Mexican mother seeks closure for son missing since 'dirty war'

Published: 2004-07-27

MEXICO CITY (CNS) -- Nearly 30 years have passed since state security forces snatched Rosario Ibarra's son off a street corner and ferried him off to a military base. She never saw him again. Suspected of belonging to a Communist guerrilla group, Jesus Piedra was reportedly held in detention centers for up to a year after his 1975 abduction. He was never tried for any crime. And while Piedra is long believed to be dead, his mother has pressed the government for decades for information on her son's fate. "I won't rest until I know what happened to him and where he is now," the aging activist said July 24 as she organized a demonstration in front of Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral. Piedra was one of the hundreds of victims of Mexico's so-called "dirty war," a government anti-insurgency campaign of torture and "forced disappearances" from the 1960s through the early 1980s.

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