Mexico readies for "Dirty War" report
They fanned out across the country during the past few years to take testimony, visit mass graves and pore over long-secret papers. Their report will be Mexico's first public document of its kind.
Dirty war prosecutor Ignacio Carrillo says it will detail systematic killing of hundreds of people, abductions and intimidation under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years until President Vicente Fox's 2000 election.
But even before its formal release, the report has been discredited by some as overblown, while survivors fear it will be watered down to protect former leaders from punishment.
"Every Mexican should be assured that the past will be made known, that it will never be repeated," Ramirez said. "This should go into the history books, even for school children."
Ramirez, 28, wanted to help rewrite history when she joined the special prosecutor's team in Guerrero state, once a rebel hotbed and major dirty war battleground.
She found a shadowy world of blood vendettas and entrenched power brokers. The peasants of the rough-and-tumble countryside stayed mum, afraid of reprisals.
Slowly, survivors started approaching, often under cover of darkness. "People began to trust, to say, 'yes, I want this resolved, it's an open wound,"' Jose Martinez, another member of the investigative team, said.
"We saw where the guerrilla movement and the repression took place, where the bodies turned up. In Guerrero entire communities disappeared. We went to places that no longer exist, just trees," he added.
On a threadbare budget the investigators went months without pay and dipped into their pockets for everything from photocopies to hammer and nails to fix office furniture.
Then in 2003 a key government witness was murdered. Ramirez had helped convince Zacarias Barrientos to testify and was with him earlier on the day he was shot.
Prosecutors concluded he was killed by his wife and accomplices in a crime of passion. Ramirez and others fear he was silenced by a network of former officials.
"He had 19 bullet wounds, they tortured him before killing him," she said.
As his six-year term ends, Fox has failed in his pledge to win justice for dirty war victims. Special prosecutor Carrillo has won no convictions. Ex-President Luis Echeverria, 84, who ruled at the height of the violence in the 1970s, has twice evaded indictment for genocide.
In February, a draft report was leaked to the press. Some, including Carrillo, questioned its findings, leading activists to fear the final version to be presented this month will be watered down.
The investigators call it a work in progress. While they negotiate with the attorney general for back pay, Ramirez and Martinez and others keep talking to survivors.
Asked why, they remember Elba Fuentes. After decades of silence she traveled four hours on foot and by truck from her mountaintop hamlet to tell her tale of abduction and rape.
As the teenage daughter of a leftist rebel, she was taken by soldiers and police in the 1970s. An officer rescued her from her secret jail -- on condition she become his concubine.
Fuentes eventually escaped to the mountains to start a new life. She kept her past secret for 30 years until, encouraged by Martinez and Ramirez, she testified to prosecutors.
"She told us, 'I need to tell my story after so many years, things I have not even told my husband and children. It left me with such pain,"' Martinez said.