[News] Mexico's ex-spy chief to be tried for '75 abduction

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Mexico's ex-spy chief to be tried for '75 abduction
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Activist vanished during `dirty war'

By Hugh Dellios
Tribune foreign correspondent

February 26, 2004

MEXICO CITY -- In a landmark case for Mexican justice, a federal judge 
Wednesday ordered a former government spy chief and alleged torturer to 
stand trial in the disappearance of a left-wing activist 29 years ago.

The ruling was applauded by human-rights advocates as an important test of 
how the Mexican judiciary will deal with Miguel Nazar Haro, who last week 
became the first official arrested for alleged crimes during the 
government's ruthless crushing of dissent during Mexico's "dirty war."

After a two-year string of setbacks in President Vicente Fox's campaign to 
investigate crimes of the past, the Nazar arrest has rekindled prosecutors' 
hopes of punishing those responsible, even though victims' families 
remained skeptical.

"This was a step toward justice, but the case has a long way to go," said 
Rosario Ibarra, the tireless leader of a group of families searching for 
missing relatives from that era. "It would be terrible now if they retreat."

After nearly three months on the run, Nazar, 79, the former chief of the 
now-disbanded Federal Security Protectorate and reportedly a former CIA 
contact, was detained last week in connection with the abduction of 
Ibarra's son, Jesus Piedra Ibarra, in 1975.

Nazar was ordered to remain in a Monterrey jail Wednesday by Judge 
Guillermo Vasquez. That is the same judge who threw out arrest warrants 
against him and three others last year, saying the statute of limitations 
had run out on a kidnapping charge from 1975.

But that decision was overturned by Mexico's Supreme Court in November. In 
a landmark ruling, the high court decided that abduction has no statute of 
limitations if the victim is still missing.

By the time a new arrest warrant was issued in December, however, Nazar and 
the other suspects had fled.

While on the run, Nazar reportedly grew a mustache and remained on the move 
in cars with tinted windows. But last week he returned to one of his homes 
in Mexico City, which agents had staked out, and they arrested him later on 
a highway.

Two other suspects are at large. They are Nazar's predecessor, Luis de la 
Barreda, and a police commander, Juventino Romero. The fourth suspect died 
of natural causes in January.

Nazar's detention is a breakthrough for Fox's special dirty-war prosecutor, 
Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, who was under growing pressure to show some 
results after two years of investigations.

Carrillo has complained of a lack of resources and support from security 
forces. But he says he continues to build cases against former authorities, 
all the way up to former President Luis Echeverria, who governed from 1970 
to 1976.

Nazar denies the charges and says prosecutors are conducting a political 
witch hunt. He says he only carried out his "patriotic" duty and has 
described himself as "just a good interrogator."

"The thing you have to have firmly on the table is the historic context, 
and then we would understand that there is no dirty war," Jose Nassar Daw, 
Nazar's son and lawyer, said last week.

Yet victims say that Nazar was barbaric in extracting information through 
torture when he was leader of an intelligence unit during the 1970s and 
1980s. It also is believed that he may know as much as anyone about 
dirty-war tactics and that he reported regularly to the government's 
highest levels.

Piedra was one of at least 275 left-wing activists who disappeared during 
the conflict, according to the National Human Rights Commission. Others say 
the number is more than 500.

Nazar's lawyers have three days to appeal Wednesday's decision. They have 
tried to prove that Nazar was not involved in Piedra's arrest and that 
Piedra was not kidnapped because police had issued a warrant for him.

But prosecutors this week filed a second set of abduction charges against 
Nazar in the disappearance of Ignacio Salas Obregon, a colleague of Piedra 
in the September 23rd Communist League.

Nazar also has run afoul of U.S. law. He was arrested in 1982 in San Diego 
and charged with being part of a Mexican car-theft ring. He fled the 
country after posting $200,000 bail.

The case took on wider significance when a U.S. attorney publicly alleged 
that the CIA was trying to block the prosecution because it said Nazar was 
a valuable intelligence source for the Reagan administration.


Copyright (c) 2004, Chicago Tribune

  http://www.chicagotribune.com/archives




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