Contact Admin. On October 2, , in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City, government troops opened fire on a student demonstration, killing or wounding hundreds of protestors and establishing what would be a modus operandi for handling threats to the political establishment in the coming years: Its methods included torture, extrajudicial execution, and forced disappearance, and often entailed an extreme degree of brutality and wanton disregard for human life.
One resident of Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, for example, described to Human Rights Watch how he had been detained by the army in and held for two weeks, blindfolded and subject to daily torture, which included cigarette burns and electrical shocks to his testicles. His captors demanded that he confess to having participated in the killing of several soldiers—a crime he insists he had not committed. He resisted their pressure, even as some his fellow prisoners were beaten to death, but finally capitulated when told that his family would be killed if he did not sign the confession.
Others fared even worse. Three days later his body appeared on a street in his home city, with signs of torture that included the holes where scorching hot nails that had been driven into his kneecaps.
His face was so disfigured that his family was only able to identify him by his teeth and some scar tissue that had been left by an earlier surgery. Hundreds of people were detained by security forces and never seen again.
During , an air force plane made regular night flights out of a military base in Guerrero to dump bodies out over the Pacific Ocean. According to former air force personnel who participated in the flights, the prisoners were shot in the head just before being boarded on the plane, though some were still alive when tossed out the cargo door. The violence left profound scars on the victims and their relatives. One torture victim told Human Rights Watch that, because of severe blows he had received to his head while in detention, he had been unable to return to work and had been supported the last three decades by his children.
