Fox's "México Seguro" Anti-Drug Operation Being Used to Shield Dirty-War Criminals

The World Socialist Web Site has a very interesting article this week on the Mexican government’s continued efforts to cover up its crimes against the student movement in the late 1960’s and seventies. Two of the seminal events in the history of Mexican social movements were the massacres of student demonstrators at Tlatelolco in 1968, by the Mexican army, and San Cosme (both areas of Mexico City) in 1971, by government-backed “Falcon” paramilitaries. And one of the major reasons both Mexicans and the international community hailed President Vicente Fox’s 2000 electoral victory — the first break in a 70-year reign by the Institutional Revolutionary Party — was the supposed end it would bring to that party’s historic crushing of dissent and impunity for political crimes. As this article shows, Fox’s efforts to clean up the government’s record and hold the responsible accountable have hardly been sincere.

But of special interest, I think, to us and our readers is a revelation made in an accompanying interview with economist and Committee of 68 member Alejandro Alvarez, who shows how the drug war is used to shield states from scrutiny over these kinds of issues. Read on for an excerpt…

RA: What is the international context of this whitewash?

AA: The Fox government is colluding with US security agencies. At the same time that it turns its back on international treaties and agreements on genocide and human rights, it wants to enforce security arrangements with the US that violate the Mexican constitution. When Fox met with Bush in Waco, Texas in March of this year he agreed to a scheme called México Seguro [Secure Mexico], which is just another way of trampling on human rights using organized crime and drug trafficking as an excuse for police-military occupations and repression. Some of those in the army that now lead these operations also participated in the dirty war. The army is being shielded from responsibility for the massacres and repression of the 1960s and 1970s in part because of its current role. The argument currently in vogue is that the armed forces are blameless for the killings and disappearances because they were following orders from elected officials.

Read the full interview here.