Fox leaves Mexico’s ‘dirty’ past unsettled

When President Vicente Fox leaves office Friday, one of the biggest hopes of his historic 2000 election will have gone unfulfilled.

Every one of the politicians, police officers, soldiers and intelligence agents responsible for the killings and tortures of Mexico’s recent authoritarian past will have gone unpunished.

The government and army officers who ordered the massacre of students gathered peacefully in a Mexico City plaza in 1968 continue to collect their pensions. The judicial police officers responsible for the 1972 rape of a 15-year-old girl and the disappearance of her activist father remain free.

This month, the Fox administration released an official report listing hundreds of victims of government repression in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. The report also charges dozens of officials, including three former presidents, with systematic human rights violations. Some were the targets of official investigations under Fox, but none were successfully prosecuted.

“The Fox government declared a de facto amnesty for the crimes of the past,” said Sergio Aguayo, an author and leading voice on human rights here. “There was no justice, no reparations to the victims, and we still don’t know the full truth.”

When Fox took office in 2000, ending seven decades of virtual one-party rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, his government announced it would aggressively investigate and prosecute human rights abuses.

A reckoning with Mexico’s violent past, many argued, was essential to building a true democracy. Fox promised to create a “truth commission” similar to those created in South Africa, El Salvador and Peru after those countries emerged from years of civil war and political repression.

But no truth commission was ever convened. And in the waning days of his government, Fox’s rights crusade is ending with a whimper.

“President Fox wanted to be the hero of the human rights community,” said Katharine Doyle of the National Security Archive, an independent research group in Washington. “But Fox was never willing to slay the dragon and take the actions necessary to bring about accountability.”

More than 600 people were “disappeared” during Mexico’s “dirty war” against leftists and other dissidents.

Prosecutions of half a dozen officials charged in a handful of those disappearances have all been dismissed.

Many observers say Fox lacked the political will to pursue a more aggressive prosecution of cases such as the one against former President Luis Echeverria, who was charged with orchestrating the killings of students in 1971 and the disappearance of activists in the southern state of Guerrero.

Echeverria was charged with “genocide,” but the case was thrown out when a judge found the 30-year statute of limitations had expired.

On Wednesday, a Mexican court ordered Echeverria arrested on genocide charges in connection with the Tlatelolco student massacre in 1968, when he was interior minister.

But Echeverria, 84, can be held only under house arrest, under a recently enacted Mexican law that critics say was designed to keep dirty-war suspects out of jail.

Fox, observers say, has held back on many prosecutions to avoid alienating the PRI, which remained the largest party in Congress. The PRI saw the prosecutions as an assault on its legacy.

Others argue that the cases were often handled incompetently.

“The lack of results speaks for itself,” said Tamara Taraciuk of Human Rights Watch in Washington. “No one is in jail for these crimes. It’s obvious that the justice system failed in its task.”

Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, Fox’s special prosecutor for human rights, released a report this month summarizing his five years of work.

The extraordinary 800-page document is the closest Mexico has come to an official accounting of government crimes in the dirty war.

It names former Presidents Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, Jose Lopez Portillo and Echeverria as being responsible for abuses that included the killings of student activists and the massacres of rural villagers during a counterinsurgency campaign in Guerrero. Diaz Ordaz died in 1979, Lopez Portillo in 2004. The manner in which the report was released is seen by many as a metaphor for the Fox administration’s ambivalent approach to the issue: It was posted on a government website on a Friday night, without any official announcement or news conference, or any response from Fox.

“We were hoping to present the report in an event attended by the president of the republic, where the Mexican state would assume its responsibilities to the victims and their relatives,” said Jose Luis Contreras, a spokesman for the special prosecutor.

The quiet release of the document was upsetting to the special prosecutor and his staff, Contreras said.

By presidential decree, special prosecutor Carrillo Prieto was granted unprecedented access to the archives of Mexico’s police, military and intelligence agencies.

Carrillo Prieto drew on those archives in assembling his final report, an often brutal account of the methods of torture it says were used by police and the military to smash both peaceful and armed resistance to the rule of the PRI.

“The authoritarian manner in which the Mexican state sought to squash social dissent led to a spiral of violence which, from one crime to the next, led the state to commit crimes against humanity,” the report says.

Among the report’s more unsettling findings is that police officials sometimes detained and tortured relatives of political activists, including children, in an apparent effort to force confessions.

Fox had promised that police, intelligence and military files related to the dirty war would be released to the public once the special prosecutor’s work was complete.

This week historians and human rights activists waited in vain outside Mexico’s National General Archive for access to the documents. But archives officials said nearly all of the papers remained sealed because of privacy concerns. Human rights activists said they feared the documents would soon be placed in the custody of the attorney general’s office, which is not likely to make them available to the public.

“We’ll see whether we ever have access to these documents again,” said Doyle of the National Security Archive.

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hector.tobar@latimes.com