LETTER FROM MEXICO
The moment must have been ceremonial, emotional and historic: after three years of work, the truth commission was going to make public an unprecedented investigation into the period known in Mexico as the “dirty war” (1960-1990), but that we knew too little about how it worked and the consequences.
Finally a president (before his transfer of power, on Tuesday the 1stAhem October, to his successor Claudia Sheinbaum), Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as “AMLO”, decided by presidential decree to create an independent organization, the Mechanism of Truth and Historical Clarification, so that fifty specialists and historians can investigate what really happened. during this era when law enforcement followed the doctrine of counterinsurgency warfare. The Mechanism published two 7,000-page reports, one in July and the other in September, after three years of work: one on violations committed against political organizations and the other dedicated to the violence suffered by society as a whole.
But instead of this great moment of truth, the Mexican authorities responded with a heavy silence: “AMLO”, who was supposed to present the results of this work to the country, did not say a word about it when he likes to talk so much. of the story during his three hours a day of press conferences. Above all, the authorities took the censorship scissors. The Ministry of the Interior, about which Mechanism, ignored and even censored the work of historians and only published a tendentious 110-page summary.
This administration judged, based on criteria that are in no way specified, that historians had “It exceeded the objective set by the truth commission. The report investigated human rights violations that were not necessarily linked to state violence in the context of counterinsurgency.”
“The internal enemy, this homosexual and drugged guerrilla”
However, this is precisely one of the main revelations of the second report: the authors show that repression was used against all forms of dissent during these years, and not only against that linked to political demands. They also point out that counterinsurgency methods were used not only in the army, but also in federal and local police. “Each governor, each police officer, each military command ended up interpreting who was a communist, who represented a threat, how to repress dissent and discipline the population”says the report.
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