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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 (Comisión 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.



23 National Human Rights Commission (Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, CNDH), “Informe Especial Sobre las Quejas en Materia de Desapariciones Forzadas Ocurridas en la Década de los 70 y Principios de los 80.”

24 “Acuerdo por el que se disponen diversas medidas para la procuración de justicia por delitos cometidos contra personas vinculadas con movimientos sociales y pol’ticos del pasado.” Order of the President of the Republic, Mexico, November 27, 2001. The official name of the Special Prosecutor’s Office is “Fiscal’a Especial para movimientos sociales y pol’ticos del pasado.”

25 In January 2002, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that Attorney General’s Office erred when it chose not to investigate the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre because the period allotted by the statute of limitations had run. The court ruled that even though the alleged crimes took place more than thirty years earlier, the issue of statutory limitation should be addressed only after an investigation was carried out. “Resolución dictada en el amparo en revisión 968/99 de la Suprema Corte de Justicia de la Nación relacionada con los hechos de 1968.”


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July 2003