HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------MEXICO
JAMES F. SMITH, LA TIMES - Fulfilling a key campaign pledge, Mexican
President Vicente Fox said Tuesday that his government will prosecute
and punish officials who are found responsible for killing hundreds of
leftists in the 1970s and '80s. Speaking in the courtyard of a former
jail once filled with political prisoners, Fox also said that security
files from that era will be opened, allowing public scrutiny for the
first time of human rights abuses during the government's "dirty war"
against leftist insurgents. Earlier, the National Human Rights
Commission disclosed the results of a long-delayed report on the
disappearances of activists and guerrillas in that period, when the
long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, controlled almost
every aspect of Mexican life. The commission found evidence that in at
least 275 out of 532 reported cases, police or security forces had
snatched and later killed the leftists. In 97 other cases, there were
signs of forced disappearance but no proof; in the remaining 160 cases,
no evidence was found to explain the disappearances. In every confirmed
case, the missing people were tortured-and no formal charges were ever
brought against the insurgents, the study found. The rights report
doesn't mention names of suspected rights violators. But commission
President Jose Luis Soberanes said the investigation identified 74
"public servants" from 37 government agencies who are believed to have
been involved in the disappearances. The report's findings were by far
the most explicit evidence of the former government's responsibility for
the disappearances, after decades of denials that rights violations
occurred.
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