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Mexico Bares Its Secret Past Kate Doyle

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Mexico Bares Its Secret Past Kate Doyle REP•RTAGE Kate Doyle is a senior analyst and the director of the Mexico Project at the National Security Archive, Washington, D.C. She lives in Mexico City. “Forgetting Is Not Justice” Mexico Bares Its Secret Past Kate Doyle In the heart of Mexico City, there is an old Mora, head of the state intelligence service panopticon prison. A guard tower once rose CISEN (Centro de Investigación y Seguridad at its center, surrounded by cells. Like all Nacional)—the president announced the panopticons, it was a structure designed to opening of tens of thousands of formerly se- permit total surveillance and control of the cret records about state-sponsored terror prison population by the state: simply by from the 1960s to the 1980s. The collection pacing the tower’s small circular room, a was the result of an executive order issued guard could watch any prisoner, day or by Fox seven months earlier demanding that night, moving about in his exposed cage. the secretariats of the interior (Gobernación) This was Lecumberri—the “Black and defense (Secretaría de la Defensa Na- Palace”—built at the end of the nineteenth cional, or SEDENA) turn over to the archive century, where from the 1950s through the all records in their possession on what is be- mid-1970s, Mexico held its political prison- ing called, for the first time in Mexico, the ers. The inmates most recently here were “dirty war.” not only members of the guerrilla, but the In a speech delivered before members of students, academics, dissident political lead- the press and archive staff, Fox told his au- ers, and labor organizers who dared to oper- dience that the 60,000 newly opened files ate outside the tight strictures for dissent would contribute to more than just the re- established by the government in those construction of history; they would be used years. as evidence in building criminal cases Today, Lecumberri is no longer a prison. against individuals responsible for violating The building was decommissioned, its tow- political and human rights. “No society can er removed, and in 1982 it was converted tolerate excesses and wrongs committed into the Archivo General de la Nación against human rights,” the president de- (AGN), Mexico’s national archives, where clared. “For this reason, we are prepared to millions of pages of the country’s docu- accept the ultimate consequences of the clar- mentary heritage are stored for public use. ification of these deeds.” Prison cells have become record repositories; The first researchers arrived the next the corridors between them are the galleries morning; a few more trickle in every day. in which researchers now sit and pore over They are historians, human rights activists, their nation’s history. journalists, families of the disappeared—and On June 18, 2002, President Vicente former inmates of the Lecumberri prison. Fox Quesada convened an extraordinary And that is how it happened that citizens public ceremony in the courtyard of Lecum- who were once the subjects of surveillance berri. Accompanied by senior members of by the Mexican state now gather in the old his government—including Interior Secre- panopticon to scrutinize the state itself. tary Santiago Creel, Attorney General Rafael Ever since Fox’s electoral victory, talk of Macedo de la Concha, and Eduardo Medina exposing the crimes of the ancien régime has “Forgetting Is Not Justice” 61 become a national pastime. How best to de- ter and legalized the Mexican Communist stroy the legacy of impunity and democratic Party. It was a bid for legitimacy—the PRI dysfunction left by the Institutional Revolu- had looked distinctly undemocratic during tionary Party (PRI) than to reveal specific in- the 1976 presidential election, when its can- stances of corruption, nepotism, and repres- didate was forced to run unopposed by the sion committed by previous governments? failure of the only other remotely viable par- Indeed, initial forays confirm that the ty, the National Action Party (PAN), to enter archive opens a revealing paper trail through the race. López Portillo sought to preserve the Mexican past, from the killing of dozens his party’s hegemony and fend off its critics of student demonstrators on the eve of the by pulling new competitors into the politi- 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, cal process. through the government’s brutal assault on He also hoped to co-opt an angry and the left in the 1970s and 1980s—the hid- articulate leftist movement that accused the den history behind the political transition PRI of betraying its revolutionary roots and that finally led to the election of Vicente demanded radical change unacceptable to Fox in July 2000. those in power. The regime’s savage re- The president himself raised public ex- sponse to what began as a series of student pectations during his campaign, with prom- protests in 1968 had spawned tiny but vio- ises to promote a new accountability and lent armed opposition groups in the coun- unearth the truth about the past. Due to a try’s poorest rural states—Guerrero and recalcitrant Congress and Fox’s own lack of Oaxaca, among others—and urban terrorism political skills, his administration has so far in some of the larger cities. A military coun- failed to carry out most of the fiscal and bu- terinsurgency campaign wiped out most of reaucratic reforms it seeks, the privatization the extreme left by the mid-1970s. In 1976, schemes, and the prosecution of powerful outgoing President Luis Echeverría Alvarez members of the elite for corruption. Fox has created a clandestine security unit called the been more successful in challenging the en- White Brigade to deal with the rest, which trenched secrecy and history of violence it did with all due efficiency—mostly by wrought by decades of one-party rule. In ad- torturing and killing them. López Portillo, dition to compelling the disclosure of secret who supported the hard line secretly, pub- files on the dirty war, the Fox government licly took the edge off with an amnesty de- has appointed a special prosecutor to inves- cree and the invitation for broader political tigate past human rights crimes, encouraged participation. international scrutiny of Mexico’s human More reforms would follow, but it was rights record, freed most of the country’s the economic crisis of the 1980s that finally known political prisoners, and supported mobilized elites, disillusioned with the PRI, the passage of a groundbreaking freedom of to join the political fray. Business groups information law. and the conservative middle class in the The road Mexico took to reach this mo- north saw the historically rightist PAN as a ment was a long and bumpy one. Vicente vehicle for change, at least in local and state Fox’s election in July 2000—when Mexican elections. Presidential politics were still voters chose their first president from out- dominated, as they had been for decades, by side the PRI in over 70 years—represented the dedazo (“finger tap”), whereby presidents not so much a coup as the culmination of 25 secretly handpicked their successors who years of incremental democratic change. The were then “elected” in public relations exer- process began in earnest in 1977, when cises masquerading as popular votes. But in President José López Portillo opened the po- 1987, a dissident branch of the PRI broke litical arena to permit new parties to regis- away from the party to form the National 62 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • SUMMER 2003 Democratic Front (FDN), led by Cuauhté- While controversy over suspected fraud moc Cárdenas, son of former president Lá- had erupted during the 1980s over votes in zaro Cárdenas. In 1988, Cárdenas ran for Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, and Sonora, inde- president. pendent pro-democracy movements now Leading up to the election, the PRI had emerged across the country, organizing the been losing ground by inches at the munici- first-ever election observations in San Luis pal level, but the broader party project to Potosí in 1991 and Michoacán in 1992. In maintain its grip on power was still intact. 1994, democracy activists joined forces with The regime relied on its old formula for suc- scholars and human rights groups to create cess—a very big tent, which could accom- the Civic Alliance, a coordinating body for modate multiple political tendencies under hundreds of national and regional non- one roof; when it came the opposition, most governmental groups dedicated to forcing of it could be coaxed into compliance by po- open Mexico’s sealed political system. litical favor, coercion or cash. By the time No one was prepared for the shock of the vote was held that summer, however, 1994, the annus horribilus that shattered the Cárdenas surprised everyone with the huge veneer of stability and progress the regime margin of support he was able to muster, still managed to provide. New Year’s Day and the government was forced to scramble dawned with the uprising of the Zapatista to prevent his victory. When the computer- National Liberation Army (EZLN), timed fe- ized count began showing Cárdenas with a licitously to coincide with the launching of significant lead over his opponents, the the North American Free Trade Agreement PRI’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Manuel (NAFTA), Salinas’s most cherished achieve- Clouthier of the PAN, public access to the re- ment. It didn’t look like other Latin Ameri- sults was suddenly cut off due to “computer can guerrilla wars: masked Mayan rebels, failure.” The dimensions of the fraud re- adept at using the press to their advantage, vealed themselves in the days that followed: were demanding economic justice, an end to the press reported tens of thousands of pro- discrimination, and democracy.
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