Case shines spotlight on Mexico's 'dirty war'

MEXICO CITY -- If it had not been for a newspaper story, Rosario Ibarra de Piedra might never have learned of her son's mysterious disappearance at the hands of Mexico's secret police.

In fact, 28 years after Ibarra read that her son, Jesus Piedra, had been seized on a street corner and taken to a military camp in northern Mexico, she knows little else about his fate, despite decades of hammering on government doors on behalf of the hundreds of leftist activists who vanished during the government's so-called dirty war of the 1960s and 1970s.

Ibarra's efforts may finally be paying off. Last week, Mexico's Supreme Court accepted a request from the federal attorney general's office to review Piedra's case, committing itself for the first time to delve into one of the darkest periods in Mexican history.

The court, whose decision is expected as early as November, will rule on whether the statute of limitations has expired for the crime of forced disappearance, opening the way for dozens of former top government officials to go on trial. Among them is former president Luis Echeverria, who governed from 1970 to 1976, when the government committed some of the worst atrocities in its campaign to stamp out a leftist guerrilla movement.

Piedra, a medical student in the northern city of Monterrey, was a member of one of the largest urban guerrilla groups, the September 23 Communist League. But rather than rejoice that her son's case has reached the highest court, Ibarra is skeptical that a decision will bring her any closer to learning what happened to him.

"They just took my son's case because I scream the loudest," said Ibarra, 76, whose Eureka Committee has secured the release of 148 political prisoners, mostly through her tireless pressure.

"I think it's totally false what they are doing. It is a smoke screen to cover up lots of other things they don't want us to see," she said, referring to efforts by President Vicente Fox to address past government abuses under the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party.

Fox sponsored a new Freedom of Information Act, giving Mexicans access to millions of once-secret government files from the past 50 years. He also created a special prosecutor's office for past crimes, which is championing Jesus Piedra's case and those of other victims of the dirty war period.

But Ibarra is not alone in criticizing Fox's efforts. Many legal analysts and human rights activists say that a truth commission would have been a more effective method of addressing decades-old crimes.

Since its creation in early 2002, the special prosecutor's office has yet to bring a single person to trial. Its first attempt to get arrest warrants for two former heads of the Federal Security Directorate accused of kidnapping Piedra were dismissed in April by a district judge, who ruled that the statute of limitations had expired.

The current case before the Supreme Court is an attempt to have that decision overturned.

"I think the attorney general's office asked the court to take the case so it wouldn't look like it was doing nothing," said Raul Carranca, a criminal law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "And I think it did so, knowing full well that it would be hard for the court to give a different ruling" from the district judge.

At the heart of the debate is the question of whether Mexican law allows for such old crimes to go to court. In the case of forced disappearances, the law sets the statute of limitations at 23 years, meaning Ibarra's last chance for trying those responsible for her son's disappearance expired six years ago.

Even if the Supreme Court rules, in accordance with international law, that forced disappearance is an ongoing crime, there is another legal snag. Forced disappearance has only been considered a crime in Mexico since 2001, and the constitution bars laws from being applied retroactively.

Legal difficulties aside, not everyone thinks the government's effort to bring Jesus Piedra's case to trial is a waste of time. "This could be a strategic ploy by the government, but the fact that the Supreme Court resolves the issue and makes its arguments explicit is very important, particularly in a country where everything happens at the margins of the law," said Graciela Stains, a constitutional law professor at National Autonomous University.

"This is a confirmation that we are advancing in a new judicial culture, in which the court can no longer choose which cases it wants to take and which it doesn't."

For Ibarra and other families of the disappeared, however, the court's ruling is of secondary importance. "I'm not that interested in punishment," Ibarra said. "I want to know what happened with the disappeared and where they are now. Not just my son, but all of them."