Victims’ Families Hopeful About ‘Dirty War’ Case

MEXICO CITY —  Relatives of people who died or disappeared during the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre are hoping that the Mexican Supreme Court reverses a judge’s decision refusing to sign an arrest warrant for former President Luis Echeverria.

Such a reversal will depend on the high court agreeing that genocide is a legitimate charge against Echeverria. Lower court Judge Julio Cesar Flores on Saturday rejected the arrest request for Echeverria and 11 others linked to the June 10, 1971, massacre. The judge said the statute of limitations on the alleged crimes had expired. Special Prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo Prieto was expected to file his appeal with the Supreme Court on Monday.

At issue is the event 33 years ago when about 45 marchers, mostly students, were killed as they demonstrated for education reform in Mexico City. In charges filed Thursday night, Carrillo alleged that the ex-president, now 82, two Cabinet ministers and nine others were responsible for the killings. Echeverria was president from 1970 to 1976.

“There is no statute of limitations for the pain suffered by the families of the victims,” said Sergio Ramirez, brother of Antonio Ramirez, a student shot to death by members of a police unit. “In Mexico, justice is never served. White-collar criminals, the powerful, are never punished.”

The special prosecutor alleged in his indictment that Echeverria had helped orchestrate a “dirty war” by the Mexican government against dissidents that continued into the 1980s. A national human rights commission study released in 2001 said at least 532 civilians were killed in the dirty war, although some say the toll was twice as high.

Ruben Gutierrez, cousin of Armando Sanchez, another victim, said: “The law in Mexico serves its masters.... To us it is unacceptable the judge would decide this way, knowing the gravity of the crime.”

Carrillo based his charges on a United Nations convention Mexico signed in 1948 that established genocide as a crime when there is an intent to destroy “in whole or in part a national, ethical, racial or religious group.” In 1966, Mexico signed another accord stipulating that there could be no statute of limitations on such crimes.

The judge’s ruling was not made public, but Echeverria’s attorney said the jurist told him it was based on a belief that the statute of limitations had run out on the killings. That suggested the judge did not view the case as genocide but as homicide, for which there is a 30-year statute of limitations under Mexican law.

Law experts said Monday that genocide may not be applicable for an event -- however horrific -- that was not part of a systemic campaign.

“This is really an exaggerated application of the genocide convention because genocide means efforts to totally destroy a group,” said law professor Jorge Vargas of the University of San Diego. “There would have to be not the killing of one or two people but the systematic and permanent government policy of getting rid of the students of Mexico.”

But some human rights organizations argue that small-scale state killings can qualify as genocide, and that Carrillo has the legal basis to make an effective appeal.

Though he declined to comment on the Echeverria case, Santiago Canton, executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, said his office had brought a successful genocide case involving the massacre of 15 people in Barrios Altos, Peru, in 1991. The Peruvian case was later heard in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States, which in March 2001 found that the Peruvian government was guilty of genocide. Peru was then obliged to investigate the killings and compensate victims’ families.

Jose Gonzalez Ruiz, a law professor at Mexico’s National Autonomous University who represents 150 families of dirty-war victims, said genocide charges against Echeverria were “legitimate.”

“The special prosecutor is no hero. He is simply doing what has been demanded by Mexican society for more than 30 years, that justice be done and people responsible for these crimes are punished,” Gonzalez Ruiz said.

Jesus Martin del Campo, whose brother Edmundo was killed in the 1971 march, said that although the judge’s decision was a “bad portent,” he was hopeful that the Supreme Court would overturn it.

“There is still an outstanding debt owed to society, still no justification for what happened. And now there is a new grievance, the expectation that justice was finally going to be applied, only to see it come out the same as always, a free pass of impunity to those who perpetrated all these crimes,” Del Campo said.