The very nature of disappearanceswhereby authorities secretly detain and hold victims incommunicado, often torturing them to extract informationmakes solution of such cases through the justice system extremely difficult. Such case require urgent reaction from authorities, since they are often followed by murder. Appealing to authorities to utilize the police and court systems often seems a hopeless cause, since by definition the detention has not officially been acknowledged and is usually being deliberately kept secret. Authorities committed to the protection of human rights insist on searching for the victims until they are located. Officials who are not equally committed may perform perfunctory searches, at best. In the cases reviewed in this chapter, police and prosecutors took the latter approach. In some cases, half-hearted searches where undertaken, while in others as much as a year went by before family members of the victims were even called to provide information. In several disappearance cases documented below, victims were transferred from unacknowledged military detention to the official custody of prosecutors, who failed to acknowledge any wrongdoing on the part of military officials involved. In others, the whereabouts of the victims remain unknown.
In the 1970s, as many as 400 real or alleged leftist guerrillas disappeared as part of a dirty war undertaken by the military in Mexico. These abuses conformed to a pattern practiced by military governments throughout Latin America during that time period, and took place in the context of Mexican guerrilla movements in several states. Current disappearances in Mexico fall into three main types. The first, reminiscent of the 1970s, consists of disappearances related to the conflict between government forces and the EPR. In some instances, these disappearances are temporary and followed by acknowledged detention and prosecution. In other cases, the victims whereabouts remain unknown. Such cases are not examined in this study.208
Another type of disappearance takes place in the context of drug trafficking and counternarcotics efforts. The Mexican military has taken on a fundamental role in the battle against drug traffickers in Mexico. The Alejandro Hodoyán and FaustoSoto Miller cases, documented below, are examples of drug-related temporary disappearances carried out by the military. These cases may have taken place in a context in which one Mexican drug cartel was using active-duty army personnel in a battle for supremacy over another. But even if the motivation of the officers who commanded the operations involving Hodoyán and Soto Miller were private, the abuses were committed by state agents, and civilian prosecutors were ready to accept both detainees when the army was through with them without asking any questions.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has annunciated standards for official responsibility for disappearances carried out by authorities acting in a private capacity. Any exercise of public power that violates the rights recognized by the Convention is illegal, the court noted, continuing,
This conclusion is independent of whether the organ or official has contravened provisions of internal law or overstepped the limits of his authority: under international law a State is responsible for the acts of its agents undertaken in their official capacity and for their omissions, even when those agents act outside the sphere of their authority or violate internal law.209
The clandestine incarceration of Hodoyán and Soto Miller was illegal and should have been the subject of investigation and prosecution. In the case of Hodoyán, a U.S. citizen, a U.S. law-enforcement agent interviewed him several weeks into his detention, and although he knew that Hodoyán was being illegally held and reported this to the U.S. Embassy, no action was taken to assist the man. In fact, closing their eyes to the manner in which Hodoyán was detained, U.S. officials arranged to further debrief the victim in the United States, where he was eventually sent; when he later fled the United States, he was disappeared again, and remains missing as of this writing. A witness to the second disappearance identified a member of a federal counternarcotics police unit as having carrired out the second disappearance. In the Soto Miller case, the victim was sentenced to forty years in prison for a crime he was said to have committed when, all indications are, he was actually in unacknowledged military detention.
Finally, disappearances have also been carried out by police-led gangs involved in drugs and kidnappings, as in the case of José Alberto Guadarrama, from Morelos state, documented below. Guadarrama, a former state judicial policeofficer, was apparently detained by other officers. Police were able to commit this abuse by virtue of the authority vested in them by the government and were encouraged to do so by the consistent failure of the state to investigate or punish such crimes. The Guadarrama case, it turns out, was symptomatic of a broader problem in Morelos state, where the highest-ranking police officials were eventually jailed after police were caught dumping the body of a kidnap victim in neighboring Guerrero state.
On September 11, 1996, soldiers detained Alejandro Hodoyán, a U.S. citizen by birth, in Guadalajara, Jalisco state. They believed him to be a member of the Arrellano Félix drug cartel. Although Hodoyán was held in secret detention by the military, police may also have been involved. After pumping him for information on the Arrellano Félix operation for several months, soldiers turned him over to federal prosecutors. Both military and civilian officials hoped that he would testify against other alleged members of the Arrellano Félix drug cartel, including his own brother. Hodoyán was eventually given immunity from prosecution in Mexico if he would do so.210 U.S. officials were also interested in debriefing Hodoyán. Alerted that a potentially valuable source of information was in military custody, an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) interviewed Hodoyán several weeks into his secret detention. Later claiming incompetence on the part of a key embassy official, U.S. consular authorities did nothing to help Hodoyán. More interested in the sources information than in protecting human rights, U.S. law-enforcement authorities also did nothing to aid the man, thereby becoming complicit in the violations he suffered. In fact, without being bothered by the way Hodoyán had come to be detained, or the treatment he received, they arranged for him to be sent to the United States to serve as a witness in drug cases.
In order to get the victim to cooperate, the army subjected him to successive rounds of torture. According to an unsigned statement he later gave to his family, soldiers tortured him intermittently for weeks. He recalled that on the day of his detention,
They put a pillow case over my head, with me lying down on a bed, one person on top of my upper body and another on my legs. My arms were handcuffed to the head of the bed and my feet to the other part, where the feet go. They started to throw water on my face, which was coveredby the pillow case. I started to suffocate. Thats when the questions started.211
The questions on his first day of detention had to do with people he had recently met whom the soldiers believed were involved with drug trafficking. Faced with answers they found unacceptable, the soldiers threw him in a car, drove him around, then returned to what Hodoyán believed to be the same location. This time, they wrapped him in a blanket with his head and feet protruding from the ends. Again they threw water on his covered head, and applied electric current to the soles of his feet and eyelids. They questioned him more about people and phone numbers he had with him when detained. After two more days of torture, then some sleep, Hodoyán was questioned on September 14 about the assassination of federal prosecutor Ernesto Ibarra Santés, stationed in Baja California, who had been gunned down that same day in Mexico City. Hodoyán was also questioned about a July 22, 1996 shootout between soldiers and drug traffickers in Guadalajara in which two soldiers had died. The Arrellano Félix brothers had attempted to kill rival drug trafficker Amado Carrillo, killing the soldiers instead.212
When Hodoyán failed to arrive in Tijuana as expected on September 11, his family began to search for him, seeking help from both Mexican and U.S. officials. His family heard nothing from him until the following month. According to the New York Times, which covered the Hodoyán story as part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series on drug trafficking in Mexico, soldiers broke Hodoyán in a matter of days, turning him into a consummate source of information. In reference to the army general who headed the governments counternarcotics agency at the time, the newspaper reported, In late October General Gutiérrez Rebollo was sufficiently confident of his new informants cooperation that he allowed him to call his family and tell them he was still alive.213 After the first phone call, his family told Human Rights Watch, they installed a caller identification apparatus on the telephone; when he called again, they noted the number from which he had called, then called back. The line was answered, Fifth [military] region.214
A U.S. State Department official familiar with the case told Human Rights Watch that several weeks after his disappearance, a U.S. law enforcement agentidentified in the New York Times as belonging to the ATFinterviewed Hodoyán. In the course of the interview and after considerable time, he learned that the guy might have had a claim to U.S. citizenship, the official told Human Rights Watch. Implying that the agent knew that Hodoyán was in illegal detention, he continued, When he realized that, the agent knew he [the agent] didnt want to be there. He told the appropriate U.S. embassy officials about the guy, and the officials all relied on the appropriate authority, the consul general, to do something about it.215 Apparently, the consul general never did.
The Office of the Federal Attorney General did not respond to Human Rights Watchs request for information about the Hodoyán case, but even if Hodoyáns own statements are not taken into account, it is clear that he was held illegally by the military. In court documents from an unrelated case involving military corruption, soldiers admitted to holding Hodoyán. Sgt. Vicente Ruiz Martínez testified on March 8, 1997, for instance, that he had guarded Hodoyán in Guadalajara and also during a trip made by the detainee to Mexico City on September 14, 1996; another soldier testified that he participated in the detention in September of a man whose nickname was Alex, which is what Hodoyáns family called him.216 If the detention had been legal, he would have been held in civilian, not military custody, even if soldiers participated in the original arrest.
The encounter with the U.S. agent led to interest from U.S. law-enforcement agencies in a more thorough debriefing of the captive, but not, apparently, in providing a remedy for the egregious human rights violation he was suffering during his clandestine detention. In mid-December, Hodoyán signed papers allowing U.S. officials to take him to San Diego, a trip that finally took place in February 1997. On February 20, disheartened by the questioning aimed at incriminating his brother, Hodoyán left the hotel in which he was located and returned to his family in Tijuana in a psychologically troubled state.217
On March 5, armed men pulled him from the passenger seat of a car that his mother, Cristina Palacios Roji Siliceo, was parking in Tijuana. She recalled,
When I got into the parking spot, I turned to get some documents from the back. I saw a van pull up very quickly, and the first thing I saw was two men getting out with machine guns. Whats going on? I asked my son. Once again, the same guys, he responded. They grabbed him by the neck. I was yelling, Who are you? What do you want? Where are you taking him? The same guy who had put Alex in the van aimed at meI was looking at him for two or three seconds, which is why I didnt forget his face. When they put him in the van, the doors were left open, so I ran and got in. Leave him alone. Leave him alone, I yelled. My son told me, Go away, Mom. The guy took my arms and threw me out.218
Palacios Roji Siliceo immediately went to prosecutors, having a clear image in her head of the man who had faced her with his weapon drawn. She had noted, too, the vans license plate number. The plate number was eventually traced back to a vehicle that had been impounded and was in the custody of Federal Highway Police. Investigators had Palacios Roji Siliceo speak to an official artist, who, based on her description, reproduced the face of the man she remembered. Eventually, she identified the man from a picture in a PGR employment file, and, as part of the investigation, identified him in person in September 1997.219 According to a Mexican newspaper, the man was Ignacio Weber Rodríguez, the head of anti-drug intelligence at what was, at the time of Hodoyáns disappearance, the National Institute for the Combat of Drugs, the PGRs counternarcotics agency.220 The PGR did not respond to a Human Rights Watch request for information on the status of the case against the agent.
It is not at all clear what officials are doing to locate the victim, and as of mid-August 1998, the Hodoyán family had no information regarding the prosecution of the man identified by Hodoyáns mother as responsible for the abduction.221 Human Rights Watch is aware of no punishment for authorities who participated in or tolerated the arbitrary detention, disappearance, or torture that began in September 1996. Moreover, the case raises serious questions about the willingnessof prosecutors to use blatantly illegal processes, including disappearance, in the name of fighting drugs. The seamless transfer of Hodoyán from secret military detention to official custody, and then to the United States, demonstrates a troubling ends-justify-the-means approach to Mexican and U.S. counternarcotics efforts.
U.S. complicity in the initial disappearance of Hodoyán is deeply troubling. Even if the State Departments version of events is truethat the failure of consular officials to aid Hodoyán stemmed solely from the consul generals negligence222U.S. law-enforcement officials moved forward with plans to further interview Hodoyán after the ATF agent learned that he was a U.S. citizen and in secret military custody.
According to Fausto Soto Miller, soldiers detained him on September 12, 1996, tortured and interrogated him, held him in unacknowledged detention for sixteen days, then turned him over to civilian prosecutors. During this period, his family searched for him in vain. For their part, prosecutors announced that Soto Miller had been detained on September 27not the 12thwhile caught in the act of guarding a drug lords safehouse. The Mexican press quoted a statement by the military labeling Soto Miller a leading drug trafficker.223 According to his family, Soto Miller had nothing to do with drug trafficking but was picked up because Alejandro Hodoyán, who had been detained by the same soldiers the day before, had had his name with him.224 Whether or not Soto Miller is linked to the drug cartel, all the evidence suggests that his version of temporary disappearance and prosecution on fabricated charges is correct.
In a letter from prison, Soto Miller recalled his treatment when detained on September 12. In addition to referring to his torturers by name, he described their acts:
The first of them connected cables to my toes, and he turned on the power. Later, he beat my heels with a board. The second person interrogated me and threatened me. They also tortured me by placing rags over my face, asphyxiating me, and putting water up my nose andin my mouth to choke me, in those moments applying electrical current that got progressively stronger.225
Soldiers in Guadalajara held him for sixteen days before turning him over to civilian prosecutors. During the time he was in unacknowledged detention, soldiers inquiries included questions about the July 22, 1996 confrontation between drug traffickers and soldiers in Guadalajara. They also flew him to Sinaloa state to identify houses belonging to drug traffickers.
Evidence from an unrelated court case corroborates Soto Millers version of events. In the trial of Gen. Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, the former anti-drug chief jailed for his ties to traffickers, Sgt. Vicente Ruiz Martínez recalled how on September 12 and 13, 1996 he was in Guadalajara, where he helped to guard several detainees.226 On September 14 he was sent to Mexico City, and he returned the next day; rather than remain in Guadalajara, though, the soldier was immediately ordered to travel to Culiacán, Sinaloa state. In his testimony about those events, he recalled that on the airplane, they brought onto the plane one of those who had been at the Fourth Company and whom he knows goes by the name of Fausto Miller. . . .227
Even though Soto Miller had been in detention since September 12, the federal prosecutors office falsely announced in early October 1996 that they had arrested Soto Miller on September 27, alleging that he was a body guard of Tijuana drug cartel leader Ramón Arrellano Félix.228 They filed drug trafficking and arms charges against him, asserting that he had been arrested in an Arrellano Félix safe house containing multiple high-caliber weapons and marijuana.229 According to court documents, Federal Judicial Police said that the arrest was made when they coincidentally flew over the house in a helicopter and noticed two vehicles in a partially covered garage that matched the description of the vehicles used in the July 22 confrontation with soldiers.230 When they saw Soto Miller run from the house, according to the official police report, they called for backup, and thesuspect was apprehended. When arrested, the officers reported, Soto Miller spoke about the illegal contents of the safe house and his own participation in the Arrellano Félix gang. These same topics formed the substance of the official statement he was alleged to have made to prosecutors on the day of his alleged arrest.231
According to Soto Miller, however, the soldiers who had illegally detained him on September 12 turned him over to federal prosecutors on September 27. The prosecutors forced him to sign a prepared statement that he was not allowed to read, which he signed Fausto Lie (Fausto Mentira), instead of Fausto Miller. According to his public defender, the detainee did not have a lawyer with him when forced to sign the statement.232 Instead, as Mexican law permits, he had people of confidence there. According to the public defender, however, the people of confidence were actually employees of the attorney generals office; neither responded to summonses to explain what happened during the time the statement was signed.233
Soto Miller was tried and convicted on June 1, 1998, and sentenced to forty years in prison for possession of prohibited weapons, possession of drugs, and criminal association based on what was alleged to have happened on September 27. In sentencing the defendant, the judge, Humberto Venancio Piñeda, rejected Soto Millers retraction of the statement he was forced to sign. Rather than requiring clarification of the procedures used in the case, the judge argued, Regarding the affirmations made repeatedly by the accused that he was detained on September 12 . . .there are no documents that sufficiently prove it such that the retraction should be given legal validity.234 Army officers identified by Soto Miller as participating in the September 12 detention or subsequent torture denied such involvement in court, and the judge cited their denials in his sentence.235 The judge refused to admit as evidence the court documents from the Rebollo case indicating that Soto Miller had been in detention since September 12, in part because the statements were not made in his courtroom.236 Overall, the judge showed greater interest inconvicting the defendant than in ensuring that serious human rights violations had not taken place during the judicial process.
The judge did express concern about Soto Millers story of detention and torture, ordering the prosecutor to investigate it. According to Soto Millers defense lawyer, the prosecutor said he found no evidence of torture or illegal detention, although the investigation officially remains open.237 Soto Millers defense lawyer has appealed the conviction.
As in the Hodoyán case, the Soto Miller incident raises several profoundly troubling issues: soldiers carried out the disappearance in violation of international law, but the justice system appeared ready to overlook the problem in the name of fighting drug trafficking. The federal attorney generals office did not answer Human Rights Watch queries about this case.
Disappearance and the Failure of the Morelos State Justice System
On January 28, 1998, Federal Highway Patrol officers discovered the commander of the Morelos state Special Anti-Kidnapping Group and two state judicial police officers disposing of the tortured body of Jorge Nava Avilés.238 The victim, who had been kidnapped the day before, reportedly died during a torture session. The Morelos law-enforcement officers tried to dump the body in Guerrero state, along the highway between Iguala and Cuernavaca. The case, which received widespread press attention, led to the downfall of many Morelos public officials, including the governor of the state, who resigned. After investigating the Nava Avilés case, the CNDH described the extent of the involvement of Morelos state officials in crime and cover-up:
In the state of Morelos, some members of the justice system have generated a climate of public insecurity, a product of the wave of kidnappings, homicides, torture, abuse of authority, and other illegal acts, committed by or consented to by those members. This has caused a climate of corruption and impunity that benefits the intellectual and material authors of these crimes. This situation has resulted in thejustice system not carrying out its appropriate functions, such as investigating and prosecuting crimes.239
The federal government quickly took control of the case under anti-organized crime laws; the state attorney general and head of the state judicial police were charged with trying to covering up the Nava Avilés torture and murder.240 While it is encouraging that federal authorities acted so quickly in the case, it is equally noteworthy that they had failed for years to pay attention to evidence that Morelos police agents were engaged in kidnappings, disappearances, and torture. Press reports from Morelos often repeated accusations made by victims and their family members regarding the involvement of police officials in such illegal acts. Indeed, at the time of the Nava Avilés murder, federal authorities had been engaged in discussions about the disappearance in early 1997 of José Alberto Guadarrama from Morelosand its concomitant exposé of the problems in Moreloswith the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
For at least two years it has been clear that the justice system was rotten, says Morelos state congressman Juan Ignacio Suárez Huape.241 There were protests, but on the state level, the leaders were involved with the criminals. On the federal level, there was no response, given the influence of [ex-Governor] Jorge Carrillo Olea. Despite the evidence, the investigations went nowhere. In December 1997, Suárez Huape organized a roundtable discussion on disappearances, torture, and impunity.242 Only after the Nava Avilés killing however, did prosecutors use the documentation he had long collected to prosecute state officials.
Prior cases had long gone uninvestigated because the very state officials responsible for doing so were involved in many of the kidnappings. One such case involved José Alberto Guadarrama García, a former state judicial police officer inMorelos state, who was detained in Emiliano Zapata city on March 26, 1997, by members of the state judicial police anti-kidnapping squad.
Elvira García Avelar, Guadarramas mother, was with him when he was arrested, and she identified one of the arresting officers as José Luis Beltrán Velázquez, from the anti-kidnapping squad. Responding to a complaint the next day, state prosecutors initiated a fruitless search for the victim. On March 29, according to ACAT and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL), which filed a complaint about the disappearance before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, family members of the victim were told by a guard at a state attorney generals detention center that Guadarrama had been brought in on the 26th but that he was sent to a state prison. Family members did not find him at the state prison, and the same official at the detention center later denied that Guadarrama had been taken there.243
Authorities did open an investigation into the disappearance, during which Beltrán Velázquez denied any responsibility for the incident.244 On April 4, Guadarramas mother filed a request for amparo, roughly similar to habeas corpus, naming Mexico City and Morelos state justice and police authorities as responsible for the detention.245 On May 21, a judge denied the writ on the grounds that the authorities said to be responsible for the detention had denied the accusation and García Avelar had not proven that they were responsible.246
Authorities failed to move on the case until late October 1997, after ACAT and CEJIL filed their complaint with the Inter-American Commission. On October 28, an arrest warrant was issued for Beltrán Velázquez, who had long since resigned from the police force and gone into hiding.
As the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ruled, federal governments cannot avoid responsibility for the actions of state-level authorities by claiming that their federal system of government shields them when federal agents are not involved in human rights violations. Official tolerance of human rights violations is itself a human rights violation. This principle clearly holds in the case of Mexico.
The Suspected Disappearance of Verber, Verber, and Beltrán
Rogelio Verber Campos, Raúl Verber Campos, and Cecilio Beltrán Cavada were last seen on January 6, 1997, in Baja California state. Two days later, the Verber family received a phone call from a man who refused to identify himself, indicating that the Verber Campos brothers had been detained by a group of people dressed in dark uniforms and driving a Suburban vehicle with polarized windows. A few hours later, they received another call, this time indicating that the brothers had been moved to a military base.247 In this case, no direct evidence links government officials to the fate of the missing men. Human Rights Watchs fear that they may have been disappeared by state agents, however, has been strengthened by authorities failure to investigate the case properly, despite repeated efforts by the families of those involved.
The Verber family had been under suspicion by the authorities for drug-related offenses. On September 12, 1996one day after Alejandro Hodoyán disappeared and the same day that soldiers illegally detained Fausto Soto Millersoldiers surrounded the family home in Tijuana. Federal attorneys, acting with a warrant, searched the premises for the Arellano Félix brothers, finding neither the brothers, nor drugs, nor guns.248 Rogelio Verber, the father of the missing brothers, informed Human Rights Watch that, off and on after September 12 and prior to the disappearance of his sons, he had observed unmarked cars parked outside his house.249
On January 10, 1997, the families of the three men filed a request for amparo in state and federal courts, arguing that the men were being held by the military. In response, a federal judge ordered an end to the incommunicado detention.250 On behalf of the judge, an agent of the court went to police offices and military bases in Tijuana on January 10. None admitted to holding the men; at the Tijuana military garrison, the agent was told to come back later by officials who refused to give their names.251 The following day, the agent was told that the men were not there. Similar searches carried out after family members named additional possible places of detention were also fruitless.
On January 13, Raúl and Rogelio Verbers father sought help from the state police,252 but state authorities never interviewed him about the complaint he had filed.253 Eighteen months later, using the control number that prosecutors assigned to the case when the complaint was initially lodged, Human Rights Watch sought information regarding what action had been taken on behalf of the brothers. No such file exist, was the official response.254 On March 4, 1997, the Verber family and relatives of several other missing men filed a formal complaint with the PGR. Displaying an outrageous disregard for the urgency required, it was one year later to the day that federal authorities finally interviewed the Verber family about the complaint.255
Unlike the Hodoyán and Soto Miller cases, in the Verber and Beltrán case there is no hard evidence to link the disappearance of the three men to state agents. We know, however, that the Verber family had been under surveillance since soldiers moved against Hodoyán and Soto Miller. The failure of federal authorities to investigate the case promptly raises serious questions regarding the governments concern for finding the missing men.
210 Julia Preston, Mexican Tale: Drugs, Crime, Torture and the U.S., New York Times, August 18, 1997.
211 Unsigned statement by Alejandro Hodoyán, March 3 and 4, 1997. The statement was made after Hodoyáns release from military custody and before he again disappeared. After the second disappearance, the document was signed by the family members to whom he recounted the events.
214 Human Rights Watch interview, family members of Alejandro Hodoyán, Baja California, May 4, 1998.
215 Human Rights Watch interview, Washington, D.C., September 4, 1998.
216 Ministerial declaration of Vicente Ruiz Martínez, March 18, 1997 and declaration of Cabo de Trans. Ramón Caetano Polino Alcala, February 19, 1997.
217 Human Rights Watch interview, members of Alejandro Hodoyáns family, Tijuana, Baja California, May 4, 1998.
218 Human Rights Watch interview, Cristina Palacios Roji Siliceo, Tijuana, Baja California, May 4, 1998.
220 Anita Snow (Associated Press), Anti-Drug Chief Weber Accused in Kidnap, Torture, The News, September 4, 1997.
221 Human Rights Watch telephone interview, Cristina Palacios Roji Siliceo, August 13, 1998.
222 Human Rights Watch interview, State Department official, Washington, D.C., September 4, 1998.
223 Positiva, la intervención del Ejército contra el narcotráfico, Excélsior (Mexico City), August 12, 1997.
224 Human Rights Watch interview, family members, Mexico City, June 6, 1998.
225 Fausto Soto Miller, letter from prison, October 10, 1997. Translation by Human Rights Watch.
226 Ministerial declaration of Vicente Ruiz Martínez, March 18, 1997.
228 Juan Manuel Venegas, Culpa Lozano a los hermanos Arellano Félix del asesinato de Ibarra Santés, La Jornada, October 3, 1996.
229 First Federal District Court in the State of Mexico, sentence in criminal case 105/96, May 29, 1998.
232 Human Rights Watch telephone interview, Héctor Sergio Pérez Vargas, July 2, 1998.
234 First Federal District Court in the State of Mexico, sentence in criminal case 105/96, May 29, 1998, p. 67.
237 Human Rights Watch telephone interview, Héctor Sergio Pérez Vargas, July 2, 1998.
238 The Morelos case preceded a similar problem in Chihuahua state, where the leaders of a federal unit responsible for investigating drug-related kidnappings were reportedly found to be responsible for some of the kidnappings they were supposed to be investigating. Associated Press, Elite Mexican Police Recalled, May 21, 1998.
239 National Human Rights Commission, Recommendation 25/98, in Gaceta 92 (Mexico City: Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos, March 1998), p. 142. Translation by Human Rights Watch.
240 Former Morelos judicial officials released on bail, Universal Journal, March 10, 1998; Conceden libertad bajo caución a Pedro Merlo y Miyazawa, La Jornada, March 10, 1998.
241 Human Rights Watch telephone interview, July 15, 1998.
242 See Desaparición forzada de personas, tortura e impunidad en Morelos, a report produced by the Morelos state Congresss Justice and Human Rights Commission, based on a roundtable discussion held on December 9, 1997.
243 Acción de los Cristianos para Abolir la Tortura and Center for Justice and International Law, document submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, August 22, 1997.
244 Comparecencia Previa Presentación de José Luis Velázquez, April 3, 1997.
245 Request for amparo, April 2, 1997 (received April 4, 1997), Elvira García Avelar.
246 Judgement of amparo 233/97, May 21, 1997, Cuernavaca, Morelos.
247 Human Rights Watch interview, Rogelio Verber, father of the missing brothers, Tijuana, Baja California, June 3, 1998.
248 Office of the Federal Attorney General, National Institute for the Combat of Drugs, Acta Circunstanciada, September 12, 1996.
249 Human Rights Watch interview, Rogelio Verber.
250 Ruling on amparo, Judge Pablo Jesús Hernández Moreno, January 10, 1997.
251 Report filed by court agent, January 1997.
252 Office of the State Attorney General of Baja California, Volante de Canalización, January 13, 1997.
253 Human Rights Watch interview, Rogelio Verber.
254 Human Rights Watch telephone interview, Leonardo Cortez Téllez, director of investigations, Baja California state attorney generals office, June 3, 1998.