In contrast to the official figure of 1,500 victims of the ‘Dirty War’, a period of government repression against dissidents, the MEH documented 8,594 victims of 11 serious human rights violations between 1965 and 1990, for which the State was responsible.
Carlos Pérez Ricart, commissioner of the aforementioned mechanism, said in the presentation of the report that many people suffered multiple violations even if they were minor, which raises the number of victims to 11,743, but stressed that these are only the cases with evidence.
“Even if we had been able to investigate for 30 years, we would not have been able to obtain a figure that came close to the real number of victims,” he said, adding that this figure does not include the more than 123,000 victims of forced displacement who are registered.
Systematic strategy of repression, including torture and forced disappearances
The report, over 4,700 pages, reveals that the Mexican State used a systematic strategy of repression, including torture and forced disappearances, and that this violence has persisted under the pretext of the War on Drugs.
The evidence generated by the Truth Commission mechanism, created by López Obrador, through more than a thousand testimonies and 90 open files, shows that these practices continue, as proven by the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa in 2014.
“It was the State. We say this because the findings of the historical clarification investigation corroborate this, with the same forcefulness with which it has also been demonstrated that the State was responsible for the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, almost a decade ago,” says a fragment of the report read by Pérez Ricart.
Warnings of cover-up deals
In particular, Commissioner David Fernández warned that institutions such as the Army continue to protect key information that would reveal their responsibility in these violations, thereby failing to comply with presidential mandates that order unrestricted access to military archives.
“The Army’s wide scope of action after 1990 is a factor in the persistence of institutional inertia that maintains impunity, that is, there are cover-up deals,” he said.
He also pointed out that “the report attests to the denial and concealment of information in military and intelligence archives despite the presidential mandate, which is also another important factor in persistence.”
Fernández added that they were also unable to access archives of the presidential General Staff or declassify Mexican archives in the United States because they needed “support from the Presidency and the Foreign Ministry that they were never able to obtain.”
“It is false that SEDENA has opened its archives”
Pérez Ricart explained that in the report ‘Forms of Silence’, the mechanism’s investigators documented how “they were mistreated in the historical archive of the SEDENA (Secretariat of National Defense)”, to the point that they could not continue the historical clarification.
Therefore, he assured that “it is false that SEDENA has opened its archives”, as López Obrador has maintained.
“We were a presidential commission without presidential support to access the archives. That’s how things are”, he denounced.
The commissioner added that the former Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN), now the National Intelligence Center (CNI) purged and removed documents from the General Archive of the Nation before 2018, which he described as a “plundering of the history of Mexico”.
“It is false that the intelligence archives were given to the General Archive of the Nation, contrary to what the president of the republic assured at the time and here is the evidence in this regard”, he said.
Among the 142 recommendations to 22 authorities, the authors urged the presidency to “form a Truth Commission to examine the serious human rights violations committed from 1990 onwards.”
Survivors and their families, such as Irma Pineda, Alicia de los Ríos, Denisse Valverde and Tita Radilla, attended the presentation of the report at the Tlatelolco Cultural Center.
“Because they took them alive, we want them alive!” and “Murderous State, hand over the files,” echoed in the auditorium after a minute of silence for the victims. (EFE)
Original article at Aristegui Noticias, August 16th, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.