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II. BACKGROUND

History of Abuses

On October 2, 1968, in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City, government troops opened fire on a student demonstration, killing or wounding hundreds of protestors and establishing what would be a modus operandi for handling threats to the political establishment in the coming years: repressive violence followed by official denial and silence.

There would be no serious investigation of the “Tlatelolco Massacre“—nor of the “Corpus Christi Massacre” that followed three years later, in which student demonstrators were attacked by thugs enlisted, trained and armed by the government. In the coming decade, the Mexican government would carry out repeated and systematic human rights abuses against political opponents and dissidents in what came to be known as the country’s “dirty war.” Its targets included armed groups and their sympathizers, real or alleged, as well as student activists and other people who participated in protests, but never armed activity. Its methods included torture, extrajudicial execution, and forced disappearance, and often entailed an extreme degree of brutality and wanton disregard for human life.

One resident of Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, for example, described to Human Rights Watch how he had been detained by the army in 1974 and held for two weeks, blindfolded and subject to daily torture, which included cigarette burns and electrical shocks to his testicles. His captors demanded that he confess to having participated in the killing of several soldiers—a crime he insists he had not committed. He resisted their pressure, even as some his fellow prisoners were beaten to death, but finally capitulated when told that his family would be killed if he did not sign the confession.¹

Others fared even worse. José Ignacio Olivares Torres, a guerrilla leader from Guadalajara, was captured by the DFS in January 1974. Three days later his body appeared on a street in his home city, with signs of torture that included the holes where scorching hot nails that had been driven into his kneecaps. His face was so disfigured that his family was only able to identify him by his teeth and some scar tissue that had been left by an earlier surgery.²

Hundreds of people were detained by security forces and never seen again. During 1974, an air force plane made regular night flights out of a military base in Guerrero to dump bodies out over the Pacific Ocean. According to former air force personnel who participated in the flights, the prisoners were shot in the head just before being boarded on the plane, though some were still alive when tossed out the cargo door.³

The violence left profound scars on the victims and their relatives. One torture victim told Human Rights Watch that, because of severe blows he had received to his head while in detention, he had been unable to return to work and had been supported the last three decades by his children.⁴ Another recalled suffering from anxiety attacks and being unable to complete his university studies because he found it impossible in the wake of his torture to concentrate on his studies.⁵

The relatives of those victims “disappeared” suffered a particularly cruel fate—waiting in vain for years for the news that might allow them to bury their dead and begin a process of mourning. The cruelty was compounded by the Mexican government’s refusal to provide them with information about what had happened to their family members—or to prosecute those responsible.

Human Rights Watch spoke with dozens of people in Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, who recalled months and years of desperation and despair as they visited government offices, military bases, and prisons searching for lost loved ones. Wherever they went, they were rebuffed, and in some cases even threatened with reprisals if they persisted in their search.

One Atoyac resident described how, in the mid-1970s, after months of searching for a son who had been detained by soldiers, she managed to get a meeting with the commander of a local military base. The officer told her to go home and wait for her son. “So I went home and waited,” she recalled. “But I couldn’t take it. I almost went crazy. I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream. I wanted to run. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. So I prayed to God to give me the peace of mind to wait. And I waited day and night. And I have never stopped waiting.”⁶

Another Atoyac resident described how her family had hounded the Attorney General’s Office about the case of her brother who had been detained by soldiers in 1974 and never seen again.⁷ After five years, the Attorney General’s Office responded with a document that alleged that the brother had been living a “troubled life,” borrowing money from prostitutes and provoking fights with their pimps. The note claimed that he had been detained by “various individuals,” who had demanded he return money taken from a brothel.⁸ The family sought to refute this account by providing the Attorney General’s Office with a series of letters from local authorities and former employees that attested to the brother’s good conduct as well as his relatively well-off economic condition (to disprove the allegations he had borrowed money from prostitutes).⁹ But they never received any clarification from the government until, in 2001, a report of the National Human Rights Commission, confirmed that the brother had indeed been the victim of a forced disappearance carried out by soldiers.¹⁰

Another resident described how, in 1998, she and a group of other relatives of “disappeared” people brought their cases to the federal prosecutor’s office in Atoyac de Alvarez. When the attending prosecutor heard the nature of their cases, he told them he could not receive it and left the office. A few minutes later a car full of soldiers showed up in front of the office and appeared to stand guard at the front door. The relatives waited for several hours and were finally able to get another prosecutor to take the case when a television news reporter showed up and began filming their interaction. But the case languished in the office for months.¹¹

The Attorney General’s Office (Procuradur’a General de la República, PGR) finally did open an investigation into the “disappearance” cases in Atoyac de Alvarez in 1999. But in 2000, the PGR decided it did not have jurisdiction over the cases and turned them over to the military justice system—which had, itself, consistently failed to investigate and prosecute abuses committed by military personnel.

By November 2001, thirty-three years after the Tlatelolco massacre, there had still been no serious effort to prosecute these or other human rights violations committed during that era.

Mexico’s Obligations Under International Law

Mexico is party to several international treaties that prohibit human rights violations, including torture, arbitrary detention, extrajudicial execution, and forced disappearance.¹² The Mexican government’s obligation under these treaties is not only to prevent violations, but also to investigate and prosecute any violations that do occur.

This second set of duties is, in part, a corollary to the first, reflecting the view that effective prevention requires investigation and punishment.¹³ It also derives from the right to a legal remedy that these treaties extend to victims of human rights violations. The American Convention on Human Rights, for example, states that every individual has “the right to simple and prompt recourse, or any other effective recourse, to a competent court or tribunal for protection against acts that violate his fundamental rights.”¹⁴ The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has held that this right imposes an obligation upon states to provide victims with effective judicial remedies.¹⁵

In addition to the obligation to investigate and prosecute, states have an obligation to inform the public about the violations that took place.This obligation also derives partly from the states’ duty to prevent future violations. As the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has held, “Every society has the inalienable right to know the truth about past events, as well as the motives and circumstances in which aberrant crimes came to be committed, in order to prevent repetition of such acts in the future.”¹⁶

The state has a special obligation in cases of forced disappearance to provide information to the victims’ relatives. The U.N. Human Rights Committee has held that the extreme anguish inflicted upon relatives of the “disappeared” makes them direct victims of the violation as well.¹⁷ To the extent the state fails to inform relatives about the fate of the “disappeared,” it fails to fulfill its basic obligation to bring an end to the violation.¹⁸ In addition, the Inter-American Court has held that states’ obligation to provide reparation to victims of abuses translates into an obligation to provide family members with information about what has happened to people who have “disappeared.”¹⁹

Given this duty to inform, the duty to investigate violations must be understood as distinct from the duty to prosecute them. According to the Inter-American Court:

The duty to investigate . . . continues as long as there is uncertainty about the fate of the person who has disappeared. Even in the hypothetical case that those individually responsible for crimes of this type cannot be legally punished under certain circumstances, the State is obligated to use the means at its disposal to inform the relatives of the fate of the victims and, if they have been killed, the location of their remains.²⁰

Finally it is important to stress that not any sort of investigation will suffice to fulfill this obligation. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has found that, "when the State permits investigations to be conducted by the entities with possible involvement, independence and impartiality are clearly compromised.”²¹ The result is “de facto impunity,” which “has a corrosive effect on the rule of law and violates the principles of the American Convention.”²²