Mexico: Truth Commission Report on Military Junta's “Death Flights”

“Those arrested on suspicion of being members of an anti-government peasant guerrilla group were seated on a long bench at a Mexican military base on the Pacific Ocean, near Acapulco. The prisoners were convinced it was for a photo op. In the meantime, each one was shot in the back of the head. The dead were loaded onto a plane. After a short, night flight, their bodies were thrown into the ocean,” the report said. Mexican “death flights” were used as a way to get rid of political opponents, used in Argentina in the 1960s and 1970s, i.e. during the rule of the military junta.

The report by the Mexican Truth Commission, which is over four thousand pages long, contains descriptions of unlawful executions of government opponents, torture, sexual violence, illegal population transfers, and mass massacres of the government's political opponents – among them Mexican peasants, students, trade unionists, prostitutes, and, for example, immigrants who crossed the border en masse to escape from the starving Mexican population. Guatemala.

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According to the testimony of Gustavo Tarin, a member of the Military Police Operational Group near the famous Mexican seaside resort of Acapulco and the local air force base, cited in the report, the command of this unit was “guilty of the death or disappearance” of 1,500 people who “were killed by a shot to the back of the head.”

Their deaths, according to the report, were caused by suspicion that they belonged to a peasant guerrilla unit led by a farmer named Lucio Cabanas from the Mexican state of Guerrero.

The cited report, according to the Associated Press news agency, was prepared on the basis of documents that its authors familiarized themselves with in 97 state and private archives, and the analysis of this documentation was carried out by two members of the Mexican Academy of Sciences – David Fernandez Davalos and Larios Perez Ricart, as well as the defender of human rights from the state of Guerrero – Abel Barrera.

The report's authors argue that “the state not only allowed the described activities, but encouraged them, showing a certain institutional inertia, to the extent that even under the current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a wide margin was left for grave violations of human rights.”

The cited report emphasises that, unlike in Argentina, where in 2012, as a result of a major trial, 29 officers were sentenced to life imprisonment – members of the military junta responsible for the famous night “death flights”, in Mexico officers guilty of similar crimes remained unpunished.

Mexico's official National Human Rights Commission, established by President Lopez Obrador's government, recently confirmed that “death flights” were also carried out in Mexico “not only in agreement with the authorities of the Mexican state of Guerrero and local military bases, but also with the Secretariat (Ministry) of National Defense.”