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Mexico: PRI ordered abuses
By Washington Post
Published November 23, 2006
BOGOTA, Colombia - Mexican authorities have quietly released an 859-page report that describes how three Mexican governments killed, tortured and disappeared dissidents and political opponents from the late 1960s until 1982. The "Historical Report to the Mexican Society" marks the first time Mexico has officially accepted responsibility for waging a dirty war against leftist guerrillas, university students and activists. It includes declassified records, photographs and details about individuals who were killed under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled the country for 71 years before being ousted in 2000. The report offers detail about how the state, with orders from up high, carried out a brutal offensive that included using electrical shocks, rounding up villagers and burning down villages in regions considered subversive. The report, released by the attorney general's office late Friday at the start of a three-day holiday, comes five years after President Vicente Fox's government appointed special prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto to investigate crimes under the PRI. An early version was leaked in February against the wishes of Fox and Carrillo, who felt it was biased against the military and left out important facts. The final report includes the names of 645 who were disappeared. It also includes the names of 99 who were victims of extrajudicial executions and more than 2,141 cases of torture. Among the more egregious abuses examined in the document was the 1968 massacre of dozens of people at the Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City, an assault prosecutors believe was engineered by Luis Echeverria, at the time the interior minister. The report has led to little punishment. A handful of former officials have been jailed but later released. The abuses took place during the administrations of Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964 to 1970), Echeverria and Jose Lopez Portillo (1976 to 1982). Only Echeverria is alive, but efforts to try him for the crimes have failed.
[Last modified November 22, 2006, 23:11:35]
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