MEXICO:
Ghosts of The Past


By John Ross.


Horacio Zacarías Barrientos, 65, had grown old trying to eke out a living from his coffee patch near Rincón de las Parotas on the road to El Paraíso, a village in the mountains of Mexico’s southern Guerrero state.

That’s precisely where he was on the afternoon of Nov. 26 when he was shot 15 times by three unknown assailants.

These days, when an old man is murdered on the road to El Paraíso, it usually has something to do with the phantoms of the past. The so-called “dirty war” against homegrown subversion in Mexico preceded its more notorious versions in Argentina and Chile by at least five years (LP, Dec. 31, 2001 and April 22, 2002).

Following the 1968 massacre of hundreds of striking students in the Plaza of Three Cultures in Mexico City, 15 distinct guerrilla cells flourished throughout Mexico.

In Guerrero, the uprising was led by two rural school teachers, Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas. Cabañas’s Party of the Poor had risen after a mass killing at a local Atoyac grade school in 1967 and he was soon encamped in the mountains where his ranks swelled with poor farmers (LP, Nov. 4, 2002).

Cabañas had a growing base in Rincón de las Parotas, and one unlucky day in Sept. 1974, Zacarías Barrientos was captured by an army patrol, allegedly delivering food to the rebels.

Zacarías Barrientos shared the same family name as Cabaña’s mother, Doña Rafita Barrientos, and although the two were not related, this coincidence was not looked on favorably by the Mexican military.

The captive campesino was turned over for interrogation to the newly-installed Guerrero police chief, a ruthless army officer named Mario Acosta Chaparro.

It is not clear what happened next but Zacarías soon emerged back in Rincón de las Parotas, now a “madrina” or guide for Acosta Chaparro. Villagers recall how Zacarías fingered six men who had been assembled on the town basketball court by the military as Cabañas supporters The men were never seen again.

Acosta Chaparro and Gen. Francisco Quirós have been charged by a military war council with disappearing 143 suspected Cabañas supporters in the same fashion.

At least 300 residents of Atoyac alone disappeared during this period, according to a list compiled by the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), although locals say the number is as high as 600.

Miraculously, after two years Zacarías was allowed to return to his village. His neighbors knew that he had been brutally tortured and forced to name names, so he was allowed to live quietly with no apparent enemies.

In 2001, soon after newly inaugurated President Vicente Fox announced the creation of a Special Prosecutor for Political Crimes of the Past (FEMOSPP), Zacarías began to unburden himself to chief investigator Ignacio Carrillo Prieto. Carrillo Prieto recently told La Jornada newspaper that Zacarías became his star witness. “He was fundamental to our investigation because he had been inside and knew the inner workings of the dirty war in Guerrero,” the prosecutor said.

Carrillo Prieto failed to provide Zacarías with any police protection despite the demands of local groups of dirty war victims, and his murder will not much encourage other witnesses to speak out.

“People here were silent for a long time,” said Tita Radilla, who is vice president of the Association of Families of Disappeared Detainees of Mexico. “Now they will clam up again.”

Zacarías was gunned down just three weeks after Mexico’s Supreme Court upheld Carrillo Prieto’s right to prosecute two alleged perpetrators of human rights crimes in the “dirty war.” And, just hours before the murder, a federal judge in Acapulco issued an arrest warrant for former Guerrero police chief Isidro Galeana, who is charged with the forced disappearances of at least 11 Cabañas supporters, among them the teacher Jacob Nájera who was taken in 1974.

Galeana, like so many of the players in this protracted drama, is old and infirm.

Despite Carrillo Prieto’s self-congratulations on having achieved an arrest warrant after two frustrating years, Galeana is described by Nájera’s survivors as “only a peon” who did the dirty work of Gov. Rubén Figueroa and then-presidents Luis Echeverría (1970-76) and José López Portillo (1976-82). The two ex-presidents, both octogenarians, have refused to respond to Carrillo Prieto’s interrogations about their role in the dirty war.

In the end, when police went to serve the warrant, Galeana had vanished. Although Carrillo Prieto links Galeana to the Zacarías murder in published interviews, he also said that Zacarías Barrientos never accused the ex-police chief of the Nájera killing.

But Galeana is not the only suspect in the murder of Zacarías. After Cabañas was killed in a December 1974 army ambush, the Party of the Poor formed an “adjudication commission” which repeatedly liquidated those seen to be “soplones” (stool pigeons), particularly those who were thought to have handed over information that led to Cabañas’s death.

The Party of the Poor’s successor in this region, the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) which exploded in 1996 after the massacre of 17 farmers on Guerrero’s coast under the direction of Figueroa’s son, also named Rubén and also the governor, has been no less harsh in its treatment of suspected informants.

In the La Jornada interview, Carrillo Prieto implied that Zacarías himself had ties to the EPR and was seen in the company of suspected guerrillas. Shortly before his death, Guerrero state police say they found weapons in the slain man’s home.

An EPR communiqué spoke of Zacarías’s “bad conscience” and labeled him a “delator” or stool pigeon. Nevertheless, it reaffirmed that his murder was the work of those responsible for the “dirty war.”