Decades after Mexico’s “dirty war,” the military has obstructed a government investigation into human rights abuses, the official heading the probe said on Wednesday.
Mexican Undersecretary of Human Rights, Population and Migration Alejandro Encinas Rodriguez told a news conference that investigators withdrew last month after discovering military officials were hiding, altering and destroying documents.
Encinas said some officials’ actions contravened a presidential decree granting investigators unfettered access to records.
Asked if individual officials might face criminal charges, he said: “We are investigating this. As soon as we have some clear indication and evidence, of course we will proceed.”
The Mexican Ministry of National Defense did not respond to an e-mail asking for comment.
The inquiry was established in October 2021 under the Mexican human rights department’s commission for truth to investigate human rights violations during the “dirty war” against guerillas, dissidents and social movements in the 1970s and 1980s.
During that time hundreds of people were illegally detained, tortured and kidnapped by the military and security forces.
More than 2,300 direct and indirect victims are still alive today, the inquiry commission said on Wednesday.
David Fernandez Davalos, a member of the commission’s subgroup for historical clarification, said that the defense ministry “continues this cycle of impunity, opacity and injustice” by moving, altering or destroying documents.
Fernandez told reporters that military officials initially withheld documents they claimed were private for reasons of national security, personal privacy or “preserving relations” with other countries.
“Files that we already knew were composed in a certain way were handed over with sheets out of place and notes ripped out,” he said.
Military officials also moved boxes of files so the investigators could not find them and in some cases just flatly denied access to documents, he said.
Other members of the inquiry spoke of success visiting military posts and conducting hundreds of interviews.
In June the subgroup for kidnapped people uncovered the remains of seven people thought to have been killed in 1971 in Guerrero state.
They have since begun analyzing ocean currents and flight paths to find where corpses dumped in the Pacific by the military’s “planes of death” might be today.
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