An Archive of Counterinsurgency: State Anxieties and Peasant Guerrillas in Cold War Mexico

Abstract

Recently declassified Mexican spy reports that tracked and analysed revolutionary guerrilla organisations during the 1960s and 1970s collectively form an archive of counterinsurgency. The archive produced knowledge on individuals and groups deemed subversive threats to the authoritarian rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This article examines one declassified spy report produced in late August 1972 after a peasant guerrilla movement in the south–western Mexican state of Guerrero surprisingly ambushed two military convoys. In proposing a series of counterinsurgent solutions to defeat the guerrilla El Partido de los Pobres (The Party of the Poor, PDLP), this article argues that the document reveals an anxious state's need to restore balance to a political situation unexpectedly off balance. The document's main suggestion, targeting the insurrection's base of popular support, would form the core of the counterinsurgency waged by the PRI regime in Guerrero from 1972 to 1974.

Keywords:

• Mexico
• Spy Reports
• PRI
• PDLP
• counterinsurgency archive

Notes

 1. Craig Robertson, ‘Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport’, in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Durham, Duke UP, 2005, p. 70.

 2. Or they exaggerated the threats posed by armed groups, labour unions, or popular movements to procure additional federal funding. See Sergio Aguayo Quezada, La charola: una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México, México, D.F., Grijalbo, 2001.

 3. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, Princeton UP, 2009, pp. 2–6.

 4. Alexander Aviña, Spectres of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside, New York, Oxford UP, forthcoming.

 5. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, Yale UP, 1998, pp. 2–3.

 6. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Dirección Federal de Seguridad (hereafter AGN, DFS), 100-10-16-4, leg. 5, h. 315, Estado de Guerrero, Grupo Guerrillero de Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, Denominado ‘Partido de los Pobres’, 25 August 1972. Translation of this document is 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.

 7. The production of such knowledge contributed to the modernisation of the Mexican Armed Forces, the creation of elite anti-guerrilla units and training institutions, and the systematising of counterinsurgency (National Security in state parlance) methodologies later used in the 1990s against guerrillas in Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca. Jorge Luis Sierra Guzmán, El enemigo interno: contrainsurgencia y fuerzas armadas en México, Mexico City, Plaza y Valdés, 2003; and Graham H. Turbiville, Jr., Hunting Leadership Targets in Counterinsurgency and Counterterrorist Operations: Selected Perspectives and Experiences, Florida, Joint Special Operations University, 2007, pp. 38–51.

 8. William Faulkner, ‘Requiem for a Nun’, in William Faulkner: Novels, 1942–1954: Go Down Moses/Intruder in the Dust/Requiem for a Nun/A Fable, New York, Literary Classics of the United States, 1994, p. 533.

 9. Beginning in 2002, the Mexican government created a special office to investigate human rights violations committed by the Mexican state from the 1960s to 1980s. The final governmental report on the ‘Dirty War’ produced by the Special Prosecutor for Social and Political Movements of the Past (hereafter FEMOSPP) in late 2006 proved censored. Anticipating such censorship, investigators working for FEMOSPP released an ‘unfiltered’ version of the Dirty War report in February 2006 to Kate Doyle and the National Security Archive. That report can be viewed at http://www.gwu.edu/ ∼ nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB180/index2.htm. Both the final and ‘unfiltered’ versions of the report cite nearly 400 documented cases of disappearances (with sufficient evidence) in Guerrero—the overwhelming majority occurring from 1971–1978. For a number of over 600 disappearances see the final report: FEMOSPP, Informe Histórico a la Sociedad Mexicana, México D.F., 2006, p. 502.

10. 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, p. 342.

11. Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru, Durham, Duke UP, 2010, pp. 16–17.

12. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

13. AGN, DFS, 100-10-16-4, leg. 5, h. 314, Estado de Guerrero, 25 August 1972.

14. AGN, Mexico City, Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (hereafter DGIPS), ca. 549, exp. 3, Estado de Guerrero, 28 April 1969.

15. AGN, DGIPS, ca. 2946A, Genaro Vásquez Rojas y Gavillas Existentes en el Estado de Guerrero, 7 May 1968. The first counterinsurgency campaigns that bore some resemblance to de la Barreda's suggestions took place in late 1970 and 1971. Alexander Aviña, “We Have Returned to Porfirian Times”: Neopopulism, Counterinsurgency, and the Dirty War in Guerrero, Mexico, 1969–1976’, in Amelia Kiddle and María Muñoz (eds), Populism in 20th Century Mexico: The Presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 2010, pp. 106–21.

16. Laura Castellanos, México armado, 1943–1981, Mexico City, Era, 2007, pp. 225.

17. Sierra Guzmán, El enemigo interno, pp. 35.

18. James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, New Haven, Yale UP, 1990, pp. x–xiii.

19. AGN, DFS, 100-10-16-4, leg. 5, h. 315, Estado de Guerrero, 25 August 1972.

20. FEMOSPP (unfiltered), ‘La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero’, 2006, 52–55.

21. Mao Tse-Tung, On Guerrilla Warfare, Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2000, p. 93.

22. AGN, DFS, 100-10-16-4, leg. 5, hs. 316, 318, Estado de Guerrero, 25 August 1972.

23. David Kilcullen, ‘Twenty-eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency’, in David Kilcullen, Counterinsurgency, New York, Oxford UP, 2010, p. 48.

24. DFS and DGIPS documents from June, July, and August 1972 contain interrogation transcripts and campesino accusations that they were tortured while detained by the military. AGN, DFS 100-10-16-4, leg. 5, Estado de Guerrero, hs. 136–40, 187–88, 22 July 1972 and 2 August 1972.

25. AGN, DFS, 100-10-16-4, leg. 5, hs. 317, Estado de Guerrero, 25 August 1972.

26. Ibid, h. 316.

27. AGN, Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (hereafter SDN), ca. 98, exp. 292, hs. 19–21, Para Informar a la Superioridad, 24 August 1972.

28. Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, p. 4.

29. FEMOSPP (unfiltered), ‘La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero’, 2006; and, Aviña, ‘“We Have Returned”’, pp. 106–21.

30. Alberto Carbot, Fausto Cantu Peña: café para todos, México D.F., Grijalbo, 1989, pp. 97–98.

31. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 4.

32. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, pp. 28–29.

33. Aaron W. Navarro, Political Intelligence and the Creation of Modern Mexico, 1938–1954, University Park, The Pennsylvania State UP, 2010, pp. 150–86.

34. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, pp. 1–22.

35. Interview with Ascención Rosas Mesino, Atoyac de Álvarez, 16 May 2007. Rosas Mesino finally received the bodily remains of his son in April 2007.