Mexico reviews its past and opens the archives of the dirty war

Alicia de los Ríos ran with all her might at noon on January 5, 1978. She had a gunshot wound to the clavicle. The guerrilla entered a house and picked up the phone. It was followed by the White Brigade, a paramilitary body of the Mexican government. He called his sister and said the last words they heard him before disappearing: “Martha, they are going to arrest me, look for meHer whereabouts are a mystery almost half a century later. Her daughter, who is also called Alicia, was 11 months old. Now 44 years old and with a specialization in history, she has only been able to reconstruct an image of who her mother is from stories and documentation. Of her captors, nothing. Neither she nor hundreds of families who have lived the same. However, the recent creation of a truth commission could clarify the crimes of what in Mexico It is known as the war dirty.

In one of the most tense scenes of the Mexican film Roma It shows how a group of paramilitaries shoots at a student demonstration. It is a representation of the Hawk, one of the darkest episodes in the history of Mexico along with the 1968 massacre. These events are not isolated, according to Alejandra Elguero, a lawyer at the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center. “The Mexican state had a whole system to repress dissent,” he said in a telephone interview with EL PERIÓDICO. There are no official data on how many people – many of them communist guerrillas, peasants and urban university students – disappeared in the period from 1965 to 1990. The truth commission, created by a presidential decree last October, will study all the archives lost during those years and will gather testimonies from those who can contribute something to locate people like Alicia’s mother.

Creating the commission has not been easy. Even though that him PRI -who ruled with an iron fist for 71 years- lost power in 2000, Mexico has not been able to make a diagnosis of the crimes that were committed in the last century. Vicente Fox, the first president of an opposition party, the PAN, created a prosecutor’s office that was of little use. The relatives of the disappeared saw with frustration how the body classified their cases as kidnapping and not like enforced disappearance. Finally, in 2006, it was dissolved with a final report that was not published. Aleida García, a member of the commission and historian, maintains that, unlike the end of the dictatorships in South America, the institutions of the old regime did not change and this meant that the repression could not be investigated: “There was no total break with the past “.

Rebuild what happened

Alicia tells in a call from Zoom that over the last few years she has been able to reconstruct what happened with her mother. Thanks to the help of victims’ associations and the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, she has contacted other guerrillas who saw her months later in Army barracks in Mexico City and the state of Guerrero, in the Pacific. Passing the magnifying glass over the dirty war has been a headache, precisely because of the hermeticism of the military, who were a key piece in the counterinsurgency. “The Army knows where my mother is,” says De los Ríos without question.

Unlike other regimes, Mexican dissidents ended up in military camps. In few places was the dirty war lived more intensely than in Guerrero. From there, the technique of the death flights, where corpses were thrown into the ocean. It is precisely in that state that one of the best known guerrillas rose up in the 70s, the Party of the Poor. Abel Barrera, a historical anthropologist, activist and now a member of the truth commission, has heard it all. But there is the same pattern: a person who, from one day to the next, disappeared. “There is a lot of blood spilled in this state, the impunity of the military, “he added.

Only in Guerrero there are four judgments of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights against the military. In that same region, the 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ school disappeared in 2014. Barrera continues: “The problem is that there is a mountain of impunity in Guerrero that continues to accumulate. The truth is that this commission is the crystallization of a dream. “. For Aleida García the latest tragedies cannot be explained without understanding how the system operated during much of the 20th century: “The horror of the present has ties to the horror of the past. The Army did not learn to torture and disappear people from one day to the next. ”

Worst atrocities

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The commission is due to deliver its final report in September 2024, shortly before the president’s term runs out. Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The president is criticized for strengthening the Army during his government (for example, he has granted them the operation of commercial airports and control of customs). On the commissioners weighs the responsibility of revealing the worst atrocities of a system that was created to repress, detain, disappear and assassinate.

Many of the disappeared were young, like Alicia’s mother, who was 25 years old. When I was a child, I wrote a letter to the Three Wise Men every year. I was asking you to please bring her back. On January 6, he wrote a new one, but for the captors and their families, in the hope that they can break the Silence pact who has reigned among those who, backed by the State, ruined the lives of many. De los Ríos only wants answers and justice. So be it 43 years later.