Mexico opens 50 years of secret police files to public

Fifty years of secret files held by Mexico's once omnipresent one-party state were opened to public scrutiny yesterday.

The files date back to 1952, in the third decade of the Institutional Revolutionary party's 70 years in power, which ended when Vicente Fox took the the presidency from the party at the elections two years ago.

Most attention is likely to focus on what the documents reveal about the repression of the student democracy movement in the late 1960s and the subterranean dirty war on leftwingers during the 1970s and early 1980s.

"This government is leaving behind all vestige of authoritarianism," President Fox said on Tuesday at the Lecumberri Palace, a huge former jail for political and other prisoners, converted into the country's general archive in the 1980s.

"We are not chasing ghosts. We are looking for the truth," he added, referring to the role the 80m pages may play in future prosecutions.

Last November the government appointed a special prosecutor to look at the dirty-war era and build cases against any officials implicated in torture or murder.

So far there has been little obvious progress.

In theory the files are open to any interested member of the public who asks to see them, priority going to prosecutors, victims and academics.

The October 1968 student massacre, in which hundreds are thought to have died, will be a main focus of research.

But the files are more likely to shed light on the disappearance of more than 500 leftwing activists in the more selective and systematic repression that followed.

This is because the archive apparently contains millions of surveillance notes on "subversives", as well as interrogation reports on dissidents who later vanished while in police custody.

Mr Fox has been generally praised for releasing the files, but some sceptics want more action from him.

"We should invade the archive to show we really want the cases to move forward," said Martha de los Rios, whose sister disappeared in the 1970s.

She said that many relatives of victims suspected that the files had been doctored and that the government was primarily concerned with heading off pressure to bring the guilty to trial.