Documenting Enforced Disappearances

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the Mexican government intensified its brutal campaign against political dissidents in what is known as la guerra sucia, the “Dirty War.” Extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture, and other serious human rights violations became systematic practices to eliminate individuals perceived as threats.

The visual investigation “The Death Flights” deals with the secret illegal operations in which political prisoners were tortured, killed, and then thrown into the sea from military aircrafts. This method, reminiscent of practices in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, was used by the Mexican military to leave no trace of their victims‘ whereabouts. To date, the identities of the victims of the death flights are unknown. This project highlights the story of one of many victims of enforced disappearance during this period: Alicia de los Ríos Merino, whose final known whereabouts lead to the air base from where the death flights program was carried out.

Due to the persistent efforts of victim-led justice organizations, in 2021 former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed an executive order establishing a Truth Commission to investigate this period. Despite expectations raised by the initiative, the investigation faced many obstacles, including accessing military records, inhibiting its ability to deliver on its mandate. As a pathway to truth, reconciliation, and clarifying the historical record, Centro Prodh, a leading human rights organization based in Mexico City, approached our team to analyze and reconstruct one of the state’s most clandestine programs of enforced disappearances: the so-called “death flights.”

This fourteen-minute video presents one of the first assemblages of visual evidence showing the systematic and highly organized program of disappearances carried out by key military officials in Guerrero, Mexico during this period. The work weaves together both open and closed-source research, a digital 3D site model reconstructed from archival materials, high-resolution declassified spy satellite imagery, and official records released from a 2002 military investigation that did not go to trial. The analysis also includes numerous written testimonies from military personnel who described their active involvement in the disappearances, information from multiple journalistic reports that have been made public over the years, and unexpected Hollywood film footage that aided in the reconstruction of the Pie de la Cuesta Air Force base–one of the primary crime scenes.

Widely circulated in Mexico, the film’s call to action demands the release of the full scope of the military’s archives to uncover additional aspects of the truth about this dark period of Mexican history.

To learn more about Centro Prodh and the case, please visit Centro Prodh's website.

To read the official joint press release, please visit: https://situ.nyc/research/news...