MEXICO: A leaked report says Mexico's military and security forces executed hundreds of civilians and 'armed militants', writes Hector Tobar in Mexico City
The Mexican government and military committed "crimes against humanity" through a "scorched-earth" campaign against rural guerrillas in the 1970s, according to a draft report of the first official investigation into Mexico's "dirty war" against left-wing rebels and activists.
The investigation by the country's Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past was commissioned by president Vicente Fox about a year after his election in 2000 ended decades of one-party dominance.
The draft report was leaked by the Washington-based National Security Archive, which published it on Sunday on its website.
"The authoritarian attitude with which the Mexican state wished to control social dissent created a spiral of violence which . . . led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide," the report's authors write.
The crimes outlined were allegedly committed from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s under three Mexican presidents.
The special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, received the report from a team of 27 researchers in December.
Military and security forces secretly executed or "disappeared" hundreds of Mexican civilians and "armed militants", the report says. Thousands more were tortured or illegally detained by the government.
The extensive documentation contained in the report - including records from the Mexican military, police and interior ministry - was "absolutely unprecedented", said Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico Project for the US National Security Archive.
The report details helicopter "death flights" from military bases in Acapulco and elsewhere, in which the bodies of dozens of detained left-wing activists and guerrillas were surreptitiously dumped into the Pacific Ocean.
It also documents a Mexican army campaign to deny food to residents of areas in the southern state of Guerrero where guerrillas were operating. These and other abuses, it says, amount to genocide, as defined by international law.
Ms Doyle said her NGO published the report on its website because copies had already been circulating among a small circle of writers, historians and intellectuals in Mexico. "The way that this has leaked out into the hands of a few people has echoes of an old style of doing things in Mexico."
Human-rights sources had feared the prosecutor Mr Carrillo was delaying publication because of pressure from the Mexican army to censor part of its findings.
Mr Carrillo has been frustrated in his attempts to prosecute a number of high-profile officials of the Mexican government, including former president Luis Echeverria, who was minister of the interior during the notorious 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student demonstrators.
Before the release of the special prosecutor's draft report, there had been no official calculation of crimes allegedly committed by the Mexican government to quell left-wing agitation.
The authors list hundreds of police documents and eyewitness accounts they say show hundreds of "disappeared" people had died in police and military custody.
The report also offers new detail on the Mexican army's counter-insurgency method in the southern state of Guerrerro, where teacher Genaro Vazquez had launched a Marxist guerrilla movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The Mexican army, the report says, "devastated the region, committed a true genocide, killing them with hunger, bombing the area, [ and] illegally taking prisoner hundreds of residents to create panic".
It adds that the Mexican army engaged in "pillage" of some villages and describes how soldiers entered the town of Los Pilloncillos, rounded up six adult men and executed them in the town centre.
Some relatives of the disappeared said that knowing the truth of what happened a generation ago was not enough.
"We're sure that very soon the special prosecutor will disappear because he didn't do anything, it was all just a scam," said Teresa Torres Vargas, who lost a son in the Tlatelolco student massacre.