Mexico: A rebel leader's clan was targeted in army's 1970s campaign to crush guerrillas.

By JAMES F. SMITH
TIMES STAFF WRITER

ATOYAC DE ALVAREZ, Mexico -- Back in the 1970s, just bearing the name Cabanas invited torture, disappearance and death in the villages of the
blood-splashed Sierra Madre of Guerrero state.

Lucio Cabanas Barrientos, a Mexican version of Che Guevara, was a country teacher-turned-revolutionary leader who built up a small rebel army in the mountains
that loom above his hometown here. He was killed Dec. 2, 1974, in an army ambush soon after kidnapping the governor-elect of the southern state.

Nearly 30 years later, the truth is emerging about that revolt and the army's fierce, sometimes illegal campaign to crush it. This truth contains potentially dramatic
consequences for Mexico's modern-day transition to democracy. The nation's "dirty war" of the '70s was divided between the countryside and the cities.

If the urban conflict was surgical, with few innocent victims on either side, the struggle in the mountains of Guerrero state came far closer to the Central
American-style conflicts that exploded into full-scale wars and widespread abuses.

Within the extended Cabanas clan alone, about 100 people were taken away by security forces and never seen again, family members say.

So it is appropriate that a recent investigative session by four lawyers for the National Human Rights Commission took place on the patio of the simple home of Sofia
Cabanas, a cousin of Lucio.

The forms the lawyers were filling in with the testimony of townsfolk are powerful weapons in a new Mexican war, this one against impunity, against forgetting the
costs and lessons of past conflicts.

The evidence given here on a Saturday in early December is revealing fresh names--names not yet listed in the commission's recently released report about people
who disappeared in the 1970s and the first half of the '80s. It is providing clues in the hunt for those responsible. And it is proving false many of the official accounts
that the rights report also disavowed, claims that the disappeared had died in armed clashes or at the hands of their own comrades.

The emerging official reports and the personal testimonies from emboldened survivors are raising as many questions as they answer, specifically: What happened to
the disappeared after they were taken? How did they die? Are they still alive?

The rights commission's landmark report, issued last month, provides case studies of 532 people believed to have been forcibly taken away in Mexico from 1970 to
1985. Of those, 332--or nearly two-thirds--came from Guerrero. And the vast majority of those cases occurred in the villages in and around the sprawling
municipality of Atoyac de Alvarez, the focus of Cabanas' revolt.

In meetings here with family members of the missing, a Times reporter heard detailed accounts of several cases that have surfaced only in recent months and were
hurriedly added to the commission's findings.

The stories support claims by many Cabanas family members and others in the community that the number of missing from this region is greater than officially
acknowledged. Activists here have long claimed that more than 400 people are missing from Atoyac alone, and about 650 from Guerrero state.

The growing list of cases adds to the already daunting task ahead for the year-old government of Mexican President Vicente Fox as it looks into rights abuses of the
past. Fox has pledged to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the disappearances.

Mexico's former government repeatedly dismissed accusations that its forces had systematically violated human rights in the process of stamping out the Guerrero
rebellion. But the rights commission report has provided unprecedented details of the army's campaign in Guerrero--and of how many official lies were told in the
past about the missing.

That the tiny villages and ranches scattered among the mountain ridges overlooking the coastal plain of Guerrero state became breeding grounds of rural revolt is not
surprising. Apart from the Pacific resorts of Acapulco and Zihuatanejo, Guerrero suffers some of the worst rural poverty and some of the most repressive local
power bosses, known as caciques, in the country.

Erasmo Cabanas Tabares remembers vividly the day--May 18, 1967--that his distant cousin Lucio took up arms. That day, police had opened fire on teachers and
parents demonstrating in the plaza of Atoyac, a city that now counts about 60,000 people. Erasmo, then 13, saw the bodies of about 18 people who died.

From his clandestine base in the mountains, Lucio Cabanas built a force of about 350 fighters. His movement was called the Party of the Poor.

Cabanas practiced his own kind of brutality, recalls retired army Maj. Elias Alcaraz, who once pursued him. In one ambush of an army patrol in June 1972, Cabanas'
guerrillas killed 11 soldiers. In another, in August 1974, they killed 40, Alcaraz said. He said the rebels once killed a bridegroom at his wedding because the bride
had refused to marry one of the rebels.

"If there is ever a truth commission, let it look at the atrocities of Lucio," Alcaraz told the newspaper Reforma. "If it was a dirty war, it was because they dirtied it
when they started to kidnap, rob and murder."

Erasmo says his brother, Raul, and his father, Eleno Cabanas Ocampo, disappeared on Oct. 5, 1975. They were visiting relatives in the village of Corral Falso near
Atoyac when an army patrol arrived and forced all the men to gather on the hamlet's basketball court.

Testimony to the rights commission from a witness identified only as T305 says Eleno and Raul were detained that day "after having been pointed out and for having
the name Cabanas, since it was common that they detained those with that name even if they weren't part of the guerrillas."

The commission confirms that another brother of Erasmo's, Lucio Cabanas Tabares, disappeared after he was snatched by soldiers from his barbershop in Atoyac in
April 1974. In this case, the report's findings also exposed the kind of lies typically told in the past to cover up such disappearances.

Previous accounts had said Lucio Cabanas Tabares, often confused with his more famous cousin, had been kidnapped and presumably killed by neighboring
peasants because he had carried out robberies in the area. The commission, researching the national security archives for the first time, found an intelligence file that
confirmed Cabanas Tabares had been detained by the army and held in Mexico City at Military Camp No. 1, notorious as a center for torture of leftists. He was
never seen again.

Erasmo, now a teacher in Mexico City, was himself detained twice. His accounts and those of survivors like him help sketch a picture of the army's interrogation
tactics against the Guerrero revolt in those days.

After his father and two brothers disappeared, Erasmo moved to the outskirts of Mexico City in 1976. He says he was trying to escape the conflict. He returned
home that November to find state agents waiting. They seized him and his cousin Antolin Cabanas, blindfolded them, and took them to what Erasmo says was
Military Camp No. 1.

"They kicked me in the stomach and hit my ears with their open hands. They asked for all the others who lived with me, many of them also named Cabanas," he
recalled. "They applied electric shocks to my testicles and put my head in dirty water until I almost drowned.

"When they took off the blindfold, I could see the room had many bloodstains," he added.

Three more Cabanas relatives living in Erasmo's house were subsequently detained. None of the three--Margarito Castillo, Rafael Castillo and Juan Castro--were
ever seen again, Erasmo said.

The three are confirmed as missing. They allegedly had taken part in the kidnapping that November of businessman Enrique Pineda Cuevas. Pineda was later
rescued.

Erasmo was released after two weeks, but a year later he was grabbed again and tortured anew, he says. The treatment this time included a novelty: His tormentors
forced chile-laced mineral water up his nose.

Erasmo was among more than 40 people who traveled recently to Sofia Cabanas' home in Atoyac to offer testimony to the rights commission as it moves on to the
next phase of its probe.

"Even though we listen to the testimony with sadness, we are happy to see the people losing their fear and speaking out as they haven't done for years," he said.
"Now that there is this opening up, we need to take advantage of it."

In Atoyac, the oldest of the villagers, gray-haired and stooped, trudged forward with their faded memories. They clutched pictures, from tiny ID photos to life-size
portraits, to prove their missing relatives were once real and vital.

Under the shade of a mango tree, the commission lawyers listened patiently to their stories. Some witnesses had testified many times before, but others were
appearing for the first time. Skillfully, the lawyers picked up on what was new and probed for details.

After one man described how his brother had disappeared in 1974, he went on to tell about his own brief detention in a military barracks in 1970. Lawyer Jose Luis
Espetia pressed him: "Who else did you see in detention? It is very important to remember. Who held you? Were you mistreated?"

The man recalled several names, to be cross-checked later against lists of the known missing and of suspected rights abusers. Importantly, the witness, Agustin
Barrientos Flores, said he had never testified before, so this was fresh information. Espetia gave him a telephone number to call in case he should remember more.

Many witnesses, such as 84-year-old Romana Bello Cabanas, can neither read nor write, and put an inked fingerprint over their names. Bello's story illustrates how
the disappearances spread anguish like ripples from a stone thrown into still water:

Her son, Carmelo Juarez Bello, was rounded up in the village of Ticui in September 1974, accused of being a guerrilla. He was 26, the father of four children. When
he vanished, his wife couldn't cope. She abandoned the children to her mother-in-law. Bello then struggled to raise her grandchildren on her own.

One of those children, Adolfo Juarez, is now 28. He was just a year old when his father disappeared.

"This was covered up for a very long time. Too many innocent people were taken away. Too many children grew up without fathers," Juarez said.

Some families suffered multiple disappearances.

Rosa Castro Velazquez, 72, said her brother Isaias disappeared in 1972. That same year, her husband, Alejandro Arroyo Cabanas, was taken away and tortured.
Their village near Atoyac, San Vicente de Benitez, was besieged; army tanks parked in front of her house and soldiers dug trenches across the road.

When her husband was released from jail after six weeks, "he had to drag himself to us," she said, because he had been tortured.

Estela Arroyo, 37, said her father "came out of jail, but he came out dead. He went into trances, he blacked out. He constantly relived the tortures and the humiliation
he suffered at the hands of the army."

Arroyo recalled her father's account of the worst torture--confinement in a steel drum so hot that it burned his skin. To his dying day in 1994, she said, he needed
special care.

Arroyo said he once told her the reason for the torture.

"They told him to abandon his second name because they were going to finish off all the Cabanas," she said. "He refused. He kept telling them, 'My name is
Alejandro Arroyo Cabanas.' "

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Rebels of the 'Dirty War'

Organization: Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor)

Founded: 1967 by Lucio Cabanas Barrientos (killed 1974)

Membership: About 350

Ideology: Socialist-agrarian

Where active: Guerrero and Aguascalientes states, Mexico City

Noted actions: 1974 kidnapping of Guerrero Gov.-elect Ruben Figueroa

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