When in October 2021 Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador issued a decree setting up a truth commission to explore state human rights abuses from 1965 to 1990, the reception was mixed. The president's backers celebrated it as a final opportunity to shed light on a dark era. Critics asked why López Obrador had not issued the edict until halfway through his term. And some feared that history might be repeating itself, for 20 years earlier President Vicente Fox had created a special prosecutor's office, the Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, to investigate forced disappearances during the “dirty war” of the 1970s and 1980s. After five years of work, the special prosecutor's office delivered a total of zero convictions, effectively prolonging Mexico's history of impunity. How and why that happened is the subject of the important and original study Policing the Past.
Javier Treviño-Rangel is...
