Abdallan was the sixth to be taken.
First they came for his older brother Amafer, who was arrested in broad daylight on the streets of the Mexican city of Morelia. Then they came for his other brother, Armando, on the outskirts of the capital. That same day, soldiers stormed into the family home and beat his younger brothers Solón and Venustiano, as well as his father Jesús – eventually they too would be taken away. Finally, in October, security forces took Abdallan Guzmán himself and subjected him to the cruelest forms of torture before throwing him in prison.
Over the course of four months in 1974, Mexican security forces arrested six members of the Guzmán family as part of a crackdown on left-wing rebel groups that had taken up arms against the country’s authoritarian regime during a period known as the “dirty war” of Mexico. Abdallan was eventually released, but his four brothers and his father joined the ranks of some 1,200 people disappeared by the government during the Dirty War: neither dead nor alive, simply vanished.
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Until recently. A document began circulating among human rights organizations and was later published in local media. It turned out to be a letter from a former army officer, containing a list of 183 people who had probably been killed by the army and then thrown from planes in the air. Pacific, on what was known as the ‘death flights’. Among those mentioned were three of Abdallan’s brothers – Amafer, Armando, Solón – and his father, Jesús.
“It filled us with such anger that we couldn’t find them,” Abdallan said. “Now it is clear what happened: they were thrown into the sea. But it is also clear that the fight is not over, the fight continues.”
Abdallan’s brother Venustiano was not on the list of 183 victims of the death flight, and thus remains yet another victim in what has become a national catastrophe in Mexico. Since the end of the Dirty War, the practice of enforced disappearance has been widely adopted by the country’s violent and powerful crime factions. More than 116,00 people have disappeared, leaving tens of thousands of families in a state of desperate uncertainty.
“For the families, the pieces of truth found, no matter how terrible they seem, are no more painful than the fifty years they spent searching,” said César Contreras León, a lawyer for the Guzmáns.
After being captured and tortured, Abdallan spent more than four years in Mexico’s most notorious prison, the Black Palace of Lecumberri. When he was finally released under a government amnesty in 1979, he expected his brothers and his father to be released as well. But there was no news about them at all.
The family spent months, then years, then decades searching for his brothers and father, searching prisons and morgues, visiting police stations and prosecutors, consulting lawyers and shamans – all to no avail. Abdallan was then told by members of the Mexican secret police that some dissidents had been killed during the Dirty War and then thrown from planes into the ocean.
He began to wonder if his relatives might have suffered such a fate. But because the country was still in the grip of the authoritarian PRI party, there were no official channels to continue his investigation.
Then in 2000 the PRI was defeated for the first time in seventy years. Triumphant conservative candidate Vicente Fox vowed to expose Mexico’s dark past.
He set up a special prosecutor’s office to investigate crimes committed during the Dirty War, and local media began unearthing evidence of the death flights. News reports described how dissidents were taken to a military base near the port city of Acapulco, executed and then bundled into bags weighted by rocks and thrown into the ocean.
But the special counsel’s attempt ultimately failed. After four years of work, there was not a single conviction. The final report was never officially released.
“The president didn’t want to cause any trouble and the army just stayed quiet,” Abdallan recalls. “So in the end they didn’t do anything.”
Abdallan and his family continued their search alone as Mexico became more violent and the number of disappeared people began to rise. In 2006, they filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, accusing the Mexican state of enforced disappearance.
When left-wing Andrés Manuel López Obrador came to power in 2018, he promised to tackle corruption and end impunity. Three years later, he launched a new investigation into the crimes of the Dirty War, and investigators interviewed survivors and their relatives, including Abdallan and his relatives. But this renewed effort also failed: last year, members of the Truth Commission accused the military of obstructing their investigation by hiding, altering and destroying documents.
However, when the Truth Commission released its final report in August, it included the list of 183 Death Flight victims, as well as shocking new details, such as the fact that there were as many as 1,500 Death Flight victims — and that some may still be there. were still alive when they were thrown into the sea.
For Abdalllan and his family, the report provided closure. After fifty years of searching, here was finally proof of the ultimate fate of their relatives.
“You feel a mixture of joy, sadness and so many things,” Abdallan said. “At least now we know that they are not hidden somewhere, but that they were murdered by the Mexican state.”
But until Abdallán’s little brother Venustiano is found, Abdalllan says the family cannot truly be at peace.
“I have hope because he is there, Venustiano is there in the military archives,” he says. “As the comrades say, the fight is forever.”
Reporting for this story was supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation
