He is the first official of the agency to face a murder charge.

The case occurs amid growing exposures of the dirty war conducted by the Mexican government against the student and workers movements in the 1960s and 1970s.

One of the three students the former police chief is accused of torturing and murdering is Jesús Piedra Ibarra. At the time of his death Piedra was a third-year medical student at the University of Nuevo Leon in Monterrey.

Along with other revolutionary-minded students, he was framed for the killing of a university librarian in 1974.

Among the framed-up students was Héctor Marroquín. To save his life Marroquín fled to the United States, where he waged a long struggle for political asylum and residency. Marroquín and his supporters pointed to Piedra’s murder as proof of the dangers he faced in Mexico. Up until de la Barreda’s indictment in March the Mexican authorities had repeatedly denied that the cops had anything to do with Piedra’s death.

Piedra, Marroquín, and many more like them had been active in the rising student protest movement of the 1970s. This development continued and built on the international youth radicalization of the previous decade. At that time, millions of youth around the world, spurred by the victories of the civil rights movement in the United States, began taking the lead in organizing protests against the U.S. imperialist assault on Vietnam and on other questions.

1968 was a signal year for this movement. In France student protesters were joined at the barricades by workers who had mobilized in a millions-strong general strike. Mexico was another country where students and workers mobilized in the face of fierce police repression. In October 1968, government security forces killed some 500 student protesters in Mexico City.

The student protests of the 1970s continued to face violence from cops and right-wing thugs. During a 1971 demonstration in Mexico City, a paramilitary organization known as the Halcones (Falcons)--linked to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)--attacked the students, beating and killing more than 100.

Such repression did not deter Piedra and many others from continuing their political activity.  
 
Framed-up in death of librarian
In January 1974, a university librarian was killed. Monterrey police claimed the September 23 Communist League was responsible. Piedra was accused of being a member.

The league had grown out of the student movement, and had adopted guerrilla tactics. Its cadres had kidnapped and killed a prominent member of the Garza Sada family of the Grupo Monterrey, a major financial power in the state of Nuevo León.

In the witch-hunt mounted after the librarian’s death, the cops published a wanted poster with portraits of Piedra, Marroquín, and three others.

On April 18, 1975, Piedra was kidnapped by cops as he walked down Zaragosa Street in Monterrey.

Although two of Monterrey’s daily newspapers reported details of Piedra’s arrest, the cops officially denied any knowledge of his whereabouts.

His family’s repeated attempts to locate him were fruitless. Rosario Ibarra, Piedra’s mother, met with former Mexican president Luis Echeverría on 39 occasions in her quest.

Having failed to gain the government’s assistance, Rosario Ibarra helped found the National Committee to Defend Political Prisoners and the Politically Persecuted, Exiled and Disappeared. Made up of relatives of the victims of government repression, this committee, formed in 1977, won the active support of many trade unions, student and peasant organizations, and the main opposition political parties.

The committee aimed to force successive administrations in Mexico City to free the political prisoners and present the disappeared alive. Its activities included a multitude of teach-ins, hunger strikes, press conferences, and marches. On Oct. 2, 1978--the tenth anniversary of the massacre of the student protesters--the committee organized a rally of 100,000 people in Mexico City.

As the police continued their "investigation" of the librarian’s killing, Marroquín fled to the United States. There he became active in the trade union movement and social protests. After several years, he was arrested by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for possessing false papers. At the time, he was part of a union organizing drive at a Coca Cola factory in which he worked. He had joined the Socialist Workers Party shortly before his arrest.  
 
Marroquín fights for political asylum
Marroquín’s fight for political asylum became widely known throughout the United States and Mexico. The campaign became a vehicle for building solidarity with the broadening opposition to factory raids and the deportations of hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers.

Marroquín’s lawyers found that Washington had spied on him since his days as a high school activist in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Among those who spoke up in Marroquín’s support and pointed out his likely fate if he were to return was Rosario Ibarra. She appeared at several press conferences in the United States in support of the asylum request.

Of the five men who had been accused of the murder, she said, only Marroquín was known to still be alive. Two others had been gunned down, she reported--one while leafleting in front of a Monterrey area factory, and the second in a confrontation with armed cops. The fate of her jailed son Piedra was unknown, she said.

In April 1979 Rosario Ibarra and Delia Duarte, another leader of the Mexican Committee, went to Houston to testify on Marroquín’s behalf. They brought written testimony from political prisoners who had been held in the Garza Sada killing. Each said that Marroquín had nothing to do with the September 23 Communist League.

Despite this and other evidence, the judge at the asylum hearing ordered Marroquín deported.

The prosecutor had even argued that Marroquín should be deported because he "has admitted from his own mouth that he is a Marxist. The U.S. does not grant asylum to those kinds of people."

Marroquín continued his fight on appeal and was one of the first to be granted amnesty in the 1986 INS amnesty program. He went on to gain permanent residency.

Piedra’s sister, Maria del Rosario, commented on de la Barreda’s arrest in an April 2 phone interview with the Militant from her home in Monterrey. Her brother Jesús "was not the only" victim of police assassination, she said. "There were many."

Barry Fatland is a sewing machine operator in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, and was the first national coordinator of the Héctor Marroquín Defense Committee.  
 
 
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