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Guerrero Corridos
General History
Lucio Cabanas
Ruben Figueroa
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
On June 28th, 1995, the state judicial police of Guerrero ambushed a truck carrying a group of campesinos on their way to an anti-government demonstration in a town northeast of Acapulco. After the event, 17 of the dissidents were killed and 20 were injured. When the public learned of the event, the police blamed the events on the farmers, saying that the farmers were the ones who initiated the violence. To prove this, the state government released a poorly doctored video and pictures of the dead with weapons in their arms.
The farmers had belonged to the South Sierra Campesino Organization (OCSS), a group that was highly critical of State governor Ruben Figueroa Alcocer and thought to be linked to the PDR (Party of Democratic Revolution). The demonstration was a planned attempt to peacefully protest the arrest of one of their leaders. As a result of who the victims were, the massacre created a nationwide scandal. The police told the public that they had been on a normal training exercise to retrieve any illegal weapons from the citizens and that the farmers had fired at them first. Many did not believe that the police had told the entire truth because during that summer there had been similar attacks throughout the state. Aguas Blancas had just been the most serious of the attacks and seemed to target the government's dissidents.
On February 27th, 1996, a Mexican news program ran a sixteen minute unedited version of the taping of the 17 murders. Someone had leaked the unedited tape to the Televisa network news station. President Ernesto Zedillo was so embarrassed by the events that he pressed for Figueroa's resignation. Figueroa kept his office until he agreed to a permanent leave on March 12 1996, even though opposition parties had been asking for his resignation as early as a week after the massacre. His was a result of pressure from the federal government and the reopening of an investigation into the events. Before his resignation Figueroa had only provided a three minute doctored tape to federal judges.
Thus, Figueroa appeared to be innocent because the tape appeared to support his story.
Despite the video, a prosecutor who was approved to try the case by Figueroa, Varela Vidales cleared the governor and three of his top aides from involvement in the massacre. Vidales blamed lower-level state officials and the police at the scene instead. Of the forty-three suspects that were tried for the murders, only fifteen remain in jail today and are most likely to be released soon due to what the government feels is a lack of incriminating evidence against them.
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