Mexico's Truth Commission reveals new evidence of “death flights” during the “dirty war” of 1965-1990

MEXICO CITY (AP) — More evidence has emerged that Mexican authorities disposed of the bodies of dissidents on “death flights” during the “dirty war” between 1965 and 1990.

Mexico's Truth Commission said in a report Friday that witnesses' memoirs and documents leaked over the years describe the victims' gruesome final moments. The executions were part of the Mexican government's efforts to crush left-wing social and guerrilla movements.

The victims, whose identities have not yet been released, were dragged one by one to a bench at a military airfield near Acapulco. They thought they were going to be photographed, but instead they were shot in the back of the head and their bodies were thrown into the Pacific Ocean by a plane.

According to Gustavo Tarín, who served in a military police unit at the time, the same pistol was used so often in the murders that the soldiers nicknamed it the “Sword of Justice.”

Tarín said that as many as 1,500 people may have been killed in this way, but did not provide lists or names of the victims. Some of the victims may have been dying but not yet dead when they were ejected from the planes.

Military aircraft mechanic Margarito Monroy said he was involved in 15 of these flights and that female victims were sometimes offered release or the release of their husbands if they had sex with soldiers; however, he never saw any of them released.

The Truth Commission found logbooks for around 30 flights by a plane from this base between 1975 and 1979. And a 20-year-old testimony from a man claiming to be a deserter from the armed forces mentions another 25 flights by a different plane.

That statement, long kept in the archives of a now-deceased human rights activist, contained a list of 183 names of likely victims of the “death flights.” Several of those names matched people who had disappeared during the government's counterinsurgency campaign.

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In contrast to the better-known “death flights” carried out by the Argentine military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, little is known about Mexico’s “death flights,” which were carried out primarily in the 1970s from a small air force base in Pie de la Cuesta, just west of Acapulco.

During a trial between 2012 and 2017, survivors in Argentina testified that the flights took place at least weekly.

The Argentine trial, which sentenced 29 former officials to life imprisonment, proved that the Argentine dictatorship used “death flights” as a systematic method of extermination. The Argentine junta is widely considered the deadliest of the military dictatorships that ruled much of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s. Human rights groups estimate that 30,000 people were killed and many of them disappeared without a trace.

In Mexico, the less widespread executions appear to have targeted small guerrilla movements in the rural state of Guerrero, where Acapulco is located, but the killings appear to have affected a broad range of people.

The executions in Mexico seemed somewhat more rudimentary and less well planned: local fishermen recalled seeing bodies washed up on the shore, whereupon the military allegedly began packing them into sacks weighted with stones and throwing them into the sea.

The revelations were part of a 4,000-page report detailing all the crimes committed by the government against peasants, students, union activists and members of indigenous groups: executions, torture, disappearances and forced relocations. Almost none of the abuses were ever brought to justice, although investigations began during the administration of President Vicente Fox (2000-2006).

The victims of the “death flights” were only a small part of a larger strategy of repression. According to the Truth Commission, there are around 4,500 identified victims of severe mistreatment during the so-called “Dirty War” across the country. 1,450 people were killed and 517 simply disappeared without a trace.

The government has been conducting excavations in and around military bases in recent years to find the remains of those buried in secret graves, but with relatively little success. During the commission's work, the remains of seven victims were recovered.

However, the report's authors also pointed out that the army, the National Intelligence Center and other institutions rejected requests for some documents and destroyed others in order to “hide the truth.”

The commission called for investigations into around 600 possible perpetrators, even though many of them are believed to have died.

In 2004, the late former President Luis Echeverría became the first former Mexican head of state to be formally charged with criminal offenses. Prosecutors linked Echeverría, who ruled from 1970 to 1976, to the “dirty war” in which hundreds of left-wing activists and members of fringe guerrilla groups were imprisoned, killed or simply disappeared without a trace.

In 2005, a judge ruled that Echeverria could not be charged with genocide in connection with political assassinations in 1971 because, although the former president was responsible for a murder, the statute of limitations for that crime had expired in 1985. In March 2009, a federal court upheld a lower court's ruling.