By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

MEXICO CITY, Feb. 19 -- Miguel Nazar Haro, a onetime domestic spy chief implicated in the killings of government critics in the 1970s and 1980s, was arrested Wednesday evening as he drove to his doctor's office, the first former official arrested for crimes committed during what was known as Mexico's "dirty war."

The dramatic arrest, hailed by human rights activists, comes three years after President Vicente Fox took office promising to punish officials responsible for the torture and disappearance of hundreds of student activists and anti-government guerrillas. Nazar Haro was seized as Fox's chief prosecutor was under increased pressure to show results in his investigations of dirty-war cases.

Nazar Haro, 80, who has denied the charges against him, is accused of not only ordering numerous murders but also directly participating in torture. As former director of the now disbanded Federal Security Directorate, he was once named in an FBI cable as an "essential contact" for the CIA in Mexico City. He is also wanted in the United States on 1982 charges involving a car theft ring.

The arrest was one of the few bright spots in stalled efforts to carry out democratic reforms in Mexico. Under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which Fox swept from office in the 2000 elections after seven decades in power, corruption and arbitrary abuses of power went unchecked.

Nazar Haro "was like a psychopath," said Fernando Pineda Ochoa, who said he was tortured by him in 1971. Pineda Ochoa, then a Marxist opposed to the authoritarian government, said Nazar Haro beat him, applied electric shocks to his mouth and told him he was going to torture his mother in his presence.

Now a teacher, Pineda Ochoa said his torture continued for more than a month as Nazar Haro and others sought names and addresses of other Marxists. He said he was hung from the ceiling by his arms for hours at a time. "I am not seeking revenge," Pineda Ochoa said about Nazar Haro. "But he is guilty. Everybody who suffered at his hands knows that."

Nazar Haro also has legal troubles in the United States. He was arrested in San Diego in 1982 on charges of participating in a multimillion-dollar car theft ring. A federal indictment said that hundreds of cars were stolen in California and brought into Mexico; some later turned up being driven by senior government officials. Nazar Haro fled after posting $200,000 bail.

In a highly sensitive and publicized incident at the time, the U.S. attorney in charge of that case said the CIA was hindering the prosecution because Nazar Haro had been an intelligence source. Nazar Haro -- whose job at the security directorate was roughly equivalent to the director of the FBI or the CIA -- had been named by officials at the time as helping the CIA monitor radical and communist groups in Mexico and Central America.

Kate Doyle, a senior analyst in Mexico for the National Security Archive, a private research institute based in Washington, said newly declassified documents show that there was a "deliberate decision on the part of the U.S. government" not to publicize or protest "grave human rights violations unfolding right under their noses." While U.S. officials were aware of the tactics being used by the Mexican government to eliminate its opponents, she said, they decided to stick to issues that "mattered most to Washington," such as trade and oil.

Federal police pulled over Nazar Haro's Pontiac Grand Am on the Periferico, Mexico City's beltway, during rush hour on Wednesday evening. Police said Nazar Haro was with his wife and daughter en route to a medical checkup; his family said he suffers from severe diabetes and heart problems.

He was then flown to the northern city of Monterrey, where he was to stand trial for the disappearance of Jesus Piedra Ibarra, a member of an anti-government guerrilla group who was abducted in 1975. Piedra Ibarra's mother, Rosario Ibarra, who has become a well-known activist for victims' families, said in an interview the arrest was "the culmination of a long fight."

Nazar Haro is "guilty of horrible things," she said, including using iron prods and electric shocks to torture people in basements of government buildings.

Ibarra said she hoped the federal investigation would now turn to former president Luis Echeverria, who served from 1970 to 1976. Echeverria, 82, was called last year to testify before the dirty-war special prosecutor, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, but invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination. Former president Jose Lopez Portillo, an Echeverria protege whose term from 1976 to 1982 also coincided with dirty-war crimes, died this week.

The arrest was a major boost for Carrillo Prieto, who has been under intensifying pressure as his two-year investigation had dragged on without results. Late last year, at the prosecutor's behest, a judge issued arrest warrants for Nazar Haro and three other former officials, none of whom had been arrested until now. One of the fugitives, Isidro Galeana, a former state police commander, died of natural causes at his home in Acapulco on Jan. 3.

In a recent interview, Carrillo Prieto said he would ask Fox for more government resources to capture dirty-war fugitives.

"We need more elements of the state to help make arrests to keep this from becoming a joke," the prosecutor said. He said he was committed to finding Nazar Haro and the others even if he had to "look under every rock and in hell if they are there."

Nazar Haro, often described as a complicated man with uncommonly clear blue eyes and a mercurial demeanor, was called in for questioning by Carrillo Prieto last year but declined to answer any questions. As he entered the prosecutor's office, members of a crowd shouted: "Nazar, murderer! Nazar, murderer!"

Nazar Haro later told reporters that he was a Mexican patriot. He said he was not a torturer, but "just a good interrogator."

Police said Nazar Haro was able to elude capture for the last two months since his arrest warrant was issued by traveling in cars with darkened windows, dyeing his hair, growing a mustache and staying in different houses.

No trial date has been set. Daniel Wilkinson of Human Rights Watch in New York said that if the trial goes forward, "it would mark a turning point for Mexico, because for decades Mexico failed to hold government officials accountable for their crimes."

© 2004