Handle This Box of Dynamite Very Carefully.(secret police files, Mexico)(Brief Article)

You who wronged a simple man

Bursting into laughter at the crime,

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.

You can kill one, but another is born.

The words are written down, the deed, the date.

The inscription, from a poem by Polish Nobel Prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz, is engraved on a monument erected by Solidarity activists outside the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. It honors the 44 protesting workers killed there in 1970 by security forces, but it also eloquently voices a more general belief, one that many Mexicans now subscribe to as many Poles did earlier: the truth will out, and justice can be served. Mexico was never as repressive as communist Poland, of course, but the impulse is similar: get the facts about past wrongs. Particularly when there are stacks of files from the secret police and other government agencies that suddenly have a chance of seeing the light of day. As the experiences of the Poles, Czechs and others have shown in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, though, the problem is that secret-police files guarantee neither truth nor justice. And they certainly offer very little in the way of catharsis or closure.

The first problem with files of dictatorships is that they rarely nail top people. No country did more to open up secret-police files than Germany. The archives of the special commission contain 180 kilometers of files from the Stasi, the infamous East German secret police, and everyone from ordinary citizens to media organizations can request access. Yet Erich Honecker, who presided over this police state from 1971 to 1989, was able to evade the courts by pleading ill health, and then took off to comfortable exile in Chile before he died. By contrast, several border guards who carried out their "shoot to kill" orders against escapees found themselves in the dock. In Poland, ex- communist leader Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski is now on trial for allegedly issuing orders to security forces to fire upon the Gdansk workers in 1970 when he was Defense minister. Jaruzelski denies the charges, no smoking gun has surfaced in the files and his defense team has engaged in endless delaying tactics. The prospects for a verdict, any verdict, keep receding. Secret-police files have exposed genuine informers: neighbors who reported on neighbors, family members who reported on one another--in one famous East German case, a husband who kept tabs on his dissident wife. But often the evidence is neither clear-cut nor reliable. In her book "The Haunted Land," American writer Tina Rosenberg notes that Czech secret-police men, "under ...