Features

October 2, 2008

Mexico: Forty years on, justice is unfinished business

By Mariclaire Acosta

On October 2, 1968, Mexican army and police forces opened fire on 5,000 students and workers at an anti-government protest in Mexico City's Tlatelolco district. Estimates of the dead ran into the hundreds. Forty years later, no one has faced trial for the killings, and the full truth of the Tlatelolco massacre -- like many other crimes by the Mexican state -- has yet to be told. In Mexico, justice remains unfinished business.

The Tlatelolco massacre marked the opening stages of the state's "dirty war" against left-wing activists and rebels during the 1970s and 80s. Government forces under control of the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI), which held a near monopoly on power for 70 years, killed or disappeared thousands of people. The state hid its crimes, and victims had no way to seek recourse.

In 2000, there was reason for hope. PRI lost the presidency to Alliance for Change candidate Vicente Fox, who vowed during his campaign to create a truth commission to investigate human rights violations during the "dirty war," including the Tlateloco massacre and the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre, when government-trained forces killed at least 25 demonstrators marching for independent universities.

President Fox's pledge turned into a fiasco. Instead of a truth commission, Fox created a Special Prosecutor's Office (SPO) that was crippled by a vague mandate, inexperienced staff, errors in strategy, political resistance and a lack of legitimacy in the eyes of victims and human rights organizations.

The SPO investigated 1,000 cases over five years, but brought only 19 cases and issued only eight indictments. Its highest profile case charged former president Luis Echeverría Álvarez with genocide in relation to the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi massacres, but he and other suspects were later released on technical grounds. To date there has not been a single conviction.

In February 2006, SPO investigators team leaked a draft report on the dirty war, Let It Never Happen Again! (¡Qué no vuelva a suceder!) to the Mexican press. The report named military officers and units in detailing an official government "genocide plan" against dissidents and anti-government guerillas through the kidnapping, torture and murder of hundreds of people, as well as the destruction of entire villages.

The report was officially released in November 2006-posted on the internet on a Friday night -- in a substantially revised version that downplayed military responsibility and was criticized by the SPO's own investigators. This version was available to the public for only a short time before being removed from Mexican government websites.

The SPO was dissolved on the final day of President Fox's term in November 2006, though this news was hidden from the public until four months later. Another institution Fox created, a reparations committee within the Ministry of the Interior, continues to operate, but no information is available to the public about its work or results.

October 2, 2008, will mark the 40th anniversary of one of Mexico's darkest hours. It will be a time for solemn commemorations, and it should be a time for far more. It is time for the Mexican government under President Felipe Calderón to release all documentation of human rights abuses that the SPO gathered during its investigations. It is time for the state to withdraw limitations on investigating past crimes by military personnel. It is time for the government's official human rights commission to join with Mexican civil society and UN human rights experts in reviewing and reformulating all of Mexico's truth and justice initiatives, including truth-seeking, prosecutions and reparations.

Only then can Mexico's unfinished business be made into a promise fulfilled.

Mariclaire Acosta, former special ambassador for human rights and democracy at the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is director of the Americas Program at the International Center for Transitional Justice.