Archival evidence of Mexico's human rights crimes: The case of Aleida Gallangos

Washington, DC, March 9, 2010 - A Mexican human rights activist who was orphaned in infancy when her parents disappeared at the hands of government forces filed a petition before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) yesterday, drawing on dozens of declassified U.S. and Mexican documents as evidence. Aleida Gallangos Vargas--whose case became widely known in 2004 when she tracked down her long-lost brother through intelligence records found in Mexico's national archives--joined with her paternal grandmother to charge the State with responsibility for the secret detention and disappearance in 1975 of her parents, Roberto Antonio Gallangos Cruz and Carmen Vargas Pérez, among other family members. Today the National Security Archive is posting a selection of the documents being used in the case, obtained by the Archive through the Freedom of Information Act and from the Mexican government.

Aleida was two years old when her parents were captured; she was rescued by a friend of her parents who himself was killed by security forces in 1976. Aleida was adopted by his family and renamed Luz Alba Gorostiola Herrera. Aleida's brother Lucio Antonio, who was three when Roberto Antonio and Carmen disappeared, was taken by members of the government death squad that raided their home in June 1975; shortly afterwards he was delivered to an orphanage and in February 1976 was adopted by a couple and christened Juan Carlos Hernández Valadez. The two children grew up in separate lives knowing nothing of their true identities or of their relationship.

The history of the Gallangos-Vargas family emerged in 2001 when a magazine published an interview with Roberto Antonio's mother, Quirina Cruz Calvo, along with photographs of the disappeared couple and their two small children. Aleida's adoptive family recognized Luz Alba's face in the pictures and Aleida was reunited with her grandmother. She spent the next several years piecing together the circumstances of the Mexican government's role in abducting and secretly detaining her parents. Using government records that had been located by the office of the Special Prosecutor assigned to investigate past political crimes, Aleida managed to track down her brother in the United States in 2004, 29 years after their separation.

The records Aleida used to find Lucio Antonio--along with dozens more obtained by the National Security Archive through requests to the Mexican and U.S. governments--now serve as critical evidence in the case brought by Aleida on March 8 before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.

The Inter-American system has been an important venue for victims and activists seeking recourse from the Mexican government for state-sponsored human rights crimes committed during the 1960s-80s. On November 23, 2009, the Inter-American Human Rights Court issued a landmark decision, finding Mexico responsible for the illegal detention and disappearance of Rosendo Radilla, a schoolteacher and social activist stopped at a military checkpoint in Atoyac, Guerrero on August 25, 1974. Radilla--known for his songs of social protest and his admiration of Lucio Cabañas, the popular guerrilla leader from Guerrero--was disappeared at the height of the State's extralegal counterinsurgency campaign against rebels and their supporters in southern Mexico in the early 1970s [see NSA briefing book on Lucio Cabañas, and the Dawn of the Dirty War]. The 2009 ruling marked the first Inter-American decision against Mexico for abuses committed during the "dirty war." The court ordered the government to pay reparations to the family members for the years of suffering inflicted as a result of the crime.

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