by John Gibler
“They told me that revolutionary propaganda is fundamental, similar to realizing a military attack, that armed propaganda hurts them, just like attacking a base.
“They asked me about the reporter from El Sur, Maribel Gutiérrez, (what rank she holds in our organization) and they also asked about Juan Angulo (the director of El Sur), Rosario Ibarra, and other people who have nothing to do with our organization.
“They showed me some of our communiqués, and about the message to the journalists they said: ‘These are well written; they are not written by a laborer or a campesino; this is written by an intellectual. Who? Which journalist or Congressperson is writing your stuff?’”
Tzompaxtle Tecpile, who says he is a 27-year-old Náhuatl [sic] indigenous man from the Zongolica Sierra of Veracruz, says that his captors also asked him about Omar Garibay, about his activities with the POCUP [sic] and about his supposed participation in the OIPUH (Independent Organization of United Pueblos of the Huasteca).
“Once they asked why we didn’t negotiate and become a ‘peaceful’ guerrilla movement, but at another point they said that they’d never negotiate with us, that they feel a boundless hate for the EPR because we are radicals.”
In a section titled “The capture,” the reporter writes:
Rafael, whom the Army denies having detained, says he was captured in Zumpango del Río, Guerrero—during a unilateral cease-fire declared by the EPR—when he was leading, with other EPR members, a number of journalists toward a camp where they would carry out an interview with EPR’s regional command.
And then she again cites the document:
“Military Intelligence (IM) set up a capture operation with at least 25 men, four vehicles, and radio and cellular telephone communications. . . . The IM agents were armed, while we were not armed due to the peaceful nature of the task we were carrying out, and so as not to put in danger the reporters we were leading to the interview.”
In a section titled, “Torture,” she again cites the document:
“During the first two months in captivity I was subjected to 30 to 40 sessions of electric shocks applied all over my body, including my head and genitals; the frequent placement of plastic bags over my head to take me to the edge of suffocation; the pouring of mineral water down my mouth and nose; palm strikes over my ears; hanging me by the neck to the point of strangulation; simulations of cutting my throat, rape, and castration; constant beatings, amongst other abuses. Even thus, the psychological torture was the worst, the threats of raping and killing my children (younger than five years of age), my wife, and my mother.
And then the reporter adds: “The first two months he had—he said—his feet bound and his hands cuffed behind him, and he was blindfolded.”
In a section titled “The Torturers,” she cites the document without preamble:
“The torturers mostly had Mexico City accents; they were sergeants or of higher rank; I heard references to captains, a colonel, and the highest-ranking official they called patrón [boss]; he traveled by helicopter.
“The patrón told me that he’d been dealing with—that is to say, torturing—people like me for twenty years.
“The ‘good’ torturer told me that the war is more select now; that soon they might have to kill a lot of people; that there will be massacres, but that for the moment they want to trap us selectively; he proposes that I should join an organization and spy for the government.
“The torturers told me, ‘We’re from the old school; we respected Lucio because he showed his face, but not Genaro.’ They talked to me about Fierro Loza and Carmelo Cortés, as if to show how much they know about us, but they actually said a lot that was incorrect.
“One of the torturers told me that he had broken Zambrano’s back—Zambrano is an EPR compañero prisoner in Almoloya—and that he was a specialist in breaking spines and that he was going to leave me an invalid for the rest of my life.
“They told me, ‘We’re going to use our work to make what happened in Oxchuc (Chiapas) happen to you, we’ll turn the masses against you.’”
The last section carries the title “The Detention Locations,” and again consists mainly in quotations from the document. It reads:
Tzompaxtle Tecpile states that at the Llano Largo military camp in Acapulco they took him to “a school-like construction surrounded by a wire fence. There are some offices in front, and in the back they have the area set up for torture.
“They put me in a room; it was very hot. I think there was a boiler next to the room, due to the noise it made. There were typewriters there. They used cell phones and took me outside to go to the bathroom.
“It was a military base, because I could hear the marching band and helicopters. There were times when they made me go down a staircase with 22 stairs [sic]. I was blindfolded. They have a room set up with a metal table essential for torture; it resembles the medieval torture racks used in the feudal inquisitions.”
On January 20 he claims that they took him to Teotihuacán in a Chevrolet Suburban. There “they kept me in a room with a bathroom, with one hand cuffed to a bunk. The cell where they kept me is inside a larger structure, with a pitched corrugated tin roof about 40 meters long. The windows do not have bars. The bathroom has a Persian window. In front of my cell you can see a residential complex.”
He escaped from there on February 22: “I walked between the houses, between 20 and 40, it seems like a residential complex surrounded by a wire fence. It seems like there are various storage rooms and a carpentry workshop of some kind. It is a military base.
“Two soldiers walk by and I pretended to do exercise. I’m wearing pants and have my head shaved. They greet me. It is around six in the morning. They had already played the reveille and it was beginning to get light.”
On April 9, 1997, La Jornada published an article by José Gil Olmos on the upper left-hand corner of the back page. The article’s headline reads: “EPR: The Army Reactivated the White Brigade with Acosta Chaparro in Charge.” The article, which continues on page 14, consists of three columns and thirteen paragraphs and is accompanied by a photograph of two masked men sitting behind a table and identified as “Commanders Vicente and Oscar.” One of the men holds a rifle. The walls behind them are covered with what appears to be paper.
The article says that in a communiqué commemorating the 78th anniversary of Emiliano Zapata’s murder, EPR commanders called for the creation of a truth commission and announced their intention to continue a propaganda campaign and revolutionary self-defense in the face of “the strengthening of the [paramilitary] white brigades intensively trained by the Army and the police” as well as their support for the San Andrés Agreements [signed between the EZLN and the Mexican federal government], which consist in “a heartfelt demand and fair national protest.”
Gil Olmos then writes:
A long meeting took place in an EPR safe house located somewhere in the Valley of Mexico. Reporters traveled to the location through multiple contacts, and were instructed to close their eyes during the final segment of the trip. During the meeting, which was staged in a small room whose surfaces were covered with brown paper and doorknobs masked with tape, the EPR leadership said that it fully trusted Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile—Rafael—despite the suspicion created by “his incredible” escape from military barracks. The leadership also maintained its willingness for the combatant to directly present his denunciation before civilian human rights organizations.
Accompanied by his wife, the combatant Rafael again shared his testimony of his abduction and four months spent disappeared in various hidden jails. His wife said that she joined the EPR after her husband’s capture and said that she held the government responsible for any repression against his family or friends. They both wore military uniforms and had their faces covered from beneath their eyes down, even though Rafael removed the brown cloth covering his face for half an hour without allowing anyone to take photographs.
The following section of the art
icle is titled “Rafael’s Incredible Escape.” Gil Olmos writes:
The EPR combatant—supported by his wife and military commanders—said that during the four months of his torture they sometimes video-recorded testimonies in which he “simulated collaborating and accepting the claims of his torturers, signing documents that could implicate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Rosario Ibarra, Félix Salgado Macedonio, and Ranferi Hernández, but that it was to lessen the beatings, electric shocks, and waterboarding.”
Tzompaxtle explained that his escape was aided by his receiving less food and having lost as much as 14 kilos during the prior month of captivity in the military base in Teotihuacán. For that reason his wrists had become thinner, and he was able to remove them from the handcuffs that bound him to the bunk.
“I toyed with the handcuffs, dreaming about slipping out of them, until one day I did so,” Rafael said, recalling that day and night he thought of escaping, trying twice through the only window, located in the bathroom of the 40-meter-long structure, before succeeding on February 22.
After discussing Rafael’s medical report and denouncing the reappearance of the [paramilitary] White Brigade that operated in the 1970s against the guerrilla movements under the command of general Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, the two EPR commanders said that as soon as the combatant made contact with the organization and told them everything that had happened, “he had our complete support even if under the pressures of torture and inhumane treatment he signed documents put before him or made agreements that were recorded.”
Commander Oscar, in civilian dress representing the PDPR, with his face covered by a piece of gray cloth, assured that the EPR will accept Rafael with all the rights and obligations he has as a combatant and “offer all the support to the compañero, who is now receiving permanent psychological treatment and sedation” to lessen the emotional impact and the scars of the torture. . . .
He warned that the EPR remains alert to the government’s attempts to infiltrate the organization and “uses objectivity, maturity, and sensitivity” to analyze such attempts made through combatants or sympathizers who have been captured. He assured that they have developed “tasks and methods” over the decades to guarantee the prevention and the “failure” of any possible government infiltration.
The article closes with a renewed call to “independent social groups” to create a truth commission “that could take charge of investigating cases of forced disappearance, torture, incarceration, murder, and massacres over the last thirty years of armed struggle.”
That same day, April 9, El Universal published a photograph in the lower right-hand corner of the front page showing three people in military uniform, armed, their faces covered with cloth. The photograph, taken by Claudia Fernández, is accompanied by the following caption: “In a clandestine interview, EPR members conduct a review; they denied any connections with drug trafficking and called for the formation of a truth commission.”
On page 18 there are two articles and one photograph by Claudia Fernández. The photograph shows a man in military uniform, his face covered with a bandanna, showing his hands to the camera. The photo’s caption reads: “Rafael shows some of the scars left after four months of being tortured by presumed paramilitaries.” The first article, with the headline “The government has not been able to strike us: EPR,” describes the conditions in which the interview with Rafael took place and coincides with the information published the same day by La Jornada. It begins like this:
The Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) and the Popular Democratic Revolutionary Party (PDPR) warned of a resurgence of Mexico’s Dirty War at the hands of a paramilitary group “under the command of the federal Army and advisors from the United States.”
This resurgence has come about through abductions, disappearances, and torture not only of members of the insurgency, but also in the worst ways against social activists and citizen opponents, claimed the EPR commanders Óscar and Vicente.
Likewise, they said that the testimonies of their own combatants, those who have been able to survive abductions and torture, reveal the existence of hidden prisons in the country.
Attempts to confirm this information with the National Defense Secretary were unsuccessful.
During the five-hour-plus interview in an EPR safe house in the Valley of Mexico, Commanders Óscar and Vicente also denied any contacts between the EPR and drug traffickers.
Fernández describes the room where the interview was held and the uniforms and weapons of the EPR militants. She paraphrases and quotes the combatants declaring that the government has not been able to hit them. Then she takes up Tzompaxtle’s story, mentioning the place and date of his abduction. She writes:
Subjected to constant torture for four months, Rafael—whose real name is Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile, originally from Veracruz—was held captive in Llano Largo, Acapulco, and then at the San Juan Teotihuacán base from which he escaped last February 22.
His via crucis began with a cold warning from his tormentors: “We feel an incalculable hatred for you and here you are going to pay for everything the EPR has done and will do,” Rafael recalled as night fell on Monday.
And this is how it happened: electric shocks all over the body, blindfolded and wet, rape simulations with an iguana’s tail, simulations of castration, breaking his back, cutting off his head . . . until his torturers made him suffer a thousand deaths and he began to speak.
Also on April 9, El Sol de Acapulco published an article on the front page with the headline: “Even at the edge of death, the combatant Rafael did not give away anyone from the EPR.” The article, by Javier Trujillo Juárez, appears with a photograph showing the journalist taking notes in front of a television screen on which one can vaguely make out two masked people facing a camera. The article, with the subheadline “He endured four months of torture,” opens with these lines:
“You know the life that waits for you. You don’t even know that you’ve come to die here.” That was the sentence the combatant Rafael, named Andrés Tzompaxtle Tecpile, received from his torturers.
Speaking to a video camera at a press conference, the insurgent narrates how he was captured and disappeared for four months in different regions of Guerrero, and held at the Military Zone 37 base located in the archaeological zone of Teotihuacán, from which he escaped on February 22, 1997, around six in the morning.
The article continues on page A2, taking up three columns and giving a detailed summary of the recorded testimony. Juárez writes:
After five days of intense interrogations and savage torture, “almost at the edge of death, I give them my name, Andrés Tzopaxtle [sic] Tecpile, from the municipality of Atozique [sic], Veracruz—in the Zongolica Sierra—to see if that way they wouldn’t kill me. They confirmed the information and then came back to tell me, ‘Your family says we should kill you, that you don’t matter to them.’ ‘Okay, I assume my responsibility,’ I answered.”
The next section of the article carried the subhead, “The doubt . . . the conviction.” The reporter writes:
Back in Acapulco, at the police mini-station at the Y intersection known as La Laja, there was a major operation—they had found a safe house—in which more than forty agents participated, raiding houses, going through stores, and conducting surveillance from their cars. They detained a number of people.
“Are these them?” the torturers asked Rafael.
“No,” he replied, now without the blindfold covering his eyes.
“They say they are,” they told him.
“They aren’t, but if they say they are, that’s their problem. Because they aren’t.” He adds: “The men being held identified themselves and said where they lived, and they were the neighbors of where the compañeros rented a place.”
It was on November 11 that the torturers—that is how he identifies them throughout almost the whole interview—tell him that they know he is Rafael. “Your compañeros are looking for you.”
“At that moment I accepted my death,” says the EPR combatant, sitting between his wife and five other masked people, two of whom remain at all times in military position, each uniformed and with an MP-5 7.62 caliber rifle and automatic pistol, apparently a nine millimeter, holstered to their waists. He explains that at that moment he felt the firm determination to “not give anything” to the torturers.
The following day, April 10, El Sol de Acapulco published an article on the front page with the headline: “Social activists are not tortured, assures Aguirre R.” The article, by María Antonia Cárcamo, the paper’s Chilpancingo-based correspondent, reports that Governor Ángel Aguirre Rivero “denied that hidden prisons operate in the state where social activists are tortured.” The article continues on page A4, where the reporter cites the governor saying that “it is absolutely false, absurd, it is irresponsible information and I don’t know who started spreading it.”
Cárcamo then asks him: “But wouldn’t it be worth investigating?”
And the governor responds: “How can we investigate something that is totally invented? It is a worthless situation.”
I interviewed José Gil Olmos, now a reporter for Proceso magazine, in Mexico City. I asked him if he could tell me a bit about what he remembers of attending the interview in April 1997 with Rafael and other EPR members. He told me this:
I don’t know if it had been a few months or weeks since he had escaped from a secret prison that I don’t know if the Army still uses near San Juan Teotihuacán. I think that was the name of the place. Near the pyramids.
I had heard about the story through a testimony that was published somewhere. And, honestly, it seemed unlikely to me the way that, well, he described how they held him captive, how they had grabbed him, beaten him, tortured him in a house and then at some point the soldiers guarding him left, got careless. He started removing some glass panes there, some windowpanes that were removable. He took several out of what was like a louver window in the bathroom, and that was how he got out. He also told about the handcuffs that they had used to chain him. If I remember correctly, he said that he was able to slip out of the handcuffs using his own blood I think, or something like that. He was able to take off the handcuffs and then remove the windowpanes and escape.