Mexico readies for "Dirty War" report

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060412/wl_nm/rights_mexico_dc



Mexico readies for "Dirty War" report
By Lorraine Orlandi

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mariana Ramirez cannot forget the anguish of one mother whose husband and son vanished 30 years ago in Mexico's "dirty war" against dissidents.

A rural sociologist documenting past government atrocities, Ramirez found the aging woman in the Sierra Madre mountains off the Pacific coast, going blind and clinging to hope of learning her loved ones' fates.

"She begins to cry and tells me, 'Mariana, you left your family, your parents, to come here to work, but they know where to find you,"' Ramirez recalled. "'I don't know where my husband and son are, I don't know where to begin to look."'

This month Mexico's government will present a report on an era of government brutality from the 1960s to the 1980s, based on investigations by Ramirez and two dozen other sociologists, anthropologists, historians and rights experts.

It's late, and I'm tired... but this smells 'wrong'.

Why is this coming out now?...

Part of Vicente Fox's election campaign was that investigations would be launched into the Dirty War period and that the victims of that era would see justice.

with genocide. He was lucky the judge found that he didn't believe the murders actually amounted to genocide.

Much effort was made to keep records completely concealed. Some records have been declassified recently, and probably more is going to be known about this. Mexican military people were schooled in some of their techniques here in the U.S.

Monday, February 27, 2006
Report Leaked on Mexico's "Dirty War"
A report prepared for Mexico's President, Vicente Fox, has concluded that the Mexican government and military committed numerous crimes against humanity during its "scorched earth" campaign against alleged left-wing rebels between 1964 and 1982:

The draft report's authors write: "The authoritarian attitude with which the Mexican state wished to control social dissent created a spiral of violence which... led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide."

They say they base their findings partly on declassified military, police and interior ministry documents and list for the first time the names of officers allegedly involved in the abuses.

The report says that units detained or summarily executed men and boys in villages suspected of links to rebel leader Lucio Cabanas.
Detainees were forced to drink gasoline and tortured with beatings and electric shocks, it says.

Bodies of dozens of leftists were dumped in the Pacific Ocean during helicopter "death flights" from military bases in Acapulco and elsewhere.

President Fox established an office in 2002 to probe possible human rights violations under Presidents Diaz Ordaz (1964-70), Echeverria (1970-76) and Lopez Portillo (1976-82). The office presented the report last December to the special prosecutor investigating past abuses, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, but he refused to release it, saying that it places too much blame on the military and understates the abuses committed by the rebels. He says a revised version will be published soon.

Human-rights groups in Mexico have criticized Carillo's refusal to make the report public. That criticism certainly has merit, but Carillo has taken his job seriously, doggedly pursuing charges againt Echeverria for his involvement in the worst abuses of the Dirty War. Carrillo initially brought charges against Echeverria for ordering the Falcons, a paramilitary force allegedly created by his political party, to massacre students in June, 1971 -- an event known as the "Corpus Christi massacre." Those charges were thrown out by the Mexican Supreme Court, which held that the 30-year statute of limitations for the charges had expired.
(snip/...)

http://lawofnations.blogspot.com/2006/02/report-leaked-on-mexicos-dirty-war.html

This segment is intense:

REWRITING HISTORY

Ramirez, 28, wanted to help rewrite history when she joined the special prosecutor's team in Guerrero state, once a rebel hotbed and major dirty war battleground.

She found a shadowy world of blood vendettas and entrenched power brokers. The peasants of the rough-and-tumble countryside stayed mum, afraid of reprisals.

Slowly, survivors started approaching, often under cover of darkness. "People began to trust, to say, 'yes, I want this resolved, it's an open wound,"' Jose Martinez, another member of the investigative team, said.

"We saw where the guerrilla movement and the repression took place, where the bodies turned up. In Guerrero entire communities disappeared. We went to places that no longer exist, just trees," he added.
(snip/...)

It's time the truth started coming out much sooner. This info. has been buried so long, and the people responsible were never asked in all this time to atone for their fiendish crimes against humanity.

If _Bush will ever leave, maybe our entire world will spring into action to prevent this kind of barbarity from happening again. One can always dream.

....in Mexico like they do here??

US streets instead of in Mexico?

This is awful. Has the population of Mexico learned it's lesson and refuses to fight for rights in Mexico because of massacres by the government for speaking out? Twenty years this went on. No wonder so many Mexicans came to live shadow lives as illegals in the US.

I truly wish Mexican citizens living illegally in the US would protest for holding Mexican government officials accountable for these atrocities. Instead they protest for amnesty and US citizenship, giving up their right to change and improve Mexico forever. But I guess that was what those government massacres were designed to do. Stop citizens from taking an active part in the change and improvement of Mexico.

How terribly sad that it worked.

Many Mexican agricultural workers have been left without any sources of income when much cheaper, U.S. taxpayer-subsidized products like corn and sugar cane flooded the Mexican market and drove farmers out of business and their generations-old farms. The U.S. products were far cheaper for the public to buy than the prices Mexican farmers needed to receive and they were destroyed.