Verónica López was 15 years old when she learned about the terror of the torture cells.
She ran the Mexican government of José López Portillo (1976–1982) and she was a young trans woman who, due to poverty and hunger, worked in prostitution.
One afternoon, a group of Mexico City police officers captured her and beat her into a patrol car, then known as
Julia .
and transferred to a prison.
"That's where my horror began," she says.
The agents booked her for “misconduct” and although they released her, the arrests became systematic: “They stripped us naked, they poured cold water on us, many colleagues died of pneumonia, others were taken out sick, we never saw them again We listened to the torture of innocent people;
What we lived through was a horrible panic,” says López.
His testimony is part of an initiative that tries to recover the memory of the horror suffered by the so-called dissident groups, people who were persecuted by the regime during the so-called Dirty War for belonging to guerrilla groups, social organizations, unions, student groups or minorities, such as LGBT people.
“The agents killed our compañeras when they did not want to get on the
Julia
and those of us who saw it couldn't say anything”, recalls López.
She has narrated her story along with three other trans colleagues during an emotional meeting organized this Wednesday by the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification (MEH), as part of their efforts to rescue the memory of the horror in Mexico between 1965 and 1990, Decades full of infamy in which the Government carried out a silent and systematic hunt against any movement that it considered a threat.
Not only were guerrilla groups exterminated in Guerrero, those labeled subversives were scientifically eliminated (thrown into the sea from helicopters in sacks, burned alive in garbage dumps), students were massacred in Tlatelolco or massacres were committed such as the so-called
falconazo
, but gays and lesbians were persecuted and horror was unleashed viciously against trans people, because they represented a challenge to the moral standards of the time.
Everything with caution and with impunity, because Mexico sold itself to the world as a democracy, far from the military dictatorships that bled the continent dry.
"What happened between 1965 and 1990 are serious violations that admit of no excuses and even less forgiveness and forgetfulness," warned Alan García Campos, a member of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The event took place at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center, built precisely to keep the memory of the students murdered and disappeared in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in 1968.
Verónica López, 58 years old, surviving victim of the dirty war and member of the collective Historical Reparation for Transgender Older Adults. Mónica González Islas
Verónica López's is a story of suffering.
She left her house in Tapilula, a small town in Chiapas, at the age of 13 due to the contempt of her family, which was very conservative.
She had moved with an aunt in Mexico City, but she soon had to run away from her because her cousins raped her.
On the street, without money, she had to start prostitution.
“It was an unknown world for me, but I was hungry and I had to eat,” she recalls.
Police officers made rounds and raids in areas where trans people waited for their clients.
Violence always reigned.
In one of those raids, Verónica López was transferred to the fearsome cells of Tlaxcoaque, a torture prison located in the center of the capital.
She was in cell five of aisle three.
"I lost my teeth to blows, my eardrums ruptured, it was very painful,
that was marked in my life”, he says.
“The agents killed and left the bodies lying around, they left you naked [naked] and bloody.
They humiliated you, stripped you naked and exhibited you in the fountain of Diana the hunter.
I am a survivor of that terror,” says López.
That ridicule of the authorities was also suffered by Denisse Valverde.
She affirms that trans women "were the object of humiliation and pleasure" of the intelligence agents and the capital's police.
“Our stories were never told because we were afraid to speak up,” she says.
“That of the trans populations is an ignored violence, the mistreatment we were subjected to was not talked about, but they did with us what they wanted,” she explains.
Valverde was 16 years old when she began to be a victim of violence from the authorities.
For practicing prostitution “we were robbed (now I know that this was a forced disappearance), beaten, raped.
It was a time of total impunity, a holocaust against LGBT people and worse for trans women”, she affirms.
Valverde suffered on many occasions the so-called "carreterazos", which were the raids of the agents,
who violently put them in their patrol cars, raped them and left them naked on the roads.
If, during the time they were held, they captured a man accused of a crime, they forced them to have sex with them.
They shaved their heads and yelled at them that they would never be a "real" woman.
"There were many missing compañeras," she alerts.
“If we saw a patrol, we didn't know what to do and if we made a report, the staff of the delegation would notify the patrolmen and it was worse,” she explains.
Denisse Valverde, 61 years old. Mónica González Islas
These trans women directly denounce Arturo Durazo Moreno, the Negro Durazo, a sadly famous, obscure and feared character head of the Federal District Police and Transit Department during the six-year term of López Portillo.
He was a violent and corrupt man, who took the hunt against dissidents to heart.
He is blamed for serious human rights violations, massacres, and an atrocious heavy-handed policy, whose crimes were committed in the feared Division of Investigations for the Prevention of Delinquency (DIPD), popularly known as Tlaxcoaque, because the headquarters of the division was in that city square.
“I spent my entire adolescence in those cells,” says Gabriela Elliot, 66.
She had left her house at the age of 11, also because her family did not accept her.
“My mom was a very tough woman,” she recalls.
One night,
Some friends invited her to a nightclub, where they hung out with clients who invited them to drinks and spent time with them.
They stayed to sleep in the place and the next morning the DIPD agents beat them awake.
A patron of the store was murdered and officers blamed Elliot and two of her friends.
Despite their innocence, they were sentenced to 25 years in prison for murder.
She only turned five, but her trauma is still with her.
they were sentenced to 25 years in prison for manslaughter.
She only turned five, but her trauma is still with her.
they were sentenced to 25 years in prison for manslaughter.
She only turned five, but her trauma is still with her.
“We had to live through a system that repressed us,” says Emma Yessica Duvali.
Her life changed at the age of 13, when she arrived at school with her eyebrows plucked.
The principal kicked her out and claimed there would be no place for her in the education system.
“I was kidnapped at the age of 17, they shaved my head, beat me, and raped me for the
crime
of being dressed as a woman,” she recalls.
“We were cut off from all the possibilities of human growth for straying from the norm and from a patriarchal and macho system,” says Duvali.
She, as a survivor of that Dirty War, remembers other colleagues who did not live to tell her stories.
“Sulma, packed in a suitcase;
China, hanged in a hotel.
Emma Yessica Duvali, 62 years old. Mónica González Islas
Duvali listens carefully to Alejandro Encinas, Undersecretary for Human Rights, who in the meeting affirms that the State intends to "build a collective truth to rescue the stories of people who were victims of violations of their rights by an appalling regime."
The official acknowledges before the audience the State's responsibilities during that sinister period, which he describes as intolerant and authoritarian.
Encinas' words resonate with Duvali, who criticizes the different administrations for keeping quiet about the horrors suffered by thousands of Mexicans.
"It's a shame for a government that talks about openness," he says.
And then he unleashes his fury: "I don't want a high-ranking official to apologize to me", his voice echoes in the corridors of the cultural center, goes out the windows and reaches the Plaza de las Tres Culturas.
“All the culprits should be here, López Portillo, Durazo Moreno, their officers, the officer who arrested me, all those assholes.
I don't want an apology, I want full reparation for the damage.
These stories cannot be repeated in this country, whatever the government or whatever the party," says the woman, and her indignation explodes next to the plaques and sculptures that commemorate those murdered in Tlatelolco, one of the darkest chapters of Mexican history, who have also been victims of impunity.
It seems that this morning Duvali also wants to avenge them, to shout that they are not alone.
"A public apology is useless to me!"
whatever government it is or whatever party it is”, says the woman, and her indignation explodes next to the plaques and sculptures that commemorate those murdered in Tlatelolco, one of the darkest chapters in Mexican history, who have also been victims of impunity.
It seems that this morning Duvali also wants to avenge them, to shout that they are not alone.
"A public apology is useless to me!"
whatever government it is or whatever party it is”, says the woman, and her indignation explodes next to the plaques and sculptures that commemorate those murdered in Tlatelolco, one of the darkest chapters in Mexican history, who have also been victims of impunity.
It seems that this morning Duvali also wants to avenge them, to shout that they are not alone.
"A public apology is useless to me!"
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