Search for lost brother reveals dark secret of Mexico’s ‘death flights’ | Mexico

Abdallan was the sixth to be taken.

First they came for his older brother Amafer, nabbed in broad daylight on the streets of the Mexican city of Morelia. Then they came for his other brother, Armando, grabbed on the outskirts of the capital. That same day, soldiers burst into the family home, beating his younger brothers Solón and Venustiano, as well as his father Jesús – eventually they too would be taken. Finally in October, security forces took Abdallan Guzmán himself, subjecting him to the cruelest forms of torture before tossing him in prison.

Over the course of four months in 1974, Mexican security forces detained six members of the Guzmán family, part of a crackdown on leftist rebel groups who had taken up arms against the country’s authoritarian regime during a period known as Mexico’s “dirty war”. Abdallan was eventually released, but his four brothers and his father joined the ranks of about 1,200 people disappeared by the government during the dirty war: neither dead nor alive, simply gone.

Until recently. A document began to circulate among human rights organizations, and was later published in local media which appeared to be a letter from a former army officer which included a list of 183 people who had probably been killed by the military and then thrown from planes into the Pacific, on what were known as the “death flights”. Among those named were three of Abdallan’s brothers – Amafer, Armando, Solón – and his father, Jesús.

“It filled us with such rage not being able to find them,” said Abdallan. “Now it’s clear what happened: they were thrown into the sea. But it’s also clear that the fight isn’t over, the fight continues.”

Abdallan’s brother Venustiano was not on the list of 183 death flight victims, and thus remains yet another victim in what has become a national catastrophe in Mexico. Since the dirty war ended, the practice of forced disappearance has been adopted on a major scale by the country’s violent and powerful crime factions. More than 116,00 people have vanished, leaving tens of thousands of families in a state of desperate uncertainty.

“For the families, the bits of truth that are found, no matter how terrible they may seem, are no more painful than the 50 years spent searching,” said César Contreras León, a lawyer for the Guzmáns.

After he was detained and tortured, Abdallan spent more than four years inside what was Mexico’s most notorious prison, the Black Palace of Lecumberri. When he was finally released in 1979 under a government amnesty, he expected that his brothers and his father would be freed as well. But there was no news of them at all.

The family spent months, then years, then decades searching for his brothers and father, scouring jails and morgues, going to police stations and prosecutors offices, consulting lawyers and shamans – all to no avail. Then, Abdallan was told by members of the Mexican secret police that during the dirty war, some dissidents had been killed and then tossed from planes into the ocean.

He began to wonder if maybe his relatives might have met such a fate. But with the country still in the grips of the authoritarian PRI party, there were no official channels to pursue his inquiry.

Then, in 2000, the PRI was defeated for the first time in 70 years. The triumphant conservative candidate Vicente Fox vowed to excavate Mexico’s dark past.

He launched a special prosecutor’s office to investigate crimes committed during the dirty war and local media began unearthing evidence of the death flights. News reports described how dissidents were taken to a military base near the port city of Acapulco, executed, then bundled into sacks weighed down by rocks which were then tossed into the ocean.

But the special prosecutor’s effort ultimately failed. After four years of work, it did not achieve a single conviction. Its final report was never officially released.

“The president didn’t want to cause trouble and the army just stayed quiet,” Abdallan recalled. “So in the end they did nothing.”

Abdallan and his family continued their search alone, as Mexico grew more violent, and the number of disappeared began to soar. In 2006, they filed a petition before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, accusing the Mexican state of forced disappearance.

Then in 2018, firebrand leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador was swept into power promising to tackle corruption and end impunity. Three years later, he launched a new investigation into the crimes of the dirty war, and researchers interviewed survivors and their family members, including Abdallan and his relatives. But this renewed effort also floundered: last year, members of the Truth Commission accused the military of hindering their investigation by hiding, altering and destroying documents.

Still, when the Truth Commission released its final report in August, it included the list of 183 death flight victims as well as shocking new details, such as the fact that there were as many as 1,500 death flight victims – and that some may have still been alive when they were tossed out to sea.

For Abdalllan and his family, the report represented closure. After fifty years of searching, here at last was evidence of their relatives’ ultimate fate.

“You feel a mixture of joy, of sadness, of so many things,” said Abdallan. “At least now we know that they’re not hidden away somewhere, but they were killed by the Mexican state.”

Until Abdallán’s little brother Venustiano is found, however, Abdalllan says the family cannot truly be at peace.

“I have hope because he’s there, Venustiano is there in the military archives,” he says. “As the comrades say, the fight is forever.”

Reporting for this story was supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation