In the Archives: History and Politics

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Alexander Aviña, Ingrid Bleynat, Kirsten Weld and two anonymous peer reviewers for their thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this article. We are also grateful to the editors of JILAR for supporting this project. Tanalís Padilla would like to thank the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, for the 2011–2012 residency fellowship during which she conducted much of the work on this project.

Notes

 1. Although the PRI was founded in 1946, it was the political heir to two earlier parties: the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 1938, and the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano (PRM) that ruled from 1938 to 1946. These changes indicated tensions within the ruling elite, and were more than nominal re-brandings, but following other scholars we conceptualise the three parties as representing one (if heterogeneous) political elite.

 2. For an analysis of the limited extent of this process see Human Rights Watch, ‘Mexico: Lost in Transition’, 16 May 2006, http://www.hrw.org/node/11319/section/1, accessed 16 September 2011.

 3. Delia Salazar Anaya, Begoña Hernández y Lazo, ‘Guía del Fondo de la Secretaría de Gobernación, Sección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales’, Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH), 2006. Available online at: http://www.estudioshistoricos.inah.gob.mx/guia/INTRODGIPSCOMP.pdf, accessed 16 September 2011, p. 6.

 4. Aaron Navarro, Political Intelligence and the Creation of Modern Mexico, 1938–1954, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010, pp. 10 and 152.

 5. Navarro, Political Intelligence, p. 186. On the early history of the intelligence agencies, see also María de los Ángeles Magdaleno Cárdenas, ‘Documentos sobre la policía’, Históricas: Boletín del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 77, September-December 2006, pp. 34–45.

 6. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, La charola: Una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México, Mexico City, Grijalbo, 2001, p. 62.

 7. This description is based on Aguayo Quezada, La charola, Chapters 2 and 3; Navarro, Political Intelligence, Chapter 4; and Salazar Anaya, Hernández y Lazo ‘Guía del Fondo de la Secretaría de Gobernación’.

 8. Aguayo Quezada, La charola, p. 79. For detail on the amount and method of payment see, Jacinto R. Mugía, Las nóminas secretas de gobernación, Mexico City, LIMAC Libertad de Información, A.C., 2004.

 9. Aguayo Quezada, La charola, p. 124.

10. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, ‘Intelligence Services in Mexico’, in Sergio Aguayo Quezada and John Bailey (eds), Strategy and Security in United States-Mexican Relations Beyond the Cold War, San Diego, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1996, p. 145.

11. The description of the background, recruitment and activities of agents is drawn from Aguayo Quezada, La charola, especially Chapters 2 and 3.

12. A more precise figure on the quantity of documents has been difficult to obtain since Mexico's National Archive which houses the DFS and DGIPS collections has several different classification systems, none of which allow for precise quantification. At the time of writing (November 2012) archive staff in the Reference Centre and Gallery Two describe the DGIPS collection as 3,052 boxes that contain bundles of carbon copies, a number also cited by the INAH guide mentioned in note 3 above. But these ‘boxes’ often represent several boxes with identifying letters (1554A, 1554B, 1554C, and so on), as is the case with the document analysed by Muñoz in this dossier. Thus 3,052 boxes is not a precise estimation of the size of the collection. Because the DFS collection is not controlled by AGN archivists but rather by CISEN workers, the Reference Centre cannot give information about its size. At this time, attendents in Gallery One do not provide the number of cards in their catalogue nor the quantity of boxes, folders, documents, or papers in the collection. Instead, they point to the list of available ‘public versions’ that presently includes 286 subject headings, 606 folders and approximately 105,000 pages (on public versions, see note 33 below). But these public versions contain both DFS and DGIPS documents and represent only a portion of each collection.

13. In the absence of official descriptions or instruction manuals, we compiled this initial description drawing on the few scholarly publications about the Gobernación archive in consultation with certain experts. Further information was gleaned from a DFS documentary produced by the agency itself in 1981 or 1982, likely for internal training purposes or as a means of showcasing its work. See, Youtube, ‘La Dirección Federal de Seguridad en tiempos de Nazar Haro’, accessed 6 October 2012 and Youtube, ‘Así era la extinta Dirección Federal de Seguridad 1/5’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = USr-CFgmRtc&feature = endscreen&NR = 1, accessed 6 October 2012. We hope that in the coming years more information on the bureaucratic life of the intelligence reports will come into the public domain. We are especially grateful to Sergio Aguayo Quezada, María de los Ángeles Magdaleno Cárdenas, Adela Cedillo, Aaron Navarro, and Jacinto Rodríguez Munguía for their assistance in drawing up this description.

14. Texas Archival Resources on Line, ‘Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Mexico) Security Reports, 1970–1977’, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utlac/00200/lac-00200.html, accessed 6 October 2012.

15. A partial declassification occurred in 1998, the thirty-year anniversary of the Tlatelolco student massacre. Indeed, much of the pressure for declassification came from activists seeking information about 1968 and the dirty war. See Salazar Anaya, Hernández y Lazo ‘Guía del Fondo de la Secretaría de Gobernación’.

16. Ginger Thompson, ‘Report on Mexican “Dirty War” Details Abuse by Military’, The New York Times, 27 February 2006, A3.

17. Both versions are posted on the National Security Archive's Mexico Project website. The project directors have also set up an informational website about Mexico's freedom of information programme and, in conjunction with other groups, organised workshops for document use. The National Security Archive, ‘The Mexico Project’, http://www.gwu.edu/ ∼ nsarchiv/mexico/, accessed 2 October 2011.

18. For example: Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, ‘Caídos en combate’, http://centrodeinvestigacioneshistoricas.blogspot.com, accessed 2 October 2011. Those interested in furthering public discussion about Mexico's guerrilla and the dirty war have likewise created websites to upload these documents: ‘La guerra sucia en México’, http://guerrasuciamexicana.blogspot.com/, accessed 2 October 2011.

19. Directed by Mario Hernández, Cementerio de Papel (Estudios Churubusco Azteca, 2008) was based on the novel by Fritz Glöckner of the same name. Carlos Montemayor's Los informes secretos, Mexico City, Joaquín Mortiz, 1999, also centres on the spy report documents. Interestingly, these documents, written by agents infiltrated in the Mexican Communist Party, landed in the author's hands quite by accident. Two historians who were studying an unrelated topic came across a large collection (between 3,000 and 4,000 documents) of confidential reports and gave them to Montemayor who was known for his study of Mexico's counter insurgency system. Gerardo Galarza, ‘Seguridad Nacional, al servicio de grupos de poder, no de la estabilidad: Carlos Montemayor’, Proceso, 30 May 1999, no. 1178.

20. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, The Lives of Others [Das Leben der Anderen] (Buena Vista Pictures, 2006).

21. For example, Kirsten Weld analyses the discovery of secret police documents in Guatemala, and ongoing efforts to create an archive of the dirty war; Weld also offers a helpful outline of other attempts to create archives of terror. Kirsten Weld, ‘Reading the Politics of History in Guatemala's National Police Archives’, PhD Diss., Yale University, 2010. On Paraguay, see R. Andrew Nickson, ‘Paraguay's Archivo del Terror’, Latin American Research Review 1 (1995), p. 125; http://www.aladin0.wrlc.org/gsdl/collect/terror/terror_e.shtml (viewed 22 September 2011). On Argentina, see Emmanuel N. Kahan, ‘¿Qué represión, qué memoria? El “archivo de la represión” de la DIPBA: problemas y perspectivas’, Revista Question, 16, de la Facultad de Periodismo y Ciencias de la Comunicación de la Universidad Nacional de La Plata, http://www.comisionporlamemoria.org/archivo, accessed 22 September 2011. On Chile, see Carlos Dorat Guerra and Mauricio Weibel Barahona, Asociación ilícita: Los archivos secretos de la dictadura, Santiago, Ceibo Ediciones, 2012. On Brazil, see Darien J. Davis, ‘The Arquivos das Polícias Politicais of the State of Rio de Janeiro’, Latin American Research Review 31:1, 1996; Maria Aparecida de Aquino, Marco Aurélio Vannucchi Leme de Mattos, and Walter Cruz Swenssos (eds), No coração das trevas: O DEOPS/SP visto por dentro, São Paulo: Arquivo do Estado / Imprensa Oficial, 2001. For an overview of the management of archives of repressive regimes, and the connection between archive-creation and human rights work, see the two reports from a joint UNESCO–International Archive Council project: Antonio González Quintana, ‘Los archivos de la seguridad del estado de los desaparecidos regímenes represivos’, Paris, UNESCO, 1997; Antonio González Quintana, ‘Archival Policies in the Protection of Human Rights’, Paris, International Council of Archives, 2009.

22. For a review of the literature on the Stasi archive: Catherine Epstein, ‘The Stasi: New Research on the East German Ministry of State Security’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 5: 2, Spring 2004, pp. 321–48. This dossier is partly based on a roundtable discussion organised for the 2011 American Historical Association. Epstein was the panel's discussant and helped to draw out some of the similarities and differences.

23. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, Princeton UP, 2009, pp. 44–46.

24. Ibid., pp. 1–53.

25. Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counter-Insurgency’, in Subaltern Studies II, ed. Ranajit Guha, New Dehli, Oxford UP, 1983, pp. 1–42.

26. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, esp. pp. 8–20.

27. Although James Scott does not refer to archives in his study of high modernist state projects, his analysis could be extended to include the connection between archives and state formation, and some of the contributors to this dossier engage with his analysis. James Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, New Haven, Yale UP, 1998.

28. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language, New York, Pantheon Books, 1972, pp. 126–31.

29. This question is inspired both by Sergio Aguayo Quezada's analysis of the Gobernación spies, and by Kathryn Burns' analysis of colonial notaries. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, La charola; Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru, Durham, Duke UP, 2010.

30. See the Introduction and essays in Part One of Antoinette Burton, Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Durham, Duke UP, 2005.

31. See the Introduction and essays in Part Three of Burton, Archive Stories.

32. There were some early attempts to create guides for the DGIPS boxes. One is available in the AGN's reference room but the descriptions of box contents are too general to be of much use beyond a broad overview of the sort of material in the entire collection. Guerra fría y guerrilla en México: guía de acceso al archivo de la Dirección de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales, AGN, a CD-ROM organised by Daniela Spenser and published by CIESAS circa 2004 has proven more helpful to researchers. The most systematic and promising attempt at cataloguing is underway by a team at the INAH (see note 3 above).

33. The list is available online: Archivo General de la Nación, ‘Versiones públicas disponibles para consulta’, http://www.agn.gob.mx/pt/versiones_publicas.pdf, accessed 18 November 2012.

34. Personal correspondence.

35. Kate Doyle, ‘“Forgetting is not Justice”: Mexico Bares its Secret Past’, World Policy Journal 20:2, Summer, 2003, p. 71.

36. The reader will note awkward and incorrect prose in the transcriptions; in general, ‘sic’ was added when a grammatical error impacted the meaning of the sentence. Translations of the intelligence reports in this dossier are in Tanalís Padilla and Louise E. Walker (eds), ‘English Translations of Documents from Mexico's Secret Police Archive’, working paper 2013, available online at the Dartmouth College library website and Northeastern University digital repository: http://www.dartmouth.edu/∼library/digital/publishing/padilla2013/ and http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002992.

37. This dossier is by no means exhaustive; our aim was to cover an array of subjects. For other recent works that use these sources, see: Robert F. Alegre, ‘Las Rieleras: Gender, Politics, and Power in the Mexican Railway Movement, 1958–1959’, Journal of Women's History 23:2, Summer 2011, pp. 162–86; Paul Gillingham, Cuauhtémoc's Bones: Forging National Identity in Modern Mexico, Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2011; Navarro, Political Intelligence; Gladys McCormick, ‘The Political Economy of Desire in Rural Mexico: Revolutionary Change and the Making of the State, 1935–1965’, Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, 2009; Thomas Rath, ‘Army, State and Nation in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920–1958’, Ph.D. Diss., Columbia University, 2009; Sandra Mendiola, ‘Street Vendors, Marketers, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Puebla’, Ph.D. Diss., Rutgers University, 2008; Jaime Pensado, ‘Political Violence and Student Culture in Mexico: The Consolidation of Porrismo during the 1950s and 1960s’, Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago, 2008; Paul Gillingham, ‘Force and Consent in Mexican Provincial Politics: Guerrero and Veracruz, 1945–1953’, Ph.D. Diss., Oxford University, 2005.