By John Ross
MEXICO CITY (July 26th) — One day long ago, in August 1974, the 25th to be precise, in the heat of the Mexican military’s “dirty war” to root out subversion in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero, security forces under the command of General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparo dragged the popular musician and former mayor of Atoyac, Rosendo Radilla, off a bus along the Costa Grande highway just north of Acapulco. His son, also named Rosendo and then 11, remembers that when the musician asked the “guachos” (local vernacular for federal troops) why he was being detained he was told that it was for “writing corridos (ballads) about Lucio Cabanas,” a rebel Atoyac schoolteacher whose Party of the Poor was then roaming the sierras that soar above the Costa Grande. Rosendo Radilla never saw his father again.
This past July 7th, 35 years after the elder Radilla vanished off the face of the earth, Rosendo and his sister Tita sat in a San Jose, Costa Rica courtroom as the Inter-American Human Rights Court (CIDH) opened hearings into their father’s long-ago forced disappearance. The hearing was the first time an international court has agreed to put Mexico’s “dirty war” (1974-78) on trial.
To be sure, the corridista was not the only local to have been disappeared during the military’s long reign of terror. Families in Atoyac count more than 600 campesinos taken by security forces and never seen again. Acosta Chaparo was later convicted of dumping the bodies of 143 prisoners from Mexican air force Israeli Arava 201s into the Pacific Ocean near Acapulco. The names of 121 other victims were attached to the Radilla case before the CIDH.
Even Mexico’s Interior Secretary Fernando Gomez Mont, who oversees internal security, concedes that the military was probably complicit in Rosendo’s disappearance, but argues that the CIDH has no jurisdiction in the case — the court did not exist in 1974 and Mexico only recognized its competence in human rights matters in 1998.
At any rate, Gomez Mont insisted before the court, Mexico has made great advances in human rights since 1974. “That was another Mexico,” he said. “Mexico is different now.”
Or is it?