A Reunion Underlines Mexico’s Past Abuses

The young woman brought up as Luz Elba Gorostiola had a void in her life. Though her adoptive family raised her with great love, she learned in her teens that her birth parents were leftist guerrillas killed long ago by police in a shootout. But she never knew their names--or her own.

Her adoptive parents, Alejandro and Maria Gorostiola, could only tell her that one June night in 1975, Alejandro’s brother Carlos came to their door with a toddler wrapped in a sweater. “Raise her like your own child,” he said. “Her parents have just been killed in a battle.”

For many years, a woman named Quirina Gallangos also was haunted by her own loss, ceaselessly hunting for her two sons, a daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, Aleida and Lucio. All five disappeared in mid-1975, at the height of the government’s crackdown against a small but tough revolutionary movement known as the Communist League of September 23. None was heard from again.

Until this September. Now Luz Elba Gorostiola, 28, knows that she is also Aleida Gallangos. And Quirina Gallangos, 79, is speechless with tears to be able to hug her granddaughter again after 26 years.

Their reunion symbolizes the emerging power of information in the new Mexico--how information wrested from a long-secretive political system is answering questions about past abuses that even a new and more legitimate government seems unable or unwilling to confront.

The Gallangos and Gorostiola families have a total of seven members who are still missing from Mexico’s war against leftist insurgents from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. They are among more than 530 documented cases of desaparecidos, or persons who were forcibly “disappeared.”

When the 71-year presidential reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party ended last December with Vicente Fox’s inauguration, hopes rose that families such as these would learn what had happened to loved ones. But the president stalled on his campaign pledge to open the door on Mexico’s past, worried that the still-influential PRI would react angrily to such scrutiny and undermine his agenda.

Nevertheless, a growing army of academics, journalists and family members mobilized. They came together to share knowledge, demand access to security archives and push for information that would let them know if the desaparecidos were alive or dead.

Among them was Jorge Torres, a tenacious if inexperienced 28-year-old freelance journalist. Torres learned of the Gallangos family’s history and wrote a compelling story focusing on the missing toddlers with a headline that asked: “Where Are They?”

On Sept. 16, Alejandro Gorostiola bought the Sunday newspaper with the national magazine supplement, Dia Siete, that carried the article. He read it as he rode home on a bus and burst into tears. He knew immediately and called his adopted daughter. Several days of delirium followed as the families discovered each other.

Luz Elba grew up as just another of the Gorostiola family’s 10 children. But over the years, she recalled, she began to sense that she didn’t fully belong. She was told at age 16 that she was adopted.

“It was as if I was the ugly duckling: ‘And me: Where do I come from?’ ” she recalled. “I was very quiet, very withdrawn.”

Since the tear-filled reunion with the Gallangos family, which still calls her Aleida, “I feel like I have a star on my forehead.” she said. “To be able to find my family--and to know they looked for me all these years and that they love me, that I have two big families now. . . . I am so happy when I hear people say I look more like my mother, or that I have my father’s eyes.”

The Gorostiola family had reason to shelter Luz Elba after she arrived that night in 1975. When Carlos dropped off the 2-year-old, he said that the parents had been killed and that he had rescued the girl from the shootout. He disclosed only her first name, Aleida, and he gave Alejandro and Maria an explanation for the name that he said anyone claiming the child would know.

Carlos also said Aleida’s 3-year-old brother, Lucio, had been shot in the leg in the clash and was taken away by police.

Carlos--a comrade of the toddlers’ father, Roberto Gallangos, in the Communist League--then vanished back into his clandestine life. A year later, he too was killed by police--executed, his family believes, judging by the 27 bullets in his body when it was handed over for burial.

Carlos’ other brother, Francisco Gorostiola, and Francisco’s 17-year-old pregnant wife, Ema, who also were members of the Communist League, disappeared in 1976 after being wounded in a gun battle. Police often patrolled the street and watched the Gorostiola house back then.

Mother Never Stopped Search for Missing Kin

The Gallangos family also was hit hard during those times. Roberto’s younger brother, Avelino Francisco, disappeared around June 1975. He was never heard from again.

The Gallangos boys’ mother never stopped looking for her two sons, her daughter-in-law Carmen and her two lost grandchildren. Quirina checked the hospitals, prisons and morgues. She watched television news faithfully and studied the faces of people in the streets--especially those who looked about the age of her missing grandchildren.

She learned from the principal of Avelino Francisco’s high school that police had arrested the teen in mid-1975, but the trail stopped cold there.

The Gallangos family was hardly among the poorest and most downtrodden. Quirina’s husband, Ignacio, was a respected landowner, well-liked by the local indigenous people in their hometown of Jamiltepec in the southern state of Oaxaca.

Roberto developed his social conscience in Oaxaca, angered by the inequalities and mistreatment of Indian people there, says his older brother Jose Ignacio, now 53.

Hoping for improved opportunities and a better education for the eight Gallangos children, the family moved to Mexico City in 1964, when Roberto was 14. He soon was swept up into the emerging student movement. In the tumultuous year of 1968, he was detained for three months as a political prisoner. He was released Oct. 2, 1968, the day hundreds of demonstrators were slain by the army during an infamous massacre in the capital’s Tlatelolco Square. His mother, Quirina, was among the protesters that day.

The Gallangos family moved back to Oaxaca in 1969 to escape the unrest, but security forces and local political bosses kept up the surveillance and harassment of Roberto and his wife. The couple’s son, Lucio, was born in 1972; Aleida followed a year later. But Roberto was restless in Oaxaca, and in 1973 he took his young family back to Mexico City, where he apparently joined the Communist League.

Older brother Jose Ignacio tried to keep tabs on Roberto and Avelino Francisco. He saw them for the last time in March or April 1975. Although Roberto had often disappeared for weeks or months at a time, by the end of 1975 the family feared the worst. But there was no word: not that year, not since.

From Traumatized Girl to Independent Woman

The Gorostiola family, meanwhile, did everything possible to provide a warm family life for Luz Elba. Maria, the adoptive mother, remembers the girl as traumatized at first. She cut Luz Elba’s unkempt hair, and the girl grew to be part of the house full of brothers and sisters.

Luz Elba was quiet but determined and independent. She left home and moved to Ciudad Juarez on the Texas border in 1994 and later married, though the union lasted only a few months. She worked her way up in a Delphi auto parts assembly plant to a job in quality control. The company is funding her part-time university studies for a degree in industrial engineering.

As the years passed, the Gorostiolas made tentative, unsuccessful efforts to learn what had happened to their disappeared family members. This year, with word that the Fox administration was making the government’s intelligence archives available to the National Human Rights Commission, Alejandro filed a fresh claim with the panel to learn what had happened.

The Gallangos also were encouraged by Fox’s victory and started pressing again for information. Jose Ignacio, who like Alejandro had never been an activist, spoke at a forum organized by the leftist Democratic Revolution Party to gather support for a truth commission that would more aggressively investigate and air human rights abuses of the past.

In the audience was Torres, the reporter. He had first heard about the two missing toddlers while doing research for an investigative story on the Communist League. Working at the time for a little-known magazine, Torres met with the Gallangos family to find out more. He traipsed through Oaxaca and elsewhere, tracing family members and gathering childhood photos of the missing children for his story.

When Alejandro called Luz Elba to tell her about the article, she rushed out to buy a copy of her own. “I cried and laughed and cried and laughed all that Sunday and all day Monday,” she said.

That Monday, Alejandro sent an e-mail to Torres, who was skeptical at first. But as he asked for details, it became clear that Luz Elba was Aleida. He contacted Jose Ignacio.

Suddenly, in a matter of days, the Gallangos and Gorostiola families were transformed.

Luz Elba flew to Mexico City that Tuesday night for a gathering of the families. Aunts and uncles

from both sides met at the airport for the first time while waiting for her.

As a final test, Luz Elba’s adoptive mother asked Jose Ignacio to explain why the girl was named Aleida. His answer coincided with the clues--a photograph of Latin American revolutionary leader Che Guevara and a poem--that Carlos had given the family in 1975: Aleida was the name that Guevara had given his own daughter.

Many more tears were spilled that night as the families chatted with Luz Elba until 4 a.m. in the Gorostiola home here in San Martin Cuautlalpan, a village southeast of Mexico City, and the following day in the Gallangos’ home in the nearby town of Cuernavaca--at the most emotional reunion--with the young woman’s grandmother.

She’s Luz Elba to One Family, Aleida to Other

Luz Elba, who has grown to be a quietly confident and articulate woman, recalls that at first her grandmother could barely look her in the eye, so overwhelmed was the older woman by the encounter. So Luz Elba gently stroked Quirina’s hand and hair, letting her touch speak more than her voice.

To the Gorostiolas, she is Luz Elba; to the Gallangos family, she is Aleida. And that doesn’t matter to either family. They often phone each other. “We don’t want to take her away from them,” Jose Ignacio said. “Aleida fell into good hands, and she is well educated. We said to her, ‘What great luck now to have two families.’ ”

But they all remain resolved to know what happened to the remaining desaparecidos in the families, including Lucio.

“What interests us most is my brother. We don’t know if he was adopted, if he was cured, what happened to him,” Luz Elba said. “And I wouldn’t dare to say that my parents are dead, nor that they are alive. And many hundreds more are in the same situation.”

During last year’s presidential campaign, Fox compared himself to Poland’s Lech Walesa and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, promising a truth commission and an end to impunity for those who abused human rights during the PRI’s seven decades of rule.

Leaders of the PRI gave the security forces virtual free reign to stamp out the tiny revolutionary movement of the 1970s in Mexico’s less deadly version of Argentina’s “dirty war” in the 1970s and ‘80s.

At least 9,000 people disappeared in the South American nation, an Argentine truth commission reported. Eureka, the key Mexican activist group for the disappeared in Mexico, has documented 532 cases of desaparecidos.

The National Human Rights Commission, a government-funded body sharply criticized by some activists, plans to issue this week the first comprehensive report on what happened to the missing. In a process begun in the final year of the PRI government, the panel has been given access to intelligence files to trace each case.

This flurry of activity may be prompting a reaction. Last month, prize-winning human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa was shot and killed in her office. A note was found threatening unidentified others “if they continue.” This month, a letter appeared threatening five other leading activists with death, suggesting that the remnants of the rights abusers may feel threatened by the new Mexican glasnost.

Sergio Aguayo, a prominent academic and human rights leader for three decades, was given unprecedented access to the intelligence files last year to trace several missing people. His book on his findings, which appeared recently, lifted the veil on how the intelligence service operated.

Aguayo--one of the five who were threatened--says Fox’s government has prevaricated because “they are caught in the desire not to antagonize the old regime. They have a policy of appeasement, like the one England followed toward Hitler. . . . We are still trying to decide what to do with our new freedom.”