Abdullan was the sixth man to be captured.
They first came for his older brother, Amalfiel, who was arrested in broad daylight on the streets of the Mexican city of Morelia. They then went to the outskirts of the capital to capture his other brother, Armando. That same day, soldiers stormed his home and beat his brothers Sauron and Venustiano, as well as his father Jesus – who were eventually taken away as well. Finally, security forces arrested Abdelán Guzman himself in October, subjected him to the most brutal torture, and then threw him in jail.
Over a four-month period in 1974, Mexican security forces detained six members of the Guzman family as part of a crackdown on left-wing rebel groups that took up arms against The country’s authoritarian regime. Abdul was eventually released, but his four brothers and his father joined some 1,200 people missing from the government’s dirty war: neither dead nor alive, just gone.
Until recently. A document began circulating among human rights groups and was later published in local media that appeared to be a letter from a former military officer that listed a list of 183 people who may have been killed by the military and then removed from the plane. Thrown into a plane. Those named include Abdellan’s three brothers – Amafel, Armando and Sauron – and his father, Jesus.
“We were very angry that we couldn’t find them,” Abdullan said. “It is now clear what happened: they were thrown into the sea. But it is also clear that the battle is not over, the fighting continues.
Abdullan’s brother Venustiano was not among the 183 victims of the fatal flight, so he remains another victim of Mexico’s national disaster. Since the end of the dirty war, the practice of enforced disappearance has been adopted on a large scale by the country’s violent and powerful criminal factions. More than 116,000 people are missing and tens of thousands of families are plunged into deep uncertainty.
César Contreras León, a lawyer for the Guzmán family, said: “For the family, the discovery of the truth, no matter how horrific it may seem, is no better than the 50 years spent searching. More painful.
After being detained and tortured, Abdolan spent more than four years in the Black Palace of Lecamberi, Mexico’s most notorious prison. When he was finally released under a government amnesty in 1979, he expected his brother and father to be released as well. But there was no news from them at all.
The family spent months, years, decades searching for his brother and father, searching prisons and morgues, going to police stations and prosecutors’ offices, consulting with lawyers and shamans – to no avail. Then the Mexican secret police told Abdulan that during the Dirty War, some dissidents were killed and thrown from planes into the sea.
He began to wonder if his relatives had suffered a similar fate. But there are no official channels for investigations as the country remains under the control of the authoritarian Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Then, in 2000, the PRI failed for the first time in 70 years. Victorious conservative candidate Vicente Fox vowed to unearth Mexico’s dark past.
He established a special prosecutor’s office to investigate crimes committed during the Dirty War, and local media began digging up evidence of the fatal flights. News reported how dissidents were taken to a military base near the port city of Acapulco, executed, then put into bags, weighed down with rocks and thrown into the sea.
But the special counsel’s efforts ultimately failed. After four years of effort, it came to nothing. Its final report was never officially released.
“The president didn’t want to cause trouble, and the army just kept quiet,” Abdullan recalled. “So ultimately they did nothing.”
As Mexico became more violent and the number of missing persons began to soar, Abdulan and his family continued to search alone. In 2006, they submitted a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, accusing the Mexican government of enforced disappearances.
Then in 2018, firebrand leftist Andres Manuel López Obrador came to power promising to tackle corruption and end impunity. Three years later, he launched a new investigation into the crimes of the Dirty War, with researchers interviewing survivors and their families, including Abdul and his relatives. But the new effort has run into trouble: Last year, truth commission members accused the military of obstructing their investigation by hiding, altering and destroying documents.
Still, when the truth commission released its final report in August, it included a list of 183 fatal flight victims, as well as shocking new details, such as the fact that there were as many as 1,500 fatal flight victims, some of whom may not have been conscious. to this point.
For Abdellan and his family, the report means closure. After fifty years of searching, evidence of their loved one’s final fate was finally found here.
“You feel joy, sadness, a variety of emotions,” Abdullan said. “At least now we know they were not hiding somewhere but were killed by the Mexican government.”
However, Abdolan said there will be no real peace for the family until Venustiano, Abdolan’s younger brother, is found.
“I have hope because he is there, Venustiano is in the military archives,” he said. “As my comrades say, the battle is forever.”
Reporting on this story was supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation