Report Says 74 Officials Involved in Abuses

By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY, Nov. 27 -- Ending decades of stonewalling, the Mexican government acknowledged today that at least 74 officials from 37 government agencies
were involved in a campaign of disappearances, torture and executions of leftists in the 1970s and 1980s.

"We are changing the way power is exercised in Mexico," President Vicente Fox said at a news conference, standing with the attorney general, the head of the
military and the interior minister. Soldiers, police officers and security agents working for their institutions under previous governments were said in the report by the
National Human Rights Commission to be implicated in the crimes.

"We are not chasing the ghosts of our past," Fox said. "We are showing that it is wrong to believe that the law should be abandoned to benefit the country. We are
shining a light on parts of our past that are still covered in darkness."

The report was a landmark for Mexico, whose government officials have consistently denied and covered up the fact that soldiers and police waged a dirty war that
resulted in the illegal detention, torture and execution of hundreds of anti-government activists.

Fox took office last December vowing to account for abuses that occurred during 71 years of unbroken rule under the Institutional Revolutionary Party that preceded
his election. As he formally accepted the report today, he ordered appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the cases and prosecute offenders whenever the
law permits.

"There is not a national security reason that justifies forced disappearances of people," said the rights commission president, Jose Luis Soberanes, handing the report
to Fox in a two-foot stack of volumes. "There is no state interest that can be above human rights."

The commission's report was not made public, and no government official was publicly identified as having been involved in disappearances. But in a lengthy
presentation to Fox, Soberanes said six police and security agencies at the federal level, 25 at the state level and six at the local level were involved.

In an interview Monday, Fox said, "nobody will be beyond prosecution" in the cases, even former presidents or other high-ranking government officials who might be
implicated. But some activists said they will believe Fox's political will only when they see government officials charged, tried and punished.

"We have always known that these people were taken by the government," said Hilda Navarrete, a human rights activist in rural Guerrero state, where 332 of the
532 cases investigated by the commission took place. "We have heard rumors that they left their bodies in caves or threw them into the sea, and we want to know
what really happened. I want clarity and I want prosecutions. There will be no justice until that happens."

Another doubter was Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, whose 21-year-old son Jesus disappeared in 1975 after being last seen in government custody. After reading the
report's section dealing with her son's case, she said the commission had done nothing but compile information she turned over to the government years ago.

"It doesn't offer anything new," Ibarra said. "What kind of a report is it if it doesn't have the names of those responsible or the whereabouts of the disappeared? It's
useless."

The section of the report dealing with Jesus Piedra Ibarra does identify seven state police officers in the northern state of Nuevo Leon who arrested him on April 18,
1975.

A copy of the report said that the seven officers grabbed Piedra, a medical student and member of a radical communist group, beat him with fists and gun butts,
forced him into a car and took him to a ranch where he was tortured. It said the officer who oversaw the torture was promoted for his efforts.

The report said that two months later, Piedra was being held in Military Camp No. 1, the military's headquarters in Mexico City, where the defense secretary's office
is located, "recovering from savage torture." The report said he was eventually moved to a series of "secret prisons." The last reported, but unconfirmed, sighting of
Piedra was at a Mexico City prison in 1984. The report does not say if or how Piedra died.

                                               © 2001