Mexico will look for Rosendo Radilla, who disappeared four decades ago
Mexico will resume the search for Rosendo Radilla, peasant and composer disappeared four decades ago by elements of the Army in the southern state of Guerrero, federal authorities reported Tuesday.
From this Tuesday until mid-April, excavations will be made in the clandestine places where the Armed Forces carried out activities of detention, torture and extermination between the 1960s and 1970s, in the so-called Dirty War between the State and the opposition movements.
The staff of the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR) will be assisted by the collaboration of the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) and the Mexican Forensic Anthropology Team, according to local media.
In November 2009, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) handed down a judgment finding the Mexican State responsible for the disappearance of Radilla on August 25, 1974, in the first case in which he tried the Mexican Army for serious human rights violations. .
In this regard, the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights (CMDPDH) indicated in a statement that "the excavations to be carried out have the potential to be configured as an exercise of memory and truth".
However, he complained that "to date no public servant, neither military nor civil, has been sanctioned" for the disappearance of Radilla.
Before being deprived of his freedom, the peasant and corridos composer was involved in activities of political life and social work in the municipality of Atoyac de Álvarez, in Guerrero.
In the vicinity of that municipality is where he was arrested and disappeared by the Mexican Army on August 25, 1974.
His arrest was argued for having links with Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez Rojas, both guerrillas and opponents of the government of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976).
The judgment of the IACHR includes a testimony of a man named Maximiliano Nava Martínez, who stated that he was present in the then military barracks where Radilla was held.
While composing a corrido that alluded to the murders that occurred on May 18, 1967 in Atoyac de Álvarez, the soldiers went into a rage, took him out of the barracks and beat him.
After that, it is believed that he was put in a van and never heard from again.
This resumption of the search of his body more than 40 years later coincides with the recent announcement of the Mexican president, the leftist Andrés Manuel López Obrador, last Sunday.
The president announced the reinstallation of the National Search System for Missing Persons in the face of a tragedy that has accumulated more than 40,000 cases, 26,000 unidentified bodies in morgues and 1,300 clandestine graves.
The leader of the National Regeneration Movement (Brunette) recalled that this tragedy is very "painful" for the country and one of the worst legacies of the previous governments.
