in a clandestine military prison until 1987, although she has no information on what might have happened to him after that.

”All of us mothers want our children back, and our idea is that they are still alive,” she said.

Before December 2000, when President Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party became Mexico’s first non-PRI president in seven decades, it seemed impossible that the events of the dirty war would ever be clarified.

But in his campaign, Fox promised to bring to justice those responsible for past human rights abuses, and once in office he set up a ”special prosecutor’s office for social and political movements of the past” within the justice department, to investigate human rights abuses from that period.

In April 2003, the special prosecutor’s office requested Nazar’s arrest in connection with the kidnapping of Ibarra’s son, but a judge ruled that the statute of limitations had run out on the case.

However, the prosecutors appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in November that the statute of limitations did not apply to cases of kidnapping and disappearance, and in December, a lower court ordered Nazar’s arrest.

Nevertheless, the former police chief remained at large until Wednesday night, when he was arrested driving his luxury car in the Mexican capital, accompanied by a bodyguard.

Sources with the special prosecutor’s office say they are also preparing arrest warrants for more than 300 former members of the police and military, including high-ranking officials, in connection with the dirty war abuses.

Luis de la Barreda, another former intelligence chief for whom an arrest warrant was issued in late 2003, remains at large.

”I still don’t believe in the justice offered by the Fox administration, because many of its actions are only propaganda to improve its image abroad,” said Ibarra.

”When my son appears alive and all of those responsible for the repression pay for what they did, I’ll believe in justice again,” she added emphatically.