MEXICO CITY (AP) — More evidence has emerged that Mexican authorities disposed of the bodies of dissidents in “death flights” during the anniversary of the country’s terror threat. 1965-1990 “dirty war.” “
The Mexican government’s Truth Commission said in a report Friday that witness recollections and documents leaked over the years described the victims’ harrowing final moments. The executions were part of an effort by the Mexican government at the time to eliminate leftist social and guerrilla movements.
The victims, who have not been identified or counted, were dragged one by one to a bench at a military airfield near Acapulco. They thought they were going to have their pictures taken but were instead shot in the back of the head and their bodies dumped by plane into the Pacific Ocean.
According to the testimony of Gustavo Tarín, who served in a military police unit at the time, the same gun was used so often in the killings that soldiers coined a nickname for it: “the sword of justice.”
Tarín said that perhaps as many as 1,500 people died in this way, but he did not provide lists or names of the victims. Some victims may have been dying, but not dead, when they were pushed out of the planes.
Margarito Monroy, a military aircraft mechanic, said he had flown on 15 flights and that female victims were sometimes offered to be released, or their husbands would be released, if they had sex with soldiers. However, he never saw any of them being released.
The truth commission found logs of about 30 flights by one plane from the base between 1975 and 1979. And a two-decade-old testimony by a man who claimed to be a deserter from the armed forces mentions another 25 flights by another plane.
That statement, long preserved in the archives of a now-deceased human rights activist, included a list of 183 names of likely victims of the “death flights,” several of whom matched people who disappeared during the government’s counterinsurgency campaign.
Unlike the better known case of the ‘death flights’ carried out by Argentina’s military dictatorship from 1976-1983Little is known about the attacks Mexico carried out, mainly in the 1970s, from a small air base at Pie de la Cuesta, just west of Acapulco.
During a trial in 2012-2017, survivors in Argentina testified that the flights occurred at least weekly.
The Argentine trial, which sentenced 29 former officials to life in prison, proved that the Argentine dictatorship used “death flights” as a systematic method of extermination. The Argentine junta is widely considered the deadliest of the military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Human rights groups estimate that 30,000 people were killed, many of whom disappeared without a trace.
In Mexico, the less widespread executions appeared to target small guerrilla movements in rural areas of Guerrero state, where Acapulco is located. But a wide range of people were apparently swept up in the killings.
The Mexican executions appeared more rudimentary and less well-planned: fishermen in the area reported seeing bodies washed up on the shore, where the military reportedly put them in bags weighted with rocks and threw them into the ocean.
The revelations were part of a 4,000-page report detailing everything from executions, torture, disappearances and forced transfers by the government against peasants, students, trade unionists and members of indigenous groups. Almost none of the abuses have ever been brought to justice, despite investigations launched during the government of President Vicente Fox (2000-2006).
The victims of the “death flights” were only a small part of a larger strategy of repression. Overall, the Truth Commission cited evidence that there were approximately 4,500 identified victims of serious abuses during the so-called “dirty war” nationwide. It documented 1,450 deaths and another 517 who disappeared without trace.
The government has conducted excavations in and around military bases in recent years to relocate the remains of those buried in secret graves, with relatively little success. During the commission’s work, the remains of seven victims were recovered.
But the report’s authors also noted that the military, the National Intelligence Center and other agencies denied requests for some documents and destroyed others in an effort to “hide the truth.”
The commission has called for an investigation into the involvement of about 600 possible perpetrators of the abuses, although many of them may be dead.
In 2004, the late former president Luis Echeverría the first former Mexican head of state to be formally charged with criminal wrongdoing. Prosecutors linked Echeverría, who ruled from 1970 to 1976, to the “dirty war” in which hundreds of leftist activists and members of fringe guerrilla groups were imprisoned, killed or simply disappeared without a trace.
In 2005, a judge ruled that Echeverria could not be tried on charges of genocide stemming from political killings in 1971. He argued that while the former president was responsible for murder, the statute of limitations for that crime had expired in 1985. In March 2009, a federal court upheld the lower court’s ruling. ___
