MEXICO CITY — More evidence has emerged that Mexican authorities disposed of the bodies of dissidents in “death flights” during the country’s 1965-1990 “dirty war. ”
Mexico’s governmental Truth Commission said in a report Friday that recollections by witnesses and documents leaked over the years described the chilling last moments of the victims. The executions were part of an effort by the Mexican government at the time to eliminate leftist social and guerrilla movements.
The victims, who have not been identified or counted, were pulled one by one to a bench at a military airfield near Acapulco. They believed they were going to have their photographs taken, but were instead shot in the back of the head, and their bodies dumped by plane out in the Pacific ocean.
According to testimony by Gustavo Tarín, who served in a military police unit at the time, the same pistol was used so often in the killings that soldiers came up with a nickname for it: “the sword of justice.”
Tarín said that as many as 1,500 people may have been killed that way, though he provided no lists nor names of the victims. Some of the victims may have been dying, but not yet dead, when they were pushed out of the planes.
Military aviation mechanic Margarito Monroy said he participated in 15 of the flights, and that female victims were sometimes offered release, or the release of their husbands, if they had sex with soldiers, though he never saw…
