Mexican Panel Blames General in Police Deaths

The government’s Human Rights Commission on Friday determined that an army general was responsible for the deaths of seven federal police at a clandestine airstrip in Veracruz last month, but it dodged the question of whether he was providing protection to drug traffickers.

Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission said the drug agents were shot to death after the army zone commander, Gen. Alfredo Moran Acevedo, arrived at the airstrip in Tlalixcoyan, Veracruz, after receiving two telephone calls advising him that his soldiers were firing on police.

The commission confirmed reports that the Nov. 7 killings were intentional rather than a mistake, as they were first portrayed by the army and attorney general’s office. One of the victims was beaten before he died, and another apparently was shot at close range.

“The intense gunfire and the death of the Federal Judicial Police agents occurred after Gen. Moran Acevedo arrived at the scene in command of reinforcement troops,” the commission said.

Commission President Jorge Carpizo presented the findings of the panel’s two-week investigation in a 104-page report distributed at a news conference. He did not answer any questions.

The case is extremely sensitive for President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and, according to a senior government official, has caused friction within the 140,000-member military.

Mexican governments rarely have pursued charges of drug trafficking against members of the army. Mexico is one of the few Latin American countries in which the military stays out of politics, in part because of an unwritten agreement that civilians will not interfere with internal military affairs.

Some sectors of the military, however, reportedly want the army to extricate itself from Mexico’s anti-drug efforts, believing that they lead to corruption.

The report does not address whether Gen. Moran Acevedo and another army general at the scene, Humberto Martinez Lopez, were providing protection to traffickers at the airstrip. It does not explain why the agents were killed and by which soldiers, or what Moran Acevedo’s motivation might have been for the killings.

The commission, which has no enforcement or prosecutorial powers, recommended that the military’s own attorney general investigate the two generals, a lieutenant colonel, two lieutenants at the scene and the 14 soldiers involved in the initial attack. According to government officials, the case must be tried by a military court.