Mexico’s Cause Is Vanishing

It has been more than two decades since Miguel Nazar Haro last fixed his cold blue eyes on terrified prisoners -- eyes that still haunt the survivors.

Now the inquisitor of Mexico’s “dirty war” is facing his own interrogators. A brutal era is on trial, and they want him to explain how several hundred leftist detainees disappeared in the 1970s and early ‘80s.

But those eyes are as impassive and unblinking as ever, giving nothing away.

Nazar, 78, is a defiant, unrepentant target of the first criminal case filed by President Vicente Fox’s special prosecutor for past atrocities by the state. The long-retired chief of the secret police not only denies that any of his prisoners was tortured or murdered, he also condemns the entire investigation as a distortion of history.

“What kind of war did Mexico have? Why was it dirty?” he lectured a Mexican journalist before sitting stone-faced through an inquiry by special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, who later indicted him for abduction. “A communist group that was trained abroad -- subversives, soldiers of fortune ... believed they could take over Mexico.” Having failed, he said, they are now helping the prosecutor to punish those who “saved the country.”

Nazar is the latest former official called in for questioning about the dirty war and the first to speak out against the effort to review it. But as the former cop boldly defends the past, his pursuers fear that Fox already appears to be losing interest, leaving the prosecutor with scant support to build his cases.

Fox’s decision in November 2001 to create the prosecutor’s office won praise at home and abroad. The rancher whose election had ended seven decades of imperious rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party was still in his first year of office, and hopes were high that he would strip away the official secrecy and impunity shrouding the former regime’s lethal excesses, bringing the killers to justice.

No Breakthrough Yet

Nearly two years later, however, the investigation has yet to produce a breakthrough. In a recent report, Human Rights Watch warned that “the whole exercise could collapse” unless Fox takes “aggressive measures” to give Carrillo’s office more funding, easier access to national security archives and better cooperation from the armed forces.

The president has declined to comment on the report or meet with representatives of the independent New York-based rights group. The topic all but slipped off the official agenda last month when Mariclaire Acosta, an architect of Fox’s early policies, was fired as deputy foreign minister for human rights and her post abolished.

Fox has fallen short on other promises as well, and voters dealt his National Action Party a punishing vote of no confidence in the July congressional elections. In his annual state-of-the-nation speech Monday night, he acknowledged a “widespread social call for deeper and more dynamic change,” especially to ease poverty and create jobs.

A former advisor to the government said Fox is “uncomfortable” with probing the crimes of the old regime because he needs the support of the former ruling party, which still dominates Congress, to achieve his top priority: an economic overhaul that would boost private investment and government income.

“Inside the administration, I do not see a powerful champion for digging up the truth about the past or meting out justice,” said Sergio Aguayo, a leading Mexican human rights advocate. “Without such backing, the prosecutor is unlikely to get any cooperation from the military or the courts.”

Interior Minister Santiago Creel insisted in an interview that the administration was “pushing these cases with all the arguments we have at our disposal” and dismissed the idea that it was politically risky to do so.

But Carrillo’s first indictment is widely viewed as a gamble that could boost his authority -- helping him prosecute dozens of other policemen, soldiers and former officials, including an ex-president -- or cripple his entire mission. The case, involving the disappearance of a captured guerrilla 28 years ago, rests on evidence and arguments that some lawyers see as too weak to sway a conservative judiciary. One judge already has tried to throw out the case.

A Well-Known Cast

More than a legal battle, it is a historical and political drama with a cast of nationally known figures: Nazar was the most visible and notorious leader of the government crackdown, which crushed a lightly armed communist movement in the cities and a ragtag leftist insurgency in the countryside. He moved between the public spotlight and secret detention cells; several surviving prisoners say he took part in interrogations.

His alleged victim, communist militant Jesus Piedra, is the poster boy of Mexico’s desaparecidos, the prisoners who disappeared. His portrait stares from placards at street rallies in support of the prisoners and is so well known in Mexico that, like Che Guevara’s, it needs no identifying inscription.

The victim’s mother, Rosario Ibarra, 76, is the doyenne of anguished families seeking their missing ones. The tireless activist has argued face to face with presidents and twice been elected to Congress, elevating her cause to national prominence.

Piedra’s is one of 532 dirty war disappearances reported to the government human rights commission.

According to police records cited in the indictment, the 21-year-old medical student was snatched April 18, 1975, from a street in Monterrey by seven state judicial policemen, who took away his .45-caliber pistol, beat him, forced him into a car and drove him to a ranch to be interrogated.

The records say he confessed to the murder of a policeman, 10 armed robberies and participation in the 1973 abduction of a Monterrey industrialist who was slain by his captors. Piedra was last reported seen in 1976 by fellow prisoners at Military Camp No. 1 in Mexico City, who later were freed and contacted his mother. She said the witnesses told her that he had been severely tortured.

Carrillo has set out to prove that Nazar and his immediate superior, Luis de la Barreda, were responsible for Piedra’s arrest, interrogation and disappearance.

Nazar was then deputy chief of the now-disbanded Federal Security Directorate, an intelligence-gathering force that resorted to wiretapping, spying, jailing without trial, torture and killing. He had joined the force in 1960 -- inspired, he said, by the fictional TV exploits of Mike Hammer, Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled New York detective.

He once explained to Proceso magazine that his actions in the counterinsurgency campaign were driven by a patriotism instilled in him by his Lebanese immigrant father, who also taught him about harsh punishment.

“When I was 12,” Nazar recalled, “my father asked me: ‘If there were a war between my country, Lebanon, and yours, Mexico, which side would you fight for?’ ” Lebanon, the boy said. “ ‘That is treason!’ he told me. And he tied my feet to the legs of a table in the hallway. My mother had to kneel to serve my meals.”

Nazar has acknowledged organizing the White Brigade, a feared paramilitary force drawn in the mid-1970s from several police and army units to eliminate armed leftist groups. They did so, he has said, “with the same fanaticism” displayed by the enemy.

But while acknowledging that his interrogations inflicted “mental torture,” Nazar insists that the many former prisoners who accuse him of physical torture are mixing him up with another officer. As for the desaparecidos, he says, many died in combat with government forces or at the hands of fellow guerrillas who suspected that they were spies.

That, at least, is what he told Ibarra might have happened to her son, when she confronted him years ago. Ibarra’s teenage daughter was also present, and the mother remembers vividly the cop’s capacity for “mental torture.”

He produced a stack of photos of bloody corpses, she recalls, and told the girl, “Here, look for your brother.”

Nazar, who now works with a private security firm owned by his children, declined to be interviewed, sending word through his lawyer that he does not want the case tried in the media.

But the lawyer vouched for the accuracy of Nazar’s lengthy remarks, quoted by two Mexican publications before his indictment, discussing his career and portraying himself as a “wounded tiger,” the victim of a misguided probe. “I was an investigator, not a killer,” he told Impacto magazine.

Few believe him. A crowd of demonstrators outside Carrillo’s office in February chanted, “Nazar, murderer!” as the retired cop, a slight man recovering from pneumonia, arrived for a closed hearing. He pleaded ill rather than answer questions. Two months later, after gathering more evidence, Carrillo indicted him and De la Barreda.

In a recent interview, the prosecutor said he chose the case as a starting point because “there was a critical mass of evidence” against both senior police officials.

But a Monterrey judge, ruling that the 22-year statute of limitations had run out, rejected Carrillo’s request in April to order the men arrested and tried for abduction. It was a surprise setback for the prosecutor, who has appealed to the Supreme Court on the ground that abduction is a “continuing crime” as long as the abductee remains missing. The court is expected to rule this fall.

Mexican jurists are divided on the issue, and Fox undermined his prosecutor late last year by declaring it “quite probable” that many officials guilty of abuses would avoid prison “because the legal terms for judging those crimes have expired.”

Even if the Supreme Court orders a trial, the prosecutor must persuade a judge to convict Nazar on the basis of secondhand testimony by one of the officers who seized the medical student. The witness said the head of secret police in Monterrey, who is now dead, told him that Nazar had telephoned to congratulate the officers for getting their man.

Nazar, in court papers, denied the assertion.

De la Barreda’s indictment also is a problem. It is based on three memos that bear the police chief’s name -- but not his signature -- and report on Piedra’s arrest and interrogation, without specifying his police agency’s involvement.

Some Mexican human rights lawyers have criticized the case as weak. They say Carrillo should have amassed evidence involving many missing prisoners in a single indictment to show a convincing pattern of responsibility by the Federal Security Directorate and its leaders.

But the prosecutor’s office is ill equipped for such a task, according to the Human Rights Watch report. It possesses just 30 computers, six phone lines, one photocopier and two police investigators for its 57 prosecuting attorneys. It has five researchers “working blind” in a largely uncataloged security archive containing 80 million card files, the report said.

Carrillo said he had begged Fox for more support.

“The executive does not fulfill its mission just by creating the special prosecutor’s office,” the prosecutor told The Times. “Like any piece of machinery, it needs lubricants, fuel, replacement parts, maintenance and direction.”

If the investigation is allowed to fail, he added, “you not only send a message tolerating impunity; you also cover up crimes.”

The prosecutor’s limitations already have cost him credibility among relatives of the missing, whose cooperation he needs to build cases. The fiercest critic is Ibarra, who belittles the inquiry as “a total, giant, well-planned deceit” by Fox to appear tough while doing nothing.

Seated in her Mexico City living room, a shrine adorned with posters of her son and other “disappeared” guerrillas, Ibarra dismissed Nazar as “a cop who took illegal orders.” She demanded that Fox instead arrest former President Luis Echeverria, whose administration started the counterinsurgency campaign.

Echeverria, 81, invoked his constitutional protection against self-incrimination when Carrillo summoned him for questioning last year but remains under investigation.

Nazar rose to head the secret police under Echeverria’s successor, Jose Lopez Portillo, but fell out of favor and was dismissed in 1982. He was arrested in California that year on federal charges of involvement in a huge car-theft ring, jumped $200,000 bail and remains a fugitive from U.S. justice.

The dirty war indictment ended his years of relative obscurity, and he reemerged as “a grandfatherly figure more intimidating in legend than in person,” said Mexican journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio, who interviewed him in February.

The old warrior was imperturbable under questioning about his police work, the journalist said, and stonewalled about who had given him orders.

“There are security institutions in charge of security,” Nazar said. “Forget about the politicians.”