The violent kidnapping attempt was nothing new in 1970s Mexico. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)– already in power for four decades–was fighting off attacks from 29 scattered leftist groups numbering about 1,800 revolutionaries. But this one had a twist. The target’s brother, Jose Lopez Portillo, was about to take power as Mexico’s president. Once in office, Lopez Portillo intensified the crackdown against violent revolutionaries, the attack on his sister fresh in his mind." It was a warning of what the future would be like if the guerrilla phenomenon got stronger," 81-year-old Lopez Portillo said in an interview with NEWSWEEK.
The female assailant that day, shot in the left arm, went deep underground. Alicia de los Rios Merino, a member of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, sometimes called her family from safe houses, always using the alias “Suzana.” On Jan. 6, 1978, she phoned her sister Marta in a panic. There had been a gun battle, and she was holed up in a Mexico City house, surrounded by police. The next day Marta flew to Mexico City, where officials told her to look for Alicia among the cadavers in the morgue. She was not there.
Her family now is convinced that Alicia is one of Mexico’s “disappeareds”: seized by security forces during turbulent times, but never seen again. The numbers–465 people between 1970 and 1982–are not dramatic by Argentinian or Chilean standards. But suddenly the case of Mexico’s disappeareds has risen high on the agenda of President Vicente Fox.
Upon taking power last December, ending 71 years of PRI rule, Fox vowed to examine old cases of corruption and human-rights abuses. But despite growing pressure for a truth commission–such as those in South Africa or Chile–to exorcise the country’s dirty secrets, Fox’s choices are far from simple. Talk of a truth commission has enraged the PRI, which remains powerful enough in Congress to paralyze his reform program. If the government looks into too many dark corners, says Federico Estevez, a political scientist in Mexico City, “there could be major collateral damage.”
The explosion seems to be coming nonetheless. A prominent academic, the first outsider granted access to Mexican spy records in 70 years, was able to review intelligence reports of 11 people who had vanished; the documents show that 10 had been in government custody. In his initial search, one entry in particular stood out, says the academic, Sergio Aguayo, a former leftist radical himself who shared his findings with NEWSWEEK. He was looking for information about Enrique Perez Mora, a boyhood friend who had joined the rebels and was eventually killed, when he stumbled on the following notation, dated Jan. 6, 1978: “Alicia de los Rios Merino, who is detained for being a member of the Liga, said she had been the lover of the deceased [Enrique Perez Mora], with whom she had a child…” It was the present tense–“who is detained”–that alerted Aguayo, a professor at the Colegio de Mexico. “I knew I had something very important,” he says. “It was the first documented proof that the state was responsible for a disappearance.”
The daughter of an apple grower in the northern state of Chihuahua, Alicia de los Rios Merino joined the guerrillas in 1973. One afternoon, Alicia, then 21, announced to her family that she was leaving home for good to help wage war against the Mexican government. Her parents begged her not to go: only a semester remained before Alicia was to graduate from college as an electrical engineer. But a companero from the guerrillas was waiting in the next room. “She was against the system, because there was so much poverty, so much inequality,” recalls her mother, Alicia Merino Figueroa, now 84. “I told her, ‘My daughter, how can we combat this? It is impossible’.”
That did not stop her from trying. On Jan. 23, 1976, she helped free six fellow guerrillas from Penal de los Oblatos in Guadalajara. The prisoners dug a hole through a wall in their cellblock, killed three guards with pistols that relatives had smuggled into the prison inside of bread and escaped on a homemade rope down a watchtower. Alicia and another comrade stood on a street corner kissing in order to distract the guards in the tower, and later provided cover as the escapees fled to a waiting van. Enrique Perez Mora, who had been arrested and charged with murder and terrorism two years earlier, was among the escapees. He and Alicia met the day of the escape, and by May she was pregnant. The next month a security agent killed 25-year-old Enrique in a shoot-out.
Alicia’s parents visited her in Mexico City in late 1976, when she was nearly eight months pregnant. She refused to come home. The baby was born on Feb. 6, 1977, and the infant joined her mother and grandmother as the family’s third Alicia. A month later Marta went to Mexico City, where her sister passed her the baby. Marta recalls that “the baby could not sleep. She was used to sleeping in her mother’s arms because of all the insecurity.” A year later Alicia disappeared.
Three former guerrillas, all prisoners who were released, recount seeing Alicia in captivity. The most vivid account came from Mario Alvaro Cartagena Lopez, a guerrilla who had broken out of prison with Enrique and later shared a house with Alicia in Mexico City. On April 5, 1978, he was shot seven times in a fire fight with soldiers and taken to Military Camp No. 1 in Mexico City. “They brought Alicia in to identify me,” recalls Cartagena, whose leg was amputated the next day. “I remember her face. Very thin. She must have lost 20 kilos.” Sentenced to five years in prison, he never saw her again.
But a former prison doctor did. Juan Altamirano Perez, who worked at the Santa Marta Acatitla prison from 1961 to 1992, has reason to remember Alicia. She arrived in prison pregnant, he told NEWSWEEK, and he delivered her baby by Caesarean-section in June 1978. The baby, a girl, spent nights with her mother and days in a nursery inside the prison. But two months after the birth, Altamirano recalls, “the baby was handed over to people who said they were relatives of Alicia.” And in late 1978, when the doctor arrived at work, Alicia was gone too. “She never came back,” he says. Altamirano told the story to the newly formed National Human Rights Commission in 1992, but it was never investigated. And until now, Alicia’s family knew nothing of a second daughter.
Over the past 20 years Alicia’s family has tried several times to file a lawsuit against the government but was told there was no evidence that the state had anything to do with her vanishing. Relatives also met more than a dozen times with government officials to seek the truth. In 1991 President Carlos Salinas told several mothers to go see Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, then the Interior minister, to get their children back. Barrios sent them to the human-rights commission, where Marta claims she was told that her sister had been freed from a military prison in 1983. Barrios died last October. “The government has never helped us,” says Rosario Ibarra, who formed an activist group for families of the disappeared in 1977, two years after her son vanished. “I know my son was a guerrilla. Judge him and punish him, but don’t make him disappear.”
The clearest memory family members have of Alicia is the daughter she left in their care. She grew up believing that her father had died in an accident and that her mother was studying in the United States, and she often drew cards and wrote letters that her family pretended to send. In 1985, when Alicia was 8, her family told her the truth about her parents. Now she says: “I am used to absence. It is rare that I miss anyone.” She also says: “I would rather my mother be dead than in a clandestine prison. Because I imagine a clandestine prison as a dungeon.”
When Aguayo met 23-year-old Alicia in January, he told her about his old friend, the father she never knew. She may someday learn more of her mother’s story. Alicia’s records track meetings that she attended and note the attack on President Lopez Portillo’s sister. Most important, they say that she was questioned on March 11, 1978, more than two months after she vanished. Aguayo negotiated access not to the spy files themselves but to a complicated system of cards used to track files. The complete file of her interrogation, according the cards, is labeled 11-235-78 H-4 L-50. There are dozens more files mentioned in her cards. Do the actual files name soldiers and security agents involved in disappearances and the bosses who gave the orders?
The PRI was often accused of corruption and political blackmail, but rarely of violence–and always in the context of a government that kept Mexico stable in a turbulent region. Indeed, violence in Mexico has always paled in comparison with places like Argentina, where tens of thousands of people were killed in a dirty war against the left–or Guatemala, where the 35-year civil war cost 200,000 lives. There are no examples of truth commissions in a place where the number of victims is so relatively low. “You have to look at the type of transition we have here in Mexico,” says Interior Minister Santiago Creel, who opposes a truth commission. “We never had racial discrimination as in South Africa or a military regime like Argentina or Chile or the countries of Eastern Europe.”
Other officials argue that the government must uncover the darker side of the old regime in order to make peace with the past. Presented with the detention records of the disappeared, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, the national-security adviser, said: “This is actual proof that these cases can be investigated. It demonstrates that the disappeared were in the custody of the Directorate of Federal Security. That is 80 percent of the case.”
Lopez Portillo, president from 1976 to 1982, recalled a pregnant guerrilla participating in the attack on his sister. In the NEWSWEEK interview, he spoke proudly of solving the rebel problem by issuing an amnesty for political prisoners and opening up political space for the ultra-left. “I tried to use legal measures, not police ones,” he said. But the security forces continued their offensive against the guerrillas, and Lopez Portillo acknowledged that at times they may have overstepped their bounds. Shown the detention records, he said that security forces could have been involved in the disappearance of Alicia de los Rios: “Possibly the fight to control this clandestine [guerrilla] movement took on an inertia. It is not impossible that it happened like that.” Lopez Portillo does not oppose the formation of a truth commission, unlike some of his fellow PRI politicians of that era. Mario Moya Palencia, Interior secretary from 1970 to 1976, told NEWSWEEK: “It is truly absurd to revive these issues.”
The next move lies with Fox. He defeated the PRI last year largely on promises of change, and he needs to investigate old abuses boldly to maintain his popularity. His government has already arrested several high-level members of drug cartels as well as a former PRI governor who had been on the lam for two years, fleeing from drug-trafficking charges. But Fox has other priorities as well, especially passing a fiscal-reform bill to raise crucial revenue for his government. The Congress, no longer a rubber stamp, recently tabled the bill until the fall, and Fox will not help his cause by launching what his opposition will paint as a political lynching. Truth-commission opponents such as Creel, the Interior minister, don’t oppose examining the past, but they would rather the courts or the Congress do it than a commission set up by presidential decree.
A bigger obstacle to forming a truth commission is elusiveness of the truth itself. Mexico would most likely follow the model of Chile, where a massive research effort produced reports that accused the government of human-rights violations, recommended compensation, but mentioned few names and led to few prosecutions. Families of the killed and disappeared in Chile now receive monthly checks from the government. But promises of immunity would be unlikely to persuade surviving Mexican security officials and politicians to talk, since the government apparently lacks enough evidence for prosecutions in any case. Researcher Aguayo is a leading candidate to head a truth commission, but even he has mixed feelings about the job: “Should I get involved in making deals with torturers?”
The families of the victims appear unwilling to bargain away justice for truth. “I want to know what happened to my mother,” says Alicia. “But we also need a penal process to punish those responsible.” Fox would like nothing less, but he also needs to think about his own political health. He is likely to offer a very Mexican solution: a truth commission with limited investigative powers that offers a general recounting of the past without naming the guilty. And Mexico will not be forced to look itself in the mirror too closely.
Correction
In “Mexico’s History Test” (World Affairs, July 2), a photo caption incorrectly described Sergio Aguayo as a former “rebel.” In fact, while several of his teenage friends joined the Mexican guerrilla movement of the 1970s, Aguayo turned down an invitation to enlist and instead went on to become an academic and human-rights advocate. Newsweek regrets the error.
