HARSH SPOTLIGHT SHINES ON MEXICO'S ARMY

MEXICO CITY, July 8 - As newly declassified archives begin to illuminate
what happened to hundreds of leftists who disappeared during a "dirty war"
waged by the government in the 1970's, a harsh spotlight is turning on
Mexico's army.

President Vicente Fox's election two years ago ended seven decades of
authoritarian rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. But the army,
which built the party, remains as secretive a power as any in Mexico.
Opening it to greater oversight is one of the greatest challenges facing
Mr. Fox's government, and the institution has been slow to change.

Without a foreign foe, its 183,000 uniformed men fight the enemy within:
big criminal cartels and small bands of rural guerrillas. Its role in the
campaign against drug traffickers, who once corrupted generals with bribes,
has been a smashing success of late.

But two decades after the "dirty war" ended, its battles against its real
and imagined enemies - in particular, supposed guerrilla sympathizers among
the rural poor - have continually been marked by abuses including rape,
torture and killing.

Those crimes, judged by secret military trials, often go unpunished.
President Fox's promises to make the military more accountable to civilian
powers remain unfulfilled.

That raises a question: if Mexico's army polices the country, who polices
the army? "In this country," said Luis Garfias Magana, a retired general,
"the army is an institution unknown by almost everyone - unknown by
society, unknown within the government and sometimes within the military
itself."

The newly opened files will make it harder for the army to hide its
misdeeds, said a dissident senior officer, Brig. Gen. Jose Francisco
Gallardo, who was freed in February, having been jailed eight years ago
after criticizing the military's abuses of power.

The military must answer for "crimes against humanity," he said, and "open
up to public scrutiny to prevent it from continuing to violate human rights."

The defense secretary, Gen. Ricardo Clemente Vega, has slowly begun to
respond but has struggled to shield the institution from public inquiry.
The army still answers only to the president, and only in private.

"This army did what it was told to do by the state" during the dirty war,
said General Vega, who calls himself a man of "silence, not stridency."

But Mexico's transition to democracy means that the military's power may
not continue unquestioned forever, and there are signs that the army has
begun working from within to change its image.

Sergio Aguayo, a leading human rights investigator, points to the freeing
of political prisoners like General Gallardo, military support for Mexico's
decision to join the International Criminal Court and the public release
last month of some 160,000 secret government documents.

"General Vega is a very smart man, and he knows that he has to make
changes," Mr. Aguayo said of the defense secretary. "But he has also been
smart enough to control the speed of the change."

It is a tough institution to tamper with. The army's power reaches back to
the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1917. Military leaders ruled for the next
two decades and created the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1929. For
the next seven decades the military was its silent servant.

"The military had an unwritten agreement with the government: give us
complete autonomy, and we will leave you alone," said Raul Benitez, a
leading national security scholar at the National Autonomous University of
Mexico. "This system is changing, but slowly."

Unlike many Latin American armies, Mexico's never mounted a coup. But like
so many others, it became a national police force.

Today military men hold the attorney general's office and key law
enforcement posts throughout the country, commanding roughly half of
Mexico's police. Tens of thousands of soldiers perform antidrug work or
patrol poor rural southern states like Guerrero and Chiapas. Up in the
mountains they are the law.

"Why do we have an army?" said Alvaro Vallarta Cecena, a retired general
who heads the congressional armed services committee. "To invade the United
States? To invade Guatemala? No, we need it inside Mexico, to solve
internal problems."

The army posed a delicate internal problem for Mr. Fox when he took office
in December 2000, ending 71 years in power for the Institutional
Revolutionary Party.

For starters, an army general, appointed drug czar, was found to be on a
cocaine kingpin's payroll in 1997. Five more generals were subsequently
jailed for drug corruption. The cases called the military's role in the
drug war into question.

Then there was Chiapas. The military turned much of the state into an armed
camp after a band of rebels seized several towns in 1994. Human rights
groups accused the army of backing paramilitary groups that killed hundreds
of people. One such attack in 1997 killed 45 unarmed peasants in the
village of Acteal.

In Guerrero, in 1998, soldiers ambushed dozens of sleeping men and women,
leaving 11 dead in the hamlet of El Charco. Military officials said the
dead were members of an armed rebel group. Witnesses said many had been
killed in cold blood.

Mr. Fox, acutely sensitive to Mexico's image in the eyes of foreign
investors, needed an army that was arresting drug traffickers, not taking
payoffs from them, and freeing political prisoners, not taking them. His
army, in short, needed a better public image, to be scrubbed of corruption
and to have its rogue elements reined in.

The morning after he was inaugurated, President Fox invited military
leaders to breakfast. He announced plans to "humanize" the army's public
face. "We're not going to let a few bad apples spoil the image of the
entire armed forces," he told them.

The army's antidrug duties changed. A small group of soldiers underwent
stringent background checks and served as shock troops for civilian drug
prosecutors. The new system worked beyond expectations: leading figures
from every major drug cartel in Mexico have been arrested in the last year.

Under international pressure the army agreed that three political prisoners
it had taken could be freed: General Gallardo and two peasants from
Guerrero who had demanded an end to rampant illegal logging.

But the army strongly resisted civilian oversight by men like Adolfo
Aguilar Zinser, who joined Mr. Fox's government as the national security
adviser, supposedly overseeing all security agencies. After a year, his
post was abolished, an important setback for efforts to establish civilian
control over security issues. Mr. Aguilar Zinser is now Mexico's ambassador
to the United Nations.

"The military is always extremely jealous, systematically jealous, about
sharing information with anyone who is not the president," said a senior
official involved in the struggle over the national security post.

"The military chooses the terms of their oversight," the official said.
"They choose when and where and with whom they want to share information.
They do not allow outside forces to push changes on them."

Under Mr. Fox the massacres have stopped. Still, there are signs that the
military continues to prey on the people it is ordered to protect.

In recent months, soldiers have been accused of ransacking villages in
Guerrero. In one case a human rights group has charged soldiers with
beating and raping a 17-year-old Indian woman, Valentina Rosendo, in a
village called Barranca Bejuco.

"In Guerrero and Chiapas, the military doesn't have a good image, and with
reason," Mr. Benitez said. "For Fox, the human rights question and the
image are the key. When commanders have a sensitivity to these issues their
troops don't commit abuses. Some commanders are sensitive. Others don't see
that things have changed.

"But the army is learning - slowly. And things are changing - slowly."