MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) -- President Vicente Fox is creating a special
                 prosecutor to investigate reports that hundreds of leftists vanished while in
                 government hands -- by far the most dramatic move by any Mexican
                 administration to lift the veil from horrifying past abuses.

                 Fox ordered the position's creation Tuesday after Mexico's National Human Rights
                 Commission presented a 3,000-page report concluding that many of the 532 people
                 who were reported as having disappeared in the 1970s and early 1980s had been
                 seized by municipal, state or federal agents.

                 Human Rights Ombudsman Jose Luis Soberanes said that while his agency could
                 confirm only 275 of the cases, further investigation might confirm others.

                 "The justice that has been awaited for decades is beginning to become a reality,"
                 said Fox, whose action partly fulfills campaign promises he made before becoming
                 taking office a year ago.

                 Fox also ordered the creation of a committee to consider ways of compensating
                 relatives of the victims, and he directed federal agencies to release tens of
                 thousands of files that might shed light on human rights violations between 1960
                 and 1985, or perhaps even cases today.

                 The missing victims include suspected members and sympathizers of small guerrilla
                 groups that carried out bombings, kidnappings and occasional slayings during the
                 1970s in hopes of creating a communist state in Mexico.

                 Mostly farmers, students and rural school teachers, many were arrested without
                 warrant and disappeared into clandestine prisons at Mexican police and military
                 bases, Soberanes said.

                 All of those mentioned in the report were tortured or abused.

                 Soberanes opened the presentation by reading a terrifying account from a survivor:
                 a woman who described being forced to watch the beating and electroshock torture
                 of her husband and her 1-year-old daughter after agents had raped and tortured her
                 as well.

                 Although the report implicated 37 municipal, state and federal agencies, the majority
                 of the abuses appeared to involve the army or the former Federal Security
                 Directorate.

                 Soberanes said human rights laws barred his agency from naming the 74 officials --
                 59 federal and 15 from the state level -- implicated in the forced disappearances.
                 But he turned the report and its files over to prosecutors so that they could bring
                 charges.

                 The report was formally presented at the National Archive, a former prison building
                 known as the "black palace" of Lecumberri, which served as Mexico's chief
                 political prison. The stone cellblocks, which now silently house library tables, were
                 visible through tall glass windows.

                 During his campaign, Fox vowed he would investigate past human rights abuses;
                 his election in December ended 71 years of often-authoritarian rule by the
                 Institutional Revolutionary Party.

                 But many human rights activists remained skeptical, especially following the
                 October 19 slaying of prominent human rights lawyer Digna Ochoa, after a series
                 of death threats.

                 "There is a recognition that there was a period of clear and undeniable violations of
                 human rights," said Edgar Cortez, director of the Jesuit-run Miguel Agustin Pro
                 Human Rights Center where Ochoa once worked. He noted that previous
                 governments had often tried to ignore the issue.

                 But he said he wanted to see the results of Fox's promises.

                 David Cabanas, whose brother Lucio led Mexico's most famous rural guerrilla band
                 of the 1970s, expressed concern that the report did not name the torturers and that
                 an army general, Rafael Macedo, is the attorney general overseeing the case.

                 Cabanas said Fox's announcement "could be important, but we need to see deeds."

                  Copyright 2001 The Associated Press.