50 Years-Mexico And The Legacy Of The Dirty War

Fifty Years of Silence: Mexico Faces the Legacy of its Dirty War coffins on the square Image courtesy Jorge León / Archivo Histórico del PRD, reproduced in Fue el Estado (1965-1990). Country’s First National Truth Commission Releases Monumental Reports on State Violence Government Archives Played Essential Role in Investigating Past Abuses Declassified Documents Reveal U.S. Prioritized Stability of Mexican Regime over Human Rights Concerns Published: Dec 20, 2024 Briefing Book # 879 Edited by Kate Doyle and Claire Dorfman Special thanks to Salvador Leyva and Laura Sánchez Ley For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Subjects Cold War – General Human Rights and Genocide Regions Mexico and Central America Project Mexico Commissioner Eugenia Allier Montaño presents the report “Verdades Innegables. Por un México sin impunidad” at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City, October 10, 2024. Commissioners Abel Barrera Hernández, David Fernández Dávalos, and Carlos A. Pérez Ricart present the report “Fue el Estado (1965-1990)” at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City, August 16, 2024. It was the State (1965-1990), Volume 1, Chapter 1 (in English) Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification, It was the State (1965-1990), Volume 1, Chapter 1 (in English) Undeniable Truths: For a Mexico Without Impunity, Volume 1, Executive Summary (in English) Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification, Undeniable Truths: For a Mexico Without Impunity, Volume 1, Executive Summary (in English) Washington, D.C., December 20, 2024—Half a century ago, Mexico was convulsed by state violence and social upheaval. The year 1974 witnessed some of the most emblematic human rights abuses to occur during the country’s long-running Dirty War: the forced disappearance of community activist Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, the killing of revolutionary guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas, and the Mexican military’s use of “death flights” to eliminate suspected subversives by throwing their bodies from planes into the Pacific Ocean. These and thousands of other grave human rights violations were documented in two monumental and comprehensive reports released this year by Mexico’s first major truth commission. Today, the National Security Archive is publishing a selection of declassified U.S. documents about the Dirty War, along with translated excerpts from the two reports in order to give English-readers a sense of the scope and methodologies encompassed in the truth commission’s investigations. Taken together, the materials offer a clearer picture than has ever been available of the “systematic and widespread” human rights abuses committed by Mexican intelligence, military, police, and parastate forces that targeted “broad sectors of the population” between 1965 and 1990.[1] Mexico’s government did not launch this massive transitional justice project on its own initiative. The impulse for national reckoning came from survivors and collectives of family members and activists. It was their decades-long persistence in defying the state’s permanent silence and demanding answers that finally led then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to agree to create the Commission. On October 6, 2021, the president published his decree establishing the Commission for Access to Truth, Historical Clarification and the Promotion of Justice for Grave Human Rights Violations committed between 1965 and 1990 (CoVEH, in Spanish), which in turn launched five working groups to grapple with different dimensions of the project. While the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification was responsible for investigating abuses and producing the truth commission’s report, other groups examined the promotion of justice, the search for the disappeared, reparations, and the promotion of memory and non-repetition.[2] In many countries in Latin America, the end of the Cold War spurred a profound reflection about the state’s role in political violence, and how it was rationalized by anti-communist national security and counterinsurgency concerns. By contrast, Mexican efforts were anemic, few, and far between. The earliest official initiative to investigate forced disappearance during the Dirty War was carried out by the National Human Rights Commission in 2001, decades after the fact.[3] Successive governments refused calls for a truth commission, paradigmatic cases such as the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre remained chronically unresolved, and a special prosecutor assigned to investigate historical human rights crimes closed his office after five years without holding anyone accountable for anything. In this instance, the scale of the truth commission’s efforts was unprecedented, and the CoVEH completed its mandate with a whirlwind of milestones, conclusions, and recommendations for the future. In its Executive Summary of the Reports of the Five Instruments of the CoVEH,the Commission points out some of the achievements of the enormous project. The working group on the Promotion of Justice led Mexico’s Attorney General to create a new “Special Investigations and Litigation Team” to consider prosecuting dozens of criminal human rights cases from the Dirty War era. On the Search for the Disappeared, the group launched a massive database called Sistema Angelus to organize and make accessible thousands of government records, and prepared plans to exhume cemeteries and potential clandestine burial sites on military installations. The Reparations working group contributed to a registry of more than 2,500 victims of the Dirty War who may be eligible for future compensation. And the Memory and Non-repetition group organized public forums about the Dirty War, issued publications, and helped create a memory center at the Circular de Morelia in Mexico City, a former Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate, DFS) building where detainees were tortured.[4] The work of the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification – while also extraordinary, was complicated by internal differences among the five commissioners. A central friction had to do with how the Mechanism identified the scope of repression – whether political violence was limited to armed revolutionary groups and militant activists, or whether the Dirty War included abuses committed against more diverse sectors, such as journalists, indigenous leaders, and LGBTQ activists. After the Mechanism was established in 2021, one commissioner resigned (historian Aleida García Aguirre). Three commissioners – Abel Barrera, David Fernández, and Carlos Pérez Ricart – chose to define the universe of Dirty War victims much more broadly than historically recognized. That left a single commissioner, Eugenia Allier, to assemble a team focused on traditional categories of victims: guerrillas, student activists, dissident labor and union organizers, and human rights defenders. As a result of these differences, the reports that resulted from the two separate investigations pursued the same objective – the historical clarification of the Dirty War – but landed on very distinct conclusions. Allier’s emphasis on the Mexican State’s intent to destroy armed revolutionary groups such as Lucio Cabañas’ Party of the Poor in Guerrero focused on the essential political nature of the Dirty War; its anti-communist, counterinsurgent objectives and its determination to “suffocate and eliminate any form of political dissidence and popular protest.”[5] Her team’s report, Undeniable Truths: For a Mexico Without Impunity, reveals a multiplicity of plans coordinated between the Army, police forces, and intelligence agencies that was designed to hunt down and detain or kill suspected subversives around the country, including, for example, the “Rosa de los Vientos” plan, which targeted members of the radical 23 September Communist League during the late 1970s. The report contains new details about the location of clandestine detention centers, the widespread use of torture, and the forced disappearance of victims. It lists 1,103 missing or disappeared persons, and names more than 2,000 public officials “involved in the repressive system,” including 200 DFS members. It analyzes the military’s use of “death flights” in Guerrero state, based on testimonies and archival documents. It identifies previously unknown military units involved in repression, the systematic use of sexual violence during counterinsurgency operations, the State’s reliance on hired thugs to injure and kill student protesters, and its permanent surveillance and repression of dissident labor activists and human rights defenders. The other team’s report, It was the State (1965-1990), determined that the targets of the state’s counterinsurgency campaigns were not limited to guerrillas or student and labor activists, but included a sprawling range of social actors and sometimes entire communities. The commissioners behind this analysis – Barrera, Fernández and Pérez Ricart – concluded that repression and political violence perpetrated by state security agencies aimed to crush social mobilization among “at least eleven groups of victims who until now remained invisible.”[6] Altogether, the team identified more than 8,500 victims of repression. This “new narrative,” as the report calls it, describes a uniquely intolerant State, which used espionage, harassment, imprisonment, torture, rape, forced disappearance, and execution against a wide array of marginalized groups, including refugee and indigenous communities, Afro-Mexicans, and religious dissidents. This conclusion is an innovation in the historiography of political violence in Mexico, and one that may help to explain the ferocity of the ongoing violence and inequality that Mexico continues to experience. At the same time, the decision to widen the lens to encompass sprawling categories of victims dilutes the specificity of the State’s political counterinsurgency objectives during the Dirty War: when the security apparatus of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) set out to annihilate revolution. The perspective expressed in It was the State (1965-1990) was not entirely welcomed by historians of the Dirty War era or by human rights organizations. The Commission’s executive body itself, the CoVEH, criticized the decision of the three commissioners, writing that their report: [. . .] exceeded the objectives of the Commission. The report investigated human rights violations that were not necessarily related to State violence within the context of counterinsurgency, as well as episodes of violence that took place after 1990, even spanning circumstances from recent years. [. . .] The concern that led the [Mechanism’s] commissioners to delve into these subjects in their report is understandable, but the mandate of the Commission is clear, as were the demands of the victims’ families, survivors, and collectives with respect to knowing the truth and achieving justice for the atrocities committed through State violence in 1965 to 1990. Important sections of the [Mechanism’s] final report did not address these historic demands.[7] That said, the two separate reports do have much in common; both excoriate the Mexican State’s silence and persistent impunity around Dirty War human rights crimes. As It was the State (1965-1990) put it, “The problem is that these violations have been denied or justified by the perpetrators and by the State that has sheltered them. The point is not so much a lack of knowledge as a refusal by those involved to acknowledge the existence of these atrocities, their unjustifiable nature, and their own role in them. This is a political question.”[8] And both reports agreed that it was the victims themselves and their families who brought about Mexico’s first real transitional justice effort. Undeniable Truths contains an entire section devoted to highlighting “the importance of the struggle for memory, truth and justice that has been sustained for decades by relatives, survivors, groups, and companions of survivors of this period of violence. Throughout these years of struggle, they have not only encountered the State’s response of denial, silencing, impunity for those responsible, and inaction in the face of their demands, but also persecution, surveillance, harassment, repression, continuous insult and revictimization. In this sense, this Report recognizes them as the principal guardians of memory, who with their struggle and resistance have sustained their demand for justice and prevented the erasure of the crimes committed by the Mexican State during this period.”[9] Both reports also address the vital role that archives played in shaping their understanding of the Dirty War. As part of the government’s mandate for the Commission, investigators were supposed to have full and unfettered access to state records from the era, and certain agencies complied without a problem.[10] But the issue quickly became a source of conflict when the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) and the Center for National Intelligence (CNI) refused to turn over relevant files. The Mechanism denounced this publicly and eventually released six separate “technical reports” detailing the missing documentation and the nature of the government’s secrecy. The Mechanism’s objections led to growing anger on the part of President López Obrador, who slammed the investigators as liars, declaring that Sedena had turned over all records and that the government was committed to “clarify everything, to hide absolutely nothing, to make everything transparent….” The government’s hostility towards the Commission was even more evident when the Washington Post revealed that historian and CoVEH coordinator, Camilo Vicente Ovalle, had been targeted by the Israeli spyware Pegasus since at least December 2022. Pegasus contracts were controlled by the Mexican Armed Forces, which meant that the same Army denying access to critical files for Mexico’s first national truth commission was secretly spying on the man leading the investigations. Alejandro Encinas, former undersecretary for human rights and president of the CoVEH, was also targeted by Pegasus. When the Commission concluded its work in September of this year, outgoing President López Obrador held no public reception or unifying presentation, but left the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification to deliver its two reports to the public on its own. Despite López Obrador’s abandonment of the truth commission, the CoVEH remains an unprecedented achievement for transitional justice in Mexico. The reports the Mechanism produced – more than 5,000 pages together – reveal a trove of new information about how State agencies planned, implemented, and covered up the atrocities of the Dirty War. They build on decades of work from family members, human rights advocates, and scholars, and will be central to future studies about the era for years to come. The Mechanism’s investigations help explain how the legacy of past impunity has grown into the monstrous injustice that Mexico lives with today. They take accountability seriously and acknowledge the power that memory, truth-telling, and transparency have to vindicate the lives lost and damaged by the State’s cruelty. The National Security Archive will continue to mine these two massive reports for future postings and commentary about the Dirty War. The National Security Archive’s Mexico Project curated a special collection of 240 declassified U.S. documents and provided expert analysis to support the Mechanism’s investigations. While we continue to push for further declassification, records related to key events in the history of the Dirty War reveal a wide variability in the quality of U.S. government reporting on Mexico. Some documents contain detailed and critical analysis from political officers at the U.S. Embassy. For example, a confidential cable from 1965 assessed a surprise attack by a band of guerrillas from the Ejército Popular Revolucionario Mexicano (EPRM) on the Mexican Army garrison in Ciudad Madera, Chihuahua. The Embassy determined the violence would likely worsen as the government had given “no evidence to date” that it was addressing the legitimate concerns of small farmers in the area. (Document 1) Other records exhibit a remarkable degree of trust in the Mexican security forces to maintain order, even after significant episodes of state violence such as the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi student massacres. The National Security Archive has posted extensively on Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi and published hundreds of declassified government documents related to the violence against student protestors. Documents from U.S. consulates provided invaluable granular reporting for the truth commission’s investigations. A confidential cable from the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey reported on the visit of three top Nuevo León security officials in 1967 to the AID International Police Academy in the United States. This document was reproduced in the It was the State (1965-1990) report as evidence of U.S. assistance for the “professionalization” of state security forces in counterinsurgency tactics. (Document 4)[11] The United States closely followed Mexico’s growing armed guerrilla movement, as they considered the country a frontline in the Cold War and the hemispheric battle against communism. While U.S. officials maintained a watchful eye over the activities of groups like the Party of the Poor in Guerrero, a top secret National Intelligence Daily article from the CIA concluded in 1974 that the insurgency was a “nuisance” and not a substantial threat to the stability of the Mexican regime, despite the “massive application of military manpower” deployed to combat the guerrillas. (Document 7)[12] The U.S. also monitored developments within the military, including key personnel changes and appointments. A secret Intelligence Information cable from the CIA established that General Francisco Quirós Hermosillo, who moved to third in command of Mexico's Secretariat of National Defense in 1980, was the former head of the Brigada Blanca, the “extra legal anti-terrorist organization,”. The Brigada Blanca was a brutal intelligence and operational unit responsible for forced disappearances, torture, and assassinations of suspected subversives. Quirós Hermosillo has been named an intellectual author in the military’s “death flights” in Guerrero. (Document 13) The records published today provide a sense of the concerns and priorities of U.S. foreign policy during Mexico’s Dirty War. The documents make clear the United States government valued the Mexican regime’s stability over all else, and U.S. reporting justified human rights violations as a necessary evil to contain the threat of communism. The Documents ebb 878 doc 1 Document 1 Armed Attack on the Garrison at Ciudad Madera, and Related Matters Oct 9, 1965 Source U.S. Embassy in Mexico, Confidential cable The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City reports on an assault on the Mexican Army’s garrison in Ciudad Madera, Chihuahua, by a band of guerrillas from the Ejército Popular Revolucionario Mexicano (EPRM). According to the cable, after the garrison’s soldiers quashed the attack, killing ten of the EPRM’s members, the government announced that “tranquility is expected to return to the area.” The embassy believes the source of the conflict is rooted in “an impoverished peasantry and a bitter land struggle” and determines it will likely worsen as the government has given “no evidence to date” that it is addressing the legitimate concerns of small farmers in the area. In attempting to establish a history of the insurgency in Chihuahua state predating the attack, the cable’s author admits to a lack of knowledge, most notably due to the Mexican government’s own suppression of information on civil disturbances. The Madera incident sparked years of political unrest in the region, armed insurgency, and brutal State violence. This would prove to be a crucial event in the history of Mexico’s armed insurgency; its date would later become part of the name of one of the country’s most active revolutionary organizations, the September 23rd Communist League. ebb 878 doc 2 Document 2 Security Conditions in Mexico -- and elsewhere in Latin America May 6, 1966 Source Central Intelligence Agency, Office of National Estimates, Secret National Intelligence memorandum Just weeks before being named Director of Central Intelligence, CIA Deputy Director Richard Helms forwards a memorandum to National Security Advisor Walt Rostow that extols the “favorable security conditions” created by the Mexican government in preparation for President Johnson’s visit to Mexico. In it, Sherman Kent of the CIA’s Office of National Estimates observes that the ruling government party exercises a virtual monopoly on political power and is “an outstanding force for stability,” noting that security forces, when ordered, “carry out missions without overmuch regard for legalisms.” To prepare for President Johnson’s visit, Mexico detained around 500 “potential troublemakers” and raided the offices of the local Communist party. The report is careful to note that some of the measures taken by the Mexican government would have been “out of the question in many countries.” ebb 878 doc 3 Document 3 Mexico: The Problems of Progress Oct 20, 1967 Source Central Intelligence Agency, Secret special report This CIA analysis neatly outlines the growing conflict between Mexico’s revolutionary history and recent attempts to modernize the country and encourage integration into the world economy. The report considers that a major obstacle for the government is dealing with rural unrest, which is “bound to grow and become more explosive” as education and communication improvements connect the peasant class with the rest of the country. However, according to the Agency, leftist groups sympathetic with the campesinos remain “divided and weak,” while the Mexican military is a “model institution” and “both brutally effective and politically astute.” The report focuses on the security forces’ ability to contain violence that the CIA considers a political inevitability. ebb 878 doc 4 Document 4 Training for Nuevo León State Security Officials Nov 6, 1967 Source U.S. Consulate Monterrey, Confidential cable A confidential cable from the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey reports on the visit of three top Nuevo León security officials to the AID International Police Academy in the United States at the request of the state’s governor. The consulate describes training, orientation, and visits to the Police Academy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and police facilities in other U.S. cities to help the officials prepare to restructure Nuevo León’s state security organization. The cable stresses the importance of this request for assistance by the Mexican governor and indicates that a request of this nature is an anomaly in the present bilateral security relationship, “given that the degree of confidence…has not always been present on either side.” ebb 878 doc 5 Document 5 Addendum to “Mexican Student Crisis,” 4 October 1968 Oct 5, 1968 Source Central Intelligence Agency, Secret memorandum The CIA analyzes possible Soviet and Cuban influence on the student protests that culminated in the massacre at Tlatelolco in Mexico City. In evaluating whether there was overt Soviet or Cuban participation in encouraging the students, the CIA concludes that both powers are reluctant to jeopardize their relationship with the Mexican government, especially given that the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City provide an invaluable location to mount operations against the U.S. and other adversaries. The Agency determines that the recent student unrest derives primarily from domestic concerns, most notably the Mexican government’s own “rigidity and corruption.” ebb 878 doc 6 Document 6 Mexico: An Emerging Internal Security Problem? Sep 23, 1971 Source State Department, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Secret report The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research evaluates the growing unrest in Mexico following the Corpus Christi massacre, in which student demonstrators were attacked by a group of plain-clothed paramilitaries known as the Halcones during a protest in Mexico City, leaving dozens dead and over a hundred injured. According to the State Department, the Halcones, a “government-organized group of toughs,” formed alongside other clandestine groups, allowing the Mexican regime to confront the growing student unrest while “avoiding the use of uniformed security forces.” The Corpus Christi massacre was a seminal event in Mexico’s dirty war and prompted the United States to assess the stability of the Mexican regime following the public outcry over the government’s complicity in the violence. This secret report from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research reviews three issues facing President Echeverría at the time: the student movement, the increased guerrilla presence in the countryside, and alleged discontent among members of the military. However, the State Department is clear to emphasize the ability of the Mexican security forces in maintaining order, and acknowledges that “the troops have little love for students and would probably be willing to forget their difficulties temporarily if given the chance to crack a few heads.” ebb 878 doc 7 Document 7 Guerrillas Are Nuisance to Mexican Government Sep 10, 1974 Source Central Intelligence Agency, Top Secret National Intelligence Daily article The CIA finds that, despite recent activities by armed guerrilla groups, the insurgency is a “nuisance” and not a substantial threat to the stability of the Mexican regime. The Agency is critical of the government’s counterinsurgency capabilities, however, noting that it required a “massive application of military manpower” to combat revolutionary leader Lucio Cabañas and his “perhaps 50 to 75 hard-core followers.” ebb 878 doc 8 Document 8 Death of Lucio Cabañas Barrientos Dec 4, 1974 Source U.S. Embassy cable The U.S. Embassy in Mexico City reports on the death of guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas, who was killed by the military on December 2. Despite the government’s highly publicized victory, the cable notes that political violence in the cities has always been “cause for greater concern” than Cabañas and the remaining rural guerrilla presence. ebb 878 doc 9 Document 9 Army Operations in Campaign Against Lucio Cabañas Apr 23, 1975 Source Defense Intelligence Agency, Confidential Intelligence Information Report The DIA records a conversation with the commander of the Mexican Army paratroop battalion tasked with searching for Cabañas in Guerrero state. According to the report, Colonel Lázaro de la Vega was trained in the U.S. and Central America. After his battalion killed Cabañas in an ambush, de la Vega was promoted to full colonel. ebb 878 doc 10 Document 10 Human Rights in Mexico Mar 24, 1976 Source U.S. Embassy, Confidential cable An embassy cable outlines the human rights landscape in Mexico in a report on countries receiving security assistance from the U.S. government. The embassy finds that torture and cruel or inhumane treatment frequently occurs during police detention after both criminal and political arrests. However, Mexico’s single-party system allows the executive branch “a certain flexibility” in its adherence to human rights standards, so long as the abuses do not result in “embarrassing public disclosures.” The cable acknowledges patterns in human rights violations committed by the Mexican regime, but “[doubts] that Mexico qualifies as a country where a ‘consistent pattern of gross violations’ occurs.” In other words, the United States can continue to provide security assistance to Mexico despite the Embassy’s own documentation of human rights abuses. ebb 878 doc 11 Document 11 Incident Between Mexican Army and Farmers May 12, 1976 Source Defense Intelligence Agency, Secret intelligence report The DIA reports on a confrontation between local farmers, known as ejidatarios, and the military in Chiapas. While the farmers staged a protest to the local authorities for more communal land, the local army security detachment and two military battalions were dispatched to restore order. In the escalating situation, two civilians were killed and three soldiers wounded. The DIA determines that these types of altercations will continue to intensify ahead of the presidential elections, and that the army’s presence as the sole security force in isolated regions “demonstrates the potential for the army’s being caught in the…crossfire,” which could lead to “national exposure and criticism.” The DIA effectively warns that situations in which the army kills civilians protesting for land redistribution is likely to continue and could create a scandal for the military. ebb 878 doc 12 Document 12 Review of US Policies Toward Mexico Nov 21, 1978 Source National Security Council, Confidential Presidential Review Memorandum [extract] The National Security Council reviews U.S. policies in Mexico at the end of the Carter administration’s second year. Despite their support for international human rights issues, “Mexico’s domestic human rights record leaves room for significant improvement.” The memo highlights contradictions in the Mexican government’s relationship to human rights; the regime offers asylum to political refugees from other countries while criminalizing and persecuting domestic opposition. The NSC determines that state repression is not limited to armed guerrilla groups and acknowledges that “occasional extra legal actions by the security forces have also affected agrarian, labor, and student strike leaders.” ebb 878 doc 13 Document 13 Imminent Appointment of General Francisco Quiroz Hermosillo… Jan 15, 1980 Source Central Intelligence Agency, Secret Intelligence Information cable The CIA reports on the appointment of General Francisco Quirós Hermosillo to his new post as third in command of Mexico’s Defense Ministry. Quirós was previously head of the notorious Brigada Blanca, described here as an “extra legal anti-terrorist organization,” known by Mexicans to be a brutal intelligence and operational unit responsible for forced disappearances, torture, and assassinations of suspected subversives. From his new position inside Sedena, the general will oversee military and civilian counterinsurgency operations nationwide, as well as command the intelligence and logistics sections of the Armed Forces. ebb 878 doc 14 Document 14 Meeting with Human Rights Activist Mar 9, 1989 Source U.S. Embassy, Confidential cable A U.S. Embassy officer meets with activist Rosario Ibarra de Piedra to discuss human rights and steps the administration of President Carlos Salinas has taken to address abuses. Ibarra de Piedra is optimistic about some of the government’s recent actions – such as the pardon of hundreds of political prisoners – but describes them as a political strategy to “appear more open and thereby improve the [government’s] image.” In a comment at the end of the cable, the embassy officer observes that, while the Salinas administration is “moving in the right direction,” these measures “will not preempt future abuses motivated by local conditions in other parts of Mexico.” ebb 878 doc 15 Document 15 [Redacted] History of the Mexican Airborne Brigade Aug 26, 1992 Source Defense Intelligence Agency, Confidential Intelligence Information Report The DIA records a history of the Mexican Airborne Brigade from its creation in 1946. According to the report, the first round of officers and soldiers were trained in the United States at Fort Benning. In the course of the brigade’s existence, members have been deployed for diverse activities including “maintaining order” in the midst of student and labor protests in the cities, conducting counterinsurgency missions in Guerrero to “combat bandits” such as the guerrilla leaders Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas, engaging in counternarcotics operations, and providing humanitarian assistance and relief to civilians. The document is evidence of the level of intelligence gathered by U.S. defense attachés on the Armed Forces in Mexico. Notes [1] Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification, It was the State (1965-1990), vol. 1, pp. 12. [2] Commission for Access to Truth, Historical Clarification and the Promotion of Justice for Grave Human Rights Violations committed between 1965 and 1990 (CoVEH), Executive Summary of the Reports of the Five Instruments of the CoVEH, pp. 9. [3] Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, Recomendación 26/2001, 27 November 2001. [4] CoVEH, Executive Summary of the Reports of the Five Instruments of the CoVEH, pp. 15-19. [5] CoVEH, Executive Summary of the Reports of the Five Instruments of the CoVEH, pp. 41. [6] The violence was directed, according to the report, “against peasant, indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities, against those who were active in urban-popular movements, against communities violated by the imposition of development policies, against political-partisan dissidents, against people from the gender-diverse community, against journalists, against refugees on the southern border of Mexico, against residents of areas where the fight against drug trafficking was carried out, against people marginalized and criminalized due to their vulnerable conditions, against people who were part of some religious dissidence, and even serious violations committed against members of the armed forces and police at the hands of their own commanders.” See It was the State (1965-1990), vol. 1, pp. 14. [7] CoVEH, Executive Summary of the Reports of the Five Instruments of the CoVEH, pp. 12-13. [8] Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification, It was the State (1965-1990), vol. 1, pp. 27. [9] Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification, Undeniable Truths: For a Mexico Without Impunity, vol. 1, Executive Summary, pp. XXXI. [10] The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was one such agency. See, for example, It was the State (1965-1990), vol. 1, pp. 193. [11] Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification, It was the State (1965-1990), vol. 4, pp. 415. [12] Editors’ note: the Mexico Project conducted a thorough review of U.S. documents in our collection that have since been further declassified. This document was partially released to us in 2000 through FOIA and has now been declassified in full by the CIA. Key details that were previously redacted were thus able to be turned over to the Mechanism’s investigators.

Argentina-A Small Victory

A Small Victory Argentina Argentina officially emerged from recession in the third quarter of 2024, marking a significant milestone for President Javier Milei and his sweeping economic reforms that have sought to stabilize the country’s crisis-ridden economy, the Financial Times reported this week. The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 3.9 percent between July and September compared with the previous quarter, according to data released Monday by Argentina’s statistics agency. This marks the first expansion of the economy since late 2023, although GDP was still 2.1 percent lower than the same period last year. Growth was driven by agriculture and mining exports, alongside a rebound in consumer spending and capital investment. Still, the manufacturing and construction sectors remain severely depressed. Milei’s austerity measures, termed radical and brutal by many Argentinians and which include deep spending cuts and deregulation, have brought inflation down from a staggering 211 percent in December 2023 while bolstering investor optimism, CNN added. On Monday, Argentina’s Merval stock index rose by seven percent, marking a 174 percent increase this year, while the risk premium on sovereign bonds fell to 677 basis points, a sharp improvement from a figure of more than 2,000 basis points when Milei took office. However, these reforms have come at a social cost, say critics: The poverty rate increased to 53 percent in the first half of this year, while unemployment has also climbed. The International Monetary Fund forecasts a 3.5 percent contraction for 2024 but predicts five percent growth next year. While the rebound signals investor confidence and improved growth prospects, economists warned that Milei’s administration must lift capital and currency controls for Argentina to achieve sustained growth. Others added that the libertarian president must also deliver lasting growth that boosts the living standards for Argentines in order for Milei’s party La Libertad Avanza to gain enough support in the mid-term elections slated for late 2025.

Brasil: Bolsonaro-The Yen ANd THe Yang

The Yin and the Yang Brazil Right-wing Brazilian populist Jair Bolsonaro, who served as president from 2019 to 2023, is technically banned from running for president again until 2030. He also is facing criminal charges for allegedly attempting a coup. Still, he recently told the Wall Street Journal that he plans to file papers for the election in 2026. If he runs, he would repeat the face-off that he lost in 2023 to his ideological rival, left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. A former army officer who tortured civilians under the military junta that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, the Guardian explained, Bolsonaro has denied the allegations that he planned a coup, saying the accusations are politically motivated. But the Economist wrote that his chances of facing jail time are increasing as the case against him becomes clearer, stronger, and the charges broader – they also include theft and corruption. Prosecutors cite undercover agents who helped Bolsonaro hatch a plan to seize power. In one taped conversation among the coup plotters, a colonel tells a top commander in the Brazilian military that they need to act after voters elect Lula to a third, non-consecutive term in the presidency, according to the Associated Press. “It will be either a civil war now or civil war later. We have a justification now for civil war; people are on the streets. We have massive support,” the colonel said. “Let’s do this now. Speak to 01,” 01 being code for the president. Video evidence even showed Bolsonaro staying at the Hungarian Embassy in the capital Brasília, where some wondered if he was seeking diplomatic asylum, the Jerusalem Post reported. Bolsonaro has close ties with the illiberal leader of Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Bolsonaro is also close to President-Elect Donald Trump, Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei, and others who met recently in Buenos Aires to discuss free markets and conservative causes, added Reuters. Those international connections are one reason Bolsonaro still enjoys the support of half of the Brazilian electorate, World Politics Review noted. Corruption remains endemic in the country, too, souring many on Lula and his socialist allies, who have dominated the country’s politics for the past 20 years. Still, Lula’s base of working-class Brazilians who depend on public services is vast and well-organized, as a New York Times story showed. Lula has advocated for protecting the Amazon, recognizing Indigenous rights, and “reconciling economic growth with social inclusion,” as a Brazilian government press release explained. As the Jerusalem Post noted, the problems faced by Bolsonaro show voters there is accountability in Brazil. However, his prosecution also has consequences for Brazil’s political landscape. “These legal challenges mark a steep decline for Bolsonaro, who once positioned himself as a champion of Brazil’s right-wing movement,” it wrote. “(But) his absence from politics could leave a leadership vacuum in Brazil’s conservative ranks, (even as it is) reshaping the country’s political landscape and reinforcing accountability for undermining democracy. Share this story

Colombia Askes The US To Declassify Records On 1985 Palace Of Justice Case

Colombia Asks U.S. to Declassify Records on 1985 Palace of Justice Case Still from from the 2011 documentary film La Toma (The Siege) Still from from the 2011 documentary film La Toma (The Siege) Questions Remain About U.S. Role in Colombian Army Assault, Disappearances Nearly 40 Years Later, U.S. Should Declassify Still-Secret Documents Published: Dec 6, 2024 Edited by Michael Evans For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Subjects Human Rights and Genocide Secrecy and FOIA Regions South America Project Colombia The Palace of Justice building on fire The Palace of Justice building on fire during the night of November 6-7, 1985. (Vicky Ospina, Dirección Distrital Archivo de Bogotá) Helena Urán’s book, Mi vida y el Palacio: 6 y 7 de noviembre de 1985 Helena Urán’s book, Mi vida y el Palacio: 6 y 7 de noviembre de 1985, cites a number of declassified U.S. documents obtained by the National Security Archive. Washington, D.C., December 6, 2024 - Yesterday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that he has asked the United States to expedite the declassification of archival records on the 1985 Palace of Justice case. The request is an important step forward for human rights advocates seeking to clarify the motivations and actions of the M-19 insurgents who stormed the building on November 6, 1985, and the Colombian government’s responsibility for those who died in the fire that tore through the seat of Colombia’s judicial branch and for the disappearances that occurred in the aftermath. The request was welcomed by Helena Urán Bidegain, author of Mi Vida y El Palacio (My Life and the Palace), a memoir of her own investigation of the disappearance of her father, Carlos Urán, an auxiliary magistrate who is believed to have been tortured and murdered by the Colombian Army after surviving the initial assault on the building. The latest edition of the book includes cites a number of declassified documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive that raise important questions about the U.S. role in the episode that remain unanswered. In seeking the records, Petro is complying in part with a recommendation made by Colombia’s truth commission, which said that the president should ask the U.S. to declassify records relating to human rights violations in Colombia, including the Palace of Justice case, among others. President Petro’s request to President Biden is also made in compliance with the 2014 ruling of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which found the Colombian state responsible for deaths and disappearances during the episode and ordered Colombia to satisfy the victims’ right to know the truth about what happened (the “Right to Truth”). The case is of particular interest to President Petro, who was a member of the M-19 insurgent group that seized the Palace on November 6, 1985, but was detained at the time and was not involved in the takeover of the building. The request for declassification comes less than two months before President Joe Biden leaves the White House and turns the office over to Donald Trump. The Palace of Justice case has long been a focus of the Archive’s Colombia documentation project. Last year, as part of a call by Urán and others for Petro to request such a declassification, the Archive published a collection of U.S. records on the case, highlighting some important revelations and raising questions about documents and portions of documents that remain secret. U.S. military reports included in the posting confirm that Colombian military intelligence knew about the M-19 assault at least a week in advance and that Colombian President Belisario Betancur “gave the military a green light, telling them to do whatever was necessary to resolve the situation as quickly as possible.” The CIA ultimately found that Betancur acted mainly out of “fear that failure to act forcefully would anger military leaders.” A U.S. Embassy cable written years later found that the Colombian Army was responsible for deaths and disappearances during the Palace of Justice case. Other documents raise more questions than they answer. One describes how U.S. Southern Command dispatched a C-130 aircraft and a six-person “support team” carrying high-powered C4 explosives and detonating cord to Bogotá during the crisis, raising questions as to whether these were used just a few hours later to blow open a large metal door on the third floor of the building—an explosion that was determined to have caused many civilian casualties. The U.S. also pondered a Colombian request for “asbestos suits” so that security forces could continue “pressing their efforts” inside the “fire gutted building,” but redactions in these records make it hard to tell what became of these requests. The U.S. has also failed to declassify any contemporaneous records about the people who were disappeared in the wake of the assault and whose surviving family members have waited years to learn the truth about what happened to their loved ones. Also of interest are the still-hidden lessons that the U.S. drew from the outcome of the Palace of Justice episode, especially as a means of understanding the fragile state of civil-military relations in Colombia at the time. In its post-mortem on the case, the U.S. Embassy said that the Colombian military was anticipating “the swing of political opinion towards more forceful tactics against insurgents” and that they would have “a free hand” against the guerrilla groups when Betancur left office the next year. “President Petro’s request for a U.S. declassification on the Palace of Justice case is an important step in Colombia’s long-overdue reckoning with one of the most searing episodes in its history,” said Michael Evans, director of the Archive’s Colombia documentation project. “President Biden should seize this opportunity to use declassified diplomacy to help shed light on one of the country’s most important and most debated human rights tragedies.”

Purchasing Power In Argentina Slumps To The Lowest Level Since 2001

ECONOMY | Yesterday 00:06 Purchasing power loss in Argentina slumps to levels not seen since 2001 crisis Soaring utility bills and basic shopping-basket prices have eroded the capacity of families to buy everyday goods. Minimum wage has fallen 28% in terms of purchasing power over last 12 months, UBA report finds. Share this News A woman looks at the window of a clothing store that reads 'Clearance Last Days' in Buenos Aires on May 14, 2024, on the day of the announcement of April's inflation index. A woman looks at the window of a clothing store that reads 'Clearance Last Days' in Buenos Aires on May 14, 2024, on the day of the announcement of April's inflation index. | JUAN MABROMATA / AFP The purchasing power of families in Argentina has fallen this year to record levels not seen since 2001 economic crisis. Argentina’s minimum wage lost 1.3 percent in October, accumulating a loss of 28 percent over the 12 months between last November and this, according to a report prepared by the Instituto Interdisciplinario de Economía Política at the University of Buenos Aires’ Economics Faculty. It is the steepest annual decline in incomes since the 2001 crisis, said the report. The abrupt fall is explained mostly by increased inflation – currently at an annual 193 percent – with a post-devaluation peak of 25.5 percent last December when President Javier Milei took office. Soaring utility bills also explain the fall in purchasing power. Milei evaluates Argentina’s future in Mercosur Read more... Milei evaluates Argentina’s future in Mercosur The institute’s report – "Panorama of formal wage-earning employment and its remuneration" – shows that wages started to plunge last December when they contracted 15 percent due to accelerating inflation, nosediving yet further in January with a fall of 17 percent. This trend was temporarily interrupted in the following months, a period during which nominal wages accompanied inflation so that additional reductions were not observed. Last June there was a new fall (minus 4.4 percent), followed by a certain recovery in July (plus 4.3 percent) and by consecutive reductions in the following three months. Lula: Brussels, not Paris, will decide EU-Mercosur free-trade deal Read more... Lula: Brussels, not Paris, will decide EU-Mercosur free-trade deal The downward trend of the previous years, added to the sharp contraction of those months, positioned the minimum wage below the levels registered in 2001, prior to the convertibility crisis, as well as Implying an erosion of almost 60 percent from the highest level in that series in September, 2011. The average wage of the formally employed as surveyed by the INDEC national statistics bureau also registered a sharp contraction between November and December last year. Milei confirms his ‘chainsaw’ will keep running next year Read more... Milei confirms his ‘chainsaw’ will keep running next year However, decelerating inflation, added to the wage negotiations within the framework of collective-bargaining agreements, have prevented the fall in the purchasing power from continuing with a process of recovery beginning afterwards. Last August registered an increase of 0.8 percent with 0.3 percent in September. Despite that, last September (the last available figure) the purchasing power of the average wage continued to be 1.5 percent inferior to last November with the percentage of increase diminishing markedly since August. The panorama of August and September becomes more critical when analysing the data of the average remuneration of registered private- sector wage-earners, as recorded by the SIPA pension system. Betting on Milei, Argentine investors choose longer duration Read more... Betting on Milei, Argentine investors choose longer duration After growing in real terms in June (+four percent) and July (+2.8 percent), a fall of 2.5 percent was experienced in August while in September the preliminary data released by the Labour Department show a new fall of one percent. This implies a loss of purchasing power of three percent below that registered last November while accumulating a fall of 20 percent from the maximum level of the series registered in May, 2013. – TIMES/NA

Trump BENDS THE KNEE to Mexico President in 24 Hours

Uruguay Elects A New President

The Politics of Humility Uruguay Center-left opposition candidate Yamandú Orsi won the presidential election in Uruguay, ousting the conservative government coalition candidate, Alvaro Delgado, by a few points in Sunday’s runoff elections, the Guardian reported Monday. Orsi, a 57-year-old former history teacher from humble beginnings, secured 49.8 percent of the vote while Delgado won 45.9 percent, official results showed. Orsi’s party, the Broad Front, also won a majority in the upper house of parliament, but neither coalition clinched an absolute majority in the lower house. “The horizon is brightening,” said Orsi, addressing his supporters. Delgado and Uruguay’s current President Luis Lacalle Pou, both from the National party, conceded the election and offered to help with the transition of power ahead of the swearing-in on March 1. The Broad Front alliance, headed by Orsi, will now return to power after five years of a conservative coalition government. The Broad Front had governed Uruguay for 15 years before it was beaten by Lacalle Pou, according to the BBC. Orsi is seen as the protege of former President José Mujica, a popular leader who, known for his modesty, was labeled with the moniker, “the world’s poorest president.” Orsi himself grew up in a rural area in a house without electricity. He then worked as a history teacher, becoming active in local politics, and later becoming mayor of Canelones, a small city in southern Uruguay. Addressing the nation after his win, Orsi said, “I’m going to be the president who builds a more integrated country, where we set aside our differences and nobody is left behind, not economically, socially or politically.” He intends to govern with a “moderate left” approach and refrain from major policy shifts in the traditional and relatively wealthy nation.

What SpaceX Gwynne Shotwell just revealed after Starship Flight 6 launch...

A Tulane University Archiologist Discovers A Lost Mayan City

Lost in the Jungle Stumbling upon an undiscovered ancient city full of gold is usually the hallmark of great action films. But in real life, it is rare to find a lost city – especially by accident. However, that is exactly what happened when a doctoral student in anthropology was analyzing publicly available drone data of Mexico and stumbled across a huge ancient Mayan city buried beneath a dense jungle canopy. Archeologist Luke Auld-Thomas of Tulane University in New Orleans discovered the city while surfing the internet and examining data from modern aerial mapping technology known as LiDAR (light detection and ranging). “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” Auld-Thomas told the BBC. Auld-Thomas and co-author Marcello Canuto, in a new study, surveyed three different sites in the jungle and found 6,674 structures – essentially a huge ancient city that may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 CE, more than the population of the area today. The city, which was about 16.6 square kilometers (6.4 square miles), had two major centers with large buildings around 1.2 miles apart, linked by dense houses and causeways, according to the study. It had two plazas with temple pyramids, where Maya people would have worshipped, hidden treasures like jade masks and buried their dead. It also had a court where people would have played an ancient ball game and possibly a reservoir, indicating that people used the landscape to support a large population. The team named the city “Valeriana” after a nearby lagoon and said it has the “hallmarks of a capital city,” was second only to the density of the Calakmul site of the Mayans, which is about 62 miles away. The research team also believes that the city probably collapsed between 800 and 1,000 CE, due to issues such as climate variability and adaptation struggles because of the city’s density. At the same time, warfare with other cities and the conquest of the region by Spanish invaders in the 16th century also contributed to the eradication of Maya city-states, the BBC wrote. This study is the first to reveal Maya structures in the east-central Campeche region that runs from southeastern Mexico to Belize which the Maya inhabited from about 1000 BCE to 1500 CE. But with new technology such as laser and drone mapping, archeologists are finding more instances of ancient human activity. Now the team has emphasized the need for more field research along with drone usage to map the region. The problem is, added Auld-Thomas, there’s much more to find and too little time. “One of the downsides of discovering lots of new Maya cities in the era of Lidar is that there are more of them than we can ever hope to study,” he said. Share this story

A Small South American Country Shines

The Big Carrot Suriname The World Bank considers the South American country and former Dutch colony of Suriname to be an “upper middle-income” country due to its rich natural resources. But it noted that the country’s mining and other revenues declined in 2015, sparking a fiscal crisis that grew worse when the coronavirus pandemic struck. As a result, more than 17 percent of the country’s citizens lived in poverty in 2022. A year later, tensions in the country exploded over the economic situation: In February 2023, protesters broke into the country’s legislature in the capital of Paramaribo after President Chan Santokhi agreed to implement austerity measures such as an end to fuel subsidies and tax hikes to comply with an International Monetary Fund loan agreement, World Politics Review explained. Now new oil money might change that trajectory. French oil giant TotalEnergies recently announced $3 billion in engineering contracts for the GranMorgu offshore drilling project that could tap more than 700 million barrels of oil with production scheduled from 2028, reported Reuters. These investments were part of TotalEnergies and American exploration firm APA’s $10.5 billion offshore drilling plan for GranMorgu, Suriname’s first such project. In the local language Sranan Tongo, “GranMorgu” means “new dawn” and “Goliath grouper,” noted TotalEnergies in a statement that also promised a total of 6,000 new jobs for a country of about 600,000 people. “Today is a historic day for Suriname,” said Chan in early October when the project was announced, the Associated Press reported. “This is a game-changer.” Now the pressure is on the oil industry and Chan to demonstrate how regular people will benefit. Suriname has around 2.4 billion barrels in reserves, noted OilPrice.com, leading observers to believe that the country can expect a windfall of cash like neighboring Guyana did after opening up oil fields to international drillers. Ratings agency Moody’s agreed, boosting Suriname’s credit rating on the promise of oil revenues, Bloomberg wrote. The reality might not be so great, however. Analyst John Gerdes of Gerdes Energy Research told Barron’s that Suriname might have only a third as much oil production potential as Guyana, for example. Some constituencies in Suriname also believe they are not set to benefit. For example, Suriname has one of the largest untouched rainforests in the world and is also the planet’s most densely forested country. But the country is the only one in South America that hasn’t recognized the land rights of Indigenous communities that want to protect the forest amid a logging boom, Mongabay reported. How Chan distributes the new capital will be key. Meanwhile, some believe that while the Indigenous peoples of the country may not benefit from the oil boom, the forest actually might, wrote the Financial Times. Officials in the country say the oil boom, ironically, presents an opportunity to jump-start demand for Suriname’s fledgling sovereign carbon credits scheme, which to date hasn’t been very successful, mainly because there aren’t many international companies operating in the country – yet. The idea, possibly to be voted on in the legislature this fall, is to require all companies operating in Suriname to purchase its sovereign carbon credits so as to offset their in-country emissions. That money would go to its climate fund, mainly to protect its forest. “We are following this mechanism in which we can receive climate finance through carbon credits – OK, we’re doing that, but it’s still not working,” Suriname’s minister of the environment, Marciano Dasai, told the newspaper. “But now, we have oil and gas.” Share this story

Drug Dealing And The Temptation Of Big Money

I wrote a biography of the international drug dealer Paul Lir Alexander (o barao da cocaina). Paul was born in the small fishing village of Laguna, Santa Catarina, Brasil to an unwed mother. He started life poor and humble. Before Paul became a drug dealer, he had a distinguished career as an Israeli Mossad agent. He earned two college degrees at a prestigious private university in Rio de Janeiro. He learned to speak six languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, and Yiddish.) He created a brilliant talent agency, Sunshine Entertainment Limitada, that created the Brasilian superstar Xuxa. Just on that basis, he became a millionaire in his 20s. Then Paul became a drug dealer importing some $9 billion worth of cocaine to the US and Australia. At the time of his arrest in April 1993 at the age of 37, Paul had the following assets: 1) A Hawker Sidley corporate jet. 2) A $5 million apartment in the Barra da Tijuca section of Rio de Janeiro. 3) A $800,000 house in north Miami Beach. 4) A 6,400-hectare (15,874 acres) ranch in Brasil. 5) A $25 million mega yacht. 6) Paul was completing the raising of over $300,000,000 to buy The Manchete Television Network in Brasil. I asked Paul why he went into drug dealing. He calmly replied that he could not resist the temptation of so much money. Over 30 years later, the temptation of big money to be made from drug dealing is still alive and well. The senior Spanish officer in charge of fighting drug importation into Spain has been arrested for drug dealing and money laundering. Here is the story: Spain Spain arrested the former top law enforcement officer in charge of the unit investigating fraud and corruption after the Guardian reported this week that around $22 million was hidden in the walls of his house. Óscar Sánchez Gil, the former head of the fraud and anti-money laundering division of Spain’s national police force, was arrested last week along with 15 other people, including his girlfriend, also a police officer in the Madrid region. During the raid on his home, police found the cash hidden in the walls and ceilings of the couple’s home near the Spanish capital. Officers also found more than $1 million in his office. The couple has been charged with drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption, and membership of a criminal organization and have been jailed until trial. Spanish media said the arrests were linked to the seizure last month of 13 tons of cocaine that arrived in the southern port of Algeciras from Ecuador, the largest-ever haul of cocaine in Spain and “one of the largest seizures in the world.” Police operations uncovered links between the importer of the drugs and Sánchez Gil. He was already under suspicion by his colleagues who had tapped his phone, the newspaper El Mundo reported. He is suspected of having worked for the drug traffickers for “at least five years,” providing information on the surveillance of containers in Spanish ports, which enabled them to avoid checks, Agence France-Presse wrote. Spain is a main entry point for drugs into Europe because of its close ties with former colonies in Latin America such as major cocaine producers Colombia and Peru, and its proximity to Morocco, a top cannabis producer.

The Girl From Ipanema by Joyce Partise

Satellite Reconnaissance And The Falkland's War

Falklands The Royal Fleet Auxiliaries Sir Galahad and Sir Tristram were attacked by Argentine A-4 Skyhawks on June 8, 1982, during the Falklands War. Both ships were hit, with heavy loss of life on Sir Galahad, which was still burning on June 13 when an American HEXAGON satellite took this photo. The war ended June 14 with the surrender of Argentine forces on the islands. Satellite photo via Harry Stranger. Satellite reconnaissance and the Falklands War by Dwayne A. Day Monday, November 4, 2024 Bookmark and Share On June 8, 1982, Lieutenant Carlos Cachon was leading a flight of A-4 Skyhawk jets at low level over the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Argentine forces had invaded the islands in April, prompting the United Kingdom to send a naval and amphibious force to retake them. The war had gotten bloody in May, with significant troop and ship losses on both sides. Now it was about to get even worse for the British. What remains largely unknown and unexplored is the degree of US intelligence support to the British forces in the Falklands War. According to Skyhawks Over the South Atlantic, by Santiago Rivas, Cachon and his fellow pilots crossed into and out of clouds and rain that hampered their visibility, then flew over a large number of British troops on the ground. Another pilot suddenly yelled “There are the ships!” and Cachon saw “two grey silhouettes” against the coast. He began his attack and released his bombs, which hit the center of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) Sir Galahad. Another pair of pilots hit the RFA Sir Tristram. In total, 43 Welsh Guards and seven ship’s crew were killed in what became known to the British as “the darkest day of the fleet.” Sir Galahad burned and kept burning for days. Sir Tristram was less heavily damaged. Falklands The burning RFA Sir Galahad along with RFA Sir Tristram near Fitzroy on the eastern side of the islands. When this image was taken, Sir Galahad had been burning for five days. The ship would later be towed out to sea and sunk. RFA Sir Tristram was salvaged. Satellite photo via Harry Stranger. On June 13, a HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite overflew the islands. The weather was usually bad for overhead reconnaissance during the war, but on this day portions of the islands were clear. The HEXAGON photographed broad swaths of the islands. The HEXAGON could cover immense amounts of territory in a single image. Five days after the two ships had been successfully attacked, Sir Galahad was still burning, its smoke plume visible in one of the satellite’s images. But the downside of HEXAGON’s impressive capabilities was that it achieved them using film, and that film sat inside the satellite until the reentry vehicle that carried it was ejected on June 15 and recovered over the North Pacific. Then it had to be recovered, transported to Rochester, New York for development, and sent to Washington for imagery interpretation. The war ended on June 14; by the time the film showing the burning Sir Galahad reached an interpreter’s desk on June 24, the war had been over for ten days. Falklands The RFA Sir Galahad before the Falklands War. British forces suffered significant losses of ships and personnel during the war. Argentina also lost several ships and had a much higher loss of life. (credit: Wikimedia Commons) The Falklands War Although the history of the war has been extensively studied in the four decades since it took place, the extent of American support to Great Britain has only come to light in the past ten years or so. What remains largely unknown and unexplored is the degree of US intelligence support to the British forces. Now, more information on that subject is becoming available. British warships sailed from ports in the United Kingdom only a few days after the invasion, but it took them several weeks to arrive at the islands. When the war finally ended several months later, the toll was clear. The Argentines suffered 649 killed, including 323 men lost when the cruiser General Belgrano was sunk by a British nuclear submarine in early May, and Great Britain suffered 258 of its soldiers, sailors, and marines killed. The Royal Navy lost two destroyers, two frigates, and three other vessels to Argentine Exocet missiles and bombs. RFA Sir Tristram was eventually transported to the United Kingdom and salvaged, but RFA Sir Galahad was too heavily damaged and was towed out to sea and sunk. The Reagan Administration initially sought a diplomatic solution to maintain favor with Latin American countries that it was enlisting in opposition to communist influence in Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. But behind the scenes, the United States offered access to American weapons, perhaps most importantly the latest version of the Sidewinder air-to-air missile, which was hurriedly integrated onto British Harrier jump jets. Falklands The runway at Port Stanley was seized by Argentine forces soon after the invasion. The Royal Air Force carried out long-range bombing attacks on the islands in May and June. Although damage to the runway was minimal, the attacks prevented Argentina from operating fast jets from the runway and instead launched them from Argentina, which reduced their time over their targets. Satellite photo via Harry Stranger American satellite reconnaissance and the war On May 11, a Titan IIID rocket roared off its pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California carrying the 17th HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite. HEXAGON had first entered service in 1971, was the size of a school bus, and had earned the nickname “Big Bird,” mostly from people who did not know about the top secret satellite. The HEXAGON’s primary role was imaging large areas of the Earth to spot targets at medium resolution of approximately 30 to 90 centimeters. This was good enough to identify most military vehicles, but not sufficient to determine fine technical details—for example, it could spot a MiG-29 fighter at an airfield, but not determine if it was a single or two-seater. The HEXAGON had two powerful cameras and the film that ran through them was deposited in four satellite reentry vehicles at the front of the satellite. When a reentry vehicle was full, it was ejected and reentered northwest of Hawaii for recovery, and after the fourth reentry vehicle reached Earth about six months after launch, the satellite was useless. The time from when an image was taken until when it reached human eyes was a minimum of a few days but more likely a few weeks. The HEXAGON joined the third and fourth KH-11 KENNEN satellites already in orbit. KENNEN satellites had a near-real-time capability, beaming their images back to the ground within minutes of taking them. The KENNENs probably had resolution about 30 centimeters at the time, and they imaged far less territory than the HEXAGON, but they were fast. What is now known is that a HEXAGON satellite also photographed the islands on two days: May 31 and June 13. In their polar orbits, the two KH-11s made multiple passes near the islands during the conflict and flew almost directly over them approximately 30 times in two and a half months. Most of their passes were to the east or west, and the satellites would have had to turn to the side to image the islands, degrading their imagery. How often they imaged the islands is unknown, although they had many opportunities. The limiting factor was most likely cloud cover: the Falkland Islands were often clouded over during April, May, and June—fall heading into winter in the southern hemisphere. British forces reported that it was usually cloudy and often rainy during much of the conflict, and the two KENNENs probably had few opportunities even when they flew near the islands. KH-11-4 passed near the islands on May 28, but would have had to look 64 degrees off-nadir (i.e. 64 degrees off straight down), meaning that the satellite would have to turn far to the side and image at an angle through more atmosphere, degrading the imagery. But KH-11-3 also passed near the island, about 35 degrees off-nadir, a much more reasonable angle for imaging the ground. On that day the islands were relatively cloud-free. Falklands A HEXAGON image of the Port Stanley airfield taken on June 13, 1982. The craters from the Vulcan bombing raid are clearly visible. The war ended on June 14. This image did not get analyzed in the United States until June 24, demonstrating the primary limitation of the HEXAGON's film-return technology. Satellite photo via Harry Stranger On May 28, the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) produced a cable on “improved defensive measures, Port Stanley area, Falkland Islands.” The cable, which was declassified in 2011, reported that Argentina had improved its defensive positions around the Port Stanley area and deployed fighter and ground attack aircraft to the airfield. The Argentine forces had also constructed defensive positions on the southern outskirts of the town. They had deployed possible anti-aircraft sites on the coast to the east and erected 50 probable two-man tents as well as dug trenches. The cable does not state what satellite provided the imagery of the area, but it was most likely KH-11-3, because KH-11-4 was too far away on its passes near the islands, and the HEXAGON did not return its film until over two weeks later on June 15. Because the imagery was immediately available, it was almost certainly shared with the British government. Recently, at the request of Australian researcher Harry Stranger and this author, HEXAGON imagery was obtained of the Falklands during the conflict. What is now known is that a HEXAGON satellite also photographed the islands on two days: May 31 and June 13. On May 31, HEXAGON Mission 1217 imaged all the key locations, including Royal Navy warships then engaged in deploying troops to shore. Those ships, located in San Carlos Sound, had come under attack on several previous occasions, but on this day they were not attacked. On June 13, the HEXAGON again photographed the islands, again spotting the ships, but also spotting RFA Sir Galahad and RFA Sir Tristram on the eastern side of the islands. No intelligence cables about the British ships have been released. However, in 2011 the CIA declassified a cable from June 24 that refers to imagery “acquired on the day prior to the Argentine surrender,” i.e. June 13. That cable, titled “damage and defenses, Port Stanley, Falkland Islands,” refers to damage to the airfield and surrounding areas. The airfield had been bombed by Royal Air Force Vulcan bombers in a daring raid in May. Although the bombs barely hit the runway and it did not shut down the airfield, the attack prompted Argentina to decide not to base fighter planes on the island, which dramatically increased their distance from the attacking British forces and reduced their time over their targets. The cable continued: “Numerous craters were present throughout the area. The damage from three craters on the runway had been repaired.” (A possible reference to craters observed in the May 31 HEXAGON imagery.) “The hangar at the support area was partially damaged and one of the support buildings was completely destroyed.” Notably, the May 28 cable did not refer to destroyed aircraft at the airfield, but the June 15 cable did. Falklands Royal Navy warships near the port of San Carlos imaged by an American HEXAGON reconnaissance satellite on May 31, 1982. This area became known as “Bomb Alley” to the British, because several ships were successfully attacked and sunk here. This image was not analyzed in the United States until after the war was over. Satellite photo via Harry Stranger Falklands history The HEXAGON imagery arrived on analysts’ light tables after the war was over. The KENNEN imagery was more timely and could have had some value to British forces. It is unknown if any of the imagery was directly shared with the task force, or even if the information in the May 28 intelligence cable was shared, although it seems likely. It has also been previously reported that the United States shared signals intelligence data collected from satellites with the United Kingdom (see “Buccaneers of the high frontier: Program 989 SIGINT satellites from the ABM hunt to the Falklands War to the space shuttle,” The Space Review, November 7, 2022.) In 2011, the National Reconnaissance Office, which operated both the KENNEN and HEXAGON satellites, released a declassified film about the HEXAGON. Following a short clip of Argentine Skyhawks attacking Royal Navy ships, a HEXAGON photograph was deleted—that image was probably a HEXAGON image of ships in San Carlos Bay, which the British had nicknamed “Bomb Alley.” Falklands Close-up of several British ships in San Carlos on May 31. The HEXAGON imagery is sufficiently detailed to identify the types of ships. Satellite photo via Harry Stranger Both the United Kingdom and the government of Argentina have declassified substantial military records of the conflict, and pilots, sailors, and government officials on both sides have written memoirs about their involvement. The extent of US support to the British is still largely unknown, but these documents and photographs indicate that some new evidence is finally coming to light, over four decades since the guns went silent in the South Atlantic and the hulk of RFA Sir Galahad was sent to the bottom of the sea. The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of Harry Stranger, Jonathan McDowell, and Ted Molczan. Special thanks to Mariano P. Sciaroni. Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net.

Rio de Janeiro Tour and Bossa Nova Playlist

Chile 50 Years Ago: The Assasination Of THe Prats Family

The Pinochet Regime at 50 The Assassination of General Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert Wedding photo Car Bombing in Buenos Aires Marked First Act of State-Sponsored International Terror of Chilean Military Regime On 50th Anniversary of Prats’ Assassination, Archive Posts Key U.S. and Chilean Records on Pinochet’s Use of Terrorism to Eliminate Threats to His Regime Published: Oct 1, 2024 Briefing Book # 871 Edited by Peter Kornbluh For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or peter.kornbluh@gmail.com Subjects Covert Action Human Rights and Genocide Regions South America Events Chile – Coup d’État, 1973 Project Chile BOOKS Lo Que Tarde La Justicia bookcover Lo que tarde la justicia by Sofía, Angélica, and Cecilia Prats Cuthbert, Debate (September 30, 2024) book The Pinochet File by Peter Kornbluh, The New Press, Updated edition (September 11, 2013) book cover Pinochet desclasificado by Peter Kornbluh, Un Día en La Vida/Editorial Catalonia (August 2023) The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents by John Dinges, The New Press (August 1, 2012) Los Anos del Condor book cover Los años del Cóndor (Spanish Edition) by John Dinges, DEBATE (June 1, 2021) Chile en el corazón book cover Chile en el corazón (Spanish Edition) by John Dinges, DEBATE (September 1, 2023) Washington, D.C., October 1, 2024 - On the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism, the National Security Archive is posting a compilation of documents, including CIA intelligence reports and a judicial confession of the Chilean secret police operative, Michael Townley, who constructed, placed, and detonated the car bomb that killed Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974. Only weeks after the bombing, a friend of the Prats daughters gave them a chilling message: the Pinochet regime planned to “celebrate the coup” every September by eliminating specific persons deemed a threat to the dictatorship. This information proved to be prescient. The following September, the Vice President of the Chilean Christian Democrat Party, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife were gunned down and critically injured on a street in Rome. A year later, on September 21, 1976, a car bomb similar to the one that killed the Prats took the lives of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt in Washington, D.C. Parats Memories book cover After Gen. Prats was assassinated, his daughters salvaged the manuscript of his memoir, which was subsequently published in Mexico. “The first [assassination] was our parents,” Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia Prats write in their new book, Lo que tarde la justicia, published in Chile this week. The compilation of records posted today marks an anniversary that was commemorated in Buenos Aires, where the attack took place, as well as in Chile, where the atrocities of the Pinochet era continue to cast a shadow over present-day politics. “The Prats case,” notes Archive Senior Analyst Peter Kornbluh, “provides a dramatic reminder of the true terrorist nature of the military dictatorship—and of Pinochet himself.” Targeting General Prats The target of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism was not a renowned leftist or socialist militant but rather Pinochet’s own predecessor as Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, General Carlos Prats González. A pro-constitution officer, General Prats assumed the top military position in Chile in October 1970, after his own predecessor, General René Schneider, was assassinated in a CIA-supported plot to block the inauguration of president-elect Salvador Allende. During Allende’s tumultuous three years, Prats used his powerful position to safeguard Chile’s constitutional order. In 1972, he entered Allende’s cabinet and even held the position of vice president of the nation. In June 1973, he quickly suppressed a coup attempt—known as the “Tanquetazo”—by junior officers and the extremist paramilitary group, Patria y Libertad. In late August 1973, however, protests against Prats’ continuing support for the Allende government forced him to resign. Prats personally recommended General Augusto Pinochet to replace him as commander-in-chief, erroneously believing that he would support the constitutional order against pro-coup officers. Only four days after the coup, General Prats and his wife went into exile in Argentina. Prats “was living quietly in Buenos Aires,” the CIA later reported. “He was not permitted to make any public appearances or statements and had faithfully carried out the restrictive instructions pertaining to his exile.” But General Pinochet clearly considered the highly respected Prats to be a potential threat to his power. Only six weeks after the coup, Pinochet dispatched one of his top deputies, General Sergio Arellano Stark, to Buenos Aires to conduct secret talks with the Argentine military. Arellano’s top priority, according to a CIA source, was to “discuss with the Argentine military any information they have regarding the activities of General (retired) Carlos Prats. Arellano will also attempt to gain an agreement whereby the Argentines maintain scrutiny over Prats and regularly inform the Chileans of his activities.” In June 1974, Pinochet met with the director of the Chilean secret police, DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras, and ordered him to eliminate Prats. Contreras first assigned this mission to his DINA station chief in Argentina, Enrique Arancibia Clavel, who was instructed to enlist Argentine paramilitary groups to kill Prats. When that effort failed to advance, DINA’s deputy director, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, enlisted DINA’s newest recruit, an American expatriate named Michael Townley who was an electronics specialist and had collaborated with Patria y Libertad in anti-Allende operations. In secret testimony given to an Argentine judge in 1999, Townley recalled how Colonel Espinoza had described Prats as a potential leader of a government-in-exile and asked Townley if he could “do something” about the exiled general. Eliminating Prats “was for the wellbeing of the country,” Townley testified. “It was a patriotic request,” he stated. “So, I did it.” Townley traveled to Buenos Aires twice; the first time he was unable to locate Prats. Accompanied by his wife Mariana Callejas—also a DINA agent—he returned on September 10, 1974, and spent several weeks plotting the assassination. At one point, Townley followed Prats into a neighborhood park and considered shooting him in broad daylight, but, he testified, “there were too many people around.” Instead, Townley fashioned a remote-controlled car bomb made of two C4 cartridges, establishing his signature modus operandi as an international terrorist. On September 29, he managed to slip into the parking garage and attach the device to the chassis of Prats’ small Fiat 125. Townley and Callejas then staked out the Prats’ building until they returned from visiting friends just after midnight on September 30. Callejas tried to detonate the bomb, “but it did not function,” Townley confessed. “I took [the detonator] from her, pressed it, and it worked.” Prats car The Prats' Fiat 125 was destroyed by a car bomb planted by DINA agents on Pinochet's orders. The Pursuit of Justice For over thirty years, the Prats family pursued efforts to identify the perpetrators of this atrocity and prosecute them. In 1983, two daughters, Sofía and Angélica Prats, traveled to Washington, D.C., to work with Argentine lawyers requesting the extradition of Townley—then under witness protection in the United States after serving a short sentence for assassinating Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt with a car bomb—to Buenos Aires. But a U.S. judge ruled that Townley’s plea bargain agreement in the Letelier-Moffitt case prevented his extradition. A Chilean judge also denied Argentine legal efforts to have Mariana Callejas extradited from Santiago to Buenos Aires to stand trial. In 1987, the Prats daughters repeatedly approached the U.S. Embassy in Chile seeking information and legal assistance in the case. Eventually, their efforts led an Argentine judge, Maria Servini, to travel to Washington in 1999 and officially depose Townley. For a number of years, his secret testimony remained sealed. (See Document 8) “We instinctively understood that the search for justice would be a lengthy journey,” Sofía, Angélica and Cecilia Prats write in their new book. “We knew it would be arduous, beginning with a period of mourning that would last an unknown amount of time.” Argentine authorities did eventually arrest DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel, charging him first with espionage and then as an accessory to the Prats assassination. He was imprisoned in Argentina for almost two decades. More than 35 years after Prats and Cuthbert were assassinated, and 20 years after the return to civilian governance, in June 2010 the Chilean courts finally convicted and sentenced former DINA chief Manuel Contreras and his deputy Pedro Espinoza, along with several other DINA officials and operatives in the Prats case. Pinochet himself was never prosecuted for the Prats assassination, nor for the other acts of terrorism and repression he ordered. After he died on December 10, 2006—ironically, international Human Rights Day—the Chilean military arranged for his open coffin to be viewed by his admirers. Francisco Cuadrado Prats, the grandson of Carlos and Sofía Prats, stood in the viewing line with hundreds of Pinochetistas; when he reached the coffin, he spit on the glass covering Pinochet’s face. “It was a spontaneous act to spit on him out of revulsion,” the young Prats recalled after he was beaten by Pinochet supporters and then arrested for his sacrilegious conduct, “because he had my grandparents murdered.” The Documents ebb 871 doc 1 Document 1 CIA, Intelligence Cable, [Special Mission of General Arellano Stark to Argentina], Secret, November 27, 1973 Nov 27, 1973 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project Only six weeks after the coup, General Pinochet dispatched one of his top deputies, General Sergio Arellano Stark, to Buenos Aires to conduct secret talks with the Argentine military. Arellano’s top priority, according to a CIA source, is to “discuss with the Argentine military any information they have regarding the activities of General (retired) Carlos Prats. Arellano will also attempt to gain an agreement whereby the Argentines maintain scrutiny over Prats and regularly inform the Chileans of his activities.” Instigated by “the Junta leadership,” according to the cable, this “special mission” provides the first evidence of Pinochet’s direct role in the Prats assassination case. ebb 871 doc 2 Document 2 DINA, [Prats Surveillance Report from Captain Juan Morales Salgado to DINA Director Manuel Contreras], Confidential, June 26, 1974 Jun 26, 1974 Source Prats family archives In June 1974, following a reported meeting in which General Pinochet ordered the elimination of General Prats, DINA director Manuel Contreras dispatched an operative to conduct surveillance on the movements of General Prats in Buenos Aires. In this rare DINA cable, Captain Juan Morales files an intelligence report that provides Prats’ addresses for home and work, as well as the workplace of his wife, Sofia Cuthbert. The surveillance report describes the models of the cars used by the Prats couple, provides an account of his movements, and notes the lack of security personnel to protect him. Morales also provides a hand-drawn diagram of the street and entrance to the Prats’ parking garage. ebb 871 doc 3 Document 3 Chilean Embassy, Buenos Aires, [Letter from Consul Álvaro Droguett del Pierro to the Foreign Ministry regarding Prats Passports], August 12, 1974 Aug 12, 1974 Source Prats family archives In this communication between the Chilean consulate in Buenos Aires and the Chilean Foreign Ministry, Consul Álvaro Droguett requests guidance on whether to provide General Prats and his wife Chilean passports so they can travel to Brazil. The response he receives only four days before the assassination is that it would be “inconvenient” to provide the passports to the Prats couple. After the Prats family demands a copy of the denial, Droguett provides them with a Xerox copy of his letter with a handwritten note at the bottom quoting the Ministry’s response and claiming that he only became aware of the denial on September 30th—the day of the assassination. ebb 871 doc 4 Document 4 CIA, Weekly Situation Report on International Terrorism, “Assassination of Former Chilean General Carlos Prats,” Secret, October 2, 1974 Oct 2, 1974 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project The CIA includes an initial report on the Prats assassination in its weekly summary of international terrorism. Their initial description cites erroneous police reports that the Prats were “killed by the blast of a bomb thrown at their car” along with machine gun fire as they returned to their home. The report accurately states that “the assassins were waiting for Prats and his wife as he drove up to his apartment building.” Further investigation soon revealed that the bomb had planted under the Prats’ Fiat 125 and later detonated by the assassins—DINA agents Michael Townley and his wife Mariana Callejas—who were waiting in a car across the street for the Prats to return. ebb 871 doc 5 Document 5 State Department, Cable, “Assassination of General Prats,” Limited Distribution, October 24, 1974 Oct 24, 1974 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project Reacting to press reports that point the finger of responsibility at the Chilean secret police, the U.S. Embassy reveals how detached it is from the ruthless reality of Pinochet’s repression. Ambassador David Popper dismisses a Radio Moscow report that DINA had assassinated General Prats “on basis of rationale that Chilean military leaders were afraid Prats would attract loyalty of Chilean armed forces personnel disaffected with performance of Junta.” “This explanation makes no sense to us,” Ambassador Popper reported. Nor do we see significant interest in killing Prats of any other Chilean group with capacity of doing so.” ebb 871 doc 6 Document 6 CIA, Intelligence Report, [Overview of Prats Assassination, Possible Perpetrators and Motivations], Secret, October 25, 1974 Oct 25, 1974 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project Almost a month after the Prats assassination, the CIA station files a report providing important details from official and confidential sources. The intelligence brief states that “official Argentine government circles consider the assassination of General Prats to be the work of Chileans,” although they are not sure “whether the assassination was the work of a Chilean left-wing or right-wing group.” The report reveals that Prats had received “a phone call from a Chilean attempting to assume an Argentine accent” warning that his life was in danger and urging him to leave the country. The CIA concluded the cable by citing a possible motivation for the assassination. “Prats had nearly completed his memoirs which strongly condemned many non-Popular Unity politicians and military officers” for their roles in the coup. ebb 871 doc 7 Document 7 State Department, Cable, “Prats Family Again Seeks Information,” Confidential, June 2, 1987. Jun 2, 1987 Source Clinton Chile Declassification Project In a visit to the U.S. Embassy in Santiago, the daughters of Carlos Prats and Sofía Cuthbert press their efforts to hold the murderers of their parents accountable. A top DINA officer, Armando Fernández Larios, who participated in the car bomb assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, has recently turned himself in to U.S. officials, and the daughters seek to have him questioned in the Prats case. They also inform the Chargé that the Argentine courts are seeking the testimony of Chilean officers, but that the military regime has refused to cooperate. In this cable to Washington, Ambassador Harry Barnes requests information on whether the Argentine courts have the legal latitude to formally interrogate Michael Townley, who has finished his short incarceration for the Letelier-Moffitt assassination and is living in the United States under the witness protection program. ebb 871 doc 8 Document 8 U.S. Federal District Court, “Argentina’s Request for Assistance Through the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty Regarding the Investigation of the Death of General Carlos Santiago Prats Gonzalez: Testimony of Michael V. Townley,” November 9, 1999. Nov 9, 1999 Source U.S. Federal District Court As part of Argentina’s legal effort to prosecute the perpetrators of the Prats’ murders in Buenos Aires, the DINA operative who planted and detonated the car bomb, Michael Townley, was officially interrogated by Argentine Judge Maria Servini in Washington, D.C., with the assistance of U.S. Justice Department attorney, John Beasley, Jr. In his sworn testimony, Townley recalled how a top DINA officer, Colonel Pedro Espinoza, had repeatedly approached him in late July and August 1974 about “doing something” about General Prats, who Espinoza described as a potential leader of a government-in-exile. Eliminating Prats “was for the wellbeing of the country,” Townley testified. “It was a patriotic request,” he stated. “So, I did it.” Townley described two trips to Buenos Aires in September 1974; during the first trip, he was unable to locate Prat’s address; during the second trip, another DINA officer provided him with the location of the apartment building at Malabia 3351. He described how he managed to sneak into the parking garage and attach the bomb he had assembled with two sticks of C4 explosives and an electronically activated detonator to the undercarriage of Prats’ Fiat. Although Townley repeatedly attempted to convince Judge Servini that he had acted alone in the bombing, under intense questioning he was forced to admit that his wife, Mariana Callejas, had accompanied him to Buenos Aires and participated in the mission. “She tried to detonate the bomb, but it did not function,” Townley confessed. “I took [the detonator] from her, pressed it, and it worked.”

The Mexico School Children Disappearance Ten Years Later

The Impunity Cascade: Ayotzinapa at Ten Years ayotzi 9 A protestor is pictured outside of the National Palace in Mexico City on the 9th anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students, September 26, 2023. Photograph courtesy Héctor Guerrero/El País 10th Anniversary Brings No Closure to Families of Victims The National Crisis of Forced Disappearance in Mexico Continues Published: Sep 26, 2024 Edited by Kate Doyle and Claire Dorfman For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Subjects Crime and Narcotics Human Rights and Genocide Political Crimes and Abuse of Power Regions Mexico and Central America Project Mexico Conference poster for Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by the University College London. Conference poster for Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by University College London, September 19-20, 2024. UCL Kate Doyle presented her keynote speech at the conference Atrocities and Memory in North America: Ayotzinapa Ten Years On, organized by University College London, September 19, 2024. Washington, D.C., September 26, 2024 - On the 10th anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Iguala, Mexico, the National Security Archive posts a keynote speech given by Senior Analyst Kate Doyle at an event organized by University College London to commemorate the tragedy and to spotlight ongoing impunity for state actors involved in the crime and the cover-up. The violent attacks of that night and the repeated obstruction of efforts to obtain justice are together emblematic of the human rights crisis in Mexico. The disappearances remain an open wound for the victims’ families and the country as a whole, where more than 100,000 people have vanished without a trace. Sadly, President López Obrador will complete his presidential term without having provided closure for the families of the Aytozinapa students—one of his key campaign promises. The two-day conference at UCL brought together key investigators, analysts, and academics involved in the case. In her address, Doyle said it was the “anniversary of impunity,” explaining how the Ayotzinapa case illustrates the phenomenon of macro-criminality, where security forces, organized crime and economic elites “collaborate and generate criminal networks together that rely on extortion, trafficking, illicit weapons trade, and other forms of corruption in order to profit and thrive.” Related to this, Doyle argued, is a system of macro-impunity, where these same actors “cooperate to ensure that a justice system cannot function.” Since 2015, the National Security Archive has filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests for U.S. documents related to the case of the 43 students, the “war on drugs” and its consequences, and U.S. security assistance to Mexico. In 2020, Kate Doyle and the National Security Archive partnered with reporter Anayansi Díaz-Cortes and Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting to develop the podcast series “After Ayotzinapa,” released in January 2022. Two months later, the Spanish-language version, “Después de Ayotzinapa,” was released in co-production with Adonde Media. The National Security Archive continues to investigate the case with our partners at Centro Prodh and Reveal. Visit our Ayotzinapa Investigations page to learn more about the case and the National Security Archive’s investigative and advocacy work. The Impunity Cascade: Ayotzinapa and the Triumph of Justice September 19, 2024 By Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst, National Security Archive One decade ago, Ernesto Guerrero, 23 years old, one of the students at the Ayotzinapa teacher-training college who survived September 26, 2014, described the aftermath of the first sustained attacks by police on three buses stuck at Calle Juan N. Álvarez in Iguala. The intense gunfire had finally stopped, and the police cars were gone. One student lay sprawled in the middle of the street with a critical head wound. Another had several fingers shot off, a third was shot in the face. A group of some twenty students had been forced off the buses and taken away in the backs of police trucks. Journalist John Gibler later published Ernesto’s testimony in his book, I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us, a collection of oral histories about the night of Iguala. Ernesto told John, “We students tried to cordon off the area and protect it as best we could. We put rocks and sticks around the bullet shells and other evidence so that no one would pick them up or step on them, so when the detectives arrived… But they never came.” The Mexican government’s first response to the disappearance of the 43 was to construct a cover-up. President Enrique Peña Nieto and his senior officials maintained the validity of their “historical truth” until the day they left power. On December 1, 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office with the very public pledge to solve Ayotzinapa. López Obrador decreed the creation of a truth commission to be headed by his most senior human rights official, Alejandro Encinas. A human rights lawyer with the United Nations, Omar Gómez Trejo, was named special prosecutor. The president went further, ordering all federal agencies (including the Army, Marines, national intelligence, and federal police) to provide any assistance required by the investigation, including access to their personnel and their archives. Within 18 months, Gómez Trejo had undertaken a major housecleaning of his office, replacing career cronies with younger, committed investigators and prosecutors, many from outside the government. He and Encinas had searched dozens of sites and located the remains of two students. Arrest warrants were obtained for more than 80 suspects. The group of independent experts (GIEI) was invited back into the case. It was exciting to see the work that was getting done, the resources invested, the new technologies available, the searches underway, the multiple meetings, the assurances to parents, the skills and knowledge and expertise being poured into this case. To solve it and to find the boys. So it’s hard to believe we are gathering today to mark ten years since one of the most shocking human rights atrocities to ever take place in Mexico and contemplating how completely the case has collapsed. It turns out, those early advances were the exceptions that proved the rule. Once the investigation began to find evidence of a military role in the crimes, President López Obrador became disaffected and the government’s cooperation began to wither – then curdled into open hostility. In 2022, the special prosecutor left the country in fear for his life. The commission head, Alejandro Encinas, resigned after learning he had been under military surveillance through Pegasus spyware. The GIEI jumped ship in 2023, accusing the Army and the Center for National Intelligence of sabotaging the investigation. No more students have been found. There have been no trials and no convictions. No truth, no justice. This is the anniversary of impunity. The title of my talk is half-borrowed from the title of an influential book published in 2011 by Harvard scholar Kathryn Sikkink called The Justice Cascade. In it, Sikkink proposed that with the end of the Cold War, some nations began organizing what had previously been impossible to imagine – criminal trials of the perpetrators of human rights abuses. According to her research, once the political logic of the Cold War vanished, a powerful desire for truth, memory, and justice began to emerge in countries around the world, and specifically the desire to hold individuals criminally responsible for grave human rights violations. This global trend, as Sikkink identified it, took place within the context of the much broader arena of transitional justice, which included forms of truth-telling and memorialization, but the focus of her book was on the trials. Human rights trials were periodic and highly dispersed at first, but by the early 2000s turned into a flood – the cascade of her title. They were not homogeneous; they could be national courtrooms, regional bodies, special tribunals, cases of universal jurisdiction, all the way to the International Criminal Court at The Hague. My entire career at the Archive has been focused on the post-Cold War consensus in the Americas that the recovery of historical memory, truth-telling, transparency, and trials would not only strengthen democratic governance but also support social movements through recognition of their struggles, information about what truly happened, and accountability. I still believe this. But it’s clear that the narrative of The Justice Cascade fails to address other powerful and insidious forces at work, even in those countries that convened the truth commissions, built the monuments, held the trials. I think, for example, of Guatemala, which shortly after the historic genocide trial of Ríos Montt careened into an aggressive authoritarian government that quickly dismembered the very justice system that had carried out that and other paradigmatic human rights trials. Obviously, individual criminal accountability through a justice system in and of itself does not lead to political, social, or economic justice. Furthermore, while The Justice Cascade posits impunity as the opposite of individual accountability – in other words, impunity is literally when a person goes unpunished for a crime they committed – there’s another, more ferocious kind of impunity, a structural impunity, that is not addressed. We could call it macro-impunity, in direct response to what has become a whole new field of violence studies in the Americas, called “macrocriminality.” Using the definition given by María Luisa Quintero (former Director of Investigations and Litigation at CICIG), macrocriminality is a system that functions at the intersection of three spheres: 1) the classic “criminal” (organized crime group), 2) economic, business (private interests, private companies), 3) and the public (agents of the State, whether police, judges, prosecutors, politicians, etc.). The three spheres collaborate and generate criminal networks together that rely on extortion, trafficking, illicit weapons trade, and other forms of corruption in order to profit and thrive. So we could say that macro-impunity would operate in a similar fashion, as those networks of actors from the public, private, and classically “criminal” spheres cooperate to ensure that a justice system cannot function. In other words, macro-criminality is the crime, macro-impunity is the cover-up. And the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students is now a caso paradigmatico – not of Mexico’s ability to solve a complex human rights case for the very first time, as I know Prosecutor Gómez Trejo and his team had hoped and believed – but a paradigmatic case of macro-impunity. In order to better understand the contemporary problem of macro impunity, we need to look at the history of impunity in the Americas – which for me starts in the United States, after the Second World War. As the Cold War began, the United States instrumentalized “national security doctrine” in order to protect US interests, and military governments south of the border largely signed on to the anti-communist project, converting it into the Dirty Wars of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. US support for repression in the hemisphere took many forms: military assistance, training in our military schools, weapons grants, and “technical assistance,” which meant access to advanced computers as well as surveillance and intelligence technologies. Physical and psychological torture techniques were recast as “interrogation methods” and formalized in official US military training manuals. The rest of the hemisphere knew this – the Mexicans, the Central and South Americans, they knew it; we trained their militaries for decades in the art of what US defense strategists called “internal security”: how to identify and eliminate the enemy hiding inside civil society. Most US citizens did not know it or refused to know it. They were spared the firsthand experience of the Dirty Wars, of course. And the United States government was careful to shroud kidnapping, torture, and assassination programs in secrecy – especially at home. If there were activists and human rights groups and investigative journalists, a few members of Congress, who exposed the consequences of the US-supported counterinsurgency programs, most Americans accepted the propaganda manufactured by Washington that explained that the wars south of our border were dirty because that’s just how it was in Latin America. Latin America was made up of communist terrorists and brutal militaries, it was in their nature, a history of bloodshed going back hundreds of years. Even in internal, classified communications, US officials promoted this framing. “Guatemala is a violent society,” wrote one State Department analyst 38 years ago in a secret report on forced disappearance. “The conscious acceptance and use of violence as an instrument of politics contribute to the extraordinary levels of murder, kidnapping, and disappearances.” The analyst was referring to human rights violations committed by Guatemalan army officers and units the US had backed for decades. The United States had less direct influence on the Mexican military because Mexico’s insistence on sovereignty kept the Pentagon mostly out of its defense affairs. At the same time, Washington had confidence in the ability of the PRI to control subversion, with or without US military assistance. As a CIA secret intelligence estimate on “Security Conditions in Mexico” explained in 1966, “The government party virtually monopolizes politics and is an outstanding force for stability. Top government leaders are strong, determined men, conversant with the uses of power. Security forces are tough and well-trained; when so ordered, they carry out missions without overmuch regard for legalisms.” “Without overmuch regard for legalisms”: That’s the CIA signaling impunity as a strategic advantage in Mexico. 1966 is about when Mexico’s Dirty War began, according to the truth commission, which issued its first report last month. By the mid-1970s, when political repression in Mexico reached its most intensive phase, US human rights policy was taking shape in Washington. As early as 1973, Congress began conditioning military assistance to countries on their human rights records. The Department of State instituted a new human rights reporting requirement for embassies around the world, and in 1977 compiled the first annual State Department Human Rights Report. But Congress and later President Carter’s new commitment to human rights coexisted uneasily alongside US national security objectives in Mexico (and the rest of the Americas). Read the now-declassified communiqués sent by the US Embassy in Mexico City to Washington during those years and you can track how the US government sanitized Embassy reports of human rights abuses under the Echeverría regime for public consumption. In 1976, for example, political officer John Hamilton addressed the prevalence of torture in Mexico’s criminal investigations system. “Torture and other similar violations of human rights frequently occur immediately after arrest during police interrogation… These violations occur in all kinds of instances, both in normal criminal arrests and in politically motivated detentions…. Although the Government of Mexico clearly does not condone this officially or publicly, it just as clearly tolerates the abuse so long as it does not result in embarrassing public disclosures. It undoubtedly is also limited in its ability to change this centuries old pattern.” Although Hamilton used his best bland and bureaucratic language to describe the abusive practices of a close ally, the State Department’s first annual human rights report, issued one year later, stripped his references to torture and other violations altogether and pointed instead to the “strong enforcement actions” taken by Echeverría’s government against suspected terrorists. The truth was US interests lay elsewhere. In 2003, I interviewed Lawrence Sternfield, the former CIA chief of station in Mexico who served in the mid to late 1970s. When I asked him about the CIA’s concerns about the excesses of the Dirty War at that time, Sternfield told me: "There was absolutely no mention of human rights while I was there. Not one word was spoken about it with my counterparts. It wasn't something that we broached or they broached. The relationship we had with the DFS was about pure intelligence gathering. This was the height of the Cold War, and our efforts were focused against the Soviet target. Not that we weren't aware that the Mexicans were doing bad things when they picked up people. But we didn't raise that with them." As one former US ambassador told me a few years ago, “It’s always the fault of the United States!” But whether or not we want to make a direct, causal link between the hundreds of Mexican military officers who trained at the School of the Americas and the methods they used to crush dissent at home, we can recognize the erasure of the Dirty War in the official US record as a cover-up of Mexican repression in exchange for policy priorities that mattered more. Washington’s willingness to read authoritarian rule as an “outstanding force for stability” and to christen human rights abuses as “strong enforcement actions” point to what was actually important to US policy makers. Mexico has always considered itself exceptional, and when the era of transitional justice dawned in the early 1990s it became the exception in how countries in the hemisphere grappled with legacies of political violence. There would be no truth commission. Memorialization was left to the victims and their families. No human rights trials would be held. Upon taking office in 2000, President Vicente Fox took the important decision to order an opening of Dirty War archives. When it came to truth-telling and accountability, however, he fell back on the old impunity playbook. With great fanfare he announced the creation of a special prosecutor’s office to investigate past human rights crimes and prosecute those responsible, but the effort was an expensive simulation that ended with a whimper. FEMOSPP – the fake transitional justice effort – was dissolved in November of 2006, and days later Felipe Calderón was sworn into office as Mexico’s new President. One of his first acts in office was to declare war on the drug cartels and call in the military to assist. The common critique of the war on drugs rejects the emphasis on punitive measures: drug addiction should not be criminalized and the effort to stop narcotics production should not be militarized. But maybe we should look at it from a different perspective. How does the war on drugs itself produce criminality? Can we draw a line connecting the drug war and the disappearance of 43 college students in Guerrero? Let’s recall the 1990s, when the United States crafted the “kingpin strategy” to combat violent drug trafficking organizations. It resulted in the takedown of major drug lords in Mexico. Analysts of counternarcotics policies have demonstrated that – like any corporate break-up – when the monopoly is dismantled, the dominant cartel fragments into smaller trafficking groups which, in their search for territory and market share, burrow into local communities and use any combination they can of bribes, favoritism, intimidation, and coercion, to extreme violence to increase their power. One cartel dismantled under the kingpin strategy was Beltrán Leyva. After breaking with the Sinaloa Cartel, Arturo Beltrán Leyva and his brothers created a powerful, thriving criminal business that trafficked millions of dollars of narcotics annually. In order to protect it, they bribed national-level government officials such as Mexico’s drug czar and the head of the Attorney General’s organized crime division, SEIDO. In 2008, the US declared Arturo a kingpin, and the Treasury Department sanctioned him. In 2009 he was shot and killed by Mexican Marines, effectively destroying the organization. At least seven splinter groups took its place (according to InSight Crime) and competed with each other for territory. One of them was Guerreros Unidos, which from 2010 began controlling plazas in parts of Morelos, Estado de México and northern Guerrero. By 2014, Guerreros Unidos was a pretty successful transnational drug trafficking organization. It wasn’t bribing Mexico’s drug czar but, according to investigators, they were bribing state officials in Guerrero, local mayors, municipal police, the head of the Guerrero office of the federal police, the commanders of two military bases, and employees of the bus companies that ferried their heroin from Iguala to Chicago, Illinois every day, returning with dollars. Then the attacks of September 26 happened. Let’s read what Enrique Peña Nieto’s government declared about the night of Iguala. In the Informe de Caso Iguala, the official story released in 2016 (full of misleading and false information), the government described the attacks and then concluded, “These unfortunate events alerted us to abuse of power, corruption, and infiltration of some municipal police forces by criminal organizations in Guerrero’s northern zone.” The response of the authorities to the disappearance of the 43 was not investigation but containment. The human rights atrocity was characterized as a common crime (kidnapping, homicide). Some municipal police were “corrupt” and acted in collusion with local thugs. A bone was planted and found, suspects detained and tortured, the official story became the historical truth, and as far as President Enrique Peña Nieto and everyone who reported to him were concerned, the case was closed. Containment was necessary because it masked a monster. For every action that unfolded on the night of September 26-27 – as described by then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam and his chief of investigations, Tomás Zerón – there were countless other actions taken by people who were invisible in the official story. It took time and courageous effort on the part of the survivors and the parents of the missing students, the new investigating team, the forensic experts, and the GIEI, but the true dimensions of the atrocity began to be revealed. We learned of the complicities of the military battalions in Iguala, the Federal Police, state police, Ministeriales, Transit Police. The bus companies. The meetings held with the President to coordinate strategy, the roles of the Attorney General, Zerón, the Marines, Defense Secretary Cienfuegos. These weren’t the people who seized the students, hustled them into the backs of trucks, and took them to their fates. These were the people who concocted a cover story and then did everything in their power to ensure the facts about that night would be suppressed. Because the truth about the night would expose the criminal networks that bound Guerreros Unidos not just to local police but to state and federal officials, to members of the Army, the Marines, to private companies. The truth would rearrange accepted definitions of who is the criminal and what is corruption. As the students were being stalked and surveilled, then attacked in Iguala, thousands of miles away the DEA was wrapping up a criminal investigation it had launched in Chicago against a group of Mexican heroin traffickers who belonged to a gang called Guerreros Unidos. In December 2014 – just a few weeks before the Peña Nieto government would close the case with the verdad histórica – eight GU members were indicted, drawing on thousands of hours of surveillance over the course of a year and a half, and hundreds and hundreds of pages of intercepted text messages sent between the group in Chicago and their co-conspirators in northern Guerrero. The messages contained running conversations about the mechanics of operating a heroin trafficking business. There were references to the passenger buses the GU used to transport drugs over the border into the US – the buses the students were riding in when they were attacked by police. Discussions of the system of roadblocks and lookouts maintained by collaborating police officers that kept the shipments safe. The traffickers planned meetings with municipal presidents, compared which officials got what bribes, name-dropped army commanders and other military officers on the payroll. They borrowed police cars to run errands without interference. They guided Marine patrols to the hide-outs of rival gangs to ensure their elimination. They organized special dinners for officers they were courting for favor. They complained about the greedy soldiers, who always asked for more no matter how much they gave them. The investigators in Mexico and the GIEI didn’t see most of the intercepted messages until 2022. Despite the notoriety of the Ayotzinapa case, the Justice Department refused to share them for years, claiming they didn’t contain evidence related to planning or carrying out the students’ disappearance. When the National Security Archive got involved in 2017, it was at the request of the parents’ lawyers from Centro Prodh, who were trying to figure out how to obtain the DEA intercepts. We filed FOIAs and sued the government in federal court. Nothing a non-profit research institute could do succeeded in prying them loose, and they weren’t released until the President of Mexico asked the Vice President of the United States for them when Kamala Harris visited Mexico in late 2021. That helped. So did Mexico’s decision to extradite one of the accused Guerreros Unidos chiefs – Adán Casarrubias Salgado – to Chicago in May 2022. The messages were released to the special prosecutor a few weeks later. I once asked a senior diplomat who was serving in the embassy when the boys were taken how the US viewed the Mexican government’s efforts to solve the case. He had sent a team of FBI agents to Iguala to provide technical assistance, and they returned to Mexico City with bad news. “The investigation was so disorganized,” he told me. “Mexicans had very poor practices, like not protecting the crime scenes. It was a bit frustrating for us since we had spent years and millions of dollars in training them in police and criminal investigation techniques!” Unfortunately, the kind of impunity that protects criminal networks in Mexico can’t be improved with better police techniques. Not because the “drug lords” or the “cartels” are so powerful that they’re impervious to even the most skilled investigators. But because they’re part of a criminal system that includes the police chief we just trained or the Marine commander we invited to Washington for a conference on drug interdiction. Or a defense secretary like Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, awarded with the Pentagon’s Legion of Merit in 2018 for his “extraordinary contributions in strengthening the relationships between the militaries of Mexico and the United States.” In 2015, Cienfuegos refused to allow the soldiers stationed in Iguala to be questioned by investigators, a position he held until his retirement three years later. In 2020, he was arrested by DEA agents in Los Angeles on charges of drug trafficking. US policy needs to recalibrate. The United States backed Calderón’s militarization plan with the Mérida Initiative, which pushed hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons, helicopters, vehicles, intelligence and other assistance to the Army and Marines for their cooperation in going after the traffickers. Today, the military is linked to multiple human rights violations that have gone mostly unpunished, and Sedena has more power to exercise civilian law enforcement than US laws would ever allow at home. But Washington continues to encourage the military’s lead role in the drug war. We’ve trained thousands of Mexican soldiers and Marines in counternarcotics – including members of the 27th Infantry Battalion, based in Iguala, in the weeks before the students were taken. Why didn’t the US Justice Department release the intercepted messages to investigators for eight years, when they contained powerful evidence of the web of complicities that lay behind the disappearance of the students and the subsequent cover-up? The fact is, the Office of the US Attorney in Northern Illinois is concerned with targeting the heroin trade in the streets of Chicago and charging individuals for their roles in it – not macro-criminality in Mexico. By the same token, the hundreds of FOIA requests the Archive filed for information about Ayotzinapa have been met with silence: denials, continuing secrecy, extensive redactions, even of unclassified documents. From a US policy perspective, allowing even the most modest critique of Mexico’s actions in this case threatens bilateral relations on two of the most politically charged issues in Washington today: counternarcotics and migration. And so far, the US hasn’t been willing to take that risk. There are other unintended consequences of the Chicago case on the Ayotzinapa investigation, rarely mentioned. When Adán Casarrubias was extradited to face trafficking charges, his defense lawyer got him a plea deal. As a result, there will be no public trial, and Casarrubias will never be compelled to speak about his role in Guerreros Unidos or say what he knew about the attacks against the students, their disappearance, or their collective fate. For the parents, that is a missed opportunity. To borrow (and paraphrase) again from Kathryn Sikkink, in contrast to the “justice cascade,” the impunity cascade implies the growing legitimacy of the norm that accepts the lack of criminal accountability for human rights abuses and the absence of prosecutions. “The term captures how the idea started as a small stream, but later caught on suddenly, sweeping along many actors in its wake.” The ways the logic and procedures of the US drug war feed impunity and strengthen it make the United State a partner in impunity with Mexico. Impunity-complicit. But as we’ve seen, impunity has its own history. The impunity of the Dirty War flowed naturally into the impunity of today’s permanent violence of the Drug War. As John Gibler pointed out in the Afterword to his collection of oral histories – responding to Ernesto’s story about protecting the evidence after his companions were disappeared – it was the students who believed in the rule of law, who treated the site of attacks as a crime scene and protected evidence they knew the authorities would need to investigate properly. Even in Mexico, even in 2014, the urge to believe in justice existed, that justice was a real possibility. That’s true today. The parents have to believe that their sons will be found and justice is possible. And we do too. But if we don’t challenge the militarized enforcement apparatus managed by the US and Mexico that produces criminality and reinforces impunity, we’re left with… rocks and sticks. Waiting for the detectives. Thank you.