Civil Society, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-MEXICO: Truth Commission or Justice Commission?

Emilio Godoy

MEXICO CITY, Aug 15 2007 (IPS) - Human rights groups in Mexico are making another effort to get a truth commission established to investigate the "dirty war," the name given to the illegal strongarm measures used against guerrillas and opponents of successive Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governments in the 1960s and 1970s.

Eight non-governmental organisations have been debating how to set up the commission for the past several weeks. Among the matters under discussion are candidates for membership, and the scope of its remit.

The issue is whether the commission should restrict itself to compiling testimony and information on rights violations that were committed, as happened in South Africa with the commission presided by Archbishop Desmond Tutu after apartheid was abolished in 1994, or whether its aim should also be to bring human rights violators to justice, as happened in Argentina after the most recent military dictatorship (1976-1983).

The head of the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights, Fabián Sánchez, told IPS that setting up the commission is "a very complex issue" because of the different aspects involved, from historical to social and legal.

"We want to define the aims, especially taking into account the timeframe of the commission’s working period," he said.

Those promoting the initiative want to avoid repeating what they call the "failure" of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Political and Social Movements of the Past.

The Special Prosecutor’s Office was created in November 2001 by then conservative president Vicente Fox (2000-2006), as part of the Attorney General’s Office, and was headed by Ignacio Carrillo. It was disbanded in December 2006, just before Fox handed over the presidency to his fellow party member Felipe Calderón.

Human rights organisations are searching for a way to overcome the flaws in the work of this body.

In its final report, "Historical Report to Mexican Society 2006," the Special Prosecutor’s Office concluded that genocide had taken place in Mexico, orchestrated by the administrations of Presidents Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970), Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) and José López Portillo (1976-1982), all of whom belonged to the PRI, which governed Mexico from 1929 to 2000.

Not satisfied with hunting down, arresting and jailing opponents and activists, the state subjected them to cruel and unnecessary punishment, says the over 600-page report, which was submitted to the Attorney-General’s Office.

In spite of these conclusions, the Special Prosecutor’s Office only managed to initiate prosecutions in barely 2.5 percent of the 532 cases investigated, which included killings and forced disappearances. And only 17 cases were carried forward, resulting in just seven arrest warrants.

Alicia de los Ríos, a member of the Committee of Mothers of those Disappeared for Political Motives in Chihuahua, in the north of the country, said victims should not sit on the commission, as that would undermine its credibility.

"It has to be an independent body, not subject to political influence of any kind," she told IPS. Her mother, a member of the September 23 Communist League guerrilla movement, was arrested by the security forces in January 1978 and never heard from again.

The Mexican NGOs have tried to involve supranational human rights bodies, such as the International Centre for Transitional Justice and Human Rights Watch, which already have information about the plan.

"We need them to participate. We should also ask the United Nations, and get advice from other international bodies like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights," Sánchez said.

Before the Special Prosecutor’s Office was created, human rights organisations were divided between those that supported it, and those that would have preferred a Truth Commission.

"The outcome confirms the distrust that some of the organisations expressed," said de los Ríos, who presented a complaint to the Special Prosecutor’s Office in 2002 to find out where her mother was, and what responsibility the state had for her disappearance, and received no reply.

According to the Special Prosecutor’s Office, 12 massacres, 120 extrajudicial killings, 800 forced disappearances and 2,000 acts of torture against detainees were committed by state security agents, mainly in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

One of the unfulfilled challenges of the Special Prosecutor’s Office was to clarify the massacres committed on Oct. 2, 1968 and Jun. 10, 1971, when police and paramilitaries fired on unarmed civilians, killing an undetermined number of people.

The Special Prosecutor’s Office also failed in its attempt to prosecute Echeverría, who was first interior minister and then president during that period, for genocide.

Luis de la Barreda and Miguel Nazar Haro, former heads of the notorious Dirección Federal de Seguridad, the now-defunct secret police agency, also escaped imprisonment.

Mexico’s Supreme Court has ruled that no statute of limitations applies to forced disappearance until the victim has been found, dead or alive. However, it ruled that genocide is subject to the statute of limitations.

"Today, victims have neither truth nor justice, and this is something that must be remedied," said Sánchez.

In the southern state of Guerrero, where the most intense repression of opponents of the regime and guerrilla groups occurred in the 1970s, the Calderón administration and the leftwing opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) are planning to set up a Truth Commission to unearth the secrets of the "dirty war" in that area, as well as crimes committed in the 1990s.

In Aguas Blancas, 17 campesinos (small farmers) were murdered in June 1995 by the police, and in El Charco 11 people were killed in June 1998 by the army.

The human rights groups’ struggle may soon bear fruit.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the system of the Organisation of American States, is about to determine whether or not the Mexican state violated the rights of Rosendo Radilla, thought to have been arrested at a military roadblock in Guerrero on Aug. 25, 1974, and those of his relatives.

"It’s the first case of its kind in relation to Mexico that has been accepted by the Commission. If it decides that rights violations occurred, it could trigger a series of chain reactions here," said Sánchez.

When President Fox took office in December 2000, he promised to investigate the "dirty war" and bring its perpetrators to justice. This he manifestly failed to do. Meanwhile, his successor, Calderón, has so far not said a word about the subject.