One of numerous protests by relatives of victims of forced disappearance, who come to Mexico City to demand that the government search for their relatives and solve the cases. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Aug 26 2016 (IPS)

“Go and tell my dad that they’re holding me here,” Maximiliano Gordillo Martínez told his travelling companion on May 7 at the migration station in Chablé, in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. It was the last time he was ever seen, and his parents have had no news of him since.

Gordillo, 19, and his friend had left their village in the southern state of Chiapas to look for work in the tourist city of Playa del Carmen, in the southeastern state of Quintana Roo. It was a 1,000-km journey by road from their indigenous community in the second-poorest state in the country.

But halfway there, they were stopped by National Migration Institute agents, who detained Maximiliano because they thought he was Guatemalan, even though the young man, who belongs to the Tzeltal indigenous people, handed them his identification which showed he is a Mexican citizen.“One single forced or politically motivated disappearance in any country should throw into doubt whether a state of law effectively exists. It’s impossible to talk about democracy if there are victims of forced disappearance.” -- Héctor Cerezo

When his friend tried to intervene, he was threatened by the agents, who said they would accuse him of being a trafficker of migrants. The young man, whose name was not made public, was terrified and fled. When he reached his village he told Arturo Gordillo, Maximiliano’s father, what had happened.

It’s been over three months and the parents of Max, as his family calls him, have not stopped looking for him. On Monday, Aug. 22 they came to Mexico City, with the support of human rights organisations, to report the forced disappearance of the eldest of their five children.

He had never before been so far from Tzinil, a Tzeltal community in the municipality of Socoltenango where four out of 10 local inhabitants live in extreme poverty while the other six are merely poor, according to official figures.

“The disappearance of my son has been very hard for us,” Arturo Gordillo, the father, told IPS in halting English. “I have to report it because it’s too painful and I don’t want it to happen to another parent, to be humiliated and hurt this way by the government.”

“The Institute ignores people, their heart is hard,” he said, referring to Mexico’s migration authorities. At his side, his wife Antonia Martínez wept.

The case of Maximiliano Gordillo is just one of 150 people from Chiapas who have gone missing along routes used by migrants in Mexico, the spokesman for the organisation Mesoamerican Voices, Enrique Vidal, told IPS.

They are added to thousands of Central American migrants who have vanished in Mexico in the past decade. According to organisations working on behalf of migrants, many of the victims were handed over by the police and other government agents to criminal groups to be extorted or used as slave labour.

Antonia Martínez, devastated by the forced disappearance of her son, Maximiliano Gordillo, 19, while his uncle Natalio Gordillo went over details of the case with IPS. His parents and other relatives came to Mexico City from the faraway village of Tzinil, of the Tzeltal indigenous community, to ask the government to give back the young man, who they have heard nothing about since May 7. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

The only official data available giving a glimpse of the extent of the problem is a report by the National Human Rights Commission, which documented 21,000 kidnappings of migrants in 2011 alone.

But the problem does not only affect migrants. In Mexico, forced disappearances are “widespread and systematic,” according to the report Undeniable Atrocities: Confronting Crimes against Humanity in Mexico, released by the international Open Society Justice Initiative and five independent Mexican human rights organisations.

The study documents serious human rights violations committed in Mexico from 2006 to 2015 and says they must be considered crimes against humanity, due to their systematic and widespread nature against the civilian population.

The disappearances are perpetrated by military, federal and state authorities – a practice that is hard to understand in a democracy, local and international human rights activists say.

“One single forced or politically motivated disappearance in any country should throw into doubt whether a state of law effectively exists. It’s impossible to talk about democracy if there are victims of forced disappearance,” said Héctor Cerezo of the Cerezo Committee.

The Cerezo Committee is the leading Mexican organisation in the documentation of politically motivated or other forced disappearances.

On Wednesday, Aug. 24 it presented its report “Defending human rights in Mexico: the normalisation of political repression”, which documents 11 cases of forced disappearance of human rights defenders between June 2015 and May 2016.

“Expanding the use of forced disappearance also serves as a mechanism of social control and modification of migration routes, a mechanism of forced recruitment of young people and women, and a mechanism of forced displacement used in specific regions against the entire population,” the report says.

Cerezo told IPS that in Mexico, forced disappearance “evolved from a mechanism of political repression to a state policy aimed at generating terror.”

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) urged Mexico in March to acknowledge the gravity of the human rights crisis it is facing.

Signs with the images of victims of forced disappearance are becoming a common sight in Mexico, like this one in a church in Iguala in the southwestern state of Guerrero. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

The report presented by the IACHR after its visit to Mexico in 2015 denounced “alarming” numbers of involuntary and enforced disappearances, with involvement by state agents, as well as high rates of extrajudicial executions, torture, citizen insecurity, lack of access to justice, and impunity.

The Mexican government has repeatedly rejected criticism by international organisations. But its denial of the magnitude of the problem has had few repercussions.

The activists who spoke to IPS stressed that on Aug. 30, the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the international community has an opportunity to draw attention to the crisis in Mexico and to hold the government accountable for systematically disappearing members of certain groups of civilians, as documented by human rights groups.

But not everything is bad news with respect to the phenomenon of forced disappearance, which runs counter to democracy in this Latin American country of 122 million people which is free of internal armed conflict.

This year, relatives of the disappeared won two important legal battles. One of them is a mandate for the army to open up its installations for the search for two members of the Revolutionary Popular Army who went missing in the southern state of Oaxaca, although the sentence has not been enforced.

Meanwhile, no progress has been made towards passing a draft law on forced disappearance under debate in Congress.

“The last draft does not live up to international standards on forced disappearance nor to the needs of the victims’ families, who do not have the resources to effectively take legal action with regard to the disappearance of their loved ones. There is no real access to justice or reparations, and there are no guarantees of it not being repeated,” said Cerezo.

In the most recent case made public, that of Maximiliano Gordillo, the federal government special prosecutor’s office for the search for disappeared persons has refused to ask its office in Tabasco to investigate.

For its part, the National Human Rights Commission issued precautionary measures, but has avoided releasing a more compelling recommendation. The National Migration Institute, for its part, denies that it detained the young man, but refuses to hand over the list of agents, video footage and registries of entries and exists from the migration station where he was last seen.

Aug. 22 was Gordillo’s 19th birthday. “We feel so sad he’s not with us. We had a very sad birthday, a birthday filled with pain,” said his father, before announcing that starting on Thursday, Aug. 25 signs would be put up in more than 60 municipalities of Chiapas, to help in the search for him.

As the days go by without any progress in the investigations, Gordillo goes from organisation to organisation, with one request: “If you, sisters and brothers, can talk to the government, ask them to give back our son, because they have him, they took him.”

Excerpt:

The photos of victims of forced disappearance in the southwestern state of Guerrero hang on the walls of the San Gerardo parish soup kitchen, in the city of Iguala. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
IGUALA, Mexico, Sep 24 2015 (IPS)

The soup kitchen of the San Gerardo parish in the southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero has become a memorial to horror. Long rows of photos have been hung on the walls of the large hall – the faces of dozens of people who were “disappeared”, abducted, extracted from their lives without a trace.

Most of them are from the northern part of Guerrero, the poorest state in Mexico and one of the hardest-hit by violence. The database of the organisation searching for missing loved ones includes 350 ‘desaparecidos’, and every week new names are added.

Over the past year, this parish church in Iguala has offered a safe meeting place every Tuesday for families who have overcome their fear of speaking out and searching for their ‘desaparecidos’ in the clandestine cemetery which was discovered in the hills surrounding this city after the Sep. 26, 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the rural teachers college of Ayotzinapa.

That night, the students were attacked by the Iguala municipal police and – as is now known thanks to a meticulous investigation by a group of experts appointed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) – there was a concerted action by different security forces, including the military and federal police, which lasted a number of hours and took place in at least nine different locations.

Municipal police executed five civilians, including two students, while another student was tortured and killed, his body appearing hours later next to a garbage dump.

Another 43 students, most of whom were in their first year of teachers college, were seized and taken away.

Saturday Sep. 26 marks the first anniversary of their disappearance. But the remains of only one student have been found – a burnt corpse in a plastic bag – while the possible discovery of the remains of a second student is now being investigated.

There is no trace of the rest of the missing students.

The attack brought to light alliances between local political leaders and organised crime groups.

It also revived the pain surrounding the 30,000 ‘desaparecidos’ left, according to human rights groups, by the militarised security strategy launched by former president Felipe Calderón in January 2007.

Enrique Peña Nieto, president since December 2012, kept his predecessor’s hard-line security policy in place. But its effects have become largely invisible due to a media strategy focused on promoting constitutional reforms that have opened up the energy and telecommunications industries to private investors.

In its first year alone, the Peña Nieto administration invested nearly 500 million dollars in official advertising, according to a joint study by the FUNDAR Centre for Research and Analysis and the Mexican office of Article 19, a London-based human rights organisation that focuses on defending and promoting freedom of expression and freedom of information.

But the levels of violence have not come down. According to a report by the newspaper El Universal, published ahead of the anniversary of the disappearance of the teachers college students, more than 5,000 ‘desaparecidos’ were reported by public attorneys’ offices around the country in 2014 – 14 a day.

Another area heavily affected by the problem is the northern state of Nuevo León, where 31,000 bone fragments have been found on a ranch since 2011, leading to the identification of 31 missing persons.

“The difference is that now, human rights defenders and members of organised social movements are being targeted for human rights violations,” Héctor Cerezo, who has documented forced disappearances of fellow human rights and social activists over the last four years, told IPS.

Since Peña Nieto took office, “we have documented 81 human rights defenders who became victims of forced disappearance; under Calderón we documented 55. In total that’s 136 missing defenders since 2006 – cases in which it has been documented that they were taken away by agents of the state.

“That might seem like a small number in the universe of thousands of ‘desaparecidos’, but it indicates a stepping up of the Mexican state’s social control strategies,” the activist said.

The report “Defending human rights in Mexico: political repression, a widespread practice”, presented Aug. 27 by the Cerezo Committee Mexico and the National Campaign Against Forced Disappearance, listed 860 human rights abuses against social and human rights activists between June 2014 and May 2015.

The incidents include collective abuses, against 47 civil society organisations and 35 communities, and a rise in arbitrary detentions, which nearly doubled.

These included arrests during a protest by seasonal farm workers in the northern state of Baja California, who work in slavery conditions, and teachers’ protests ahead of the June legislative elections, in Guerrero and the southern state of Oaxaca, where two demonstrators were killed.

Héctor Cerezo of the Cerezo Committee said the disappearance of the teachers college students from Ayotzinapa occurred in the context of this strategy of social control.

“The brutality, the scale of the aggression, and the fact that the government would assume such a huge political cost cannot be explained if it was merely part of a drug affair. Their disappearance was meant to serve as a lesson for the human rights and social movements,” he said.

In any case, the brutal attack on the students drove home the gravity of Mexico’s human rights crisis.

Journalistic investigations have documented at least 80 extrajudicial executions committed this year by the army and the federal police in three supposed “shootouts” with organised crime groups in the central states of México and Michoacán.

In Iguala, civilian brigades searching for the remains of missing family members in the hills around the city have found 104 bodies in clandestine graves, although only nine of them have been identified so far.

“It’s not just Ayotzinapa; the whole country is like this,” one of the members of the brigades, Graciela Pérez, told IPS. She has been searching for her missing daughter for three years now, in the south of Tamaulipas, 750 km north of Iguala, where she mapped – on her own – the location of 50 secret graves in January and February.

In response to the crisis, the IACHR has scheduled a Sep. 28-Oct. 2 on-site visit, as requested by human rights groups.

And in the legislature, four separate bills to create a law that would classify the crime of forced disappearance have been tabled and are awaiting debate.

“This is the first forced disappearance of a large group of people, members of a social movement, in contemporary Mexico,” says the Cerezo Committee report, referring to the disappearance of the students.

On Wednesday Sept. 23, the parents of the missing students began a 43-hour hunger strike, one day before meeting with the president.

And a Saturday Sep. 26 march is being organised in the Mexican capital, to demand the students’ reappearance and a solution of the case.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Parents and other relatives of the 43 missing students at a Sep. 6 meeting with the press in Mexico City shortly after the five members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts announced their initial conclusions on the serious shortcomings in the investigation of the case. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
Sep 8 2015 (IPS)

Nearly a year after the forced disappearance of 43 students in Mexico, the government’s investigation is back to the drawing board, after a group of independent experts refuted all of the official arguments.

“The investigation must be completely refocused and rethought,” said Spanish psychologist Carlos Beristáin, one of the five members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (IGIE) designated by the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), which presented its report on Sunday Sep. 6.

The IGIE was set up by the IACHR under an agreement with the Mexican government and the representatives of the victims’ families, to provide international technical assistance in the investigation of the Sep. 26, 2014 municipal police ambush of the buses the 43 students had boarded.

The male victims were students at one of Mexico’s 17 rural teachers colleges, in Ayotzinapa in the southwestern state of Guerrero.“They weren’t burnt in the Cocula dump. That event, as it was described, did not happen.” -- Francisco Cox

The IGIE’s initial mandate was from Mar. 2 to Sep. 2. The experts reviewed the 115 volumes of the case file, visited the area, and interviewed the families of all of the victims.

The 550-page report is a catalog of the errors committed by the investigation headed by Mexico’s attorney general’s office: leads that were not investigated, evidence that was destroyed, omissions, major inconsistencies in witness statements, reports of torture, false conclusions, and a disconnect between the investigations of the ambush itself and the final fate of the students.

Above all, it dismantles the central thesis, presented in January as the “truth” by former attorney general Jesús Murillo Karam, that the students were killed and their bodies burnt in a municipal dump in Cocula, next to Iguala, the town where they were ambushed.

The government’s theory was based on testimony from three alleged participants in the massacre, who said that for 12 hours they fed the fire, using tires, wood, diesel and other fuels, before crushing the bones into ash and gathering the rest in garbage bags that they threw into a nearby river.

“They weren’t burnt in the Cocula dump,” said Chilean lawyer Francisco Cox. “That event, as it was described, did not happen.”

The IGIE’s conclusion was based on research by José Torero, a professor in fire safety engineering at the University of Queensland in Australia. He said it would have taken 30 tons of wood, 13 tons of tires and at least 60 hours to incinerate the 43 bodies.

Furthermore, the flames would have been seven metres high and the smoke plume 300 metres high, a forest fire would have been inevitable, and the heat would have burnt alive anyone who came near.

The report cleared up other doubts such as the presence of the army in at least two of the possible crime sites, and the possibility that the students were attacked by mistake.

The five members of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts meeting with students and relatives of the victims during their visit to the Escuela Normal Rural Raul Isidro Burgos de Ayotzinapa, the rural teachers college attended by the 43 students who were disappeared on Sep. 26. Credit: Courtesy of CENTROPRODH

“The students were being watched by state and federal authorities and the army,” Guatemalan lawyer Claudia Paz said. “It wasn’t a question of them not knowing who (the students) were or what they were doing.

“The students weren’t carrying arms, no police were injured, they reached the city long after the event and they did not plan to enter the city,” she added. She was referring to an alleged motivation: that they wanted to boycott a political rally for María de los Ángeles Pineda, the mayor’s wife, who is accused of ties with a local drug gang in Iguala.

On the other hand, there was a lead that was not investigated, where a key role could be played by a bus from the Estrella Roja company, which pops up in the case file before disappearing again. That “fifth bus” was the last to leave the bus station with students aboard, setting off in a different direction.

The IGIE reported that Iguala is a hub for the trafficking of heroin to the United States, which is sometimes shipped in passenger buses. It concluded that the students could have unwittingly boarded a bus carrying drugs, which would explain “such an extreme and violent reaction and the massive character of the attack.”

The group of experts explained that the simultaneous attack lasted at least three hours in nine different places, and was intended to keep the buses from leaving the city.

The extent of the involvement by the police at different crime scenes indicates the level of coordination and command needed to carry out such an action, the report states.

The IGIE notes that the investigation was fragmented from the start, and that at one point there were 52 prosecutors working on it separately, without sharing information among themselves.

The experts set forth 20 recommendations, including: to unify the investigation, to investigate public employees who hindered or blocked the inquiries, and to focus principally on the hypothesis that the main reason for the ambush was drug trafficking.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto announced on Twitter that he instructed investigators to take into account the report’s theories and findings.

In a press briefing where questions were not allowed, Arely Gómez, named attorney general in March, offered a new investigation at the garbage dump and a six-month extension of the IGIE’s work.

The parents of the students refuse to accept that their sons are simply missing.

They feel they have been cheated by the authorities, and demanded that the president meet with them before Sept. 10. They also called for the IGIE to continue operating until the students are found.

The question now is: “What next?”

“The experts’ central recommendation is for the attorney general’s office to incorporate the report in the investigation and in the case files,” lawyer Abel Barrera, the director of the Tlachinollan Mountain Human Rights Centre, which is providing the victims’ families with legal support, told IPS.

Mario Patrón, of the Miguel Agustín Pro Human Rights Centre, commented that the lines of investigation into the political-criminal connection must be exhausted. “A good sign is that the group of experts was endorsed; as long as they are operating we can have guarantees,” he told IPS.

But not everyone is so optimistic. In the attack, not only were 43 students forcibly disappeared, but six were killed, including two students shot at point-blank range and another who was tortured and then murdered, and 40 were injured (two are still in coma).

The IGIE report also cites 148 documented cases of forced disappearance in eight years – 82 in Iguala and 55 during former mayor José Luis Abarca’s term in office.

Since October 2014 more than 100 people have been arrested, including Abarca and his wife. But no one has been sentenced, and not all of the arrests were linked to the students.

The former mayor is facing charges for another of the 55 disappearances reported during his term. The 60 people prosecuted in connection with the case of the students have been charged with kidnapping, not forced disappearance.

“Imagine if they do this in the case of the 43 students, which has made headlines around the world, what’ll they do with us,” said Mario Vergara, a representative of the Association of the Other Disappeared of Iguala, which groups relatives of victims of forced disappearance searching for the remains of their loved ones in the common graves that have been discovered in the area during the investigation of the missing students.

“I’m really grateful for the experts’ work, but until we find our missing family members, and those responsible are punished, this won’t go anywhere,” he told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

A scene from the mission of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) to Chad to inquire into crimes committed by the regime of Hissène Habré in 2001. Credit: FIDH/cc by 2.0

By a Global Information Network correspondent
DAKAR, Jul 21 2015 (IPS)

After years awaiting justice by a court of law, Chadian citizens packed the Palais de Justice in Dakar, Senegal, to catch a glimpse of Hissene Habre, president of the central African nation from 1982-1990 during which time his iron fist rule took between 1,200 and 40,000 lives, according to evidence compiled by Chadian and international rights groups.

Members of victims’ groups, whose efforts to bring Habre to court spanned over two decades, now strained to view this now slight figure dressed in white robes and a traditional white turban to cover most of his face.

The 72-year-old former strongman appeared unrepentant. As the proceedings began, he shouted “Down with imperialism! [The trial] is a farce by rotten Senegalese politicians. African traitors. Valet of America,” setting off a struggle between his supporters and alleged victims. At least half a dozen guards rushed to remove him. A small group of supporters was also removed.

When Mr. Habre refused to return to the courtroom, presiding judge Gberdao Gustave Kam warned he would be forced to attend on Tuesday. Over 100 victims are due to testify at the trial.

“We want to show the Chadian people, and why not all Africans, that no, you cannot govern in terror and criminality,” Souleyman Guengueng, 66, a former accountant who spent more than two years in Habre’s prison, said to Diadie Ba, a Reuters journalist.

“After 25 years, to see him again – it was a very emotional experience,” said Clément Abaifouta, president of the Association of Victims of the Crimes of Hissène Habré, who claims he was forced to dig graves for many of his fellow inmates. “But now I see that I am in the sun and he is in the shade. For us, the victims, this has been an important occasion.“

The tribunal is supported by the African Union but is part of Senegal’s justice system, making it the first time in modern history that one country’s domestic courts have prosecuted the former leader of another country on rights charges.

A successful trial would also make the case that African countries could try their own, rather than have the Western-led International Criminal Court (ICC) be the venue for trials of Africans.

The case against Habre turns on whether he personally ordered the killing and torture of political opponents and ethnic rivals. In 1992, the Chadian Truth Commission accused Habré’s government of up to 40,000 political murders, mostly by his intelligence police, the Documentation and Security Directorate. (DDS)

Human Rights Watch in 2001 unearthed thousands of documents in the abandoned DDS headquarters updating Habre on the status of detainees. A court handwriting expert concluded that margin notes on one document were Habre’s.

“Rarely do we find so much evidence of crimes,” said Reed Brody of HRW. “And these match the testimonies of the victims, day for day, word for word.”

“This is the end of a nightmare,” said Jacqueline Moudeina, the lead lawyer for the victims. “The fact that he is here and listens to victims speak of all the atrocities they suffered is already a great victory.”

Habré denies being responsible for hundreds of deaths.

The trial is expected to last several months.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Ana María Luna Barrios searches murals of photos of people “disappeared” after the 1973 coup d’etat that ushered in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, looking for a face that might be her mother, from whom she was apparently taken after being born in captivity. Credit: Marjorie Apel/Creative Commons

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Dec 31 2014 (IPS)

The suspicion that babies of people detained and disappeared during Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship were stolen is growing stronger in Chile, a country that up to now has not paid much attention to the phenomenon.

“There has always been a suspicion that something similar to what happened in Argentina also occurred in Chile, and that many women who were pregnant when they were detained actually gave birth in detention centres,” a 70-year-old woman who asked to be identified simply as Carmen told IPS.

“No one dug into that issue much back then, because we were afraid, and nobody would have listened to us,” she added.

During the Sep. 11, 1973 coup, Carmen, a high school teacher who actively supported the left-wing Popular Unity government of socialist President Salvador Allende (1970-1973), was in a small town in southern Chile doing political work with a group of other young activists.

A few hours after Allende was overthrown by the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, Carmen saw one of her fellow activists killed right next to her as they were protesting against army troops advancing on the small town. “You never get over that pain,” she said.

Despite the violence and insecurity, she made it back to Santiago and from there managed to flee into exile.“In this country things have moved forward slowly, very slowly at times, but with the certainty that there will be no backsliding. And this issue is not going to disappear, in case someone was hoping for that." -- Lorena Fríes

“I wasn’t detained or tortured, but many of my fellow activists were. A number of them gave birth to children, and no one knows if they are alive, while others fell pregnant as a result of being raped during torture,” she said.

According to the official investigation, 40,000 people were tortured during the 17-year military dictatorship, and 3,095 of them were killed, 1,000 of whom are still disappeared.

It has been confirmed that at least 10 women were pregnant when they were detained and disappeared. They were between the ages of 26 and 29, and were three to eight months pregnant.

In August, the moving images of Argentine activist Estela de Carlotto with Guido, her grandson, who was finally tracked down, made headlines around the world.

The discovery of the grandson of the president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who was stolen during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship, moved many people in Chile, who see progress being made across the border in healing the wounds left by human rights violations in a particularly sensitive area – the question of babies born to political prisoners and stolen.

Lorena Fríes, director of the National Institute of Human Rights, said there are well-founded suspicions that some children of political prisoners were taken by agents of the dictatorship, “but not in the same magnitude as in Argentina, where it formed part of the repressive policies.”

“I do not have the conviction that it was widespread, although there may have been cases,” she told IPS.

Human rights lawyer Alberto Espinoza has not yet handled any cases involving the theft of babies born in captivity.

“I know about pregnant women who were tortured and as a result may have lost their pregnancies, but I don’t have any information about those babies surviving,” he said.

But, Espinoza added, “I don’t rule out the possibility that it happened. Such extraordinarily inhumane and exceptionally shocking things happened during the military dictatorship that it can’t be ruled out that maybe some children survived and no one knows what happened to them.”

But for the first time, the suspicion that children were stolen by the dictatorship has been acknowledged to be well-substantiated.

That is especially true after the programme Informe Especial (Special Report) broadcast by the public station Televisión Nacional de Chile, with previously unheard accounts from women who were raped as part of the torture they suffered during the dictatorship, and who were told that their babies had died, in murky circumstances.

The report titled “the invisible children of the dictatorship” ended with an unprecedented appeal: “If you know or suspect that you were adopted and are between the ages of 35 and 40, contact the Interior Ministry’s Human Rights Programme.”

The information provided in the Special Report programme and the appeal put the spotlight on the official suspicion that children were stolen, but also on the children who were born as a result of the sexual violence that female political prisoners suffered in clandestine detention centres.

The programme, which aired Dec. 15, triggered a flurry of reactions on the social networks.

And the next day, Justice Minister José Antonio Gómez met with a group of former female political prisoners who were victims of sexual violence and promised to move ahead on a draft law that classifies torture and related sexual violence as specific crimes.

“It is certain that many people, principally women, have not given all of their testimony with respect to the politically-related sexual violence or sexual torture to which they were subjected during the dictatorship,” Fríes said.

“It has also been shown that it takes women a much longer time to report these kinds of situations. That means there is a pending issue here,” she said.

On the other hand, she added, “many years have gone by, and time is the main enemy of the possibility of seeing justice done.”

There is at least one concrete case of a baby girl who was born to a political prisoner. The name of the torture victim’s daughter, who is now an adult, was kept anonymous. Another young woman, Isabel Plaza, is the daughter of Rosa Lizana, who was kidnapped on the street when she was seven months pregnant, in 1975, and was held for a month before she was sent into exile.

Another special case is that of Ana María Luna Barrios, who since finding out she was adopted has been searching for her mother among the faces of the disappeared. She was abandoned in 1976 in the Military Hospital, where a nurse took her home and later adopted her.

She has taken her case to court, without results. But new investigations have found that a DINA – the dictatorship’s secret police – lieutenant Hernán Valle Zapata (now dead) registered her before she was abandoned, listing the mother as “failing to appear”, as he had done in the case of another baby girl.

Nieves Ayres, who now lives in New York, was held in Londres 38 and Tejas Verdes, two torture centres. She was systematically gang-raped, and in her account she describes that rats were inserted in her vagina, and she was subjected to sexual abuse by dogs.

She became pregnant, but suffered a miscarriage.

Espinoza noted that these cases are considered crimes against humanity, which means there is no statute of limitations and they can still be investigated, even though 24 years have passed since Chile’s return to democracy.

Fríes, for her part, said “these issues will probably be with us for a long time to come, which is why it is important to understand that the new times open up new doors with respect to what happened during the dictatorship and the need to bring these memories to light so that this never again happens in Chile.

“In this country things have moved forward slowly, very slowly at times, but with the certainty that there will be no backsliding. And this issue is not going to disappear, in case someone was hoping for that,” she concluded.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Credit: Proyecto Diez Periodismo con Memoria, via Ilustradores con Ayotzinapa

By Charlotte María Sáenz
MEXICO CITY, Nov 20 2014 (IPS)

“Alive they were taken, and alive we want them back!”

That’s become the rallying cry for the 43 student teachers abducted by municipal police and handed over to the Guerreros Unidos drug gang last September in Iguala, Mexico. None have been seen since.In Mexico’s unraveling, there is an opportunity for the rest of the world to witness—and support—the emergence of more direct and collective forms of democracy.

It remained the rallying cry even after federal officials announced that the missing students had most likely been executed and burnt to ashes.

Since then, Argentine forensic experts have concluded that burned remains found in Iguala do not belong to the missing young men—and so the 43 remain undead. The findings speak to a growing scepticism about the Mexican government’s competence—not only to deliver justice, but also to carry on an investigation with any kind of legitimacy or credibility.

It has become ever clearer that the state is in fact deeply implicated in the violence it claims to oppose. The student teachers were originally attacked by municipal police—allegedly at the orders of Iguala’s mayor and his wife, who were at a function with a local general when the attack took place.

Although the exact details of who ordered the attack are not yet clear, the handing over of the student teachers to a violent drug gang betrays a thorough merger of the police force, local officials, and organised crime.

This growing realisation has ignited rage all over Mexico, with social media campaigns flaring up alongside massive street protests. Peaceful marches happen almost daily in Mexico City, while elsewhere there are starker signs of unrest. Some demonstrators even set fire to government buildings in the Guerrero state capital.

Meanwhile, the government has carried on an increasingly clumsy investigation, first purporting to have found the students in nearby mass graves—as The Nation reports, plenty of mass graves have turned up, but none has yet been proven to contain the missing teachers—and then claiming to have extracted confessions from the alleged killers.

In a November press conference, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam showcased detailed video testimonies from three alleged hit men who claimed to have burned the 43 at a nearby garbage dump. Parents of the missing went to inspect the alleged site and found evidence lacking. Many doubted that a fire of such magnitude—the supposed killers claimed that they had spent 14 hours burning the bodies—could have happened due to the rain of that night.

When Argentine forensic specialists disproved Karam’s narrative, the federal government pledged to “redouble efforts” to find the students. Now President Enrique Peña Nieto is hinting at a conspiracy against his government. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Mexican officials want this issue put to rest as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, the mounting number of mass graves investigators are turning up serves as a reminder that this kind of violence has been going on for years. Police round up, detain, beat, arrest, and shoot at student activists routinely, as when state police shot and killed two Ayotzinapa students during a protest action on the highway in 2011. As with over 90 percent of such crimes in Mexico, no one has been punished.

These kinds of killings and disappearances have a long and sordid history as a practice of state violence in Mexico—and particularly in Guerrero—since the so-called Dirty War of the 1970s.

The many discrepancies in Karam’s press conference are feeding into a growing popular refusal to trust the government’s ability to investigate the disappearances independently.

In response to a reporter’s question about whether the parents of the missing believed him, Karam quipped that the parents are people who “make decisions together.” The question was not so much about whether the parents, as individuals, believed or disbelieved Karam’s evidence—although they have since visited the alleged crime scene and reaffirmed their scepticism.

Instead, ordinary Mexicans are increasingly employing their collective intelligence in making sense of the events and refusing to accept the state’s evidence on the grounds that the state itself is compromised. And just as importantly, they’re condemning the government’s silence about its own complicity in the probable execution of their sons.

In their increasing rejection of the Mexican narco-state’s legitimacy, the parents of the missing 43 are signaling their membership in what anthropologist Guillermo Bonfíl Batalla famously termed México Profundo—that is, the grassroots culture of indigenous Mesoamerican communities and the urban poor, which stands in stark contrast to the “Imaginary Mexico” of the elites.

Recalling the Zapatista movement, the rumblings from below in the wake of the mass abduction in Guerrero are merging with older modes of indigenous resistance to give new life to Mexico’s deep tradition of popular struggle.

Bolstered by social media, this new life is expressing itself in a number of colourful ways. Defying the government’s theatre of death, artists from all over the world are creating a “Mosaic of Life” by illustrating the faces and names of the disappeared. Mexican Twitter users have embraced the hashtag #YaMeCansé—“I am tired”—to appropriate Karam’s complaint of exhaustion after an hour of responding to questions as an expression of their own rage and resilience.

Gradually, a movement calling itself “43 x 43”—representing the exponential impact of the 43 disappeared—is rising up to greet the undead, along with the more than 100,000 others killed or disappeared since the start of this drug war in 2006 under former President Felipe Calderón. This refusal of the dead to remain dead made for a particularly poignant Dia de Muertos celebration earlier this month.

This form of resistance recalls what happened last May in the autonomous Zapatista municipality of el Caracol de la Realidad in the state of Chiapas, where a teacher known as Galeano was murdered by paramilitary forces. At the pre-dawn ceremony held there in Galeano’s honor on May 25, putative Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos announced that he, Marcos, would cease to exist.

After Marcos disappeared into the night, the assembled then heard a disembodied voice address them: “Good dawn, compañeras and compañeros. My name is Galeano, Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano. Does anybody else respond to this name?”

In response, hundreds of voices affirmed, “Yes, we are all Galeano!” And so Galeano came back to life collectively, in all of those assembled.

And now 43 disappeared student teachers have multiplied into thousands demanding justice from the state and greater autonomy for local communities, which are already building alternative healthcare, education, justice, and governmental systems. A general strike is scheduled for the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution on November 20th.

In Mexico’s unraveling, there is an opportunity for the rest of the world to witness—and support—the emergence of more direct and collective forms of democracy. As the now “deceased” Marcos said: “They wanted to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Excerpt:

Students from this school, the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, were attacked by the police in the city of Iguala in the state of Guerrero. Six were killed, 25 were injured and 43 are still missing. Credit: Pepe Jiménez/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Oct 17 2014 (IPS)

The images filled the front pages of Mexico’s newspapers: 61 half-dressed state policemen kneeling, with their hands tied, in the main square of the town of Tepatepec in the central state of Hidalgo, while local residents threatened to burn them alive.

It was Feb. 19, 2000. The reason the townspeople were furious was the police occupation of the Normal Rural Luis Villarreal rural teachers college in the town of El Mexe, and the arrest of 176 of the students, who had been on strike because of the government’s announcement that enrollment would be reduced.

Between that episode and an incident on Monday Oct. 13 in the southwest state of Guerrero, when teachers, students and local residents of the town of Ayotzinapa set fire to the state government building, there has been a history of repression and criminalisation of the country’s poorest students: the sons and daughters of small farmers who study to become teachers in rural schools.

“It’s built-up anger,” Etelvina Sandoval, a researcher at the Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, Mexico’s national university for teacher training, told IPS. “For years there has been a campaign against the rural teachers colleges and they have been scorned for what they do. In the view of the government, they are very expensive, and the students have to constantly fight to keep their schools running. And no one says anything because they’re poor kids.”

Guerrero is the third-least developed state in the country, and one of the most politicised. It has been the birthplace of social movements, and four decades ago it was one of the targets of the “dirty war” – a time of military repression of opponents of the government, which left a still unknown number of dead and disappeared.“For years there has been a campaign against the rural teachers colleges and they have been scorned for what they do. In the view of the government, they are very expensive, and the students have to constantly fight to keep their schools running. And no one says anything because they’re poor kids.” -- Etelvina Sandoval

It is also one of the most violent states. And since Sept. 26 it has been in the global spotlight, after police in the city of Iguala attacked three buses full of students fom the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college of Ayotzinapa.

The reason for the attack is not yet clear. But it was reported that the police handed over a group of students to the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel.

In the clash with police, six people were killed, 25 were injured, and 43 mainly first-year students went missing.

Implicated in the massacre were Mayor José Luis Abarca and his wife María de los Ángeles Pineda, both of whom are fugitives from justice and who, according to investigations, were on the cartel’s payroll.

In the search for the students, 23 mass graves have been found so far, containing dozens of corpses.

“The indiscriminate violence against the civilian population that we saw during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) has been directed towards organised social movements since the change of government. What happened in Iguala was just a question of time,” said Héctor Cerezo, a member of the Cerezo Committee, an organisation that documents forced disappearances and the dirty war.

The young people who study at the rural teachers colleges – known as “normales” or normal schools – are the poorest students in the country, who receive training to educate poor “campesinos” or peasant farmers in the most marginalised and remote communities, where teachers who have trained in urban areas do not want to go.

The students are themselves campesinos whose only chance at an education is the normales, which were founded in 1921 and are the last bastion of the socialist education imparted in Mexico from 1934 to 1945.

In the normales, which function as boarding schools, and where students are given meals as well as a scholarship of three to seven dollars a day, the students are in charge.

They participate directly in administrative decision-making, and have established support networks among schools through the Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico, the country’s oldest student organisation, which has frequently been accused of churning out guerrillas.

Through its ranks passed legendary guerrillas like Lucio Cabañas, who in 1967 founded the Party of the Poor, and Genaro Vázquez (both of whom were graduates of the Ayotzinapa teachers college). Another was Misael Núñez Acosta, who studied at the “normal” in Tenería, in the state of Mexico, and in 1979 founded the Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación teachers union and was killed two years later.

“They were created for that reason – to do political work and consciousness-raising. The students are very independent young people [in comparison with students at the urban ‘normales’] with very strict discipline,” said Sandoval, who added that the rural teachers colleges have been “a thorn in the side of the governments.”

Of the 46 original rural teachers colleges, only 15 are left. Half of them were closed after the 1968 student movement by then-president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970).

The ones that are still open have been waging a steady battle since 1999 to avoid being turned into vocational-technical schools. But the state governments have financially suffocated them, with the argument that the country doesn’t need more primary school teachers, because the declining birth rate has reduced student enrollment.

As a result, fires and other incidents have become common in the rural teachers colleges as the installations have become more and more rundown. In 2008, for example, two students died in a fire caused by a short circuit in the first rural school of its kind in Latin America, the Normal Rural Vasco de Quiroga in the northwest state of Michoacán.

“What I can say is that there are not enough teachers in the most remote areas,” Sandoval said. “There are communities who go for months without a teacher. In some places a ‘non-teacher’ covers the gap temporarily, working without any contract or fixed timeframe.”

The attack on the buses carrying students from the Ayotzinapa school has put President Enrique Peña Nieto’s human rights policy to the test.

The incident occurred in the context of growing tension caused by attempts by the latest governments to close down the school.

In January 2007, then state Governor Zeferino Torreblanca tried to reduce the number of students enrolled and declared that his government’s aim was to reduce the “studentocracy”. In November of that year, the anti-riot police cracked down on students when they demonstrated outside the state legislature.

On Dec. 12, 2011 the police killed two normal school students: phys-ed student Gabriel Echeverría de Jesús and primary education student Jorge Alexis Herrera Pino.

They were taking part in a roadblock to protest cuts in the school budget. In addition, Édgar David Espíritu Olmedo was seriously wounded, and 24 other students were beaten and injured.

“Ayotzinapa is standing up to fight for justice. The academic excellence that we are seeking cannot be conditioned on our political submission,” the Federation of Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico stated in a communiqué at the time.

No one was held responsible or punished for the deaths.

Nearly three years later, as they were getting ready to visit Mexico City to take part in the commemoration of the anniversary of the Oct. 2, 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco square in Mexico City, the students from the Normal Rural Raúl Isidro Burgos teachers college in Ayotzinapa were ambushed by municipal police, and the detained students, according to the investigations and testimony, were handed over to a criminal group that the mayor worked for.

Since then, there has been no sign of the 43 missing students.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

“Thanks, thank you so much.” These were the words tweeted by Guido Montoya Carlotto on Friday Aug. 8 when he first met with his grandmother Estela de Carlotto. Credit: Twitter account @IgnacioHurban

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Aug 8 2014 (IPS)

The recovery of “grandchild number 114” – one of the sons and daughters of those who were “disappeared” during the Argentine dictatorship – caused a commotion that many compared to the excitement of making it to the final match of the World Cup a month ago.

A degree of compensation for the wound that has remained open during 30 years of democracy but has finally begun to heal.

“Speechless”, “excited”, “ecstatic” were some of the terms repeated over and over on the social networks which reached a record number of retweets and shares on Aug. 5, when the discovery of the grandson of the president and founder of the Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo organisation, Estela de Carlotto, was announced.

A sensation of “speechlessness” felt by most – although not all – people in Argentina and reflected across the media, regardless of ideological slant.

“The tireless struggle to search for their blood relatives could never be called into question, it is something so natural, so logical, so right, that no one can remain indifferent towards it,” lawyer Marta Eugenia Fernández of the University of Buenos Aires told IPS.

Since 1977 the Abuelas have been looking for the children born into captivity or kidnapped along with their parents during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, which left 30,000 people dead or disappeared, according to human rights groups. The children were raised by military and police couples as well as by families unaware of their origins, who adopted them in good faith.

The search for her grandson took 36 years, the age today of “Guido”, as his mother wanted him to be called, or Ignacio Hurban, as he was named by the parents who raised him in Olavarría, a town 350 km from the city of Buenos Aires, apparently unaware of where he had come from.

Guido, a pianist, songwriter and arranger, decided to have a DNA test taken to get the sample compared to a national database because of doubts about his own identity.

The test showed, with a compatibility match of 99.9 percent, that he is the son of Laura Carlotto, a university student and member of the defunct guerrilla group Montoneros who gave birth in captivity in the Military Hospital on Jun. 26, 1978. She was killed two months later, another victim of one of the cruelest dictatorships in Latin America, a region plagued by de facto military regimes in the 20th century.

Guido’s father was Oscar Walmir Montoya, a musician like his son, and a Montoneros militant who was killed shortly after he and Laura were seized in November 1977.

“Laura Carlotto and Oscar Montoya will not come back to life,” journalist Luis Bruschtein wrote in the Buenos Aires newspaper Página12. “The damage is infinite and irreversible. The recovery of their son is an immense reparation for that infinite damage.”

Fernández wrote: “The news of the reunion of the grandson with one of the grandmothers in the vanguard of the struggle is as cinematographic as seeing [Argentine football star] Lionel Messi make a goal in the 98th minute.”

Nearly a month after the end of the FIFA World Cup, held in Brazil, where Argentina lost the final match to Germany on Jul. 13, other football enthusiasts made similar comparisons.

“Not only football can bring us together,” said legendary midfielder Diego Armando Maradona.

Messi, meanwhile, called for the struggle to continue because “there are still many more” grandchildren to track down. According to the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, some 400 children who were kidnapped or stolen during the dictatorship are still missing.

Ahead of the World Cup, Messi and other players on the Argentine team expressed support for the Abuelas’ cause in a video that transcended national borders.

But Argentine society is still divided 30 years after the return to democracy and the release of the report “Never Again”, produced by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons.

Referring to the kidnapped children in a conversation with IPS, pensioner Edith Gómez referred to them as “the children of the subversives” and said it was better “that they were raised by decent people.”

Laura Carlotto and Oscar Walmir Montoya, the parents of Guido Montoya Carlotto who was finally reunited with his grandmother 36 years later. Credit: Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo

Arguments of this kind are not heard infrequently.

But things are changing thanks to the adoption of “respect for human rights as a state policy” over the last decade, according to psychoanalyst Viviana Parajón.

Parajón said the new generations, which neither experienced the dictatorship nor were its direct victims, are beginning to internalise concepts like “repudiation of crimes against humanity.”

She mentioned measures like the creation of a “National Day of Memory for Truth and Justice” commemorated on Mar. 24, the day the coup d’etat ushered in the dictatorship. The national day was approved by Congress in 2002 and was declared a holiday in 2005 by then president Néstor Kirchner (2003-2007).

The history of the dictatorship and genocide committed by other regimes around the world has also been added to school textbooks.

“Until a few years ago the question of the ‘disappeared’ was only addressed by a small segment of society – the rest took stances that ranged from indifference to the theory that there were two ‘demons’,” she pointed out to IPS.

This argument justifies the human rights abuses committed by the dictatorship because they were comparable to – and responded to – the armed violence waged by the guerrilla organisations.

“What is so nefarious and ghastly was that they went so far as to annihilate not only that generation but several more,” said the psychoanalyst, who added that in this sense the recovery of Guido will have a “healing effect.”

“He’s like everyone’s grandson…a reparation for that horror,” she said.

Fernández said: “He wakes us up from our slumber, shakes us to our inner core because on a personal level we are all sons, daughters, parents or grandparents, and on a social level we share the same history – and this, like our DNA or blood, can’t be erased, it remains latent there until an unexpected event confronts us with that common identity, which can’t be debated or taken away.”

Psychologist and reporter Liliana Helder recalled on Argentine Public Television that after other genocidal events like the Holocaust or the Armenian Genocide, studies have shown that “the two or three following generations continue to feel the consequences, when things have been left hanging.”

“The appearance of each grandchild is a little bit of disinfectant on the wound,” she said.

But in a story such as Carlotto’s and Guido’s, which had a happy ending like in a movie, where the 83-year-old grandmother was finally able to embrace her stolen grandson before it is too late, there is nothing better than letting the main character explain it.

“If by stoning to death the poet you think you’re killing the memory, what is left of this land that is gradually losing its history,” goes one of the songs, “Para la memoria” (For memory), written by the man who until now was known only as Ignacio Hurban, who actually took part in the event “Music for identity” two years ago – organised by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.

“The exercise of not forgetting will give us the possibility of not repeating it,” says another verse of the song by the man known now as Guido Montoya Carlotto, which he wrote before he knew who he really was, and before he became a symbol of the recovery of identity in his country.
Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Mothers of the disappeared march in central Mexico City in May 2012. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Feb 8 2014 (IPS)

Tita Radilla is waiting, somewhat sceptically, for Mexican military personnel accused of carrying out forced disappearances to be brought before civilian courts. It is a demand that has spanned the past five decades.

Her father, Rosendo Radilla, was abducted by soldiers in August 1974 in the southern state of Guerrero, and Tita has searched tirelessly for him ever since, through the press, national courts and international bodies."Justice is too slow. There are no criminal prosecutions, no arrests and no trials." -- Tita Radilla

She took her complaint to the San José-based Inter-American Court on Human Rights, which in November 2009 ruled that the Mexican state was responsible for violating the rights to personal liberty, to humane treatment, and to life of Rosendo Radilla, a community leader in the municipality of Atoyac, 400 kilometres southeast of the capital city.

“It has been our struggle. It matters because of the huge efforts involved. We think being able to try the military in civilian courts is an achievement. It is a recognition of our efforts,” Tita Radilla told IPS.

On Tuesday, Feb. 4, the Mexican senate withdrew Mexico’s reservation to the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons that allowed military authorities to investigate and punish the crime of enforced disappearance.

Conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), requested that the senate abolish the reservation in October, as part of Mexico’s commitments to comply with the Inter-American Court ruling.

While other countries like Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala and Uruguay have made progress with holding trials of cases of forced disappearances, these crimes have remained completely unpunished in Mexico.

Forced disappearances have multiplied in recent years as paramilitary militias, drug cartels and human traffickers  have become involved in the crime. According to some estimates, there may be 30,000 victims or more.

“In our countries, the laws are not enforced. Justice is too slow. There are no criminal prosecutions, no arrests and no trials,” complained Radilla, who is the vice president of the Mexican Association of Relatives of the Disappeared (AFADEM).

Other activists share her scepticism.

“There won’t be any changes. We have heard many promises that have only served to make a lot of people busy, without any of our loved ones appearing or any trials happening,” said Martha Camacho, president of the Union of Mothers with Disappeared Children of Sinaloa (UMHDS), a state in western Mexico.

The disappearances must be “regarded as crimes against humanity that have no statute of limitation,” she said.

In August 1977, when Camacho and her husband, José Manuel Alapizco, were both 21, they were taken from their home in the northwestern city of Culiacán by agents of the Federal Security Directorate and municipal and traffic police.

The couple were active in the September 23 Communist League, and Camacho was pregnant. They were both tortured. Alapizco was executed and his body was never found.

After 47 days in captivity, her parents paid a ransom and Camacho and her newborn son were freed.

UMHDS was created in 1978 and documented 47 forced disappearances occurring in Sinaloa between 1975 and 1983.

Guadalupe Pérez, a member of Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence (HIJOS Mexico), is also a sceptic.

“It is surprising that it has taken nearly 12 years to put this situation to rights, and that it took the result of the Radilla case to see that much of what Mexico promotes on the international stage is not entirely enforced domestically,” said Pérez.

His father, Tomás Pérez, disappeared May 1, 1990, allegedly at the hands of paramilitaries, in the municipality of Pantepec in the southern state of Puebla.

The victim, 39 years old at the time, was active in the Central Campesina Independiente (Independent Peasant Union) fighting land seizures from the local rural population.

HIJOS documented 561 disappearances between 1969 and 2010.

The National Human Rights Commission examined 532 cases from the 1960s and 1970s, during the “dirty war” between state armed forces and leftwing guerrillas, activists and social leaders.

Non-governmental organisations say disappearances during this period number over a thousand.

The ruling PRI party is in the awkward situation of having to investigate PRI governments that were in power when the disappearances began in the late 1960s, and prosecute those responsible.

A Special Prosecutor’s Office working from 2000 to 2006 documented 12 massacres, 120 extrajudicial executions, 800 disappearances and 2,000 cases of torture of detainees, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.

“The main thing is for the state to carry out a thorough and effective investigation to find Rosendo,” said Radilla.

In spite of the Inter-American Court ruling, since May 2013 there has been no official attempt to find his remains.

In Guerrero, AFADEM opened criminal lawsuits in 126 cases. Since April 2012 this state has had a special commission to investigate violations of human rights during the dirty war, which has documented dozens of crimes.

One barrier to its work is that the national Attorney General’s Office has denied it access to testimonies and files collected by various state bodies.

There has been “a great pretence over 44 years, because forced disappearances continue to happen. Those who are in power bear the political responsibility, because they continue to avoid investigating or saying where” the disappeared are, Pérez complained.

Pablo Neruda taping his poems in the U.S. Library of Congress in 1966. Credit: Public domain

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Nov 11 2013 (IPS)

Ongoing efforts to determine the causes of the deaths of high-profile Chileans – singer-songwriter Víctor Jara, former presidents Eduardo Frei Montalva and Salvador Allende, and Nobel Literate Prize-winner Pablo Neruda – indirectly bring visibility to thousands of other victims of Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship.

“A search for the historical truth is being driven by penal proceedings,” Luis Emilio Rojas, director of the master’s programme in penal law at the Alberto Hurtado University, told IPS.

“While the goal is to determine criminal responsibility, the reopening of legal proceedings indirectly helps to establish the occurrence of events that are milestones in the history of Chile,” he added.

Human rights lawyer Eduardo Contreras was the first to file, in conjunction with the Association of Relatives of Politically Executed Persons (AFEP), a lawsuit to establish the cause of the death of socialist president Salvador Allende during the military’s bombing of the La Moneda presidential palace in the Sep. 11, 1973 coup.

Today Contreras is demanding clarification of the death of poet Pablo Neruda, which occurred on Sep. 23, 1973 – just 12 days after his close friend Allende was overthrown.

Neruda’s remains were exhumed in April from the final resting place he shared with his last wife, singer and writer Matilde Urrutia (1912-1985), at their home in Isla Negra, 110 km west of Santiago.

On Friday Nov. 8, seven months after the exhumation, the Forensic Medical Service reported that international forensic experts ruled out the presence of toxic chemical substances that could have caused Neruda’s death.

Contreras noted, however, that the forensic exams by Chilean and foreign experts were just the first part of the investigation. He said that on Monday Nov. 11 “we will request that other laboratories take part in the investigation, in search of toxicological agents that are biological, not chemical, in nature, such as sarin gas, mustard gas, or bacteria.”

Judge Mario Carroza, who investigated whether third parties were involved in the death of the 1971 Nobel laureate, said it could not yet be established judicially whether Neruda was killed or died of cancer 40 years ago.

If the results of the forensic experts do not satisfy all of the concerned parties, “we will have to look for other alternatives,” he added.

Neruda, who was 69 years old and was being treated for prostate cancer when he died, had been a member of the Communist Party of Chile for 28 years.

At the time of his death, he was getting ready to go into exile in Mexico, where he would have been a prominent voice of opposition against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

In the days before his death, Neruda was demoralised when his three houses were raided by agents of the dictatorship.

His most beloved home, in Isla Negra, was looted by the troops, who overturned his seashell and butterfly collections and destroyed paintings, his incomplete writings, and the books, masks, wooden carvings, bottles, pipes and ocean-related memorabilia that filled the shelves of nearly every room.

The military had all of his staff fired, and only his wife and his driver and personal secretary, Manuel Araya, were allowed to stay.

Although Neruda was being treated for prostate cancer, Araya alleges that he was killed by an injection to his stomach given by someone posing as a doctor in the private Santa María clinic on the supposed orders of the dictatorship.

Nine years later, former president Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970) was killed in the same clinic, with a biological toxin, according to the legal investigation of his death.

Frei Montalva’s case shocked Chilean society, because it proved that the Pinochet regime had used toxins against its opponents. It also helped “raise awareness among some incredulous people,” AFEP president Alicia Lira told IPS.

But the perpetrators of abuses during the dictatorship still enjoy impunity, even though the regime’s human rights violations are now talked about openly, Lira said.

“There is impunity when many cases were closed by the military prosecutors office, which is both judge and plaintiff, and when more than 178 agents of the state who murdered and ‘disappeared’ people have not spent a single day in prison because of the application of ‘media prescripción’ [by which a sentence may be reduced when more than half the statute of limitation has elapsed] or because they were granted a suspended sentence,” she said.

Singer-songwriter and activist Víctor Jara was killed Sep. 15, 1973 while he was being held in Chile’s national stadium along with thousands of other opponents of the coup. His body showed signs of torture and was riddled with bullet wounds.

But it was not until 2008 that an investigation was launched into his death. The man accused of ordering his torture and firing the fatal shot, army Lieutenant Pedro Barrientos, is still at large, living a quiet life in the United States.

Contreras said it is a “moral duty” to investigate these deaths in the face of contradictory elements.

“Just as the law requires an inquiry into the death of a homeless man who dies of cold, which seems fair to me, why not investigate the death of a president? To me that is absolutely despicable,” he said, referring to Allende’s death.

For many years, doubts surrounded the death of Allende, who entrenched himself in the presidential palace along with a number of armed civilian supporters to resist the coup and the bombing of La Moneda. As a result of the lawsuit brought by Contreras, it was finally confirmed that he committed suicide.

In Neruda’s case there are also contradictions, which means “you are ethically and morally obligated to investigate, and if you don’t, you are a scoundrel,” Contreras said.

During the regime, 3,065 people were killed and/or forcibly disappeared, and 37,000 were held as political prisoners.

Some 1,300 human rights cases are making their way through the courts in Chile, involving crimes like extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, torture, or illicit association committed between 1973 and 1990.

These cases and others that have been resolved cover 75 percent of the victims of killings or forced disappearance recognised by the state, but only a small portion of the cases of political prisoners who survived torture.

Sept. 29 demonstration in Kabul for missing persons. Credit: Giuliano Battiston/IPS

By Giuliano Battiston
KABUL, Oct 19 2013 (IPS)

“My relatives and I tried many times, again and again, to find out what happened to my father. I searched constantly for 35 years, without success. Just a few days ago, I found out from the ‘death list’ that my father had been executed.”

Mirways Yameen is among the thousands of Afghans who gathered for condolence ceremonies in Kabul in late September to commemorate their loved ones, whose names were included on a list released Sept. 18 by the Netherlands’ national prosecutor’s office.

The list, dating from the late 1970s, was obtained by the International Crimes Unit of the Netherlands National Police in the course of a war crimes investigation of torture and killings.

It includes 4,875 names of people detained and killed in 1978 and 1979, during the first 20 months of the communist regime that came to power following the April 1978 coup d’etat organised by Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin, both from the Khalq (People’s) faction of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).

The list is meticulously filled out, giving names, professions, places of birth and “crimes” committed by teachers, mullahs, students, intellectuals, civil servants: people considered counter-revolutionary by the newly empowered regime. The dead are listed in chronological and alphabetical order.

“My father is number 2,419,” Yameen told IPS. “He was a teacher, accused of being a Maoist. He was living in a village in Laghman province when he was captured and thrown in a local jail. After two days, he was transferred to a prison in Kabul for two days. The third day, he was executed together with 120 other people.”

Yameen said that for the first time in his life, he had decided to take part in a protest march. Organised on Sept. 29 by social activists and victims’ relatives, it ended with a moving candlelight ceremony behind the Darul Aman, the palace built in the early 1920s by King Amanullah Khan.

“We do not belong to any political party,” said Habib Rahiab, one of the organisers of the demonstration. “We are just demanding truth and justice, as we haven’t come to terms with the death of our loved ones,” he told IPS.

“I am trying to obtain truth and justice not only for my relatives, but for all the men and women killed or disappeared over the past 35 years,” said Rahiab, a prominent lawyer who won the Human Rights Watch Annual Award for Monitoring Human Rights, in 2004.

As Kate Clark, a member of the Kabul-based Afghanistan Analysts Network, pointed out, the 4,875 names listed are “only a fraction of the total number who were forcibly disappeared during this period or killed in subsequent phases of the war.”

All governments “since the 1978 coup and many armed groups have practiced torture. Most have carried out summary executions and massacres and indiscriminate bombing or indeed the deliberate targeting of civilians,” Clark said.

For Hamidullah Zazai, managing director of Mediothek Afghanistan – an Afghan-German NGO committed to peace and media pluralism – the release of the list was an important step to open up such an important issue to public debate. But it also risks justifying a “selective engagement” with the country’s bloody past, he said.

“It is definitely useful to shed light on the crimes of the communist regime, but those crimes are part of a broader picture,” Zazai told IPS. “We need to consider all the crimes and all the human rights abuses committed over the past four decades.”

“The worst perhaps happened during the period of mujahideen rule (1992-1996): the mujahideen killed and raped, destroyed the country and our national values. They should face prosecution, but there’s no political will to do that now,” he added.

Those who should answer to serious allegations of war crimes include many key figures in the government of Hamid Karzai, prominent political leaders and some of the candidates running in the Apr. 5, 2014 presidential elections.

One of them is General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a powerful northern warlord in the 1990s, the founder of the Jombesh party (National Islamic Movement of Afghanistan), and the Uzbek community’s main political figure.

The day after registering as running-mate to Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai in the presidential elections, Dostum published a letter on his Facebook page, where he apologises “to all who have suffered on both sides of the wars,” suggests a reconciliation process, and says he hopes the elections will be “a new page in our country’s politics in which war is not the solution for differences”.

Due to the cruelty of his guerrilla warfare methods during the Afghan civil war, the apology of this commander who claims to be “the initiator of a new era” has met with suspicion and pragmatism, here in Kabul. “But it is also the first small step on a path which no other Afghan leader has taken before,” writes Clark, with the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

Coupled with the recent release of the “death list”, Dostum’s apology – even if hypocritical – could be a good chance for human rights activists to put the controversial issue of how to deal with the human rights crimes of the past on the Afghan political agenda, in a country where so many were committed.

The remains of 2,840 victims exhumed from a common grave will be laid to rest in the memorial in the old San Rafael cemetery in Málaga. The families will be able to reclaim them after each body is identified. Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Sep 27 2013 (IPS)

A pyramid is being built in the old San Rafael cemetery in the southern Spanish city of Málaga – a monument to thousands of people shot by firing squads here during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

Their bodies were exhumed from the biggest of the mass graves from that era scattered around Spain.

On a Wednesday Sept. 25 visit to the cemetery, which was closed in 1987, IPS saw the nearly complete mausoleum in the shape of a pyramid, which will be covered in slabs of white marble engraved with the names of the people buried there.

The rest of the abandoned cemetery will be a public garden.

The monument and mausoleum will be completed in a few weeks. But it will be many years before the remains of each body to be placed there are identified and, in some cases at least, handed over to the families.“We are asking that the bodies be removed from the ditches so they can be buried as people.” -- Francisco Espinosa

“The only thing I remember are my mother’s screams when they took him away,” said José Dorado, 79, who was three years old when Franco’s troops shot his father, Pedro Dorado, a railway worker, in the nearby village of Bobadilla.

It was 1937. The body of Pedro, 33, was dumped along with the corpses of his workmates in a huge ditch dug in the San Rafael cemetery, Dorado told IPS.

Documents show that 4,471 people were shot by right-wing firing squads here during the civil war and the early years of the dictatorship, presumably because they were “republicanos” – in other words, they belonged to the side that was defeated by the Franco troops or Franquistas in the civil war.

From October 2006 to October 2009, 2,840 bodies were recovered here, in one of the largest exhumations carried out in Western Europe.

The rest of the bodies may have been moved at some point to the Valley of the Fallen in Madrid – a monument that the Franquistas built in the 1940s and 1950s, said Francisco Espinosa, with the Málaga Association against Silence and Oblivion – Historical Memory, which represents more than 400 relatives of victims.

Dorado, the president of the association, describes himself as “a person who likes to give battle.” In 2002, he started to wage the struggle to exhume the bodies in the common grave in San Rafael, which finally got underway in 2006.

The University of Málaga took DNA samples from the bodies to compare to the DNA from over 1,000 relatives of the people killed here, Antonio Somoza, a founding member of the association, told IPS.

The remains now lie in boxes, waiting to be put in the new mausoleum.

The names of the 4,471 victims have been identified. But it will take years to match the specific remains in the boxes to names, Somoza explained, adding that none of the 2,840 bodies recovered had been specifically identified so far.

Over the space of four decades, between 88,000 and 130,000 people were killed and buried in common graves across Spain, and some 30,000 babies were stolen and sold in illegal adoptions, according to human rights groups.

“We are asking that the bodies be removed from the ditches so they can be buried as people,” said Espinosa, 76, who has struggled for over three decades to find the body of his father, a carpenter from Argentina.

“My father died here. I was still in my mother’s belly, and my brother was three years old,” he told IPS in the San Rafael cemetery.

No attempt at investigating the mass graves around the country has been successful, because the courts invoke the 1977 amnesty law that blocks investigation or prosecution of Franco-era human rights crimes.

Moreover, the conservative government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy closed down the office that was coordinating the exhumations around the country and the funds collecting money to help pay for the costly DNA tests.

Emilio Silva, the 47-year-old grandson of another of the Málaga victims, took part in a Monday Sept. 23 meeting in Madrid with two experts from the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances visiting Spain Sept. 23-30 to examine the measures taken by the government on the prevention and eradication of forced disappearance, and the response given to the victims’ families.

In the meeting, the victims’ relatives asked the Working Group to review its decision not to address forced disappearances committed before 1945, when the United Nations was founded.

“We have hundreds of well-documented cases from prior to that date, and forced disappearance is an ongoing crime [not subject to any statute of limitations],” Silva told IPS.

His grandfather, Emilio Silva, was executed in October 1936 in Priaranza del Bierzo, in the northern Spanish province of León.

“He was the first victim of Franquista repression in Spain to be identified through a DNA test,” said Silva, a member of the Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory. “Now he is buried next to my grandmother.”

The U.N. experts “should be flexible and should accept the cases of forced disappearance dating before 1945. If they don’t, the majority of the cases of the victims of reprisals will be left out,” said trade unionist Cecilio Gordillo, who coordinates the Todos los Nombres (All the Names) web site, which has a list of the names of nearly 78,000 victims.

There is a possibility that the Working Group will reconsider its decision when it presents its final report to the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2014.

The Working Group urged the government to repeal the 1977 amnesty law.

The Truth Commission Platform launched the campaign #DiseloalaONU (Tell the U.N.) this week, to denounce that “there are more than 2,500 common graves that have not been exhumed.”

Dorado hopes to bury his father’s remains in Bobadilla, where the body of his mother Pilar Cubero, who was 29 years old when her husband was killed, rests. “If I’m alive then [when the bodies are identified through DNA tests], I’ll take him there. I’ve already bought a niche,” he said.

Investigating in Argentina

On Tuesday Sept. 24, a Spanish prosecutor challenged the arrest of four former agents of the dictatorship requested by Argentine Judge María Servini.

Servini is investigating human rights crimes committed in Spain, based on the principle of universal jurisdiction. Hers is the only investigation of Franco-era crimes.

Under the principle of universal jurisdiction, crimes against humanity, genocide and terrorism, which are not subject to statutes of limitation or amnesties, can be tried at any time in any place.

The trade unionist Gordillo, who met Friday Sept. 27 with the U.N. Working Group experts in the southern city of Seville, said one aspect of Judge Servini’s investigation involves forced labour to which political prisoners were subjected in Spain.

“The state ‘rented out’ prisoners to private companies, which used them as slave labour to build roads, airports and canals. There were around 250,000 victims of forced labour,” said Gordillo, whose great-uncle was killed by the firing squads.

Emilio Silva said most of the exhumations around the country have been carried out thanks to the work of the victims’ families and volunteers.

Miguel Alba, another founding member of the Málaga association of families, is the grandson and great-grandson of a mayor and justice of the peace who were killed by the firing squads.

For eight years, he has investigated forced disappearances in 31 villages and towns in Axarquía, a comarca or region east of Málaga.

“It’s not about opening old wounds,” Alba told IPS. “It’s about closing them in good conditions, and without political bias.”

Elizabeth Gomes, the wife of Amarildo de Souza, who has been missing from the Rocinha favela in Rio de Janeiro since Jul. 14, 2013. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Aug 19 2013 (IPS)

Over the last two decades, nearly 92,000 people have gone missing in the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro, according to official figures and academic studies. Most of the cases have been shelved with little or no investigation.

Amarildo de Souza, 43, lived in Rocinha, one of the biggest of the favelas or shantytowns that line the hills ringing the city of Rio de Janeiro, the state capital.

His small 10-square-metre house on a narrow alleyway called “Roupa Suja” (dirty clothes) at the top of the hill was home to himself, his wife and their six children.

The neighbourhood has no sanitation, running water, garbage collection or street lighting.“The UPP police took my husband away, and his documents. He went missing a month ago and I have no money. At least I want his bones, to bury them. I want an answer: Where is Amarildo?” -- Elizabeth Gomes

To support his family, de Souza worked in construction and did odd jobs. When he wasn’t working, he would go fishing.

On Sunday Jul. 14 he came home after fishing. At the door to his house he was met by a group of 20 military police officers who said they needed to take him to the local Police Pacification Unit (UPP) for questioning.

The UPPs were created by the Rio de Janeiro state government to establish a sustained police presence in the favelas and drive out the drug trafficking gangs. The community policing and crime prevention strategy launched in 2008 is complemented with social programmes, such as bringing piped water, sanitation, education and other services to the favelas.

Rocinha was “pacified” in September 2012, when the police occupied the vast favela and forced out a drug gang that controlled the area, where heavily armed drug traffickers used to be a routine sight.

De Souza was last seen getting into the police car.

His case became another focus of the near-daily protests that have been held in this city over the last two months. His face can be seen on posters plastered around the city, above the question “Where is Amarildo?”

“There are a series of irregularities in what the police did,” Amnesty International adviser Jandira Queiroz told IPS. “If [de Souza] was wanted for questioning, he would have only had to go to the local police station, rather than UPP headquarters. These mistakes on the part of police merit investigation, in and of themselves.”

Amnesty International is urging its three million supporters worldwide to send letters to the state government and ministry of security calling for a thorough investigation, witness protection, and prosecution of the perpetrators.

“The police say they let him go,” said Queiroz. “Nothing has been found so far, and there is no evidence of where he – or his body – could be. If he died, his family at least wants to give him a decent burial.”

The UPP headquarter’s surveillance cameras, which could confirm the police claim that he walked out of the station, weren’t working that night. And the GPS devices in the police cars that picked up de Souza were not hooked up.

The civilian police are treating the case as a homicide, possibly committed by UPP federal agents or by drug traffickers.

The family is losing hope of finding him alive. The climate in the neighbourhood is one of frustration and a feeling of insecurity and lack of protection.

An indignant Elizabeth Gomes, de Souza’s wife, said: “The UPP police took my husband away, and his documents. He went missing a month ago and I have no money. At least I want his bones, to bury them. I want an answer: Where is Amarildo?”

This high-profile disappearance drew attention to the cases of hundreds of people who have gone missing without leaving a trace. Police officers were the main suspects in many of the unresolved cases.

According to the Public Security Institute, an average of 15 people a day go missing in the state of Rio de Janeiro. The most frequent causes are murders, domestic disputes, and mental problems.

But the statistics are not updated when a missing person case becomes a homicide, for example, after a body is found.

A study by Fábio Araújo, a sociologist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, found that 91,807 people went missing in the state between 1991 and May 2013.

In 2011, 5,482 people went missing, and in 2012, 5,934. Most of the missing persons are men from the favelas or poor suburbs.

In his report, Araújo says the police are “extremely violent,” as are the militias – bands of off-duty members of the police or military involved in extortion and other forms of organised crime – and drug trafficking gangs. “These actors sometimes fight and sometimes cooperate to make bodies disappear,” he said.

On Aug. 13, families of missing persons and activists took part in a public hearing organised by the human rights commission of the Rio de Janeiro state legislature.

“My sister’s car was shot up by the police, and she has been missing for five years,” said Adriano Amieiro, the brother of Patrícia Amieiro, a 24-year-old engineer who went missing in June 2008. “I don’t think we’ll ever see her again. Our family has not been able to have closure; we have no body to bury,” he told IPS.

A bill currently moving through the Senate would classify the crime of forced disappearance in a new article in the penal code.

In Brazil, bodies are often made to disappear, because when no body is found, police stop investigating.

“This is a country of impunity when it comes to crimes against life,” Antônio Carlos Costa, the head of Rio de Paz, a local NGO, told IPS. “Thousands of people disappear and the authorities don’t worry about finding out what happened to them. Many cases are never even registered in police stations, and the police are among those who carry out this practice.”

According to Costa, although the statistics are “chilling,” the number of people who go missing is actually higher than the official figures, and there are clandestine cemeteries all around the city and surrounding areas.

“We live in a culture of banalisation of the loss of human life, which is reflected in the powers-that-be,” Costa said.

The chair of the state legislature’s human rights commission, lawmaker Marcelo Freixo, said “deep contradictions” emerged in the investigations into de Souza’s disappearance. In the second week of August, he sent an official request asking the prosecutor’s office and the civilian police to clarify the discrepancies.

In the legislator’s view, the police claim that de Souza may have been linked to drug trafficking in Rocinha was an attempt to “discredit the victim” and the complaint that he had gone missing.

Freixo told IPS that there was no indication that de Souza or his family were involved in drug trafficking.

He proposed the creation of a task force involving representatives of the prosecutor’s office and the state ministries of security, social assistance and human rights, to investigate cases of missing persons in the state.

The progress made by Argentina in trials for crimes against humanity committed by the 1976-1983 dictatorship has been tarnished by a growing number of human rights violators escaping from prison.

Human rights organisations are concerned about the rise in the number of escapes from what they consider lax prison conditions.

The number grew from 35 to 40 escapes a year to 54 over the past year, Lorena Balardini, a researcher with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a leading human rights group, told IPS.

“The previous number was persistent and steady,” she said. “Some were captured while others escaped…But what caught our attention is that since 2012, the number of fugitives has jumped to 54.”

Argentine victims of forced disappearance. Credit: ha+/CC BY 2.0

According to figures from the public prosecutor’s office, updated this month, 1,049 people are currently facing prosecution in trials for human rights abuses committed during the dictatorship, when up to 30,000 people were killed or disappeared in the country’s “dirty war”.

In addition, 471 have been tried for kidnapping, torture, forced disappearance, extrajudicial executions and other crimes against humanity. Of these, 426 were convicted and 45 acquitted.

Meanwhile, 853 are in custody, either convicted or awaiting trial. More than 60 percent of them are in common prisons, 36 percent are under house arrest, and the rest are in security forces installations or hospitals.

Balardini, head of research at CELS, said there is no clear explanation for the increase in escapes, although she suggested it could be related to “the flexible detention conditions” that some of the human rights violators enjoy, whether due to a decision by the courts or the prison authorities.

The latest case, which gave rise to suspicions of privileged treatment, was the escape of retired army major Jorge Olivera and retired army lieutenant Gustavo de Marchi on Jul. 25.

They were found guilty of human rights abuses Jul. 4 in the western province of San Juan. Olivera was sentenced to life in prison and de Marchi was given a 25-year sentenced.

Olivera and de Marchi had been transferred from the Marcos Paz prison in San Juan to the Cosme Argerich Central Military Hospital in the city of Buenos Aires, 1,300 km away, for appointments in dermatology, kinesthesiology and psychiatry.

The request for the transfer and medical appointments was filed by Olivera’s wife, Marta Ravasi, a psychologist in the military hospital. It was initially rejected by the court where the two men were tried. But another judge, Miguel Ángel Gálvez from San Juan, approved the request.

Shortly after they arrived at the hospital, the two men went missing. Interpol immediately issued an international notice for their arrest, and the justice ministry offered a reward of two million pesos (364,000 dollars) for information leading to their capture.

The government of centre-left President Cristina Fernández sacked military and prison personnel implicated in the escape, and charges were brought against Judge Gálvez.

To prevent future escapes, all transfers of people detained in connection with human rights cases were suspended. And on Jul. 29 the justice, defence and health ministries signed an agreement to review the medical condition of all of the detainees.

According to the agreement, the detainees will no longer be taken to military hospitals, but to the health centre that serves each prison.

In addition, government officials explained, every transfer of prisoners will be based on symptoms or health problems that have been duly certified, rather than on a simple request from the prisoner, as was the case up to now.

The justice ministry’s national programme for the coordinated search for people wanted for crimes against humanity currently has a list of 52 fugitives. Rewards are offered for their capture.

“The most difficult case is that of (Jorge) Vildoza,” said Balardini, referring to the former captain who was one of the heads of the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in 1976 and 1977, when it was the dictatorship’s biggest clandestine centre for torture, killings and forced disappearance.

Vildoza and his wife Ana María Grimaldos moved to Switzerland in 1986, taking with them their illegally adopted son, who was born at ESMA in 1977. Two years later, the Argentine courts issued international warrants for their arrest for kidnapping the boy. But Vildoza was never captured.

In 1998, the boy, by then a young man, presented himself in court in Argentina and underwent DNA testing to verify his identity. He turned out to be Javier Penino Viñas, the son of Hugo Penino and Cecilia Viñas, victims of forced disappearance. Viñas was seven months pregnant when she was seized in 1977. She was last seen at ESMA.

Nevertheless, Javier continued to live with the couple who stole and raised him, until he married.

Grimaldos was arrested a year ago in Argentina, after entering the country on a false passport. She is currently under prosecution for theft of children. She claims her husband died, but the search for him continues.

Theft of the children of political prisoners was one of the crimes of the dictatorship. The babies, or in some cases toddlers, were illegally adopted, often by military families.

Balardini said the escapes from prison have been a problem since the start of the human rights trials in the mid-1980s, which were cut short by amnesty laws passed in 1986 and 1987 that were struck down in 2005, allowing the cases to be reopened.

CELS says the dictatorship’s human rights abusers have their own support networks and sources of financing that make it possible for them to obtain forged documents, hire lawyers, move from one country to another, and survive far beyond the reach of Argentina’s justice system.

The activist said the rewards offered by the government help put the issue on the table and increase its visibility.

But she said the special conditions that the prisoners enjoy, better than those of common criminals, make it easier for them to escape.

She said CELS has been “surprised” by cases of human rights violators who have already been living at large before they are captured, and who, despite requests by prosecutors and the victims’ lawyers, are granted bail by judges and later flee.

Olivera, who was let off the hook by the amnesty laws, was arrested in Italy in 2000 on a warrant from the French justice system. But he went free, thanks to false documents.

Finally, a warrant for him was issued in Argentina in 2007, and a year later he was arrested. But he escaped just three weeks after he was sentenced on Jul. 4.

Margarita Camus, a victim who testified in the trial against Olivera and de Marchi, said she was worried about the escapes. “We know what kind of people they are, how they move around in hiding, and it makes us nervous and uneasy.”

Balardini pointed out that escapes have also occurred in other parts of the country. But she said they only receive attention when they involve better-known figures like Oliveri and de Marchi.

In other cases, suspects have skipped bail. For example, retired army colonel Carlos Arroyo disappeared in May before the start of a trial against him and eight other human rights violators in Bahía Blanca, near the city of Buenos Aires.

At the time, the prosecutor’s unit in Bahía Blanca stated that “the need for all of those charged with crimes against humanity to be held in prison units has been repeated on innumerable occasions, given the concrete and real risk that they will flee since, as it has been seen, those who formed part of the terrorist state still today count on the connivance of different sectors of power who protect this kind of criminal.”

And in the northeastern province of Formosa, a trial against nine suspects charged with kidnapping 74 people is set to begin on Jul. 31. But the main defendant, Ángel Spada, a former army intelligence chief in an infantry battalion, skipped bail in June.

Carlos Santos and Fabricio Santín alongside a papier-mâché sculpture representing a torture victim of the security forces during El Salvador’s civil war. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

The Salvadoran army kept a detailed list of names and photographs of leftists detained or sought during El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war. The report is the first official military document proving the armed forces’ direct involvement in forced disappearances and other abuses.

Activists told IPS that, besides serving as evidence of human rights crimes, the document confirms the links between the army and the death squads, since a number of the detainees on the list were later forcibly disappeared by the far-right paramilitaries.

The title on the cover of the list of 1,975 people described as “terrorist criminals” is “Yellow Book”. It was apparently written by the joint chiefs of staff of the armed forces, whose initials EMCFA – for Estado Mayor Conjunto de la Fuerza Armada – can be seen clearly printed on each of its 270 pages.

“The book proves that all of our denunciations were true – that the security forces and army were behind the forced disappearances, operating as death squads,” Guadalupe Mejía, the president of CODEFAM, an association of families of victims of human rights violations, told IPS.

The Yellow Book was found three years ago, hidden in a cranny in a house in San Salvador by someone who was moving house. IPS and the Mexican daily La Jornada have a copy of the report.

Carlos Santos, president of the Salvadoran Association of Torture Survivors (ASST), said the fact that some 250 victims of forced disappearance, whose cases were documented by the United Nations truth commission, are on the list confirms that at some point they were detained by the military or police.

“This provides new evidence that it was members of the army who seized the victims of forced disappearance. Everyone knew it was them, but the evidence (from the military) was lacking,” Santos told IPS.

The report, marked “confidential”, is dated July 1987. But it has names of people who were detained, killed or “disappeared” in the late 1970s and even earlier, which indicates that the date refers to the last time it was updated.

Death squads and the security forces are blamed for the majority of the 75,000 killings and 8,000 forced disappearances committed during the 12-year armed conflict, which ended when a peace agreement was signed by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the right-wing government of Alfredo Cristiani.

Many of the photos in the report were clearly taken in military or police installations, with the dishevelled and sometimes bruised detainees standing against a wall with an anguished look on their faces.

Other photos were apparently taken from the detainees’ identity documents, obtained by military intelligence from municipal civil registries. Yet others are surveillance photos taken by cameras with zoom.

Some of the people in the report were senior FMLN leaders, listed as “most wanted”. Others were leftwing intellectuals, trade unionists, rural community leaders and social activists, considered “subversives” during El Salvador’s civil war.

“The book is evidence that these people were captured by the security forces and then tortured,” Miguel Montenegro, director of the NGO Human Rights Commission of El Salvador, told IPS. “Files on them were compiled, and they were later ‘disappeared’ – in other words, killed.”

Santos said “after they were captured, their photos were taken to put in the file before they were killed; that means the document is clear evidence of the summary executions committed by the army, operating as death squads.”

One of the names in the Yellow Book is that of Abel Enrique Orellana, a 25-year-old medical student who is on CODEFAM’s list of victims of forced disappearance. He was seized on Aug. 18, 1981 by the National Guard.

Many other names are found in both the army report and on the lists kept by CODEFAM and other human rights groups, such as Ana Elizabeth Alvarado García, who disappeared in June 1982; Julio César Ávalos Hernández, in November 1982; and Felipe Oswaldo Ayala Portillo, in July 1983.

But some of the people on the list survived, like Cunegunda Peña, who is now 77 years old. She spent six months in a dark cell after she was seized Mar. 9, 1977 by members of the National Guard and the National Police – both of which were dissolved, along with the Treasury Police, under the 1992 peace deal because of their involvement in human rights abuses.

The agents, Peña told IPS, burst into her house that day in search of her three sons, who belonged to the Popular Liberation Forces, one of the five guerrilla groups making up the FMLN, which is now the governing political party of President Mauricio Funes.

“Since you’re sons aren’t here, we’ll take you,” the police told Peña. She was photographed after they took her to the National Police station, and her photo appears in the Yellow Book. She was released after six months.

“I heard screaming when I was in prison, as if they were dismembering people,” she said. One of her sons, Manuel Martínez Peña, has been missing since June 1980, and is presumed dead.

The activists who spoke to IPS complained that the amnesty signed in 1993, a year after the peace agreement was reached, protects human rights violators from being brought to justice.

Only courts in other countries have tried former Salvadoran military chiefs in connection with crimes against humanity.

Retired generals Eugenio Vides Casanova and José Guillermo García, who both served as defence ministers in the 1980s, were found guilty in 2002 by a U.S. court for the torture of three civilians by units under their command. The court ordered the two retired officers to pay 54.6 million dollars in damages to the civilians.

The current defence minister, General José Atilio Benítez, did not respond to multiple calls by IPS to ask whether the report could have come from any office under the Defence Ministry.

“Help us find them” reads a sign with photos of victims of forced disappearance, put up by their families. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

Mexican police officer Luis Ángel León Rodríguez disappeared along with six other officers and a civilian on Nov. 16, 2009, in the western Mexican state of Michoacán. Six days later, his mother, Araceli Rodríguez, began her ceaseless search.

In the past three and a half years, she has knocked on every door, heard from her son’s killers how his body was dismembered and buried, supposedly under an avocado tree, and helped excavate twice in a fruitless search for his and the others’ remains.

But in April an official citation was delivered to her house from the internal affairs department of the federal police, summoning León Rodríguez to appear on May 15 “without his uniform and service firearm” and “with a lawyer” to respond to charges of dereliction of duty and abandoning his post.

His mother showed up with the same photo that she has taken to protest marches and caravans by the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, to meetings with then conservative president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), and to a number of interviews.

“Here is my son, in uniform, because I couldn’t take it off; without a gun; and with his lawyer, me. Can I bring charges against you, who lost my son?” she told the police representatives.

The head of the internal affairs department, Paul Aguilera, said the police do not have a complete up-to-date database making it possible to follow the precise circumstances of each officer, and that his office has 16,000 cases pending.

“What they did to me was cruel, and the worst thing is that if this can happen in my case, which is so visible, what about the thousands of others who have not drawn so much attention?” Rodríguez remarked to IPS.

Local and international human rights groups have been sounding the alert about the humanitarian tragedy in Mexico, where tens of thousands of people have been killed and forcibly disappeared since Calderón involved the military in the war on drugs. The violence has not let up since conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto took office in December.

There are 26,000 missing people in Mexico, according to a list released in February by the interior ministry. But the list does not include, for example, 86 of the 140 cases of forced disappearance documented by the New York-based Human Rights Watch in the report “Mexico’s Disappeared: The Enduring Cost of a Crisis Ignored”.

Nor does it include the victims of cases made public by the Movement for Peace in 2011, like those of environmental activists Eva Alarcón and Marcial Bautista, chess player Roberto Galván, or Yahaira Guadalupe Bahena, whose mother has held two hunger strikes to demand answers.

In a Jun. 4 report, “Confronting a nightmare: Disappearances in Mexico”, London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International talks about a “pattern of systematic disappearances and enforced disappearances largely ignored by the previous administration.”

It says “Some are the victims of enforced disappearances in which public officials are implicated. Others have been abducted by private individuals or criminal gangs.”

The rights group says that during several visits to Mexico since 2010, it documented 152 cases of disappearance, and adds that evidence of involvement of public officials was found in 85 of the cases.

It mentions cases of people apparently abducted by criminal groups for their professional skills, such as nine telephone engineers who went missing in June 2009 in the northern state of Tamaulipas.

But the available information is just the tip of the iceberg that the government of Peña Nieto risks crashing into.

Investigative reports by the daily newspaper Milenio published in October 2012, based on municipal reports, found that during the Calderón administration, at least 24,000 unidentified bodies were buried in common graves.

In Mexico there is no protocol for collecting information on missing persons, or for medical examiners to register information. Each state has its own system for identifying bodies, and the files on most unidentified corpses buried in common graves are, in the best of cases, incomplete, lacking fingerprints, photographs, dental X-rays or DNA samples. In other cases, the information in the files actually turns out to be wrong. And in some cases, unidentified bodies are even cremated.

There are only 25 forensic anthropologists in this country of 117 million people, and many mortuaries have no DNA lab. There are no standard procedures in place for exhuming and identifying bodies.

The government refuses to acknowledge that there is a humanitarian tragedy. But on Feb. 21 it signed an agreement with the International Committee of the Red Cross for advice on the creation of a protocol for the search for missing persons.

There are cases like that of Bárbara Reyes, who disappeared at the age of 17 in August 2011, and whose remains were found 18 months later in a common grave. To find her body, trenches were dug along 64 metres over the space of three days. “I only recovered my daughter’s bones,” her mother, Lourdes Muñiz, told IPS.

Alejandra Viridiana was kidnapped in November 2011 from a bar on the outskirts of Mexico City. After searching through morgues far and wide, her mother, Beatriz Mejía, finally found her last month – in the morgue where she had initially reported her daughter’s disappearance.

The young woman’s body had been there two months, from December 2011 to January 2012, on the list of unidentified bodies.

“They had her there for two months and put her in a common grave. Two months when I went there practically every day to ask if they had any news! How can that be?” Mejía complained.

There are innumerable stories of families who incessantly make the rounds of cemeteries and mass graves seeking bodies buried as “NN” or Jane or John Doe or who fight to revive investigations that have been shelved.

“They told me they had no more leads to follow and that they had shelved the case,”
Brenda Rangel told IPS. Her younger brother, Héctor, disappeared in November 2009 with two other people in the northern state of Coahuila.

In response to the pressure from the families, the government announced May 17 the creation of a specialised unit to investigate and search for missing people, under the attorney general’s office.

But the unit, which has begun to operate, was only assigned 12 investigators.

To complete the bleak outlook, the crisis of forced disappearances has reached the capital, which up to now had seemed off-limits to the worst displays of violence.

On May 26, 11 young people from the poor suburb of Tepito were kidnapped from a bar in the centric tourist area of Zona Rosa. The police still have no leads.

“No More Forced Disappearances; They Took Them Alive, We Want Them Back Alive!” say victims’ families who presented their cases to the Permanent People's Tribunal in Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 31 2013 (IPS)

The last time Enrique Rangel heard his brother Héctor’s voice was on the night of Nov. 10, 2009, when he called and said “they’re coming, they already stopped me and asked for money, and I already paid, but they’re coming.”

“We never heard from him again,” Enrique Rangel said, in one of the 13 testimonies heard by a jury of nine in Mexico City during a May 28-29 pre-hearing on “Forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions in Mexico: a permanent state policy.”

The pre-hearing was part of the work of the Mexico chapter, launched in 2011, of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT), an international public opinion tribunal that has examined human rights violations and crimes against humanity since 1979 and hands down non-binding judgments.

The jury of each thematic pre-hearing will deliver its conclusions to a grand general hearing to be held in 2014, and a verdict will then be issued on the conduct of the Mexican state.

Héctor Rangel disappeared in the city of Monclova, in the northern state of Coahuila. “When we went there the police told us that some officers had arrested him, that he had paid a fine and that they had taken him off to be searched,” Enrique Rangel told IPS.

“But paying a fine at midnight? It seems very odd. Then they told us we’d better go away,” said Rangel, who lives in the central Mexican city of Querétaro.

Since 2007, as the military campaign against drug trafficking intensified in Mexico, the number of forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions has steadily climbed.

In this Latin American country, forced disappearances have traditionally been blamed on the public security forces and paramilitary groups.

But human rights activists say organised criminal groups are increasingly involved in the practice, sometimes acting in collusion with the police or military.

In December 2006, only days after he took office, conservative former president Felipe Calderón deployed the armed forces to combat the illegal drug trade, a strategy that has had fatal results.

During his six-year term, more than 100,000 homicides were committed, over 26,000 people disappeared and another 250,000 were displaced, according to official reports and NGOs.

The violence has continued since the arrival in office of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto. Between December and the end of April there were 8,000 violent deaths, according to journalists’ tallies.

Common threads in all of the accounts heard by the PPT were the problem of impunity and the desire for justice.

Domingo Pérez, a Chol Indian who testified before the PPT, is tireless in his search for his sister Minerva Pérez, who was a 19-year-old student when she disappeared on Jun. 20, 1996, in the municipality of Tila in the southern state of Chiapas.

“Witnesses say she disappeared at a checkpoint. We reported her disappearance and an investigation was ordered. But the authorities have not taken up the matter. This is a violation of our rights, we want to live in peace but the government thwarts our wishes,” Pérez told IPS.

The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre (FRAYBA) learned from witness statements that Minerva Pérez was held for three days by the Paz y Justicia paramilitary group. During that time she was beaten and raped, and afterward all trace of her was lost in the Chiapas jungle.

At the time the armed forces were fighting the leftwing Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) that took up arms on Jan. 1, 1994 in Chiapas, one of Mexico’s poorest states.

FRAYBA documented 37 forced disappearances and 85 killings committed between 1995 and 2000, most of them by three paramilitary groups which according to reports were supported by the army and the state government.

On Mar. 20, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) admitted eight cases – six extrajudicial executions and two forced disappearances, in Chiapas – presented by civil society organisations against the Mexican state.

“The cases are well grounded. The situation is muddied by the strategy of blaming the disappearances and executions on organised crime. Now it will be harder to prove the relationship between paramilitary groups and the state,” Clemencia Correa, an academic and one of the members of the PPT jury, told IPS.

The PPT deals with matters like collective violence, impunity, lack of access to justice, migration, femicide and other gender-based violence, threats to native maize and food sovereignty, as well as environmental destruction.

Victims’ relatives continue to fight for effective investigation of their cases.

“We ask for clarification of where (our loved ones) are, and if they committed a crime, that they be tried. We want an effective inquiry to catch those responsible and put them on trial,” Nadin Reyes, the daughter of Edmundo Reyes, who disappeared together with Gabriel Cruz on May 25, 2007, told IPS. They both belonged to the leftwing insurgent Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR).

Based on an investigation by the National Human Rights Commission, their relatives believe that they were both captured in a combined state and federal police and military operation at a hotel in the southern city of Oaxaca.

Like the titles of Swedish author Mari Jungstedt’s trilogy of novels, they are: Unspoken. Unseen. Unknown.

“It’s a politically motivated case, because of his involvement in the EPR. We made the same journey all the families have had to make, to several agencies to ask for solidarity and demand a response from the authorities,” said Reyes.

On Monday May 27 the Mexican government announced the creation of a Disappeared Persons Search Unit. But victims’ families complained that only 12 agents were assigned to it.

“We have the log books of the police officers who arrested my brother, and their names. We gave them to the authorities and they still haven’t been able to arrest them,” complained Rangel, whose brother sold clothing.

In 2010, victims’ relatives formed United Forces for Our Disappeared in Coahuila, which became United Forces for Our Disappeared in Mexico (FUNDEM) because of the magnitude of the human rights tragedy. FUNDEM has documented more than 300 disappearances.

Jorge Rafael Videla swears in as the head of the military junta on Mar. 24, 1976. Credit: Public Domain

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, May 17 2013 (IPS)

Thirty-seven years after leading the coup d’etat that ushered in the most brutal dictatorship in the history of Argentina, former army commander Jorge Rafael Videla died in a common prison Friday.

Convicted in several cases for crimes against humanity, the former dictator was found in his cell without a pulse, according to the medical report from the Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 87 years old.

Videla was serving several sentences in the Complejo Penitenciario Federal Número 2 in the city of Marcos Paz in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, in a section of the prison where he was held with dozens of other human rights violators from the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

“I never killed anyone,” Videla stated. In every conviction against him he was found to be the “intellectual author” of crimes against humanity. He himself admitted as much in the book “The Dictator” by journalists María Seoane and Vicente Muleiro. “There was no lack of control. I was above everyone,” he told the writers.

Human rights groups, the families of victims and observers of the fight against impunity for the de facto regime’s crimes said Videla’s death in a common prison was a powerful symbol, but did not represent the end of a cycle and was merely one more landmark in the process.

The executive director of Amnesty International in Argentina, Mariela Belski, told IPS that Videla “will be remembered for the (dictatorship’s) most brutal and appalling excesses.”

“But the most important thing here is that justice was done, Videla was convicted, and he died in prison,” she said, stressing that Argentina “took a major stride forward in bringing these crimes to trial, and became a model for the region and for the global South.”

But Belski warned that the death of the dictator “does not bring the process to a close. This is an ongoing process, which Argentina is spearheading, but which must continue in the country and in the region.”

Videla’s death in prison “is a very important symbolic development,” Víctor Abramovich, executive secretary of the Institute of Public Policies on Human Rights of South America’s Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc, told IPS.

“Ten years ago this was unthinkable. Today it is the result of a process of regional scope, a process that is moving forward at different speeds, under different laws, but is generating very interesting debates throughout Latin America,” said the representative of the bloc made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Abramovich, a former vice president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said the fact that the former dictator died in a common jail “reaffirms the principle of equality before the law.”

“This process, which is moving ahead at varying rates, is occurring in Chile, Brazil, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay, as well as Guatemala, where (former dictator José Efraín) Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison (on May 10),” he said.

In Argentina, 422 human rights violators, mainly members of the military, have been tried since 1983. Of that total, 378 were convicted and 44 acquitted, according to the prosecution unit for the coordination and monitoring of cases involving human rights violations.

In the last two years, trials have picked up speed, thanks to measures such as the accumulation of cases committed in each torture centre. In 2012, 24 trials ended in 134 convictions and 17 acquittals.

As part of the fight against impunity, the organisation Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo has managed to identify more than 100 sons and daughters of political prisoners who had been kidnapped as children along with their parents or were born in captivity.

Some of those stolen children now hold public posts – as national legislators, city councillors or executive branch officials, like the secretary of human rights, Martín Fresneda.

In 1976, then army chief Videla led the junta made up of the commanders of the three military forces after the coup that overthrew the democratic government of Isabel Perón.

Under his leadership (1976-1981), thousands of people were kidnapped, tortured, killed and forcibly disappeared. Government records that are gradually being updated account for more than 11,000 victims of forced disappearance, while human rights organisations put the total number at 30,000.

When the regime collapsed in 1983, the former junta members were tried. In 1985, Videla was sentenced to life in prison for 66 murders, 306 kidnappings, 93 cases of torture and 26 cases of theft.

He spent five years in a military prison along with other officers, enjoying privileges that were denounced by the media and human rights groups. But in 1990 they were pardoned by then president Carlos Menem (1989-1999).

However, Videla was arrested again in 1998 in connection with the theft of children born to political prisoners – a crime he had never been convicted of and thus was never pardoned for.

But it was the declaration of the presidential pardon and the two late 1980s amnesty laws as unconstitutional that reactivated a number of human rights cases against him over the last decade. In 2010 he was handed a live sentence for crimes committed in the central province of Córdoba and in 2012 he was sentenced to 50 years for the theft of children.

He was also tried for crimes against humanity committed by the regime in the central province of Santa Fe and the northern province of Tucumán.

In the trials, Videla did not recognise the authority of the civilian courts to try him, and complained that he was a “political prisoner.”

He did so once again on Tuesday May 14, in another case related to Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing, exchanging and eliminating left-wing opponents.

On his last appearance in court he looked unwell, with difficulty walking and a trembling voice.

But he never repented in public. On the contrary, he said he gave the orders for the crimes committed by his subordinates.

In his last statements to the press, to the Spanish magazine Cambio 16 in March, he urged young officers to rise up against the government of Cristina Fernández “in defence of the institutions of the republic.”

Protesters demand that the Mexican government search for their missing relatives. Credit: Diana Cariboni/IPS

By Diana Cariboni
MEXICO CITY, May 14 2013 (IPS)

When people are forcibly disappeared in Mexico, it does not necessarily mean that the victims are immediately killed. In this country of entrenched violence, forced disappearance is also a method used to feed the markets for sexual exploitation and slave labour.

Mexico has regressed “to the barbarism of Roman gladiators,” lawyer Juan López, a legal adviser to Fuerzas Unidas por Nuestros Desparecidos en México (FUNDEM), a support group for families searching for their loved ones, initially in the northern state of Coahuila and now nationwide, told IPS.

In today’s Mexico, where organised crime is rampant and public security has been militarised, forced disappearances do not follow the pattern seen in past decades in this country and others in Latin America, marked by dictatorships, “dirty wars” against opponents and armed conflicts.

These days “just about anyone” is vulnerable, López said. An unknown proportion of the victims fall prey to “illegal businesses that produce lucrative profits from an unpaid slave labour force,” he said.

This includes the forced recruitment of teenagers and young adults as hired killers, workers in the production of drugs or to serve other needs of the cartels, or for organ trafficking.

“There have been confirmed reports of buses stopped by armed groups who take away all the young men,” López said.

The victims’ profile has changed, according to studies. At first the disappeared were men between the ages of 30 and 45; then the age range fell to 20-25 and again to 17-19. Now younger teenagers are also kidnapped, while the proportion of women has increased to the point where they make up half of all new disappearances, he said.

Human trafficking for labour and sexual purposes is currently flourishing in Mexico, and it is the third most lucrative illegal business in the world after drug and arms trafficking. The central Mexican state of Tlaxcala is the epicentre of networks that kidnap women in more than 20 districts, and also in border areas, and exploit them in cities in this country and the United States.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says that 80 percent of the people trafficked in Mexico are women and girls. Mexico is the second country, after Thailand, for the number of trafficked women smuggled into the United States.

The victims, who are “picked up” in streets, towns and communities, are absorbed into “a human market,” and it is possible that many of them “are still alive,” López said.

During the six-year term of former president Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), 26,121 people were forcibly disappeared, according to the database published by the government of incumbent President Enrique Peña Nieto in late February.

However, the list does not include several well-known cases, their families confirmed, nor the information, however much or little, that was often gathered by the relatives themselves.

The stories are horrifying: young men forced to fight each other to death, or to dismember a woman alive, as acts of initiation and hardening of recruits. Groups of men forced to undertake training that only the fittest survive. Women tricked, enslaved and forced into submission by threats against their children.

Brenda Rangel, a 35-year-old member of FUNDEM, is looking for her brother Héctor, who was 28 years old when municipal police detained him in November 2009, along with two other men in Monclova, Coahuila.

“But they didn’t hand them over to any authorities,” Rangel told IPS. She found out what had happened to them because her brother managed to call her on his cell phone. “The police handed him over to an illegal organisation.” The next day she went to Monclova, and she has moved heaven and earth to find him. “My brother is alive,” she stated.

Rangel was one of the most eloquent speakers at the march organised by mothers of the disappeared from all over the country on Friday May 10 in the centre of the capital to demand that the government mobilise its resources to find them.

“There is no money available to look for ordinary people who have disappeared,” she declared in her powerful, broken voice.

Dressed in white, the mothers marched several blocks to the monument of the Angel of Independence, shouting slogans like “¡Hija, escucha, tu madre está en tu busca!” (Daughter, listen! Your mother is looking for you!).

Forty-three-year-old Lourdes Valdivia has heard nothing from her husband, 47-year-old José Diego Cordero, or their 22-year-old son Juan Diego, since December 2010 when they went hunting with eight friends and relatives. Municipal police detained them at a checkpoint near Joaquín Amaro, a municipality in the central state of Zacatecas.

On the pretext of checking their hunting permits, they locked them up in the police station, Valdivia said, wiping away her tears. Thanks to an underage boy who was released and an adult who was able to escape, Valdivia learned that “they took them out at night and handed them over to a group, presumably Los Zetas,” a notoriously violent criminal syndicate.

Other people are kidnapped for ransom, or because they have witnessed a crime, or they disappear because they were unwittingly caught in crossfire.

Systems engineer Juan Ricardo Rodríguez met up with his fiancée in September 2011 in a hotel in Zacatecas, where he was working, to finetune their wedding plans. As they were leaving, they saw an armed commando taking three men away. The couple tried to get away, but they were also seized.

Federal police, who spoke to the armed men, watched the entire event, Rodríguez’s mother, Virginia Barajas, who reconstructed the scene with the help of witnesses, told IPS.

There are reports of hundreds of people shut up in warehouses, safe houses belonging to crime syndicates, or isolated ranches in rural areas.

Other sources say it is likely that the disappeared persons are dead, as indicated by the mass graves that have been found. But some families have received remains that do not correspond to their loved ones.

The families of the disappeared always live in hope, said legal expert Santiago Corcuera, a member between 2004 and 2010 of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances.

But Corcuera described a number of different patterns of disappearances.

When the perpetrators are members of the public security forces, the victim will most likely be killed, he said. But there is “collusion, for instance, with sexual exploitation of women and girls,” or with other kinds of labour exploitation “in support of drug trafficking” and to swell the ranks of hired killers, he added.

In his view, the “law on victims” adopted by the Peña Nieto administration is “a beacon,” because it establishes reparations mechanisms. But protocols to search for disappeared victims are lacking; these should be coordinated between different Mexican states and with other countries in the region, he said.

FUNDEM’s López went even further: “The state does not carry out searches or investigations. And it opposes investigations by the families.”

According to Human Rights Watch, in many cases, official investigators have told families that the investigation’s progress depended entirely on the efforts of the families themselves.

Alirio Uribe of the Jose Alvear Restrepo Lawyers’ Collective (CAJAR), questioned by reporters before filing a lawsuit against the expansion of jurisdiction of the military justice system. Credit: Courtesy of CAJAR.

By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

Victims of crimes of the state want their recommendations to be taken into consideration by the peace talks between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas that are seeking to end half a century of armed conflict.

The “victims’ demands to the parties” involved in the talks, outlined in an 11-point document presented Wednesday Mar. 6, include “deliberate and decisive participation” by their representatives in the peace process taking place in Havana, Cuba, and state that “everyone guilty of crimes should be punished.”

“We feel solidarity with the victims of the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, founded in 1964),” Franklin Castañeda, the president of the Committee of Solidarity with Political Prisoners and a spokesman for the Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE), said in a press conference in the capital Wednesday.

But, he added, “Colombian society shouldn’t only demand things from the FARC.”

“State crimes should not be amnestied,” he said, and the state should acknowledge that it created far-right paramilitary groups to back up the army, and “should effectively dismantle” these structures.

“It is unacceptable for state crimes to be erased from the history of this country,” said left-wing parliamentarian Iván Cepeda.

“Our message is very clear: if there is going to be talk of justice, truth and reparations, everyone who has participated in this conflict has to assume their responsibility,” he said.

MOVICE, the Association of the Families of Detained-Disappeared, founded 30 years ago, and groups of sons and daughters of people who have been killed, as well as numerous human rights organisations, say that is the only way to keep the internal armed conflict from continuing, as it has despite several attempted peace processes that have taken place since 1955.

The organisations signed the “proposals on truth, justice, reparations and guarantees of non-repetition” delivered Wednesday to the United Nations, which is facilitating the peace talks.

“This analysis based on international human rights law is built on the basis of much pain and many tears,” Jesuit priest Javier Giraldo said in the news briefing.

Giraldo and human rights lawyer Federico Andreu of the non-governmental Colombian Commission of Jurists headed the group that drafted the document, which sets forth 11 proposals, including the creation of an independent truth commission.

Preliminary negotiations between the government and the FARC began around two and a half years ago, in total secrecy, at the initiative of President Juan Manuel Santos.

The talks were officially launched in October 2012 in Oslo, and continued in Havana, where five rounds of negotiations have been held behind closed doors. Cuba and Norway are guarantors of the talks, and Venezuela and Chile are observers.

Progress has reportedly been made on several points, such as land ownership, the top issue on a six-point agenda that also includes the question of human rights.

In 2008, Mar. 6 was chosen as the “day of dignity of the victims of state crimes in Colombia”. On that day, large protests were held to pay homage to victims of forced disappearance and extrajudicial executions since 1946.

This year, 500 delegates met in Bogota in the sixth national conference of victims of state crimes. Besides producing proposals for the peace talks, they filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the expansion of the jurisdiction of the military courts, a reform approved by Congress in 2012.

They argued that the civilian justice system should have the authority to decide whether crimes committed by members of the armed forces are human rights violations or “acts of service” committed in the line of duty.

Andreu told IPS the groups’ demands to the government and the FARC were “based fundamentally on the obligations that international law imposes on the state, and on the rights that it upholds for victims.

“Any peace process, in order to be real, has to focus on strengthening the state of law, and on guaranteeing the key question: that the main authors of crimes against humanity, war crimes and human rights violations must be tried and punished,” he said.

“A series of measures must also be taken,” Andreu added, “to guarantee that the doctrines that prompted these crimes are abolished from the military sphere.”

The document demands that “the agents of the state who have committed, tolerated or incited these crimes, or have guaranteed the impunity surrounding them, be purged from the public administration.”

Unless these things are done, he said, “the peace process will be incomplete. There will be a process of demobilisation of one of the actors in the conflict (the FARC), but the violence and human rights abuses will continue.”

Manuel Cordero, captured on camera in 2009 by a journalist with Uruguay’s Channel 12 violating house arrest in Brazil. Credit: Canal 12

By Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Mar 5 2013 (IPS)

The trial over a campaign of terror coordinated among the dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America in the 1970s and 1980s began Tuesday in Buenos Aires with former dictator Jorge Rafael Videla as one of the main defendants, along with another 24 former military officers.

Under Operation Condor, as the coordination between the military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay was known, opponents of the regimes were tracked down, kidnapped, tortured, transferred across borders and killed – including guerrilla fighters, political activists, trade unionists, students, priests, journalists or mothers demanding to know what had happened to their missing sons and daughters.

“This is the first time in Latin America that a trial is being held over Operation Condor, to prosecute those responsible, above and beyond trials held in some countries for specific cases,” lawyer Luz Palmas of the Fundación Liga Argentina por los Derechos Humanos (FUNLADDHH), a human rights organisation, told IPS.

The 25 defendants include Videla and other former generals like Reynaldo Bignone and Luciano Benjamín Menéndez. Uruguayan general Manuel Cordero, prosecuted for the role he played in the illegal detention centre at Automotores Orletti in Buenos Aires, was extradited from Brazil for this trial.

Three of the accused were declared unfit to stand trial for health reasons. Another 15 people under investigation died before the case came to trial.

“Orletti was an operational base for Condor. Foreigners who were kidnapped were taken there, which is why it was decided to take both the cases to oral trial together,” said Palmas, who represents survivors of the torture centre as well as victims of forced disappearance.

The trial that began Tuesday, which could stretch on for up to two years, is for the kidnapping and forced disappearance of 106 people. The largest group of victims were Uruguayans (48), but there were also Argentines, Bolivians, Chileans, Paraguayans and one Peruvian.

The case was initiated in 1999, when the two amnesty laws that put a stop to the prosecution of members of the military for human rights abuses committed during Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship were still in force.

The lawsuit thus invoked forced disappearance as a crime against humanity that was not subject to amnesty.

After the amnesty laws were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005, along with the presidential pardons of former members of the military junta, the case picked up speed, more victims were included and more people came under investigation.

In the Orletti case, the crimes are illegal detention and torture. Sixty-five victims were identified, some of whom survived and, like Ana Inés Quadros, a Uruguayan citizen, have already testified in an earlier stage of the trial in 2010 against four torturers belonging to the Argentine intelligence services.

At that time, Quadros declared that she was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in July 1976 and taken to Orletti, where she was tortured and raped by Cordero. She was later transferred to an illegal detention centre in Uruguay, and eventually freed.

However, Cordero is only being tried for illegal detention under Operation Condor, and not for the crimes he committed in Orletti, because the Brazilian justice system did not grant extradition for that case.

In the view of Lorena Balardini, research coordinator for the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a local human rights group, this trial “is the biggest to be held so far in the region over Operation Condor, and could serve as an impetus for other countries where there have been delays or backsliding,” she told IPS.

Balardini said there had been “a setback” in Uruguay. She was referring to a Supreme Court ruling in February this year overturning a lower court verdict to remove the statute of limitations on crimes of the 1973-1985 dictatorship, regarded as crimes against humanity.

“This trial is a way of making these abuses visible and judging them from the viewpoint of coordination between dictatorships,” she said. For this reason, CELS, in its capacity as legal representative of several victims, has focused on key cases in which that coordination is proven.

For example, CELS is representing the families of Marcelo Gelman – the son of Argentine poet Juan Gelman – and his wife María Claudia García Irureta. The couple was kidnapped in Buenos Aires in 1976 at the ages of 20 and 19 respectively, when García was seven months pregnant.

Gelman was killed and his body was identified in 1989, but García was taken from Orletti to Uruguay, where she gave birth to Macarena Gelman, who was finally tracked down at the age of 23 by her grandfather in 2000. García’s body has never been found.

Complaints will also be lodged on behalf of Horacio Campiglia and his secretary Susana Pinus, Argentine citizens who were kidnapped in Galeão airport in Rio de Janeiro in 1980 and were presumed to have been transferred to Argentina, where they disappeared.

In the context of Operation Condor, other famous cases were investigated specifically, such as the murders in Argentina of Uruguayan Congressmen Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz in 1976.

Former Bolivian president Juan José Torres, who took refuge in Argentina after being overthrown by Hugo Banzer in 1971, was also murdered there in 1976.

According to lawyer Carolina Varsky, head of litigation at CELS, these murder cases were not included in the Operation Condor trial in order to evade restrictions imposed by the amnesty laws, and only cases of forced disappearance – considered “ongoing crimes” – were taken up.

As for the central role played by Chile’s DINA, the secret police of late dictator Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), Varsky regretted the lack of progress in prosecuting direct or indirect agents of repression who participated in Operation Condor.

Essential evidence came from Paraguay, where lawyer and journalist Martín Almada discovered in 1992 what are known as the Archives of Terror in a police station in Asunción, containing innumerable documents shedding light on the fate of Operation Condor victims from the seven countries.

Further evidence is contained in declassified documents from the United States State Department, such as a 1976 memo from an FBI agent describing the coordinated actions of South America’s military regimes, which could go “as far as murder.”

By Fabíola Ortiz
SANTIAGO, Dec 6 2012 (IPS)

The legacy of Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship, which left some 3,000 people dead and “disappeared”, remains alive in the country’s society and political system, says journalist and writer Mauricio Weibel.

In this interview with IPS, Weibel says that elements of the regime of the late dictator General Augusto Pinochet survive in the constitution inherited from the dictatorship, and are the root cause of what he sees as Chile’s present social crisis, and of the failings of its political system.

Weibel and his colleague Carlos Dorat are the authors of a book, “Asociación Ilícita – Los archivos secretos de la dictadura” (Illicit Association: The secret archives of the dictatorship), one of the most widely read books in the country since its publication in October.

Chilean journalist and writer Mauricio Weibel. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

Official documents reveal how the dictatorship made its decisions, how it was allied with other military regimes in the Southern Cone of South America (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) by means of Operation Condor, aimed at tracking down, capturing and eliminating left-wing opponents, and how its diplomats kept watch on Chilean exiles around the world.

Q: How did you do the research for “Asociación Ilícita”?

A: We wanted to put on an exhibition in the Museum of Memory for the 40th anniversary of the military coup (Sept. 11, 2013). As I researched, I came across these files in the ministries of the interior and foreign affairs. They were memos and communications exchanged between 1973 and 1990. It took four months to put the files in order, organise and read them, followed by five weeks of writing.

Q: What did the archives reveal about the dictatorship’s secret intelligence network?

A: We decided to describe decision-making and high-level communications during the dictatorship. There is clear evidence of full participation in the repression by civilians and by the foreign ministry. No one was innocent; everyone knew.

In the documents, Chile’s foreign ministers request copies of Operation Condor from the secret police. In a few cases, the secret police suggest to the ministry of the interior that a particular exiled person should be allowed back into the country, but the suggestion is rejected.

Basically, we explain how they operated, what information was communicated, what reports were written, and what kinds of materials were burned, as recorded in the certificates of destruction.

Q: The book cites personalities active in the dictatorship who hold office today, like Alberto Cardemil, now a member of Congress. What was his role?

A: Cardemil was under-secretary of the interior, and is now a member of the lower house for National Renewal, the party of President Enrique Piñera. He used to distribute reports from the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI) – the secret police – to the ministries, and he was in charge of distributing files with information on opponents of the regime.

It was known that he had been involved in some way, but we had no proof of anything. Now he has a lot of questions to answer: whether he kept copies of these files, of his reports, and whether he has used this information obtained by means of torture, since democracy was restored.

And the same is true of the other civilians, because many ambassadors are shown to have been involved. Cardemil denied the existence of the files, and he denied distributing CNI information.

Q: Have you had any problems with the justice system because of the publication of the book?

A: No, because all the information is based on and backed up by documents. It is all based on signed documents with no opinion, no adjective added. It is raw information.

Q: What impact has the book had?

A: The book is currently among the top ten most widely read in Chile. It is a book for future generations. This month we are also presenting it in Argentina. At the book launch in Santiago, at the Museum of Memory, there were more than 600 people, and at the Santiago book fair there were 200 invited guests.

Q: Why is it important to shed light on the dictatorship’s secret files?

A: Without memory there can be no future; we have to take a look at why we arrived at these horrors so that they can never happen again. We have to carry out profound social and political reflection. And we must also find out why people who now hold high political office were involved.

There is apparently a certain amount of interest in Latin America in revisiting the recent past, to tell the stories that have not been told or were only told in an official version, and to rescue it all from oblivion.

Q: What was the role of the Catholic Church during the dictatorship?

A: The Chilean Church was quite committed to the defence of human rights. Cardinal Raúl Silva Henríquez was one of the most important and most powerful opponents of Pinochet. The Vicaría de la Solidaridad (a human rights agency of the Church) protected persecuted citizens, and provided legal services such as opening legal cases and drawing up writs of habeas corpus. The clergy were involved in dangerous work.

Q: What evidence was found in the archives about Operation Condor?

A: We thought Operation Condor was a strategy of the secret police. But it was a concerted operation by the Southern Cone governments, which cooperated above and beyond conflicts over some issues.

For example, Chile and Bolivia broke off relations in 1978 over La Paz’s maritime claim (to access to the Pacific ocean). But in 1979 they were still cooperating under Operation Condor. The countries had no diplomatic relations, and yet their regimes continued to cooperate at the level of intelligence.

Q: Did diplomats carry out surveillance on exiles?

A: Movements of Chileans abroad were infiltrated. It’s amazing how much information they had. It went far beyond the limits of national borders.

Q: The Chilean dictatorship was the longest lasting in Latin America. Is it still alive in Chilean society?

A: The dictatorship is not only in our memory, but also in the whole constitutional framework Chile has inherited from it, like the 1980 constitution, approved when there were no electoral registers; the political system; the binomial electoral system (in which the top two candidates are elected from each district); and the economic system.

It is omnipresent, and it is a major cause of the political and social crisis Chile is experiencing today. Our 21st century democracy has its origins in the dictatorship.

Q: What was the democratic transition like, under the long shadow of Pinochet up to his death in 2006?

A: It was a democracy under military tutelage. After 1984, the dictatorship suspected that the political and economic system would fall, and that ultimately they would be investigated and tried for crimes against human rights.

At the beginning of the transition, the president could not remove the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces from their posts. Eventually we came to our present position, with a constitution dating back to the dictatorship, where the state has a secondary role regarding the supply and demand of public goods, and an electoral system that prevents proportional representation of voters.

Excerpt:

Artists and activists embroidering for peace in Coyoacán square. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
MEXICO CITY, Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

Each scarf represents a life cut short. Each stitch, a tear. Each thread, a cry of frustration about death and impunity.

The Mexican hands embroidering for peace belong to mothers searching for missing sons and daughters, people demanding justice for their brothers and sisters, and students, teachers, activists and artists showing their solidarity.

Conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderón, who hands over power on Saturday Dec. 1 to Enrique Peña of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is facing criticism from activists regarding his human rights record.

But one protest stands out for its moral force: a string of thousands of white scarves embroidered with the names and stories of people who have been killed or have gone missing in Mexico since Calderón began to wage his war on drugs after taking office in December 2006.

“We want to send off Calderón with the pain that he has caused thousands of families,” one of the organisers of the embroidery project, Leticia Hidalgo from the northern city of Monterrey, told IPS. “Because (the measures taken by his government) totally destroyed my family, and changed our lives, and only the love for my son has kept us going.”

Her son Roy Rivera, a philosophy student at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, was kidnapped on Jan. 11, 2011. His family paid the ransom, but he never returned. He was just about to turn 19.

Hidalgo embroidered on her scarf: “My boy, I put you in the hands of God. We’re waiting for you to come back soon, very soon. Stay strong. Your mama and Richi.”

The white scarves memorial will be set up in the Alameda Central, a park in Mexico City, with the scarves embroidered by hundreds of hands over the past 15 months in dozens of towns and cities around the country and abroad.

Some carry painful messages from parents and other family members. Others tell stories salvaged from oblivion by anonymous hands.

“15th of January. NL. Two women lose their lives in a shootout in Balcones Altavista. Embroidered by: Another woman”, reads one scarf hanging in Coyoacán square in the capital.

The idea of embroidering scarves as an act of protest came from Fuentes Rojas (Red Fountains), a group of artists who have dyed the water in fountains red to protest the blood shed by the government’s militarised security strategy.

The activists first began to embroider scarves in their meetings. In August 2011, during a day of artistic and cultural activities organised by the Movement for Peace and Justice with Dignity, they held their first collective embroidering session in the Zócalo, Mexico City’s central square.

After that, they held such gatherings every Sunday in Coyoacán square, in the south of the capital, and next to the Torre Latinoamericana in central Mexico City.

“We wanted to raise public awareness about this enormous tragedy, using the symbolic gesture of stitching up these broken stories that have been caused by the violence,” Elia Andrade, an artist, told IPS.

“We embroider for everyone, and what we put on the scarves is basically the information that we manage to find: the name, how and when they died, and who made the scarf. But it’s completely different when it’s stitched by a family member,” she said.

“That’s why every group started to do things a little differently, when the idea caught on and began to spread.”

For example, the women in Nuevo León, one of the Mexican states with the largest number of victims of forced disappearance, switched from red thread representing people who were killed, to green thread, to represent their missing sons and daughters.

“Green is the colour of hope, that we are going to find them,” said Hidalgo, who has been meeting with a group of women since March to embroider outside the Monterrey city hall. They now have 200 scarves embroidered, because every week, new people show up, who are searching for a missing loved one.

One of the biggest and most active groups is in Guadalajara, the capital of the western state of Jalisco.

“Embroidering a scarf is an act of love, of acknowledgement,” Teresa Sordo, one of the organisers of the group that meets every Sunday in Guadalajara’s Rojo park, wrote in the blog “Bordamos por la paz” (Embroidering for peace).

Many of the names and stories embroidered on their scarves are taken from a list titled
“Menos días aquí” (Fewer Days Here), an initiative of the group Nuestra Aparente Rendición (Our Apparent Surrender) which, based on newspaper reports, has started counting the number of people killed in the country every day.

“We embroider, perhaps, because a few hands can transform things and we need to transform them into beautiful things because so many hands are already doing appalling, unmentionable, incomprehensible things,” Sordo wrote.

Indigenous people forced to flee the community of San Juan Copala, in the southern state of Oaxaca, embroidered scarves for 28 of their people who were killed. Several native communities in Michoacán also sewed scarves for their dead.

In Guatemala and Nicaragua, scarves were stitched for the 72 migrants slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August 2010.

And in Mexico City, scarves were embroidered for the 49 children who died in a June 2009 fire in a day care centre in Sonora.

Other hands have started to embroider in Coahuila, another one of the states with the highest numbers of missing persons, and in Morelos, Puebla, Chihuahua, the state of Mexico, as well as countries like France, Germany and Japan.

The white scarves will form a memorial – a request that the victims expressed to Calderón during public talks s he held with representatives of the peace movement in June 2011.

But the only result of the talks was the construction of a mausoleum for soldiers killed, and a controversial construction that the government calls the “Memorial for Victims”, built in the Campo Militar, a military installation in Mexico City.

With skilled hands, María Herrera from Michoacán sews in red thread the name of one of the thousands of people killed during the six-year term of Calderón, who belongs to the National Action Party, which 12 years ago put an end to seven decades of government by the PRI, the party that is now returning to power.

A militarised police patrol, which have become routine in Xalapa, drives past the poster of a missing young woman. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Daniela Pastrana
XALAPA, Mexico , Nov 29 2012 (IPS)

Something smells rotten in the state of Veracruz. In Xalapa, the capital of this eastern Mexican state, known as the “Athens of Veracruz” because of its strong cultural tradition, fear is in the air.

The police only patrol the streets in convoys, wearing face masks and armed with assault rifles. Flyers with the faces of missing young people are everywhere, plastered along the streets and in bus stops. In university seminars and talks, outsiders are warned that there will be government informants in the audience.

“Xalapa was always a haven for social activists from communities in the north or in the mountains plagued by political violence,” environmental activist Javier Hernández told IPS. “It seemed like a place that would not be touched, but things changed with the military operations and the new governor who took office in 2010.”

Hernández left the state after the murders of journalist Regina Martínez and Professor José Luis Blanco Rosas, in April and May 2012, respectively.

Veracruz, which has 720 km of coastline on the Gulf of Mexico and borders seven other states, has become a kind of long skinny black hole in eastern Mexico in the last few years.

The third-most populous state in the country, with 7.6 million people, and one of the nine states ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for 83 years, Veracruz is today the most dangerous part of the country for the tens of thousands of Central American migrants who cross Mexico every year in their attempt to reach the United States.

One out of three migrants who have gone missing in Mexico were last seen in Veracruz.

“We know they are kidnapped, and the ones who can’t pay the ransom are forced into crime. The least fortunate become victims of labour or sexual exploitation,” said Rubén Figueroa, of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement, which in October organised a protest convoy of women whose sons or daughters have disappeared.

But this is not only a dangerous place for Central American migrants. In the last two years, nine reporters have been killed in Veracruz, two have gone missing, at least a dozen have been forced to flee into exile, and the offices of a newspaper were set on fire.

Women’s rights groups are also on the alert. They started to document the disappearance of women and girls in 2009, when 14 women were killed in a brothel in Ciudad Isla, a town in southern Veracruz.

The mutilated bodies of the women were only found several months after they went missing.

“Women are disappearing, but so are boys and girls, teenagers and young men, and, especially in Xalapa, many students,” an activist who asked to remain anonymous told IPS.

Reliable statistics on the phenomenon are not available. The local authorities even removed information on people reported as missing from the local government’s website.

According to the outgoing national government of Felipe Calderón, more than 600 people have disappeared in the state in the last six years.

But that would appear to be the tip of the iceberg. An article published in October by the newspaper Milenio, based on information from forensic services across the country, reported that at least 5,245 of the 24,000 bodies buried in unmarked graves during the six-year Calderón administration were buried in Veracruz.

In Puerto de Veracruz alone, a city of half a million people, there were 1,000 unidentified bodies in 2011.

And these figures, provided by some 30 municipal governments, are incomplete.

The state government of Javier Duarte refused to provide information, meanwhile, under the argument that it would be an “invasion of the privacy” of the unidentified bodies, and that the information would endanger institutions and “the territorial integrity of the state.”

“There are territories that have been completely lost, where no one is documenting what is happening,” said a rural activist who preferred not to be named. “In the north of the state, in the area of the Pánuco river, and in the south, around Poza Rica and Coatzacoalcos, things are happening that no one dares report,” he told IPS.

And no solution is in sight. On the contrary, security analysts predict a rise in violence in regions dominated by the Los Zetas drug cartel, since its leader, Heriberto Lazcano, was shot down by the Mexican marines on Oct. 7.

Los Zetas, the most violent of the eight organised crime groups operating in Mexico, was created by former members of the military who had originally joined the Gulf Cartel. In the last few years, its power and influence has grown, and it now controls the entire eastern edge of the country.

The latest battle by the people of Xalapa to regain control over their city was waged in the Jul. 2 presidential and legislative elections.

The PRI lost the state’s seat in the national legislature, which was won by left-wing candidate David Flores, thanks to Xalapa voters.

But the party that governed Mexico for seven decades until 2000, and is now preparing to return to power when its presidential candidate Enrique Peña takes office on Dec. 1, won the rest of the state posts with the votes from rural areas and the oil-producing region, where the oil workers union is controlled by PRI Senator Carlos Romero Deschamps.

“There was a sense of hope during the elections, after a few mothers dared to speak out about the disappearance of their sons and daughters,” said Hernández.

“But then the government of Veracruz began to get worried and started to pressure the victims to keep their mouths shut. And Xalapa became an impossible place to live,” the environmentalist said.

The biggest trial for human rights crimes committed by Argentina’s 1976-1983 dictatorship began Wednesday in Buenos Aires, with 68 people accused of crimes involving nearly 800 victims of the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA).

For the first time, six pilots who flew the so-called “death flights” – where political prisoners were dumped from planes, drugged but alive, into the ocean – will be tried.

The 68 defendants will be charged in cases involving the kidnapping, torture, and forced disappearance of hundreds of victims in ESMA, the regime’s biggest clandestine prison centre, where some 5,000 political prisoners were held over the years.

Most of the defendants (56) belonged to the navy, and five belonged to the coast guard. But there are also former members of the army, the police and the penitentiary service, as well as two civilians: lawyer Gonzalo Torres de Tolosa and former finance secretary Juan Alemann.

Five of the defendants are fugitives from justice. The national programme for the search for wanted suspects offers a 100,000 peso (20,000 dollar) award to anyone who provides information leading to their arrest.

The case is the biggest in Argentina since the human rights trials got underway again in the past decade, after the amnesty laws and pardons protecting human rights violators were declared unconstitutional.

While the accused and their defence counsel, and the families of the victims, survivors and their lawyers took their seats in the courtroom, another stage was set up for people to follow the trial.

A giant screen was installed in the Mabel Gutierrez auditorium in ESMA, which was converted into a human rights museum after it was handed over to human rights groups in 2004.

“This will be the biggest trial so far, because of the number of victims, defendants, and witnesses,” said Carolina Varsky, a lawyer with the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a human rights group taking part in the case, told IPS.

Varsky, the director of litigation in CELS, explained that the case had come to trial in bits and pieces, which she said “hid the true magnitude of the genocide committed” in ESMA.

Progress in the ESMA case began to be made in 2007, when a single defendant, former coast guard officer Héctor Febres, was tried. But he committed suicide in his cell just four days before the verdict was to be handed down.

And in 2011, 16 of 18 defendants in another ESMA trial were convicted.

The current trial is known as the “third branch” or the “unified ESMA case”.

The defendants include former navy captains Alfredo Astíz and Jorge Acosta, who were already convicted of other ESMA crimes. Acosta was also found guilty this year of involvement in stealing babies who were either born to political prisoners in detention or kidnapped along with their parents, who were later killed or “disappeared”. The children were mainly raised by military or police families.

Rodolfo Yanzón, one of the lawyers for a group of 40 survivors and victims’ relatives, told IPS that “we had opposed the breaking up of the cases, because we believed that it was best for the witnesses to not have to testify over and over again, and also because the (imprisoned) defendants had the right to be tried and convicted in a timely manner.”

In response to such demands, and to the recommendation of a higher court aimed at expediting the case, the court where the trial is being held agreed to show filmed testimony given by witnesses in other trials against the same defendants.

One of the survivors who have most often testified is Mario Villani, a 73-year-old physicist who lives in Miami, Florida. After he was kidnapped in 1977, he was held in five different detention and torture centres, for a total of three years and eight months. ESMA was the last.

Villani was tortured and forced to carry out different tasks during his detention. He gave his testimony to the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, and testified in the trials held after the dictatorship came to an end, in the 1980s, which were cut short by the amnesty laws and pardons of the members of the military junta.

Since then he has given his testimony – about the same crimes – in trials in Argentina, France, Italy, Spain, Germany and Israel.

In an email response to IPS from the United States, Villani said he saw the start of the “mega-trial” as “one more step in the direction of justice.”

He said he felt “proud” to be able to help these cases move forward. But he added that “the struggle will continue as long as there are regimes in the world that need to use torture to maintain control.”

The testimony given by Villani and other survivors has helped keep the demand for justice alive for over three decades, bring the accused to trial, and identify some of the former torturers who were living their lives under other identities.

In the book “Desaparecido: Memorias de un cautiverio” (Disappeared: Memories of My Captivity), which he wrote with Fernando Reati, he said he still had nightmares. “If anyone wakes me up, I lift my arms and cover my face, in a defensive stance,” he wrote.

Like other political prisoners, Villani not only suffered torture himself, but also witnessed horrendous crimes, like the murder by torture of a Jewish schoolteacher who belonged to the Communist Party, and whose name he never learned.

“He made him strip, he tied him to the table with the bottom half of his body hanging off. He shoved a stick up his anus and gave him electric shocks,” he testified in the trial against federal police official Héctor Simón, alias “Turco Julián” or “Julián the Turk”.

Simón, who was convicted in several cases, was known for his fierce anti-Semitism. “The f***ing Jew died. Good thing, otherwise I would have had to let him go,” Villani recalls Simón saying when his victim died.

According to government figures, 14,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the dictatorship, although human rights organisations put the number at 30,000.

During the trial, which will last at least two years, three hearings a week will be held, and every seven days, DVDs will be shown, of the testimony of survivors and relatives of victims.

The families of thousands of girls and women who have disappeared in Mexico are spending everything they have in the search for their daughters – and for justice.

The families, who are mostly poor, face not only the steep legal costs involved, but also the negligence of justice system officials in Mexico when it comes to solving disappearances and murders of women.

The costs include the fees of lawyers and outside experts, appeals procedures, and travel expenses involved in the search for their daughters and the numerous visits to courtrooms or prosecutors’ offices.

To cap it all, some victims’ mothers have to pay for the meals and cell-phone bills of the judicial agents assigned to their case.

The outlay adds up to an average of 23,000 dollars per family – although the total can be higher depending on the complexity of the case and the length of the investigation, human rights defenders say.

The monetary cost of justice for women victims of violence “is very high and is invisible,” said lawyer Irma Villanueva, coordinator of the legal department of the Centre for Women’s Human Rights (CEDEHM) in the northern state of Chihuahua.

“No one talks, either, about the loss of employment, the expenses of food and transport, the mothers’ lack of care for their other children and grandchildren, as well as their physical and emotional exhaustion. All this remains unacknowledged,” said Villanueva.

The panorama is repeated virtually all over the country, where the disappearance of women, femicides (gender-related murders) and impunity are routine.

The National Citizen Observatory on Femicides (OCNF) reported that from January 2010 to June 2011, 1,235 women were killed in Mexico for gender-related reasons.

Between 2005 and 2011, in the state of Mexico, adjacent to the capital city and notorious for violence against women, the OCNF recorded 922 victims of femicide.

In Chihuahua, in 2010 alone there were 600 cases of femicide, according to civil society organisations. The state is home to Ciudad Juárez, on the border with the United States, regarded as the global capital of murders of women.

Villanueva said that for 2007 and 2008, the Office of the Special Prosecutor for Crimes of Violence Against Women had 17,700 case files under investigation, of which only 531 were forwarded to a judge.

“Most women who are victims of violence have no idea how to present a complaint; very few case files make any progress if they don’t know about legal procedures or how to keep track of the work of the public prosecution service, so they need lawyers to support them,” she said.

Nor can the women afford to follow up the procedures, so their cases are just left “on ice,” she said.

A bottomless barrel

Villanueva said that hiring a lawyer to work on bringing a gender violence case to prosecution costs between 6,000 and 7,800 dollars.

Yuridia Rodríguez, an OCNF defence lawyer, said that in the case of Nadia Alejandra Muciño, a femicide victim in the state of Mexico in 2004, seven appeals were presented, each costing 540 dollars, for a total amount of 3,780 dollars.

Muciño’s mother, María Antonia Márquez, said that in eight and a half years of seeking justice she has spent close to 23,000 dollars. And since she reported her daughter’s murder, she has travelled three times a week to Cuautitlán, Toluca or Tlanepantla, spending over 15 dollars a day on fares and food.

Moreover she had to pay 410 dollars to make copies of her daughter’s 3,600-page case file. “At first I hired two lawyers; I gave the first one an advance of 15,000 pesos (1,150 dollars) and the second 8,000 pesos (610 dollars). They both abandoned the case,” she said.

In another example, the mother of a 21-year-old young woman who disappeared in 2011 in another municipality of the state, who requested anonymity, said she has spent over 15,300 dollars in the past year and a half.

In addition to the costs of travelling to the Crime Victims Attention Units, to the interior of the country and even abroad to find her daughter, and the payments to an independent expert, the mother also had to pay 80 dollars a day for the food, gasoline and cell-phone bills of prosecution agents.

“When I saw no results, I hired a private detective who worked for two months, and I was paying him 1,000 pesos (80 dollars) a day, as well,” she complained.

Given the inaction by the authorities over the disappearance of Esmeralda Castillo Rincón on May 19, 2009 in Ciudad Juárez, her parents had to travel last March to the Federal District of the capital city, to look for their teenaged daughter.

The family sold hamburgers on the street to pay for the trip, as Castillo’s father, a cancer patient, lost his job because of the time he spent searching for his daughter, and the girl’s mother has been unable to find a job because of her age.

* This article was originally published by the Mexican news agency Comunicación e Información de la Mujer AC (CIMAC).

Forensic analysis of clothing. Credit: Courtesy of Servicio Médico Legal Archive

By Marianela Jarroud
SANTIAGO, Sep 4 2012 (IPS)

Relations between the families of people “disappeared” by Chile’s 1973-1990 dictatorship and the forensic institute, which have been tense since a 2006 scandal when the state body admitted that it had misidentified 96 of the 126 bodies found in a common grave in 1991, are beginning to mend.

The vice president of the Group of Families of the Detained-Disappeared (AFDD), Mireya García, stressed the significance of the work done by the forensic institute, the Servicio Médico Legal (SML). She said it is “extremely important…because it restores the names of bodies buried in secret graves, who now have identities and families (to mourn them),” she told IPS.

Judge Alejandro Solís confirmed on Aug. 29 that the SML, together with the
University of North Texas Center for Human Identification, was able to identify 51 bodies exhumed from unmarked graves in Patio 29, a desolate section of the General Cemetery of Santiago.

A large number of those killed in that district in the first six months of the dictatorship were buried in Patio 29.

García said that when the families found out about the misidentification of the bodies, “they felt despair and anguish.”

“It was a very difficult moment for the families who were directly affected. But it did not come as a surprise because we had already denounced irregularities,” she said.

A process of reforms of the SML was launched in the wake of the scandal. The changes included the creation of teams of specialists, and improvements in the chain of custody, from laboratory identification to the sending of remains to national or foreign laboratories for analysis.

So far, 120 of the 1,200 victims of forced disappearance have been identified.

The bodies of another 2,024 victims had been returned to their families after they were executed by the dictatorship, according to the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 1991 report and the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture’s 2004 report.

The bloody aftermath of the coup

On Sept. 11, 1973, military forces led by General Augusto Pinochet bombed the government palace and overthrew socialist President Salvador Allende, ushering in a 17-year military regime that suspended individual rights and carried out massive arrests.

The report produced by a special mission sent to Chile in 1974 by the Organisation of American States said conservative estimates spoke of 1,500 deaths during the period immediately following the coup.

The OAS report also states that more than 220 people were summarily shot and killed in that period.

According to SML figures, between Sept. 11 and Dec. 31, 1973, 1,631 bodies were brought to the forensic institute’s morgue. Many of them were identified by their families, but others were buried in unmarked graves in Patio 29.

The dictatorship’s systematic practice of forced disappearance came to light in December 1978, when the charred remains of 15 men from small farming communities were found in the furnaces of an abandoned limestone mine in Lonquén, on the outskirts of Santiago.

Just six months before the discovery, Interior Minister Sergio Fernández had said, in response to pressure from the relatives of the disappeared as to the whereabouts of their missing family members, “it is very feasible that the large majority of the allegedly disappeared have gone into hiding or have died in armed shoot-outs carrying false identity papers, thus preventing their identification.”

But the bodies found in Lonquén proved this was not true. The victims had all been detained under different circumstances in October 1973, and it was clear that their bodies had been purposefully hidden.

The discovery of the bodies provided the first concrete evidence that hundreds of opponents of the regime had been summarily executed, and their bodies concealed.

Dr. Patricio Bustos, director of the SML, told IPS that the dictatorship’s efforts to hide the evidence of the victims, starting with a campaign code-named “operation television removal”, were the main hurdle to identifying the bodies.

In the operation, put into effect after the bodies were found at Lonquén, troops around the country were ordered to dig up the remains of political prisoners from secret graves and dump them in the ocean.

Another difficulty, Bustos said, was Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing and eliminating left-wing opponents.

Operation Condor was created in Chile with the approval of the U.S. government.

Science at the service of truth and justice

“We won’t be satisfied until we identify as many people as possible,” Bustos said. “But now we do it with other techniques, with DNA testing that offers complete certainty of a positive identification.”

A databank of DNA samples from family members of victims was also created. Today it holds more than 3,000 samples.

Besides the remains of victims buried in Patio 29, the SML has identified 12 of the 24 bodies found in Fuerte Arteaga, a fort in a mountainous area in Peldehue, northeast of Santiago, where victims of the Sept. 11, 1973 attack on the La Moneda presidential palace – in which Allende died – were found.

In addition, 14 of the 15 bodies found in Lonquén have been identified.

Other victims identified include Uruguayan leftist intellectual Mónica Benaroyo, whose decapitated body was found in the Arica desert. The mummification of her corpse made it possible to obtain fingerprints and identify the body, even though her name was not on the official list of victims of forced disappearance.

In all of these cases, the SML worked together with the Institute for Legal Medicine of the Innsbruck Medical University in Austria.

But while relations between the families of the disappeared and the SML have been improving, there is still a ways to go.

“The damage they caused us, especially those families who were given the remains of the wrong person, is irreparable, as it came on top of the disappearance and the decades of absence. And that is the responsibility of the SML, but also of the authorities at the time,” García said.

On Aug. 31, a court in Chile ordered the state to pay 526,000 dollars in reparations to the family of Luis Dávila, whose remains were exhumed in Patio 29 and misidentified by the SML in 1994.

SML director Bustos said “trust is achieved by acknowledging that the lifeblood of all of this work is not the forensic sciences or researchers, but the families.

“We only take a step towards justice based on elements of the truth, to help forward this process that has been so painful, so drawn-out, and above all, so difficult,” he said.

“Help us find them” reads a sign with photos of victims of forced disappearance, put up by their families. Credit: Daniela Pastrana/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 7 2012 (IPS)

Since the forced disappearance of his son Jethro in May 2011, Héctor Sánchez has found an outlet for his grief in activism. So far he has turned down psychological support offered by the Mexican Attorney-General’s Office and human rights organisations.

“I cope by keeping very busy with the school project. That’s how we channel our painful feelings,” said the 59-year-old owner of an automobile parts business.

Jethro Sánchez, an electromechanical engineer, was arrested by municipal police in the city of Cuernavaca, 90 km south of Mexico City, on suspicion of belonging to a criminal organisation. Then he was handed over to soldiers, who tortured and killed him.

His body was found in August 2011, and three members of the military are now in custody awaiting trial for the crime.

Experts say post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute depression are on the rise in Mexico as a result of the increasing violence seen over the last few years. Scientists have evidence that communities and soldiers involved in armed conflict – among regular or irregular armed groups – are exposed to PTSD, a severe health problem.

“This disorder is spreading rapidly in populations like that of the capital and other cities in Mexico, where PTSD levels associated with violence are already high. We find similar patterns: people’s stress levels are directly proportional to their exposure to the mass media,” which transmit terror and panic, Mauricio Meschoulam, an academic at the Jesuit-run Ibero-American University, told IPS.

Meschoulam, an expert on terrorism, peace-building and mediation, co-authored a study that assessed the prevalence of PTSD in Mexico, which is caught up in a spiral of drug-related violence aggravated by the government’s militarisation of the country.

Based on 333 replies to a questionnaire, from respondents in 15 of the country’s 32 states, the “Estudio sobre efectos psicosociales por violencia en México” (Study on Psychosocial Effects of Violence in Mexico) found that 51 percent of those interviewed said the violence affected their work life, 72 percent their social life and 58 percent their family life.

Moreover, 42 percent of the sample said the violence had an impact on their economic status and 60 percent reported that it had affected their mental health.

The survey recorded symptoms of various disorders, like frequent anxiety attacks, frequent insomnia, and feelings of irritability and despair.

The survey participants are exposed, like the rest of Mexican society, to the daily scenes of terror splashed across newspapers, blaring from television screens and circulating in cyberspace through the social networks and blogs.

The violence began to escalate after President Felipe Calderón took office Dec. 1, 2006 and immediately deployed the armed forces in the battle against the drug cartels.

After nearly six years, the success of the strategy is doubtful, as more than 50,000 people have been killed, 250,000 displaced from their homes, 10,000 disappeared and 8,000 orphaned, according to human rights organisations.

At first the hardest hit communities with the highest levels of PTSD were found in the outlying states where the cartels are powerful. But the psychosocial damage has spread beyond those areas due to the heavy media coverage.

The disorder can occur when an individual directly experiences assault, kidnapping, rape or natural disaster.

However, “not only the direct victims of criminal acts are at risk of this kind of disorder, but also their communities, neighbours and relatives,” Edith Zúñiga, the academic director and founder in 1998 of Tech Palewi (which roughly translates as “I support you and help you grow” in the Nahuatl language), told IPS.

“Reporters who experience the thick of the battle can get PTSD,” she added.

“People have tried to pass off the violence as normal, and it has not been given the importance it deserves. Attention has not been given to the mental health risks that are incurred. Early intervention is important, but not enough people are diagnosed,” she said.

The Attorney-General’s Office records at least 2,886 police officers killed since 2006, while the armed forces report at least 250 fatalities among soldiers. Military personnel have been attacked nearly 2,000 times.

“The costs are high. For instance, soldiers’ families know when the troops go away on an operation, but they don’t know when they’ll come back,” Jorge Álvarez, head of a crisis intervention programme for victims of natural and social disasters at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), told IPS.

“Moreover, they (police and military) are accused of many human rights violations, so people do not trust them,” he said.

Created in 1997, the UNAM programme trains people like firefighters, rescue workers and soldiers in psychological first aid, and helps victims and their families.

The study “Estrés postraumático en la población pediátrica atendida en el Hospital Infantil del estado de Chihuahua, México” (Post traumatic stress disorder in a paediatric population treated at the Children’s Hospital of the state of Chihuahua, Mexico), published in 2011 in the Medical Bulletin of the Mexico City Children’s Hospital, reported that PTSD has increased considerably among children in recent years.

Six researchers from the state Autonomous University of Chihuahua and the Chihuahua Children’s Hospital authored the study, which reviewed 125 PTSD patients treated by the child psychology department over a period of three months. Of these, 52 had been traumatised by violence and 73 by accidents.

The patients were aged 5 to 15, and the highest prevalence was in the 5 to 7 year age group.

Psychological support “should be a priority. First of all those responsible should be brought to justice and there should be an end to impunity. Then we ought to think about psychological treatment,” said Sánchez, who will open a school specialising in auto mechanics, named after his son, on Jun. 18.

“It is essential to work with vulnerable populations. I think the state’s response is too slow and it is failing to detect the problem in a comprehensive way,” said Meschoulam.

He said he intends to continue carrying out national surveys and research on the effects of violence, to assess the needs of at-risk groups (children, women, police, soldiers and journalists), reduce hurdles for access to health care, and train personnel.

Zúñiga said “This kind of care needs to become more widely available, because the losses are so painful. We want to train people in the states, so as to form human resources who can make positive interventions in circumstances of this kind.”