The Family of Lucio Cabañas, 50 Years after the Assassination of the Guerrilla Leader: “There Was a Clear Order to Exterminate Us”

José García, Pablo Cabañas, Guillermina Cabañas, Amalia Cabañas and Antonia Morales, in Mexico City. Photo: Aurea Del Rosario

EL PAÍS reconstructs, through the testimonies of brothers, nieces and cousins, the terror and persecution that the Cabañas have suffered at the hands of the Mexican State.

The only clue Antonia Morales Serafín (Acapulco, 56 years old) has about the disappearance of her father, Abelardo Morales Gervasio, known as El Lucio de abajo (Lucio from below) —brother and number two of the legendary guerrilla Lucio Cabañas—, was a list of names that a prosecutor showed her about ten years ago, explaining that it was not official information. They were the people who “probably” had been thrown from a plane into the sea at the Pie de la Cuesta military base in Acapulco, Guerrero. She also confirmed that the sheet was not signed or had government stamps. However, from another folder, that same prosecutor showed her another sheet that in black letters, signed and sealed by SEDENA, said: “Total extermination of the entire Cabañas family, their accomplices and close associates.”

Morales Gervasio was Cabañas’ right-hand man, a normal school teacher from Guerrero from Ayotzinapa, a guerrilla fighter and founder of the Partido de los Pobres (The Party of The Poor), when the guerrillas began to spread throughout Guerrero in the 1970s. Lucio de abajo was called that because, unlike his brother, who was entrenched in the sierra and mountains, he took charge of the urban operation on the Pacific coast. Antonia was very young, barely eight months old, when in 1974 her father was captured by the Army, which besieged and destroyed everything in its path in search of traces of the insurgency in order to exterminate it completely. It was the dark era of the Dirty War.

Antonia is also the one who has been in charge, in recent years, of preparing injunctions, complaints and convincing members of her family – who did not change their surname Cabañas – to seek justice and ask the Mexican State to recognize them as victims of crimes against humanity such as forced disappearance, kidnapping, physical and psychological torture, sexual abuse, among others, which they have systematically experienced firsthand since the murder of Lucio Cabañas in 1974. To date, the family has opened more than 300 cases for related complaints. Among them is the case of Felipe Ramos Cabañas, who disappeared during this same period, and who is also the grandfather of Cutberto Ortiz Ramos, one of the 43 Ayotzinapa students who disappeared in 2014.

The Court Decision

In recent years, the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has undertaken some attempts to take charge of what happened at that time, such as the commission of the Dirty War, in addition to the initiatives of some judges. Not with little resistance from other organs of the State. On June 13th, the Supreme Court ordered the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) to investigate the probable crimes against humanity committed during the Dirty War, in the case of four women, relatives of Lucio Cabañas, which constitute crimes that cannot be subject to a statute of limitations. That is, they do not have a deadline for their investigation due to their nature, since the victims reported illegal detentions and torture during that period – between 1965 and 1990 – at the hands of public servants and federal agents of the now defunct Federal Security Directorate (DFS).

The women are Cabañas’ first cousins: Rosa Elena, Flavia, Irene and Juana Nava Cabañas. The four were arrested in 1972 when, already forcibly displaced to Mexico City—without money, unable to receive an education and surviving with the help of strangers—they were tricked and taken to the Attorney General’s Office for questioning, some of them for more than a month. The authorities pursued them because they believed that their mother, Dominga Cabañas, was Lucio’s mother.

Rosa Elena Nava (66 years old), was 14 years old. She remembers that she, her mother and her sisters had not heard from her cousin Rosa Cabañas and her husband for days, who had also moved to the Mexican capital. One morning in 1972, after her sisters, Irene and Juana, did not return from looking for their cousin, Rosa Elena, still wearing her high school uniform, prevented her mother from going to the house of her older daughters. So she asked her sister Flavia, a few years older, to accompany her. “We arrived where she was renting, we knocked very loudly and I saw a man who had pulled back the curtain and had a machine gun. He came out and asked us who we were looking for and who we were. We never denied it, we told him that we were looking for Rosa, my cousin. He told us that they were from the secret police and that they would take us to Pino Suárez,” she says in the living room of her house.

Rosa and Flavia were put in a car and taken to the Attorney General’s Office, which at that time was located in Pino Suárez, in the heart of the capital. They were put in different rooms and interrogated for more than 12 hours. “We brought other guerrillas here,” Rosa remembers one of the men saying to another officer upon arriving at the facilities. “They slapped me, they cursed me, they told me that of course I knew [where Lucio Cabañas was] and that I was a fool, words like that. About ten men surrounded me, all armed, asking me questions over and over again.”

Irene (76 years old) was held for more than a month. She and her sister Juana had done the same search a few days earlier. While in the Attorney General’s Office cells, she remembers that they both coincided there with the wife and daughter of Genaro Vázquez, the other emblematic guerrilla fighter of the peasant and union struggle in Mexico. “They took us to the same cell at two o’clock and after about three days a woman told us that Genaro Vázquez’s wife and daughter had been captured. We had already seen them pass by, they were soaked because they had been put headfirst into the water tank. They kept us there for many days, I estimate from the time they captured us, on January 17th, 1972, until February 8th,” she recalls.

“My only crime was my surname”

Pablo Cabañas Barrientos (El Porvenir, 84 years old), Lucio Cabañas’ younger brother, lives with his wife in the Iztapalapa district of Mexico City. He looks at the roof of his house and proudly tells us that he built it himself, with his own hands and his own effort. He points outside to indicate the direction of the site from which he brought the beams and the material on foot to build his home.

He says that he never talked about politics with Lucio and remembers, with a pride dulled by sadness, that he always followed him, wherever he went, almost blindly. That is why he also studied to be a teacher at the Ayotzinapa rural teachers’ school, and he watched with admiration as his brother, faithful to a personality that stood out for his empathy from a very young age, became first a student leader, then a union leader, and then a guerrilla fighter.

Mr. Pablo did not belong to the guerrilla. He soon went to Sonora to work as a teacher, but the Army’s persecution caught up with him there as well. On January 17th, 1972, he was taken from the school where he worked and after passing through several barracks in the north of the country, he was finally taken to Mexico City. “They gave me all the tortures known at that time,” he says, avoiding going into details.

His gaze clouds over, but his oak appearance and sense of humor seek to put an end to any kind of nostalgia. However, there is something that he remembers perfectly and that, when he says it, makes his tone of voice and his gaze harden: “They sent me to be handled by [Miguel] Nazar Haro. He tortured me from January 18th, until almost the 27th or 28th. I was 32 years old. He personally was involved in my tortures, he had his henchmen who were the ones who beat me, but he commanded everything. I think they didn’t kill me because God is great,” he says.

Pablo Cabañas was imprisoned for more than six years, for the crimes of conspiracy, criminal association, and inciting rebellion and proselytism. When he got out he had lost everything. His family, his house, his resources. Nobody would hire him and, as soon as he mentioned his name, the doors were closed in his face. It took many years for him to get a permanent contract, and when he retired, despite having two teaching positions, his income did not exceed 5,000 pesos (250 dollars) a month. “My only crime was my surname,” he concludes.

The Danger of Being a Cabañas

Guillermina Cabañas (Atoyac, 75 years old) was taught to shoot by Lucio, her first cousin. For her, he was a brother without distinctions because they grew up together. When Lucio was already in the mountains, she and her brothers were hunted by the Army, but also by people who wanted to hand them over for fear that the military would destroy their town as they did with El Salto Chiquito, that community that was wiped off the map for being the bastion of the Partido de los Pobres.

Guillermina remembers the more than two years she remained in the guerrilla, together with Lucio, until she became pregnant and had to leave the movement with her companion. Like most of the Cabañas, they arrived in Mexico City persecuted and cornered. They had their first daughter, Yubicela Quiroz. In 1999, she participated in the student strike against the increase in enrollment fees as a student of the Faculty of Chemistry at UNAM. The young woman was imprisoned for several days. Guillermina believes that her surname may have influenced her being one of the last students to be released.

Although Guillermina, with her soft voice and apparent joy, gives an almost romantic account of her life in the mountains, she omits, until the end, to tell about her grief and disappearances: her brother Humberto Cabañas and her sister María del Rosario were taken into custody in 1976 when they had already settled in Mexico City. She was released after a month, but she was never able to recover, either physically or mentally, from the damage caused by the torture and rape she suffered. She died five years later, at the age of 35. Her brother Humberto was never seen again. Her sister told her that the last time she saw him he was being brutally tortured and his face was covered in blood.

Amalia Cabañas del Valle (58 years old) was nine years old when she saw how her father, Sóstenes Cabañas Tavares, Lucio’s cousin, was taken away and brutally beaten by members of the Army. She never recovered from that. Amalia has not yet been able to talk about the impact of that episode. Nowadays, she cannot go out alone. Her voice is very weak and she prefers not to go into detail about almost anything she remembers. She never saw her father again, and she, her six siblings and her mother had to leave Guerrero, completely empty-handed. She says that this is why they were sick children, and that as adults they resented the persecution, the lack of peace and resources that would allow them to have a more dignified life. Amalia was diagnosed with anemia for seven years.

The Cabañas family’s legal representative, attorney Pilar Noriega, responds with careful hope to questions about the future of the protection that the Cabañas sisters received and that requires the investigation of the events of which they were victims as crimes against humanity. It is a good sign, she says, but then she remembers that, just a few days ago, the FGR, the Army, the Government and other agencies challenged the sentence for the disappearance of activist Rosendo Radilla, another of the emblematic cases of repression in the seventies.

Noriega does not understand why this is happening after Claudia Sheinbaum’s government apologized for the crimes committed in 1968. The Radilla case, along with that of Lucio Cabañas, continues to leave an outstanding debt with the collateral victims and apparently, until now, ignored by the State: those of the Dirty War.

Original article by Erika Rosete, El País, November 2nd, 2024.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.

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