[12] The operation, commanded by General José Hernández Toledo,[13] was a flop with no major drug-lord captures, but many abuses and acts of repression were committed.

[16] In March 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador publicly released the archives of the defunct Federal Security Directorate, which contain a great amount of previously undisclosed information about the Dirty War and the political persecution by the PRI governments.

López Obrador said, "We lived for decades under an authoritarian regime that limited freedoms and persecuted those who struggled for social change", and issued an official apology on behalf of the Mexican State to the victims of the repression.

Among the most important, the September 23 Communist League was at the forefront of the conflict, active in several cities, drawing heavily from Christian Socialist and Marxist student organizations.

[9] The legalization of left-wing political parties in 1978 along with the amnesty of imprisoned and at-large guerrillas caused a number of combatants to end militant struggle against the government.

[9] In 2002, a report prepared for Vicente Fox, the first president not from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 71 years, detailed the government's actions from 1964 to 1982.

The Mexican Special Prosecutor said the report was biased against the military and that it failed to detail crimes committed by rebels, including kidnappings, bank robberies, and assassinations.

[1]: 46  The state enacted the acts of suppression on Guerrero to keep the numerous political reform movements stifled, as the local people over time grew agitated with how the government wielded its power and meddled with their rights.

[31] The detention and torture of political prisoners became more systematic after the student uprisings in 1968, as the government decided that heavy-handed responses were necessary to deal with the unrest.

[32] Part of the problem is that since there was no large-scale truth commission to bring justice to the perpetrators and closure for the victim's families, Mexico never had a "Pinochet moment".

Despite this evidence of numerous human rights violations, ex-president Echeverria and several other PRI officials had their cases dismissed and became free men.