Mexico: Caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the '70s, the Tecla Parras fought the state and lost everything.

By GEOFFREY MOHAN
Times Staff Writer
 

December 28 2001

MONTERREY, Mexico -- When Mexico's secretive counterinsurgency squad came looking for her in this industrial city two hours' drive from the U.S. border,
Violeta Tecla Parra was already hardened by detention and savvy to their ways.

So, as she opened her apartment door that day in April 1978, Violeta pulled out a pistol and opened fire, striking one agent in his flak jacket before she was
bearhugged to the ground. And that, as far as the official record goes, was the last anyone heard of her.

Within a year, Violeta had been joined by her elder sister and mother in a sorority of the missing, all three swallowed up by Mexico's "dirty war." They had gambled
on a popular uprising against the most powerful monopoly capitalists of Mexico and lost. After a seven-year battle with Mexico's security police, the Tecla Parra
family was defeated, divided and "disappeared."

Artemisa, Violeta's elder sister and comrade in the Marxist-oriented September 23 Communist League, was caught six weeks after her. She was arrested in a rural
hospital in the northern state of Chihuahua, after a long drive from Monterrey with a wounded comrade.

A year later, the matriarch of the revolutionary family, Ana Maria, would be taken in a more mundane location, in front of a shopping mall in the city of Chihuahua.

The three Tecla Parra women are on the rolls of 532 alleged victims of forced disappearances listed by the National Commission on Human Rights. The commission
released a report last month that for the first time reveals some of the grisly details of the government's secret war against communist insurgents in the 1970s and early
'80s.

Little trace is left of the nine-member Tecla Parra family that grew up in a working-class barrio of Mexico City. Theirs is a tale of turbulent times, when a small band
of leftist revolutionaries turned to kidnapping, robbery and violence in hopes of overthrowing an entire system of government. The government's zealous pursuit of
them became a campaign of harassment, torture and disappearances that persisted many years and many bodies beyond their real threat to the status quo.

The campaign exacted a harsh price from the Tecla Parra family for its embrace of radical politics and violence--the parents' marriage torn apart, the lives of the
mother and five of her seven children colliding brutally with the power of the state.

The father, Rosendo, fought bitterly with his wife and children over their political affiliations. Not long after his wife was first arrested in 1971, he left the family. He
remains estranged from his surviving offspring.

Eldest son Alfredo, detained for his radical activities in 1975, left jail three years later, a broken man who guards his silence to this day.

Adolfo, the pampered favorite of the Tecla Parra women, was rounded up with Alfredo. Unlike his brother, he disappeared. He was 15.

Concealing Her Past

Ana Lilia, the eldest daughter, dodged police for more than a decade, using false names before reclaiming her identity and moving to Tijuana. She works there now
as a nursing instructor, telling no one about her past association with the September 23 Communist League.

She says she never did anything more than pass out propaganda. Her secret police file listed her as wanted in connection with the deaths of six policemen during
unspecified attacks by the league. Ana Lilia says she finds that charge baffling.

"I had to hide all the time," she said in a telephone interview. "I saved myself from being caught more than a few times. I would use a false name, and I had to work in
places where they didn't ask you for papers, where they could abuse you as much as they wanted."

The only two of her siblings who apparently escaped the police dragnet were Roberto and Rosendo Jr. By the time they came of age, the armed communist
movement was in effect dead.

"It's not an easy story to tell," said Georgina Tecla Yalin, 54, a cousin of the Tecla Parra children, who grew up with them in the same house as part of an extended
family. "I think in the case of Anita [Ana Maria] and Artemisa and Violeta, they're dead. . . ."

As for Adolfo, she said, "I hope he is alive and in good condition, but we really have no certainty. And we don't even have any tombs to cry over."

The tomb that Monterrey residents did cry over in 1973 belonged to Eugenio Garza Sada. The octogenarian was one of the sacrosanct elders of the Monterrey
Group of family conglomerates, who had turned a brewery into a beer-and-glass empire.

On Sept. 17, 1973, commandos from the September 23 Communist League gunned him down in a botched kidnapping attempt.

The league, which never had more than about 400 members, was formed in Guadalajara in 1973 out of a collection of revolutionary groups. One member
organization, the Armed Communist League, had announced its presence in Monterrey a year before with a bloody double bank robbery. Later in 1972, its cadres
hijacked a 727 jetliner with two U.S. consular officials among the 100 passengers. The hijackers made off to Cuba with a $1-million ransom and seven jailed
comrades whose freedom they had won.

For a Marxist, Monterrey--with its banks, blast furnaces, private clubs and the well-heeled families who controlled them--was an easy target.

"If you are thinking in the most dogmatic terms, you have here a huge contrast between a big bourgeoisie class and the proletariat," said Lilia Palacios, a sociologist
whose brother was imprisoned for his participation in the September 23 Communist League.

But when they killed Garza Sada, "Monterrey went on a veritable witch hunt, where the most repressive elements of the police, and even paramilitary groups, began
to go on a crusade," Palacios recalled.

Already irked by the national government's left-leaning policies, the families of Monterrey blamed President Luis Echeverria for the radical crime wave. They still do.

"In one form or another, he allowed these currents to prosper," said Mauricio Fernandez Garza, Garza Sada's grandnephew and a former senator for Nuevo Leon
state. "Indirectly, not directly, he provoked a lot of very sad deaths . . . ."

Whether Echeverria ordered a crackdown remains to be seen. He has denied initiating any witch hunt and blames any "excesses" on his underlings. But the great bulk
of the disappearances occurred during his 1970-76 administration, and several military generals of the era have implied recently that abuses would not have
happened without presidential orders.

There is no dispute that a wave of political crime and violence--ambushes, bank robberies, kidnappings and killings--by insurgents such as the Tecla Parras
challenged the government. Scores of police and soldiers were killed, as well as several prominent businessmen. But human rights advocates and relatives of the
disappeared argue that the extrajudicial response by an elected government placed Mexico on equal moral footing with the military dictatorships of Chile and
Argentina.

"It is true that groups that grew from revolutionary movements used violence, broke laws and represented a threat to public security and the institutions of the state,"
the human rights commission acknowledged. "Nonetheless, it's also irrefutable that many of the responses on the part of public forces were done outside the legal
framework."

A Traditional Family

How the Tecla Parra women came to Monterrey begins in their Mexico City barrio, where many residents belonged to leftist unions, and some had joined the
Communist Party.

"It was a traditional Mexican family, where the daughters get married and bring their husbands home to live with the mother," said Georgina, the cousin. "So we all
grew up together, as cousins, but more like brothers and sisters."

The extended clan went to the same schools and got involved in the same movements. Its members followed Georgina into the Communist Youth, where they were
numerous enough to form their own group, called Red October, a reference to the government's massacre of protesting students in the capital on Oct. 2, 1968.

When Ana Maria Parra de Tecla, the mother, joined the Communist Party in the late 1960s, she came back from her first meeting smiling, Georgina recalled.

"She said, 'I feel like a new woman, someone who is treated with respect, like someone who counts.' "

Ana Maria soon joined the Armed Revolutionary Movement, a radical group whose members received military training in North Korea. She quarreled bitterly with
her husband over her newfound guerrilla affiliation, sometimes coming to blows, Georgina said. By 1971, she was in jail for criminal activities related to the group.
She remained there until 1977.

Left by their father after one too many fights, Alfredo, Violeta and Adolfo joined the league, which was robbing banks and businesses to raise money for guns. By
1975, all three had been rounded up by police and interrogated. Alfredo and Violeta remained in detention for two years. Their records contain no indication that
charges were filed.

Adolfo simply disappeared. A photograph of the teenager, looking toward the camera, was among the documents the human rights commission found in the
oncesecret security archives. With it was a long description of elder brother Alfredo's interrogation.

The account reflects what appears to be an effort by Alfredo to win freedom for his little brother by downplaying Adolfo's involvement.

"The detained is the brother of Alfredo Tecla Parra, who indicated that he was being prepared politically so that later on he could participate in the revolutionary
struggle, and that up to the moment he had only read a few works by Lenin and Che Guevara that were in the houses he lived in, and that only through newspapers
and other media did he know about the robberies of banks and other businesses."

Why the rest of the family was released after several years but Adolfo simply disappeared is an abiding mystery to Georgina. The last word of him came from a
bricklayer who worked in Mexico City's Military Camp One, where scores of detainees from around the nation were kept. The man brought her a crinkled piece of
brown wrapping paper. On it was a hand-scrawled note, directing her to give the bricklayer money to buy Adolfo a blanket. He said Adolfo was in the camp but
isolated from other detainees. He was known there by the nickname "Little Bird," the bricklayer said.

A Knock on the Door

Ana Maria, Violeta and Alfredo were released in 1977 and '78. As far as Georgina knows, Alfredo assumed an apolitical life in the state of Mexico. He had been
tortured in jail but has never spoken of those experiences, she said, and he declined to speak to The Times.

After their release, Violeta and Artemisa headed north to Monterrey.

"I think they wanted to start a normal life," Georgina said.

Violeta's secret file tells otherwise. She contacted top leaders of the September 23 Communist League cell in Monterrey and signed up, according to the documents.
On April 4, 1978, her life as a guerrilla ended with a knock on a neighbor's door. When Violeta opened her door to see what the commotion was about, officers
from the secretive White Brigade, an elite and loosely supervised counterinsurgency squad, realized their error and pounced.

Prisoners who were released from Mexico City's Military Camp One have said they saw Violeta alive there in 1978. But 23 years of silence have passed since then.

Artemisa stayed free only a little longer. On May 16, 1978, she arrived at a hospital in the small town of Delicias, in the state of Chihuahua, after driving with a man
and a woman. One of them--the records are vague--had a gunshot wound. Suspicious nurses called the police. Artemisa fled and was caught just as she pulled out a
.38-caliber pistol.

Records show she was flown to Mexico City the next day. At least one witness reported seeing her in Military Camp One. Nothing has been heard of her since.

Ana Maria, the mother, was picked up on April 12, 1979, in Chihuahua in front of the Futurama mall and taken to a local military installation. She, too, was later seen
alive in the Mexico City military camp, according to a witness. The witness recalled captors saying: "Do you know where you are? In the military camp, and from
here, no one gets out alive."

The witness continued: "I saw that [the interrogator] had papers with a letterhead from the Secretary of Interior.

"Before finishing, I'd like to say that I saw various people in that place. Some I don't know and others I've been able to identify from the photographic archives of the
[human rights] committee. Those were Mrs. Parra de Tecla, mother of the other disappeared: Violeta, Artemisa and Adolfo Tecla Parra."

When Mexican President Vicente Fox presented the human rights commission's report last month, he promised to name a special prosecutor to delve into the fates of
the disappeared. But none of the family members who spoke of them believes the truth will be revealed about their loved ones.

Georgina holds out little hope for her relatives, except Adolfo. She points to the few photographs she has of them, and calculates: Artemisa would be about 43 years
old; Violeta would be 40; Ana Maria, close to 70.

When she gets to Adolfo, the math fails her. All she can say is that he was just 15.

For information about reprinting this article, go to http://www.lats.com/rights