by John Gibler
So it took forever for the CNDH to collect the information they had to request from SEDENA. In all the other cases that we had before the CNDH we maintained direct communication with the lead investigator so that we could be kept abreast of the information coming in and contribute further with our own research. We couldn’t do that in this case. Because rather than the CNDH giving us information, they were the ones harassing us.
At the same time that we were working on Andrés’s case, we were doing research for a report on the CNDH’s relationship with the Army. The CNDH had never made a recommendation against the Army for human rights violations. In our report we documented with concrete statistics how many complaints the CNDH had received against the Army and which violations soldiers were accused of committing. With those statistics we then showed that the National Human Rights Commission had not made one single recommendation against SEDENA. That was the main point of that report.
Another important thing for the context of that moment was that the Mexican government had just begun to receive the first recommendations of international human rights organizations for human rights violations related to the Zapatista uprising: torture and arbitrary detention. Ernesto Zedillo [Mexican president, 1994–2000] formed an interdepartmental commission, which opened the way for the first direct dialogue [between the Zapatistas and] the authorities, the PGR [Attorney General], and I think SEDENA was at one meeting. We asked for them to follow up on the human rights recommendations made against them. All that, I think, helped push the CNDH to make a recommendation against the Army.
After the recommendation, Balbina and I received subpoenas to appear before the Military Justice Attorney General [Procuraduría de Justicia Militar]. Such an appearance, obviously, worried us a whole, whole lot. We put out a press release to let the media know what was happening. We requested that the CNDH send a representative to accompany us. We also received support from Mexico City’s Human Rights Commission, because we were obviously worried about our safety and about how the gathering of our testimony would be carried out. That was the first time that someone from a human rights organization was subpoenaed to testify before the Military Justice Attorney General. Before that, a number of lawyers took cases before the Military Justice Attorney General, but in Chiapas, not here at their headquarters.
So yes, we were really afraid that we would suffer some attack. We went, and the procedure took a long time, like three hours. And during the procedure, the military prosecutor takes out the complete case file, including the videos we had given to the CNDH. According to the CNDH’s rules and regulations, it is absolutely prohibited to turn over information. They have to safeguard all the complainant’s information, for example, information about us and the Center. And then we realized that the Military Justice Attorney General had all that information, that they had the entire case file. And the prosecutor’s questions—more than twenty questions—tried to link us to the armed movement. The whole time it was: “And when you spoke with the person named in the complaint . . . and when you corresponded with the person named in the complaint.” And after every question we had to clarify: “I must say that we have not had contact with the person named in the complaint beyond the written correspondence and that we do not have any relation to any kind of armed movement.” A large part of the testimony went like that. It was really tense and, obviously, very intimidating and irritating.
After that experience we sent a letter of complaint to the CNDH for their having given the entire case file, including our entire original complaint, to SEDENA, as well as for having been subpoenaed. That document didn’t have even the smallest impact. If I remember correctly, they never even responded to us. So no, nothing came of that letter.
Afterward we never knew if the Army made some kind of statement or punished someone. Truthfully, I don’t remember hearing anything about it at all. And I can’t remember right now if the CNDH, that publishes follow-up reports on recommendations they’ve made, if they considered that their recommendation was heeded or not. I don’t recall how that recommendation was classified.
After that case and our involvement in it, we were faced with the situation in Oaxaca and the appearance of the guerrillas in Crucecita. After that there were a lot of cases of disappearance and extrajudicial executions in Oaxaca. The Vitoria Center together with the Mexican Human Rights League and Action Against Torture (I don’t know if that last organization, ACAT, still exists) started to document cases in Oaxaca. The cases of forced disappearance that we documented in Oaxaca, I remember, had a similar modus operandi, to put it that way, as Andrés’s case. That is, Army agents arrived, forced the person into a car, blindfolded them, and took them to a location to be interrogated by other agents. After being interrogated they were taken to another location, obviously having been beaten and tortured.
I remember that during that time there were disappearances daily and we submitted appeals almost by the pound, an impressive amount of appeals sent by fax. But almost all the people later reappeared. I remember that only two people didn’t appear, and one of them appeared a year later. I don’t remember where. But that person who appeared a year later gave testimony that they kept him in one place and tortured him, but then later they moved him to an Army base where they made him wash soldiers’ clothes. He was the one washing the sheets and clothes and who knows what. But he left; he was able to get out of that place. And that is the only case I recall of someone appearing after such a long disappearance.
Carmona told me about some other jobs she did after leaving the Vitorio Center where she had to argue cases before the Military Justice Attorney General, experiences that reaffirmed that “the experience we had was totally anomalous, and was not in accordance with the way military justice should function, but was actually just a long interrogation.”
I then asked her if she remembered what was in that first envelope that arrived at the Center.
First, the envelope contained letters with all the information. We also received in that first complete document the information about the car that he left behind, the Volkswagen, the same one that later appeared. We received very concrete information that could be used for a detailed investigation. They also sent us a video with his wife’s testimony. She described how he was disappeared. And when he appeared we received the other video. I don’t think we got a letter with that video. I can’t remember if we got a letter as well. But we did get the video where he describes his abduction, torture, and the mistreatment he suffered. And, as well, giving really detailed indications about where he was held. I think SEDENA was looking into that information. And I think he was trying to implicate the officers at the military base in Teotihuacán.
And, in fact, it wasn’t so well known back then that there was a military base there. Now it is. But at that time SEDENA didn’t acknowledge that there was a base there. I don’t recall, because we didn’t go there until later, so I don’t recall how developed it was. That was a subject of debate. Today we know. Every time I go by there I think about this case, because now the base is more built up.
I asked her if she had gone to inspect the area at the time.
After [hearing Tzompaxtle’s testimony], yes. The only way to see it was by climbing up the Pyramid of the Sun. It wasn’t easy to get access. Because the base is right there in the middle of San Juan de Teotihuacán. I mean, now the base is well established and built up there. Back then it wasn’t so developed. So you had to climb up the Pyramid of the Sun, and from that height you could see a bit of the base being built. I don’t think it was so built up like it is now.
The details that he gave were absolutely true. The distances that he described about how far he walked, how he arrived, where he asked for help. All of that description held up in fact. What is more, you know, with a good investigation, which military justice should have had to carry out, you could have easily found those responsible.
And . . . I think it was one of the first testimonies, which would later be repeated
in Oaxaca, that described how such torture and forced disappearances were part of military intelligence operations used to investigate armed movements. It was a systematic operation that was in violation of human rights, as we all know, and it wasn’t that new either. The first disappeared in Mexico were related to the cases that Rosario Ibarra de Piedra documented, and they all shared the same mechanics, that is, the same ways of acting.
With the Vicente Fox administration [2000–2006] some of these things start to get modified, but the modus operandi, let’s say, continued. That is, that’s how the government operates.
I asked her what she thought to be the relation between those cases of forced disappearance and what was happening at the time of our interview in 2013.
With the disappearances during the Calderón administration [2006–2012] the argument is, “they’re involved in drug trafficking” and that makes everything permissible. . . . And the people they are disappearing . . . I think before they were much more selective with disappearances, and now the idea is to cause terror in the population so that no one moves, no one even thinks about talking. So they disappear anyone.
During this last stage of the Calderón administration, at least in Chihuahua, I think there is a lot of frustration, because there really no longer exists even the minimum rule of law capable of dealing with all this. For example, if you say that you’ll take a case against the government to the Inter-American Commission, the government couldn’t care less. In the 1990s that had an impact. Today it doesn’t. And I think that today the human rights organizations have to rethink their strategies, because this government, both the outgoing Calderón administration and the return of the PRI in the next administration, they’re coming at us with everything they’ve got. And they don’t care anymore about their image with the international organizations.
* The Fray Vitoria Human Rights Center’s offices are located inside the University Cultural Center on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
AN INCREDIBLE ESCAPE
HERE’S ONE. THE YEAR IS 1978. Argentina. The military dictatorship is in full swing. The military and police death squads operate with absolute freedom. They have built semi-hidden concentration camps across the country where they disappear, torture, and murder. Four young men have been disappeared for months inside a clandestine torture center known as the Seré Mansion in the city of Morón, province of Buenos Aires. The men are handcuffed and bound with leather straps. They are completely naked, bearing all the marks, bruises, and burns left by a team of torturers not at all worried about leaving scars. Their captors recently cut their hair short but left their beards of four months. The men have bathed two or three times in 120 days, but have not been allowed to brush their teeth. They have lived on two meals a day and no exercise. It is March 24, after midnight. The four men are in a room on the second story of the mansion. The two overnight guards are downstairs. One of the men has been practicing removing his thinned wrists from his handcuffs. He also found a loose screw while being forced to clean the house one day and hid it under his mattress. He pulls his hands out of the handcuffs, unties himself and removes the screw. One by one his companions untie themselves, though they all still remain handcuffed. The first man takes the three blankets in the room, rolls them up lengthwise and ties them together with the leather straps, making a kind of rope. He then takes the screw, slides it through the window latch where the torturers had removed the handle, and uses it to open the window. He unties and opens the external blinds and climbs out onto the balcony, ties the impromptu rope to a column, and drops it toward the ground. Three of the men climb—naked, bruised, unbathed, malnourished, and handcuffed—down the blanket and leather strap line and then drop about two meters to the ground. The man who made the rope and opened the window is the last to descend. Before doing so, he takes his screw and scratches into the wall of the room: “Thanks, Lucas!” a farewell message to one of the torture center’s cruelest guards. Then he too climbs down. Now the four naked men leave the property without anyone seeing or hearing them. They run through the predawn streets, try and fail to hotwire two cars, before hiding in a small construction site in the residential neighborhood. The young man who found the screw had unrolled the T-shirt used to blindfold him and put it on. He leaves the hiding place, walks a few steps and knocks on a door, asking a woman who peeks through the window for help, saying that he has just been robbed. He asks her to call his uncle’s house. She does, but no one answers. He repeats his misfortune of having no money to get home and being stripped mostly naked. She gives him a pair of pants and some money for a cab. He goes back to the hiding place to tell the others he will send a car for them. He then goes back outside, walks a few blocks, stops a taxi and leaves. Helicopters begin to fly overhead, combing the area. Within minutes, however, it starts raining and then the rain becomes a major thunderstorm and forces the helicopters to suspend their flight. The young man who found the screw is able to call the father of one of the other three men and give him directions to the hiding spot, where he finds them the following morning. They all escape and spend months in hiding. One at a time, and independently, three of the four leave the country. The other is captured again, disappeared, but then liberated after the fall of the dictatorship in 1983.
One of the survivors who escaped that day is Claudio Tamburrini, a former professional soccer player and now philosophy professor in Stockholm. A few years ago he wrote a book about his abduction, torture, and escape called Pase libre: La fuga de la Mansión Seré (Free Pass: The Escape from the Seré Mansion). The young man who found the screw is an actor now living in Paris. In 2006, he played the head torturer in a film based on Tamburrini’s book called Crónica de una fuga (Chronicle of an Escape).1 In this film, Guillermo Fernández plays the part of “The Judge,” a high-level government torturer who tells the young Guillermo Fernández in the film that he has a week to tell everything he knows, everything he’d kept hidden up to then, or be killed, painfully.
Theirs was the only confirmed escape from a clandestine torture center during the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976–1983. Three of the four survivors testified during the trials against the military junta in 1985.
Here’s another one, this time from the waning years of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Two political prisoners, both members of the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez guerrilla movement, start by scratching their cell wall with a fork. Within a few hours they have a handful of dust. Two months later they have a 50-centimeter hole. Then they are transferred to a different cell. They hide their work before leaving, recruit a few new comrades and start over. It is now July 1988. By January 29, 1990, a total of twenty-four political prisoners have been working around the clock in shifts to dig an eighty-meter tunnel from their prison cell, circumnavigating the subway tube, and into the street near an abandoned train station. The tunnel was equipped with ventilation, electricity, radio communication, and an improvised railcar for removing dirt from the tunnel (which the prisoners then passed through a hole in their cell’s ceiling to comrades in the cell above them who hid the dirt by spreading it out in a crawl space between their cell’s ceiling and the prison roof).2 The prisoners had coordinated with their comrades on the outside to set off a series of small bombs far from the prison on the night of their escape, pick up the escapees at the train station in an old bus, and deliver them to safe houses spread out across Santiago. Within an hour and a half of crawling out of the dirt they are all safely distributed and hidden. Before that, though, once they had all emerged from the tunnel, one of them crawled back into the prison—a fifteen-minute trip on elbows and knees along a 50-square-centimeter tunnel—approached a group of political prisoners who had not participated in nor known about the escape plan, and told them: “Listen: Get ready for tomorrow, because there will be a CNI search. Some of us won’t be here. We left the door open.”3 He then hurried back to the hole and escaped. It then takes the other prisoners about two hours to f
ind the hole and decide to risk what may be a trap: Nineteen of them make it—amazed, bewildered, terrified, covered in dirt, and then elated—another six are recaptured. What began with a few hours of scratching a prison wall with a fork led, through incredible discipline and ingenuity, to forty-three political prisoners escaping from prison in the middle of the nation’s capital during the final official days of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Or how about this one? The year is 1971, in Uruguay. One hundred and eleven prisoners, all members of the Tupamaro urban guerrilla movement, dig a 44-meter tunnel from the Punto Carretas prison into the living room of a house across the street. They and five other prisoners all escape.
And, well, David Kaplan left the Santa Martha Acatitla prison in Mexico City when a helicopter descended into the prison courtyard, retrieving Kaplan and a friend and then flying them to the northern border on August 19, 1971.4