III.THE SPECIAL PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE

Creation and Mandate

On November 27, 2001, after decades of secrecy and denial, the Mexican state officially recognized the acts of political violence perpetrated by its security forces during the "dirty war" of the 1970s and early 1980s.In a public ceremony in Mexico City, the National Human Rights Commission (Comisin Nacional de Derechos Humanos, CNDH) released a three-thousand-page report on state abuses committed during that era.[23]The report was based largely on information from secret government archives on more than five hundred people who had been reported missing.It confirmed that at least 275 of those missing had been arrested, tortured, and killed by state security forces.

After the CNDH presented its report, President Fox announced the creation of a Special Prosecutor's Office to investigate and prosecute past abuses committed against dissidents and opposition groups by state security forces.[24]He also instructed the Interior Ministry to release secret government archives with information on these abuses, so that it would be readily available to the special prosecutor, as well as to the public at large.

Within a few weeks, the attorney general named a legal scholar, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, to serve as the special prosecutor, and by mid-January 2002, the office was up and running.Its staff of fifteen prosecutors was divided into three sections.The first would address the forced disappearance cases already investigated by the CNDH, as well as other similar cases from the "dirty war."The second section was charged with examining the 1968 and 1971 massacres of student protestors.[25]The third section would explore other abuses not covered by the first two (with no fixed time limit).

In addition to these sections, the Special Prosecutor's Office set up a documentation center whose task was to collect relevant information from the secret government documents that were set to be released, as well as from other government archives.The office also set up a two-person team to develop a program to provide psychological care to the victims and relatives of past abuses.

The executive order establishing the Special Prosecutor's Office also instructed the attorney general to establish a "Support Committee," made up of "citizens of public standing and experience in the judicial branch or in the promotion of human rights," that would provide the special prosecutor with assistance in the investigations, and instructed the interior minister to establish an "interdisciplinary committee" to develop a proposal for providing reparations to the victims of abuses.

Lack of Results

During its first year and a half in operation, the Special Prosecutor's Office has opened over 300 formal investigations and received many more complaints.It has collected testimony from hundreds of victims and family members and collected documentary evidence from the national archives.

Its investigations, however, have produced few concrete results.The special prosecutor has summoned several former officials, including former president Luis Echeverra Alvarez and former Mexico City regent Alfonso Martnez Domnguez, to testify about their alleged involvement in the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre.The interrogations produced little new information, however.Echeverra chose not to respond to the special prosecutor's questions (exercising his constitutional right against self-incrimination), and Martnez Domnguez denied all responsibility.Former general Luis Gutirrez Oropeza also declined to answer the special prosecutor's questions, as did Miguel Nazar Haro and Luis de la Barreda Moreno, both former heads of the Federal Directorate of Security (Direccin Federal de Seguridad, DFS).

Aside from these interviews of high-profile figures, the Special Prosecutor's Office has conducted few interviews of former government officials or members of the institutions implicated in abuses.In the hundreds of "dirty war" cases, the office has only obtained testimony from two military witnesses.[26]In the 1968 and 1971 massacre cases, prosecutors have yet to obtain any testimony from members of the security forces that allegedly participated in the incidents."The biggest obstacle we've encountered," one top prosecutor told Human Rights Watch, "is the big silence" that has been kept by those who knew what happened.[27]

Officials in the Special Prosecutor's Office spoke candidly with Human Rights Watch about the limited results of their investigations.[28]They said that, in the vast majority of cases, they had done little more than systematize the information that had been provided to them by victims and relatives, along with the information collected by the CNDH.While the office has obtained some valuable documents from the national archive, it has pursued few investigative leads and collected virtually no testimony from third-party witnesses.The office has yet to carry out exhumations at the sites of suspected clandestine cemeteries.

In April 2003, the Special Prosecutor's Office sought arrest warrants for three men (the former directors of the DFS and the federal police) to face charges for the 1975 "disappearance" of Jess Piedra Ibarra.What was to be the special prosecutor's first arrests instead proved an embarrassing setback when a judge rejected the petition on the ground that the time period allotted by the statute of limitations for the alleged crime had run.The special prosecutor has appealed this ruling.

The special prosecutor's "Support Group," meanwhile, has kept a very low profile.In May, 2003, the president named several new members to the group, but there has been no indication that it would take a more active role in advancing the special prosecutor's work.Similarly, the "interdisciplinary committee" in charge of developing a proposal to provide reparations to victims has not yet done so.

Human Rights Watch encountered a growing sense of frustration among victims and victims' relatives.All twenty-five victims and relatives we spoke to in Guerrero reported that they had seen no results from the special prosecutor's investigations.[29]Other family members in Mexico City reported limited advances on their cases, but complained that it only consisted of compiling information that they or the CNDH had already collected, and interviewing witnesses that they themselves had provided.Several also complained that the Special Prosecutor's Office had actually failed to interview witnesses whom they had suggested-a charge which officials within the Special Prosecutor's Office confirmed (explaining that it was not easy to track down the witnesses when the family members did not provide addresses).

If the Special Prosecutor's Office does not start producing results soon, one torture victim told Human Rights Watch, the victims and relatives will stop trusting it.One Atoyac resident told us that her family "had never rested" in their search for their missing brother, but that they, and the other families they knew, were already beginning to lose faith in the special prosecutor.Many other relatives of victims appear to have never had much faith in the investigation.A police investigator told us that the vast majority of relatives he sought out to provide declarations did not want to talk to him about their cases.[30]A local human rights advocate, whose family was also subject to army abuses, told Human Rights Watch that the "hope for truth and justice" had dried up a long time ago.[31]

The opposite is true as well, however.If the special prosecutor starts producing concrete results, public perception could change rapidly, leading to much more active and widespread cooperation with the investigations."As soon as he jails some of the people who committed those crimes," the local human rights advocate in Guerrero predicted, "many more people will step forward and be willing to participate"-and the testimonies of what took place will then inundate the Special Prosecutor's Office "like a downpour."