State Spying on the State: Consejo Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas Meetings in 1980

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales, an agency within the Secretaría de Gobernación, produced hundreds of spy reports on the Consejo Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas (National Council of Indigenous People, CNPI), a national indigenous organisation that, in 1975, became part of the state's corporate structure. During a time when social and political realities in Mexico led a number of social sectors to emerge and challenge state power in a way that threatened to destabilise it, these reports indicate that indigenous organisations must now be added to workers, students and guerrillas as targets of intelligence agencies. Carrying out such surveillance on the CNPI reveals how the state was spying on the state.

Keywords:

• CNPI
• DGIPS
• indigenous people
• spy reports
• intelligence agencies

Notes

 1. In this article I make a conscious choice to use the term indigenous and indígena rather than ‘Indian’. While the term indigenous tends to cast a broad descriptive shadow and can be problematic, I choose to avoid replicating historically offensive terms such as ‘Indian’.

 2. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Ramo Secretaría de Gobernación, Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (hereafter AGN, DGIPS), Caja 1554B, exp. 7, F.S. 323, Informe 728, 28 November 1980. This particular document forms part of a bundle of over 200 reports that deal with the activities of the CNPI, the activities of Supreme Council or other indigenous leaders and communities. 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.

 3. Ciudad de México, ‘Ley de Reforma Agraria de 1980’, in http://www.asuntos-agrarios.df.gob.mx/documentos/leyes/13.pdf, accessed 30 August 2011. Alicia Elena Pérez Duarte y N. ‘Ley de Fomento Agropecuario’, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México http://biblio.juridicas.unam.mx/libros/5/2108/9.pdf, accessed 1 September 2012. The amendments to the Law of Agrarian Reform and the Law of Agrarian Development were signed in December 1980 and went into effect in January of the following year. The amendments shifted focus and funding away from ejidatarios and indigenous communities to midsized and larger agricultural and forestry companies in order to focus on higher yields of basic foodstuffs and production in the areas of cattle and forestry development. In addition, the Law of Agrarian Reform served as the backbone of José López Portillo's Sistema Alimentario Mexicano (Mexican Food System, SAM). The national debate over this legislation was heated as workers and campesinos argued that the laws would only serve to recreate the latifundia system that existed before the 1910 Revolution. Its supporters claimed the laws would result in the expanded production of the agricultural sector in order to feed the nation.

 4. AGN, DGIPS, caja 1554B, exp. 7, F.S. 323, Informe 728, 28 November 1980.

 5. Ibid. and Roderick Camp, ‘Education and Political Recruitment in Mexico: The Alemán Generation’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, 18:3, Aug., 1976, pp. 295–321.

 6. AGN, DGIPS, Caja 1554B, exp. 7, F.S. 323, Informe 728, 28 November 1980.

 7. Ibid.

 8. Ibid.

 9. José González G., ‘The Dark Deeds of “El Negro” Durazo’, in Gilbert M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson (eds), The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics, Durham, Duke UP, 2003, pp. 512–519; Luis Suárez, Echeverría en el sexenio de López Portillo, México, Editorial Grijalbo, 1983.

10. AGN, DGIPS Caja 1554B, exp. 7, F.S. 323, Informe 728, 28 November 1980.

11. Alexander Aviña, ‘Insurgent Guerrero: Genaro Vázquez, Lucio Cabañas and the Guerrilla Challenge to the Postrevolutionary Mexican State, 1960–1996’, Ph.D. Diss., University of Southern California, 2009; James B. Greenberg, Blood Ties: Life and Violence in Rural Mexico, Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1989.

12. Jeffrey Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico, Durham, Duke UP, 1997.

13. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, 2001.

14. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968, pp. 125, 141, 165.

15. Aaron W. Navarro, Political Intelligence and the Creation of Modern Mexico, 1938–1954, University Park, Pennsylvania State UP, 2010.

16. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, La Charola: una Historia de los Servicios de Inteligencia en México, México: Editorial Grijalbo, 2001.

17. Philip, George The Presidency in Mexican Politics, Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1994; Lorenzo Meyer ‘El presidencialismo. Del populismo al neoliberalismo’, Revista Méxicana de Sociología, 55: 2, Apr.–Jun. 1993, pp. 57–81.

18. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven, Yale UP, 1999.

19. See, for example, Alexander Aviña, Spectres of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside, Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming; Fernando Herrera Calderón and Adela Cedillo, Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982, New York, Routledge, 2012; and Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: the Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940–1962, Durham: Duke UP, 2008.