Historic Hearing Delves Into Mexico’s Violent, Secretive Past

Two years ago, Mexican voters toppled a party that had reigned for seven decades through a series of presidents who gave up dictatorial powers every six years in return for untouchable retirement. Not since 1934 had anyone tried to hold them legally accountable for a misdeed.

On Tuesday, that taboo also fell--a victim of President Vicente Fox’s drive to make Mexico a more just and open society after decades of official impunity and obsessive secrecy.

Luis Echeverria Alvarez, who ruled Mexico from 1970 to 1976, obeyed a summons to hear a prosecutor read a 3 1/2-hour-long complaint from a citizens group alleging that he helped direct modern Mexico’s most infamous peacetime massacre.

Then the 80-year-old recluse faced three hours of questions about the shooting, in which as many as 300 student demonstrators died Oct. 2, 1968, in the Mexico City neighborhood of Tlatelolco.

Echeverria was the minister in charge of Mexico’s internal security at the time. Witnesses at the closed hearing, which launched the prosecutor’s investigation into the complaint, said he sat rigidly and listened silently, wincing at times.

He won a 40-day recess to prepare written answers to the allegations, which include genocide and crimes against humanity.

The former president also faces complaints that he ordered the deadly suppression of a 1971 student march and helped lead a never-acknowledged “dirty war” in which at least 275 suspected guerrillas disappeared between the late 1960s and the early ‘80s.

For decades, he has shrugged off the charges, saying, “My conscience is clear.”

But Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, the special prosecutor appointed by Fox, is investigating that violent period--aided by a new freedom of information law and the declassifying last month of millions of Mexican secret-police files dating from 1952 through 1985.

Although no former top official has gone to trial, Fox’s campaign for a more open society is one of the most striking changes of a 19-month-old administration that is widely criticized for faltering on other promised reforms.

Echeverria’s summons came on the second anniversary of Fox’s electoral triumph over the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

After Tuesday’s session, the former president was ordered to appear again next week to hear the accusations about the 1971 march, in which paramilitary gunmen killed at least 30 students.

PRI crackdowns on dissent were ruthlessly effective, although not as bloody or large-scale as those carried out by some of Latin America’s military regimes.

While calling itself a democracy and harboring leftists fleeing other countries, Mexico controlled its foes with an array of weapons that included wiretapping, torture and extralegal execution, according to archival material now coming to light.

Human rights activists say the opening of the security files is unprecedented in Latin America. The archives include nearly 80 million espionage files that PRI governments kept on citizens.

The new freedom of information law bars the government from withholding any official document that describes “grave violations” of human rights.

It requires all government departments to provide copies of documents within 20 days of any citizen’s request.

Hundreds of Mexicans have lined up to seek files in the national archives. They are kept in the labyrinthine former Lecumberri Prison, once known as the “Black Palace,” where the PRI once held and allegedly tortured some of its enemies.

Mario Ramirez, 56, a former student activist and guerrilla fighter who attended Tuesday’s hearing as an advisor to the prosecutor, has spent hours in the files searching for information on 30 comrades who disappeared in the 1970s.

“You read the files and you relive the sensation of those days--the fear, the terror, the indignation,” he said. “But what’s new is the degree of surveillance they practiced on us. It was much more intense than we realized at the time.”

“The archives give you a description of how brutal the system was,” said Sergio Aguayo, a leading human rights campaigner. “Gradually, what’s in those files will alter people’s perception of what happened and lead to changes in laws and political practices.”

What remains to be seen is whether Fox’s government will dare prosecute those responsible for past abuses. Its human rights commission has examined the secret-police files, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and handed the president a sealed list of 74 former officials it holds responsible for crimes.

A criminal trial of Echeverria, Mexico’s oldest living former president, might shatter any hope Fox has for gaining the PRI’s cooperation in pushing reforms through Congress, where the former ruling party still holds a plurality.

Tuesday’s hearing was only the start of evidence gathering that will determine whether the prosecutor asks a judge to hold a trial. Legal analysts say Mexico’s complex statute of limitations might preclude a murder trial, although Echeverria’s accusers disagree.

PRI leaders have warned against a witch hunt. Their resistance last year prompted Fox to abandon the idea of a truth commission--an instrument used by regimes in other violence-scarred countries to issue reports on the brutal behavior of their predecessors.

Instead, Fox has left it to Carrillo Prieto to decide how to punish past abuses but has made it clear that everyone in Mexico is now subject to the rule of law.

“There is no place for untouchables,” Fox said last month at a ceremony opening the police files at Mexico’s national archives to the public. “The rule of law is not negotiable.”

Tuesday’s hearing at Carrillo Prieto’s downtown office centered on a formal complaint by survivors of the 1968 massacre, in which police and army soldiers opened fire on thousands of university students protesting economic inequity and demanding democratic reforms.

The government at the time put the death toll at 30; historians say 10 times that number may have died, but no one knows for sure. Tuesday’s hearing launched the first official investigation of the massacre, for which no one has been prosecuted.

The late Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Mexico’s president at the time, assumed responsibility for the events that day. The archives have not yet produced a document showing who gave the orders to shoot, but Raul Alvarez Garin, one of the accusers at Tuesday’s hearing, said Echeverria shares responsibility because he controlled the security forces.

Historians call the massacre a pivotal event in Mexican politics. It drove hundreds of young people into armed resistance and alienated millions of others from the PRI, triggering a slow but steady decline of the party’s grip on the country.

The former president slipped into the hearing through a parking garage to avoid a small crowd of demonstrators outside the building. One held up a sign that said, “Echeverria, your hour has come.”

Inside, five of Echeverria’s seven accusers were present as the prosecutor read out their case and asked his own questions: What orders did you get from President Diaz Ordaz? Where were you on Oct. 2? Did you believe that the rally was such a threat to the country’s stability that the killings were justified?

Antonio Cuellar, the former president’s lawyer, said after the hearing that Echeverria would answer all questions.

“He has nothing to hide,” the lawyer said. “Our strategy is to testify, and to testify truthfully.”

Other former Mexican presidents from the PRI have been questioned by prosecutors, but only as witnesses in cases against others. They have enjoyed de facto immunity from prosecution so long as they refrained from criticizing their successors.

The only breach occurred in 1934, when President Lazaro Cardenas’ regime used the threat of arrest to silence his predecessor, Plutarco Elias Calles.

“It’s historic that a president of Mexico is seated before a prosecutor to testify in the role of the accused,” said Felix Hernandez, 55, a former student leader and one of Echeverria’s accusers.

“If we are really living through a moment of transition, Echeverria and his accomplices will go to jail.”