Will Mexico come clean?

PRESIDENT VICENTE FOX of Mexico took office in 2000 vowing to finally prosecute officials responsible for the deaths, “disappearing” and torturing of hundreds in that nation’s “dirty war” of the 1970s. Victims’ families have waited for decades to uncover what happened to their loved ones. Although plenty of new findings have come to light, disappointingly little has been done to prosecute those responsible for the illegal repression.

One reason to hope that this might change is a draft of a new report prepared by President Fox’s special prosecutor’s office. It documents the kidnapping and torturing of hundreds of students, opposition leaders and insurgents from the late 1960s and early ‘70s. Its most gruesome parts describe large-scale torture (for example, forcing people to ingest gasoline), summary executions, forced starvation and “death flights” in which suspected subversives were dropped from aircraft into the Pacific Ocean.

The report was leaked by its authors last week and made public by the Washington-based National Security Archive. Many of its allegations have been described before in eyewitness accounts. What makes the report unprecedented is that the incidents have been corroborated by official military documents that identify individuals and military units involved.

Fox and special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto have yet to formally endorse the report’s findings, and they have even stressed that it is just a draft that engages in some hyperbole (some abuses by the military, they point out, were called acts of genocide). The document implicates influential officials within the powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party, which could ignite a fight that the retiring Fox may not want to wage in his final months in office.

An effort to indict ex-President Luis Echeverria for the 1970 massacre of 100 students failed because of the country’s statute of limitations on murder. Others cases have been thrown out by the judiciary. Today, many officials charged are still at large and reportedly protected by powerful PRI factions.

This is a shame. Mexican democracy has made great strides in recent years. But as much as its ability to hold clean elections, the country’s ability to come to terms with its past -- and the crimes committed against its citizens by the government -- remains an important test of that democracy’s maturity.