MEXICO CITY — The Mexican government and military committed "crimes against humanity" through a "scorched-earth" campaign against rural guerrillas in the 1970s, according to a draft report released Sunday of the first official investigation into Mexico's "dirty war" against leftist rebels and activists.
The investigation by the country's "Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past" was commissioned by President Vicente Fox about a year after his election in 2000 ended decades of one-party dominance here. The Washington-based National Security Archive published the leaked draft Sunday on its website.
"The authoritarian attitude with which the Mexican state wished to control social dissent created a spiral of violence which ... led it to commit crimes against humanity, including genocide," the draft report says.
The alleged crimes outlined in the report were committed from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s under three Mexican presidents. The special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, received the report from a team of 27 researchers in December.
Military and security forces executed or "disappeared" hundreds of Mexican civilians and "armed militants," the report says. Thousands more were tortured or illegally detained.
The extensive documentation contained in the report -- including records from the Mexican military, police and Interior Ministry -- is "absolutely unprecedented," said Kate Doyle, director of the Mexico Project for the National Security Archive.
The report details "death flights" from military bases in Acapulco and other places, in which the bodies of dozens of detained leftist activists and guerrillas were surreptitiously dumped into the Pacific Ocean.
The report also documents a Mexican army campaign to deny food to residents of areas in the southern state of Guerrero where guerrillas were operating. These and other abuses, the report says, amounted to genocide as defined by international law.
Doyle said her nonprofit group published the report because copies had been circulating among writers, historians and intellectuals in Mexico.
"The way that this has leaked out into the hands of a few people has echoes of an old style of doing things in Mexico," Doyle said.
Sources in the human rights advocacy community said they feared that prosecutor Carrillo was delaying publication of the report because of pressure from the army to censor the findings.
