In October of 2020, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed an executive order forming Mexico’s first truth commission to investigate what is known as the guerra sucia, or “dirty war”: a seven-year period in the 1970s in which successive governments disappeared, imprisoned, tortured, and killed dissidents from a wide variety of backgrounds.

The number of disappeared will never be known, but a conservative estimate puts the figure at 1,500 over the seven-year period. Many were members of workers’, farmers’, teachers’, and other popular movements, together with guerrillas radicalized by the Tlaltelolco massacre of student protesters in 1968.

On June 22, 2022, at the symbolically important Campo Militar, or Military Field Number One — once a main torture center of the Mexican state — and in the presence of family members of the disappeared, López Obrador officially unveiled the five-member commission. Jacobin’s Kurt Hackbarth spoke with commissioner Dr Carlos A. Pérez Ricart, a professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) in Mexico City.