Mexico: 1970s campaign against leftists was brutal for Martha Camacho and others in Sinaloa.

One in an occasional series on citizens who vanished in Mexico's "dirty war."

By MARK FINEMAN
Times Staff Writer

CULIACAN, Mexico -- The first time Martha Camacho saw her newborn son, he had a machine gun to his head.

The boy was just seconds old.

Camacho was one of Mexico's desaparecidos, or "disappeared ones," when she gave birth, bound and blindfolded, in a secret government safe house 24 years ago.
Her husband, the father whom her son has never known, remains a desaparecido.

The story of Martha Camacho, her son and her husband, Jose Manuel Alapizco--which is partially documented by recently released Mexican intelligence files--bears
testimony to the brutality of Mexico's "dirty war," the government's clandestine crusade against leftist insurgents a quarter of a century ago.

Their story, and others like it, has fueled President Vicente Fox's stated intent to cleanse the record with truth about the hundreds of Mexicans missing since the late
1960s and '70s.

It is also a part of the history of Sinaloa, the northwestern state where the war's legacy is felt with special poignancy: With at least 40 men and women who have not
been seen since they were in the custody of government authorities in that era, Sinaloa ranks third in the nation in the number of "forcibly disappeared ones."

Most of the missing were like Camacho and Alapizco, young teachers and students in the state capital, Culiacan, who were swept up in the heady campus activism of
the 1970s. In independent-minded Sinaloa, a centuries-old culture of violence and resistance fanned that activism into the flames of armed insurrection for hundreds
of the young.

The state's tally of missing, along with case studies for each of them, is part of a 2,846-page report released last month by Mexico's National Human Rights
Commission. Fox said he would appoint a special prosecutor to pursue the perpetrators and punish the guilty.

Most of the Sinaloa missing were seized, like Camacho, from their homes, the commission concluded. Others were grabbed from buses or at security checkpoints.
And in virtually every case, the commission's files state--without assigning blame--that the missing were then "illegally and arbitrarily" denied the most basic rights of
Mexico's declared democracy: freedom and justice.

It's what the commission's report and its supporting documents do not say, however, that has triggered criticism, frustration and anger among the victims' families.

Camacho, one of the rare "reappeared ones," is incensed: Her husband's name isn't even on the commission's list of 532 disappeared. He is one of many nationwide
whose cases fell through the legal cracks. Never mind that Camacho had been a key witness before the commission in 1992 and that Alapizco's name figures
prominently in its dossiers on other missing Sinaloans.

As she told her story to a Times reporter in a restaurant booth in this hot and dusty city last week, Camacho, now 46, explained why she was going public with the
details for the first time:

"This is a historic moment. Right now, the eyes of the whole world are fixed on the government of Fox, which supposedly is a government of change. It is time for the
truth."

                                                             ___

Camacho had worn the blindfold for more than a month before she gave birth that night. She had been bound and beaten. She had been in custody since the evening
that intelligence officers and heavily armed police burst into her small concrete house on Culiacan's Avenue 11, pointed their rifles at her swollen belly and demanded
to know where her husband was. Alapizco was at work, Camacho insisted. He'd be home soon. So they waited, Camacho eight months pregnant and pleading with
the gunmen not to harm her unborn child.

When her husband, a ranking member of the September 23 Communist League guerrilla movement, approached the house, her captors opened fire--dozens of
rounds, hundreds maybe. Then they dragged her to a van and took her away.

And then, Camacho, a 21-year-old high school teacher, simply vanished from her world. So did her 20-year-old husband of two years.

Secret federal agencies held her for 60 days, first at a military camp and then at the clandestine safe house, where, she said, she was repeatedly tortured.

"When they took the baby out and cut the [umbilical] cord that night--it was about 2:30 a.m.--they lifted my blindfold for the first and only time. They were holding
up my baby, with the machine gun pointed at him. And one of them said, 'Meet your son, Thompson.'

"It was a Thompson submachine gun."

That was Sept. 29, 1977.

                                                             ___

"Meet my son," Camacho said last week, pointing across the table to the bearded, 24-year-old graduate student seated opposite her, "Miguel Alfonso Millan
Camacho."

In her tone was a defiant pride. That local trait and the history of a fierce and entrenched guerrilla wing of the Communist League that attacked police, burned buses,
smashed stores and sought to spark a popular uprising in Culiacan in 1974 help explain the state's high number of missing. That attitude and history also help explain
the skepticism of the victims' families about the rights commission's recent attempt to account for them.

Camacho had the same tone as she spoke of her husband.

"Where is he?" she asked, disbelief ringing, as she intently scanned the list of names of long-lost university friends and neighbors posted on the commission's Web
site. "It's absurd he isn't here."

Oscar Loza Ochoa, Culiacan's veteran human rights leader and head of the independent Human Rights Defense Commission of Sinaloa, said, "It's a very partial list,
because it doesn't include all the names of known missing." He estimated the total of Mexico's missing at closer to 1,100.

"But I think it's a very important first step," he said. "For the first time, it opens an investigation, an interrogation, of a very dark epoch in our history."

The National Human Rights Commission's vice president explained in an interview in Mexico City last week that, by law, its investigators could probe only cases
formally filed and presented to them. Camacho said she hadn't thought she needed to do more after her 1992 testimony before the commission.

                                                             ___

Mere mention in the thousands of pages of commission files does little to restore humanity to the missing. In the impersonal language of bureaucrats, the lists and
statistics, they remain two-dimensional. And there is barely a hint of the multilayered anguish of dozens of families here, deeply scarred and forever changed by the
many years of not knowing.

"It is an eternal torment," said Margarita Velazquez, whose son Carlos Aleman Velazquez disappeared a month after his 18th birthday. Security forces pulled him off
a bus near their lower-class Culiacan barrio, ripped off his shirt, blindfolded him with it and took him away as a suspected subversive on Aug. 26, 1977.

Ever since, Doña Margarita, as his 75-year-old mother is now best known, has been searching. She also has been a pioneer in one of Mexico's first Unions of the
Mothers of Disappeared Sons. For 2½ decades, these women of Culiacan have clung to an inexplicable, unshakable conviction that their sons are still alive.

Doña Margarita said she has stayed in the house where she gave birth to Carlos and raised him, just so he'll know where to go when he's eventually freed.

From the day Carlos failed to come home from playing basketball and a quick visit to his university, Doña Margarita has filed dozens of legal appeals. She has
marched in scores of street protests, shut down highways and elbowed her way to the side of presidents. She has prayed and wept and prayed some more.

Carlos' absence has burned through the lives of his six brothers and sisters as well. One of his older sisters, Maguy, swears she saw him in a car at a Culiacan street
corner in 1988--11 years after he disappeared. She recalled that she tried to speak to him through the car window. The man in the car replied only that he was under
the constant guard of a man nearby. To this day, Maguy says, she is tortured day and night by visions of Carlos.

The classified documents released by the rights commission last month assert that Carlos was one of six suspected rebels who fled a clandestine government safe
house in Culiacan on Dec. 15, 1977. Five of those six are officially listed among the missing. Two of them, the government documents state, were killed in
subsequent shoot-outs with government forces. The commission rejects that version but suggests no alternative conclusion.

The classified documents call Carlos "a fugitive from justice." His sister Rosa Delia Aleman, 47, dodges the issue, calling him "a strong believer in the dignity of
Mexicans."

As for the rest of the once-secret information, the family rejects it entirely: "There's nothing new, nothing at all," Doña Margarita said. "And there are lies."

                                                             ___

Among the chief sources the commission cites for its doubts about the safe-house escape is Martha Camacho. The tough, blunt-spoken teacher has been a
compelling witness against the "dirty war" as well as being its victim. Despite fears that her tormentors remain alive--even in positions of power--she came forward as
Witness T-47 during the commission's 1992 visit to Culiacan.

Excerpts from her testimony published in the commission's report last month show that she identified several of the missing through conversations she had with them in
the safe house, which served as a secret prison.

Camacho and more than 20 others were held there. At least two of the detainees were suspected guerrilla members who, according to the now-declassified internal
documents of the security forces, had been shot and killed in clashes two months before Camacho spoke with them.

One of those was Javier Manriquez Perez, the same young recruit to the Communist League who federal agents said had fingered Camacho and her husband, even
leading security forces to their front door.

Manriquez was picked up by authorities early on Aug. 19, 1977, while plastering Communist League slogans in Culiacan's downtown plaza, according to one
document from Mexico's now-defunct Federal Security Directorate. That paper was excerpted in the commission's case file on Manriquez published last week.

Under interrogation, the document states, Manriquez said he had been recruited by Camacho's husband, Alapizco, whom he described as "recruiter and coordinator
of Communist League brigades in Culiacan."

The commission also found a report of Manriquez's death in his file at the directorate: It says he was shot and killed sometime in August that year while wielding a
.38-caliber Trejo pistol during a security forces raid on a Communist League safe house.

Sharply challenging that account, the commission's report specifically cites Martha Camacho's testimony--that she knew Manriquez to be alive in the secret prison
two months later.

The commission may have used Camacho's words to shed light on the Manriquez case, but all of her detailed testimony about her own disappearance and her
husband's has so far not helped in prompting a separate investigation into Alapizco's fate. No one from the commission has approached her since 1992 to testify
further, she said. But memories of her ordeal stay sharp and haunt her endlessly.

Camacho was released--"I only imagine because they realized I had absolutely no link to the movement," she said--after two months in custody. For a year
afterward, she never once left her parents' house.

As for the son born under the barrel of a gun, she never let him out of her sight. Every night for two years, she slept holding him to her chest.

She eventually remarried, "because I thought reentering a normal life would make me normal again." She bore three daughters and tried to forget the past.

It wasn't until Miguel turned 16 that she told him how he had come into the world--and how his father had disappeared from it.

"It changed my whole perspective on the world," said Miguel, who earned his master's degree in languages in June and now hopes to seek his doctorate in France. "It
has taken a long time to assimilate all of it. There are times, dates, I don't know why, when I feel the anguish, the absence of my father.

"But it has contributed greatly to my desire to change things. To learn more. This is our generation's inheritance from the one before us. This should not be wasted nor
forgotten."

As for Camacho, she returned to her university studies four years ago--20 years after federal authorities snatched her. She completed her master's studies in June and
is now writing her thesis. Her topic: The Union of Mothers of Disappeared Sons of Sinaloa and the impact of the disappearances on their lives.

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