Shroud Comes Off Fate of ‘Disappeared’ Radical

They were joined together in a clandestine ceremony, a blessing from a Catholic priest. It was a substitute for the wedding that had to be canceled because both bride and groom were wanted by the police.

Once devotees of the teachings of Jesus, Ignacio Salas Obregon and Graciela Mijares had just become urban warriors, self-styled guerrilla fighters who robbed banks and planned kidnappings from “safe houses” scattered across this capital city.

More than a quarter of a century later, Mijares has finally learned the truth about her young lover’s fate. Mexican government documents released last month show conclusively what she and other former members of their revolutionary group had long suspected: that the authorities were responsible for his 1974 disappearance and also, most likely, his death.

Unlike many other relatives of the “disappeared,” Mijares, now 49, had never clung to hope that her missing lover might still be alive. Nonetheless, she said, “as long as you don’t know what happened, it’s an open wound. Truth is the best therapy.”

Salas, the son of provincial merchants, typified the intellectuals who led the urban rebel movement of the 1970s in Mexico. They proved better at crafting revolutionary ideology than at carrying out armed attacks. Their war against Mexico’s virtual one-party state often took on dimensions of comic amateurism and senseless brutality.

The evolution of Salas from would-be priest to a revolutionary who took as his nom de guerre Oseas--Spanish for the Old Testament prophet Hosea--is the story of the relentless upward spiral of violence in Mexico’s “dirty war.”

Most of the more than 100 city dwellers listed as disappeared in the National Human Rights Commission’s report last month were members of the September 23 Communist League, the group co-founded by Salas. When the government captured them, they were not formally charged with crimes. Instead, they were interrogated by government agents who usually used horrific tortures. And then they vanished.

A terrorist in the eyes of the government, Salas was Mexico’s most famous urban guerrilla. He was the thinker who gave direction to an army of young people. Most, like him, came from middle-class and well-off families. In the late 1960s and the ‘70s, these rebels, few of them older than 30, were drawn to Mexico City because the capital and its many universities were a caldron of radical thinking and activism.

“For them, it was a holy war, a war of liberation,” said Pascal Beltran del Rio, an editor at the investigative magazine Proceso who is writing a book on Salas. “The theological foundation was the just war of St. Thomas Aquinas.”

St. Thomas, a 13th century theologian from Italy, wrote about the conditions under which war could be morally justified.

Listed as disappeared for nearly three decades, Salas has remained something of a mystery, despite his notoriety. He was known for his gift for rhetorical argument. He is remembered as a physically unimposing man with thick glasses. But only one photograph of him from his guerrilla days ever circulated in public, a grainy driver’s license snapshot.

Now there are new pictures, discovered this year by human rights investigators in the files of the Federal Security Directorate, the now-defunct agency that was the rebels’ chief adversary. Federal agents apparently photographed Salas after capturing him in a shootout on April 25, 1974, on the city outskirts. Though not yet made public, the new pictures, along with documents released by the human rights commission, prove that government officials lied back then in asserting that he had escaped during the shootout.

The authorities, the commission concluded, “violated the human rights” of Salas and “broke the rule of law.”

Transformation Into an Urban Guerrilla

Salas was 25 when he disappeared, the son of an affluent family. At one point in his short life, he had studied to be a priest, and even as he began to drift toward Marxism, he would continue to add the salutation “Your brother in Christ” in letters home.

His transformation into an urban guerrilla began with the bright promise of Mexico’s student movement of the late 1960s. Like the youth of Prague, Paris and Berkeley, the students of Mexico City took to the streets in 1968 demanding democratic reforms.

In keeping with the spirit of the era, the movement was mostly peaceful. But the government saw the students as a threat. On Oct. 2, 1968, army troops opened fire on a rally in a Mexico City square and killed dozens--perhaps hundreds--of unarmed people.

“We would never have gone to war if it hadn’t been for Oct. 2 and the 1,000 people they put in jail afterward,” said Arturo Hirales, a founder of the league who broke with the organization after his arrest in 1974. “They opened up a Pandora’s box when they did that.”

Born in central Mexico, Salas was first radicalized in the northern industrial city of Monterrey. His parents had sent him there to study at the Technological University, famous as a forming ground for the country’s moneyed elite. There, he met Mijares, his future fiancee, in a Roman Catholic study group.

Salas majored in engineering, but quickly fell under the sway of a group of Jesuit priests with a radical interpretation of Christ’s teachings. He drifted toward the ideas of Christian charity and social equality that would later be dubbed “liberation theology,” centered on the belief that Jesus had come to Earth to free the poor from oppression.

With other students from Monterrey, he and Mijares traveled south to Mexico City and the teeming shanties of Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, then a collection of squatter settlements on the fringe of the metropolis.

They taught people to read and write and how to use typewriters. The group included Dulce Maria Sauri, now president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the political party that ruled from 1929 until it was defeated in 2000 elections. Sauri dropped out of the league as the group drifted toward ever more radical ideas.

“We talked about the relation of faith to social change and the dignity of human beings,” recalled Cirilo Ortiz, a factory worker who lived in the neighborhood and worked with Salas and the other Christian activists.

Ortiz remembered Salas as a modest young man who easily won the people around him to his way of thinking. But by then, the frustrations of trying to change the causes of poverty had further radicalized Salas’ politics. He had become a committed Marxist and was impatient to see a revolution begin.

“We need to speed things up,” he told Ortiz.

At about the same time, Salas developed a friendship with Raul Ramos Zavala, leader of the Communist Youth. Together, the two men decided it was time to launch an “armed struggle” that would emulate the guerrilla movements of Cuba, Colombia and other Latin American countries.

There was no shortage, it seemed, of young men and women willing to join them. Similar groups of armed students were springing up independently in cities all over the country.

Antonio Orozco, 47, took up arms in Guadalajara, not long after seeing a student leader there killed by a rival, right-wing student group that was protected by the police.

“It all happened so quickly,” Orozco remembered. At first, “we didn’t have any political ideas. We just wanted to fight against these thugs that were beating us and shooting us.” Orozco and his friends met older, more educated students who talked to them about socialist theory.

“In two months, we became Marxists,” he said. “We became revolutionaries.”

Salas and Ramos decided that their first armed action would be the robbery--or “expropriation”--of a Mexico City bus terminal in July 1971. Just a month earlier, an attempt to revive the 1968 student movement had been crushed by thugs wielding clubs and guns. Salas and his group, which included many Catholic activists, would fight back.

Mijares remembers learning to fire a gun for the first time.

“We went to take target practice just before the action,” she said.

The bus terminal raid was a success, so despite their relative lack of experience, the Mexico City activists decided next to launch a dramatic strike: the simultaneous robbery of three banks in Monterrey. Salas would drive a getaway vehicle.

Things went wrong right from the start. One team of guerrillas simply failed to arrive; the triple robbery became a double robbery. One of the robbers was killed. To make matters worse, the rebels netted little money.

“It was so poorly prepared we left many trails for the police to follow,” league co-founder Hirales said. “A short while later they started to capture companeros.”

Some of the rebels hid in the mountains around Monterrey. Ramos, the group’s leader, managed to return to Mexico City, but he was killed in a shootout with police in the Parque Mexico, on the western side of the city.

Salas became the undisputed leader of the small circle of Mexico City revolutionaries. He put forward another bold idea to Hirales: They would unify all the guerrilla groups across the country into a single organization.

“No one else had any idea which direction to go,” Hirales said. “But Nacho [Salas] was always absolutely certain of his ideas.”

After a year of work, representatives of radical left groups from across the country gathered in a Guadalajara home and formed the September 23 Communist League.

The guerrillas lived alone in safe houses, conducting the league’s business at prearranged meetings. Mijares and Salas lived in separate homes and saw each other infrequently, their relationship tinged with the danger and romance of the underground movement.

“We were immersed in the struggle,” Mijares said. “Those moments we were able to spend together were very few. But they were very intense.”

With dozens of comrades captured by the police, the league planned two spectacular kidnappings to free them. The rebels kidnapped businessman Fernando Aranguen but killed him when the government refused to meet the league’s demands. And in Monterrey, tycoon industrialist Eugenio Garza Sada, in his 80s, was killed when the attempt to kidnap him was botched.

“It was an apocalyptic vision, totally immersed in the idea that the spilling of blood was an act of purification,” said Hirales of the league’s thinking at the time.

The killings of the two businessmen proved to be the organization’s death knell. The Federal Security Directorate became more ruthless. Detained guerrillas began to disappear. The members of the league became increasingly desperate.

“They started to get paranoid,” said journalist Beltran del Rio. “They organized a witch hunt in the league.”

One scholar recently named at least five members of the league and of other leftist groups who were ordered killed by the league leadership.

Enraged by the setbacks, Salas summoned a national meeting of the league and fired most of the leadership.

Shortly afterward, local police officers in a town just outside Mexico City came upon him during a routine patrol. Salas, who was carrying copies of the group’s underground newspaper in the back of his car, opened fire, wounding one officer.

Only a single member of the league ever saw him alive again. Detained earlier by authorities, Hector Escamilla Lira was taken from a prison in the state of Nuevo Leon and brought to Mexico City. With his face hidden, he was asked to identify a prisoner at a hospital on a military base: It was Salas, the famous “Oseas.”

Police would later deny that they had captured him. Mijares knew that was a lie. But she remained in hiding, resigned to his death.

“We said, ‘That’s the cost of the struggle.’ And that was it. It was a mistake of mine” not to have fought for his release.

A Few More Details Come Out

Now, thanks to the documents released by the human rights commission, Mijares knows a few more details about Salas’ last days.

At first, the local police did not know that they had captured the man who was Mexico’s most wanted guerrilla leader. Later, after they had established his identity, federal agents questioned him repeatedly.

“Ignacio Arturo Salas Obregon declared today,” reads one of the now-public reports of his many interrogations, “that the September 23 Communist League is run by a national committee, of which he is a member.”

Salas later became one of the disappeared. When his family inquired, the police concocted a cover story: As far as they knew, he was still a fugitive. He had been wounded in the shootout, they said, and had probably died and been buried by his guerrilla comrades.

The lie is the last entry in his file.

But an earlier document in the file shows that Salas was alive and in police custody as late as May 15, about three weeks after his capture. It is conclusive proof that the government had lied about Salas for 27 years.

There is no record in the file that the police ever released Salas. Later, the old driver’s license picture surfaced on a poster of human rights groups. The man the government had branded a terrorist would become a martyr, a symbol of those victimized by a repressive regime.