Summer 2002 Research Report Rachel Post Graduate School of Journalism "The role of collective memory in Mexico today: a closer look at human rights abuses unveiled by the Fox Administration"

In January of this year, President Fox created an investigative commission, following the urging of the country’s National Human Rights Commission. The investigative commission is charged with the task of looking into past disappearances, torture and other human rights abuses of insurgents—leftist students, teachers and guerrillas—in the 1970s and 1980s at the hands of government-sponsored agents. Some 1,500 Mexicans are estimated to be missing from that era. In February, the government opened secret files at the Investigation and National Security Center of the disappeared from the 1970s. In July of this year, families were able to gain access to those file in that were filtered through the National Human Rights Commission and sent to the center. The Fox Administration created a Special Prosecutor’s office which began investigating the cases of the disappeared, using these secret files and other sources in May 2002. When the Special Prosecutor’s Office, which issues case updates, has gathered enough information to support a given case, the case will be brought to a special judge for legal proceedings.

Since the overthrow of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 2000 presidential election of Vicente Fox from the PAN opposition party, many institutional changes have been implemented in the new administration. In an effort to make the government more transparent, Fox has begun to focus on human rights—the first president to do this in decades. For the first time, human rights and past abuses of the government are being talked about in the press. Stories about generals who were involved in the killing of students in Tlatelolco in 1968 and those in 1971 were on the front page of every major newspaper and magazine in Mexico this summer.

Because the topic of how Mexico is currently addressing former human rights abuses is so new—literally, it had just begun this year—there is almost nothing written about how Mexico is seeking to remember and address its past, unlike in other Latin American countries like Argentina, Chile and Guatemala. This is why I wanted to go to Mexico and gain firsthand testimonies and interviews with psychiatrists, political leaders, human rights workers and families of the disappeared from political movements in the 1960s and 1970s. I plan to fill this gap in scholarship by writing my thesis about this fresh and ongoing topic. My research in Mexico was absolutely necessary to achieve this goal.

My research examined how families have dealt with forced forgetting and what the role of trauma has had on collective memory. I specifically wanted to examine how the current access to government files is affecting this process for families of “los desaparecidos.” My interviews this summer sought to answer the following questions.

Research Questions:

How is the memory of past events influenced by current events? How do the memories of what happened before change and morph because of what is happening now? What factors of the present time influence memory and how it is being recollected and retold?

What is happening in the Fox Administration that is finally allowing this to happen? Why couldn’t it happen during the PRI? What does this mean in terms of the future of politics in Mexico? What role have non-governmental organizations been playing in helping families of the disappeared? How have they helped keep the memories alive? How is the process of gaining access to newly opened government files affecting the families?

Will Mexico implement new strategies of finding out the truth or use similar methods to those in Guatemala or other Latin American countries? Is what is happening in Mexico caused in part by the pressure of exposing past atrocities in other Latin American countries?

Conclusions:

From these interviews, I ascertained that the process of uncovering the truth of what happened some 30 years ago is not going to be easy or fast. Many of the same political structures are still in place, despite regime change in Mexico. Many human rights workers said that little has changed at the ground level: Their lawyers still receive threats; they still employ lots of security, and they say that despite the dialogue, implementing change is slow in Mexico.

But many remain hopeful that finally something is being done. Families of the disappeared are organizing and connecting openly now. Many family members are eager, despite their mistrust of the government, to work with the Special Prosecutor’s Office set up by Fox, because they want to find out the truth and see justice done.

One young woman, Alicia de los Rios, 25, whose father and mother were both involved in student leftist movements in the 1970s, provides a clear example of the difficulties of finding out what happened. Her father was killed because of his involvement and her mother arrested, later having her sister in prison. This is documented. Then she disappeared. De los Rios says she will not stop—even if it is dangerous—until she finds out what happened to her mother.