Steve Quayle News Alerts

September 29, 2002; Page A14
By Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY, Sept. 28 -- Octaviano Santiago Dionisio remembers the torturer's voice, leaning in close and telling him to confess all his crimes or "I'm going to take you apart."

During the next 10 weeks, from September to November 1978, when Santiago was held incommunicado by soldiers and police, the torture-master kept his word.

Santiago said he was dunked, over and over, into a tank of water with an electrical current running through it until he nearly passed out. He said he was beaten endlessly, had carbonated water forced up his nose and received so many electrical shocks to his genitals that he developed a horrible infection.

In an interview today, Santiago said the man overseeing the torture, the one who threatened him and helped in the beatings, was Mario Arturo Acosta, an army general charged this week, along with two others, in the murders of 143 activists in the 1970s during Mexico's "dirty war."

"I know personally of Acosta's bestiality and inhumanity," said Santiago, a longtime legislator in the state of Guerrero, whose wife disappeared in 1978 and was presumed murdered by soldiers or police. "He is the most evil person in the recent history of our country."

Military prosecutors filed mass-murder charges this week against Acosta, Gen. Francisco Quiros Hermosillo and retired Maj. Francisco Javier Barquin. The Mexican military has long been a secretive and insular agency, protected from almost all public scrutiny by the country's political leaders.

Until this week, the military leadership had vehemently denied what the Mexican public has commonly taken as fact for decades: that soldiers were deeply involved in the disappearances and killings of hundreds of the government's perceived enemies in the 1970s and 1980s. During those years, as in much of Latin America, Mexico's authoritarian leaders turned to a secret campaign of torture and murder to suppress students and others demanding more democratic leadership.

The army's denial of its role ended Thursday, when a military prosecutor stood before a military judge and charged the three men with what amounts to one of Mexico's bloodiest killing sprees.

Accusations of Acosta's involvement came as no shock to Santiago and others who have followed his career with dismay and horror for decades.

"When people think of Acosta, they immediately think of repression, torture and disappearances," said Maribel Gutierrez, a journalist in Guerrero who has reported on human rights issues there for years. "He has always acted with violence."

Acosta and Quiros had already been disgraced, arrested and jailed in September 2000 on charges of being in business with a notorious drug lord. Some human rights activists here say the murder charges against the two men are too convenient, that they will allow the military to sacrifice already tainted officers and avoid difficult questions about who gave them their orders.

But some people find it hard to believe that Acosta, 63, could be punished by the military for his role in the dirty war. He is widely remembered as one of the most feared characters in one of the country's most violent and repressive states.

for full article see
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17309-2002Sep28.html