As president-elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador prepares for his inauguration this coming December in Mexico, he is a step away from inheriting a country witnessing its worst human rights crisis in a century. Since 2006, the numbers of killings and disappearances attributed to the drug war and organized crime have surpassed 150,000, and 2018 is well on track to being the most violent year on record in Mexican history. López Obrador, or AMLO, recently released a light-on-the-details four-point plan outlining how he proposes to address deep-seated problems of corruption and impunity in the judiciary and law enforcement.

AMLO could show he is serious about taking a new approach to tackling these problems by bringing justice to the families of those who were disappeared during Mexico’s dirty wars in the 1970s.

Neither the violence nor the impunity of officials in today’s Mexico is unprecedented. On October 2, 1968, fifty years ago today, police and military forces gunned down hundreds of students in downtown Mexico City, just days before the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. This massacre marked the beginning of a brutal dirty war between the government and guerrilla groups that spanned both cities and the countryside. In 2002, then-president Vicente Fox released many of the military and secret-police files pertaining to the 1968 massacre and ensuing dirty war. In lieu of a Truth Commission, Fox set up a special prosecutor’s office to look into whether or not charges were necessary.