Activists Hail ‘Dirty War’ Arrest

Late last year, the cop who once managed Mexico’s “dirty war” dyed his hair and grew a mustache. As hundreds of leftist militants had done, fearing death at the hands of his secret police, he went into hiding, guarding his secrets.

On Wednesday night, federal agents finally captured Miguel Nazar Haro, making him the first former official to be arrested in any of the disappearances of 532 prisoners listed as missing in the 1970s and early ‘80s.

The 79-year-old fugitive driving to a doctor’s appointment for his diabetes was stopped on Mexico City’s Periferico ring road by federal agents tracking a sedan with tinted windows. They had kept him under surveillance since the weekend, when he surfaced at his home.

As Nazar was flown to Monterrey and imprisoned Thursday, human rights activists hailed his arrest as a breakthrough -- not so much for President Vicente Fox, who has pledged to punish the atrocities of past regimes, but for his special prosecutor, who has complained repeatedly about a lack of high-level support for the effort.

“Either by luck or design, the capture of Nazar Haro breathes new life into a quest that many had begun to give up hope on,” said Denise Dresser, a political analyst who serves on a citizens panel advising the special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto.

During Mexico’s political turmoil of the 1970s, Nazar was the most prominent field general in the government’s crackdown on the left, first as deputy chief of the Federal Security Directorate. He led the intelligence agency from 1978 to 1982, three years before it was disbanded.

He and two other former officials of the agency were indicted last April on charges of directing the abduction of communist militant Jesus Piedra by a police squad in Monterrey in 1975. Piedra, never formally arrested, was last seen alive in a military prison the following year.

A federal judge in Monterrey quickly dismissed the case against Nazar, applying a 22 1/2-year statute of limitations, but was overruled in November by the Supreme Court. By Dec. 9, when another judge ordered the three suspects arrested, they had vanished. The other two remain at large.

Carrillo said Thursday that the arrest would help his office “move ahead with our work to clarify history, to achieve truth and justice.” Just last week, the prosecutor told advisors he felt “stalled” by a lack of full support from the country’s law enforcement agencies.

Atty. Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha said the arrest shows “there is no space for impunity.” In about two years on the job, Carrillo has just one other arrest warrant to show for his investigations of hundreds of disappearances. Hours after that warrant was filed in November, against a former police chief in Guerrero state, a key witness in the case was kidnapped and killed. The former police chief eluded arrest until his death from diabetes in January.

The special prosecutor is building a case against former President Luis Echeverria, who led Mexico during the early part of the “dirty war.” But Echeverria, 82, has refused to submit to interrogation, citing ill health. His successor as president, Jose Lopez Portillo, 83, was also under investigation, but he died Monday after a bout with pneumonia.

Nazar may become the first former official obliged to answer in court for the “dirty war.” But human rights lawyers worry that the prosecutor’s case against him, based on secondhand testimony by a participant in the 1975 abduction, is weak.

“The arrest is one thing and justice is another,” said Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, mother of the abducted militant. “I am going to wait to see what the judges say.”

Nazar appeared in a closed hearing Thursday before the same judge who last year dismissed the case. The judge has three days to decide whether to start criminal proceedings or throw out the charges for lack of evidence.

In written testimony last year, Nazar denied the charges against him. His son, lawyer Miguel Nazar Daw, called the case “a baseless political maneuver” and tried to delay it late Wednesday by demanding that his father be hospitalized in Mexico City for diabetes and high blood pressure.

The arrest was front-page news here, after weeks of unconfirmed sightings of the fugitive in several Mexican states and neighboring Guatemala. Mexican media Thursday detailed how federal agents had supposedly located him by tapping phones, following his three grown children and monitoring bank accounts.

But some who followed the case believe that Nazar, who helped his two sons run a private security firm and traveled with four bodyguards, allowed himself to be caught because his life on the run was damaging his health.

He put up no struggle Wednesday night and underwent three medical checkups before doctors allowed him to be flown to Monterrey.