After being handed the report on torture and the forced disappearance of hundreds
                 of people, Fox promised to bring human rights violators to justice.

                 "There are no needs of the state that are above the rule of law," Fox said at a
                 solemn event after being handed the report by Mexico's human rights ombudsman,
                 Jose Luis Soberanes.

                 Fox also said the victims of dirty war atrocities or their relatives would receive
                 compensation, with a special committee set up to study specific cases.

                 Fox took office last December after an election victory that ended 71 years of
                 unbroken rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

                 He repeatedly promised to investigate past rights abuses, and the report released on
                 Tuesday was part of efforts to shed light on Mexico's past, especially during the
                 1970s when the government and security forces faced a series of small leftist
                 rebellions.

                 Critics have accused him of giving only lip service to human rights and lacking the
                 political courage to prosecute rights abusers.

                 The dirty war report did not publicly identify the government and military officials
                 who ordered and carried out atrocities in the counterinsurgency campaign.

                 Neither did it give any information on where the hundreds of "disappeared" were
                 murdered and buried, or whether some might still be alive.

                 Human rights groups and relatives of the disappeared were quick to condemn the
                 report's limitations.

                 "We don't want any more proposals. What we want is action. We want them to tell
                 us where the disappeared are," said Rosario Ibarra, a prominent rights campaigner
                 whose son was picked up by police in 1975 and never seen by his family again.

                 "The report is a lie because it says the disappearances occurred at military bases,
                 and that is not true. The orders came from the military high command, from the
                 desks of presidents," Ibarra said.

                 The worst abuses of the dirty war occurred duri ng the presidencies of Luis
                 Echeverria, who ruled from 1970 to 1976, and Jose Lopez Portillo, who led Mexico
                 for the next six years.

                 Soberanes, who leads the autonomous National Human Rights Commission
                 (CNDH), said security agencies such as the now-defunct Federal Security Board,
                 shadowy organizations like the "White Brigade" and members of the army carried
                 out illegal searches and arrests, torture and "forced disappearances."

                 It said the victims were held at military bases, Federal Security Board installations
                 and clandestine jails across the country before disappearing.

                 The CNDH report focused on 532 disappearances and said it had conclusive proof
                 that 275 of the victims were murdered and secretly buried. It said it did not have
                 proof of what happened to the other victims, but confirmed that all of them had
                 been illegally arrested and tortured before they disappeared.

                    Copyright 2001 Reuters