Fifty Years of Silence: Mexico Faces the Legacy of its Dirty War

Washington, D.C., December 20, 2024—Half a century ago, Mexico was convulsed by state violence and social upheaval. The year 1974 witnessed some of the most emblematic human rights abuses to occur during the country’s long-running Dirty War: the forced disappearance of community activist Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, the killing of revolutionary guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas, and the Mexican military’s use of “death flights” to eliminate suspected subversives by throwing their bodies from planes into the Pacific Ocean. These and thousands of other grave human rights violations were documented in two monumental and comprehensive reports released this year by Mexico’s first major truth commission.

Today, the National Security Archive is publishing a selection of declassified U.S. documents about the Dirty War, along with translated excerpts from the two reports in order to give English-readers a sense of the scope and methodologies encompassed in the truth commission’s investigations. Taken together, the materials offer a clearer picture than has ever been available of the “systematic and widespread” human rights abuses committed by Mexican intelligence, military, police, and parastate forces that targeted “broad sectors of the population” between 1965 and 1990.[1]

Mexico’s government did not launch this massive transitional justice project on its own initiative. The impulse for national reckoning came from survivors and collectives of family members and activists. It was their decades-long persistence in defying the state’s permanent silence and demanding answers that finally led then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to agree to create the Commission. On October 6, 2021, the president published his decree establishing the Commission for Access to Truth, Historical Clarification and the Promotion of Justice for Grave Human Rights Violations committed between 1965 and 1990 (CoVEH, in Spanish), which in turn launched five working groups to grapple with different dimensions of the project. While the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification was responsible for investigating abuses and producing the truth commission’s report, other groups examined the promotion of justice, the search for the disappeared, reparations, and the promotion of memory and non-repetition.[2]

In many countries in Latin America, the end of the Cold War spurred a profound reflection about the state’s role in political violence, and how it was rationalized by anti-communist national security and counterinsurgency concerns. By contrast, Mexican efforts were anemic, few, and far between. The earliest official initiative to investigate forced disappearance during the Dirty War was carried out by the National Human Rights Commission in 2001, decades after the fact.[3] Successive governments refused calls for a truth commission, paradigmatic cases such as the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre remained chronically unresolved, and a special prosecutor assigned to investigate historical human rights crimes closed his office after five years without holding anyone accountable for anything.

In this instance, the scale of the truth commission’s efforts was unprecedented, and the CoVEH completed its mandate with a whirlwind of milestones, conclusions, and recommendations for the future. In its Executive Summary of the Reports of the Five Instruments of the CoVEH,the Commission points out some of the achievements of the enormous project. The working group on the Promotion of Justice led Mexico’s Attorney General to create a new “Special Investigations and Litigation Team” to consider prosecuting dozens of criminal human rights cases from the Dirty War era. On the Search for the Disappeared, the group launched a massive database called Sistema Angelus to organize and make accessible thousands of government records, and prepared plans to exhume cemeteries and potential clandestine burial sites on military installations. The Reparations working group contributed to a registry of more than 2,500 victims of the Dirty War who may be eligible for future compensation. And the Memory and Non-repetition group organized public forums about the Dirty War, issued publications, and helped create a memory center at the Circular de Morelia in Mexico City, a former Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate, DFS) building where detainees were tortured.[4]

The work of the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification – while also extraordinary, was complicated by internal differences among the five commissioners. A central friction had to do with how the Mechanism identified the scope of repression – whether political violence was limited to armed revolutionary groups and militant activists, or whether the Dirty War included abuses committed against more diverse sectors, such as journalists, indigenous leaders, and LGBTQ activists.

After the Mechanism was established in 2021, one commissioner resigned (historian Aleida García Aguirre). Three commissioners – Abel Barrera, David Fernández, and Carlos Pérez Ricart – chose to define the universe of Dirty War victims much more broadly than historically recognized. That left a single commissioner, Eugenia Allier, to assemble a team focused on traditional categories of victims: guerrillas, student activists, dissident labor and union organizers, and human rights defenders. As a result of these differences, the reports that resulted from the two separate investigations pursued the same objective – the historical clarification of the Dirty War – but landed on very distinct conclusions.

Allier’s emphasis on the Mexican State’s intent to destroy armed revolutionary groups such as Lucio Cabañas’ Party of the Poor in Guerrero focused on the essential political nature of the Dirty War; its anti-communist, counterinsurgent objectives and its determination to “suffocate and eliminate any form of political dissidence and popular protest.”[5] Her team’s report, Undeniable Truths: For a Mexico Without Impunity, reveals a multiplicity of plans coordinated between the Army, police forces, and intelligence agencies that was designed to hunt down and detain or kill suspected subversives around the country, including, for example, the “Rosa de los Vientos” plan, which targeted members of the radical 23 September Communist League during the late 1970s. The report contains new details about the location of clandestine detention centers, the widespread use of torture, and the forced disappearance of victims. It lists 1,103 missing or disappeared persons, and names more than 2,000 public officials “involved in the repressive system,” including 200 DFS members. It analyzes the military’s use of “death flights” in Guerrero state, based on testimonies and archival documents. It identifies previously unknown military units involved in repression, the systematic use of sexual violence during counterinsurgency operations, the State’s reliance on hired thugs to injure and kill student protesters, and its permanent surveillance and repression of dissident labor activists and human rights defenders.

The other team’s report, It was the State (1965-1990), determined that the targets of the state’s counterinsurgency campaigns were not limited to guerrillas or student and labor activists, but included a sprawling range of social actors and sometimes entire communities. The commissioners behind this analysis – Barrera, Fernández and Pérez Ricart – concluded that repression and political violence perpetrated by state security agencies aimed to crush social mobilization among “at least eleven groups of victims who until now remained invisible.”[6] Altogether, the team identified more than 8,500 victims of repression. This “new narrative,” as the report calls it, describes a uniquely intolerant State, which used espionage, harassment, imprisonment, torture, rape, forced disappearance, and execution against a wide array of marginalized groups, including refugee and indigenous communities, Afro-Mexicans, and religious dissidents. This conclusion is an innovation in the historiography of political violence in Mexico, and one that may help to explain the ferocity of the ongoing violence and inequality that Mexico continues to experience. At the same time, the decision to widen the lens to encompass sprawling categories of victims dilutes the specificity of the State’s political counterinsurgency objectives during the Dirty War: when the security apparatus of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) set out to annihilate revolution.

The perspective expressed in It was the State (1965-1990) was not entirely welcomed by historians of the Dirty War era or by human rights organizations. The Commission’s executive body itself, the CoVEH, criticized the decision of the three commissioners, writing that their report:

[. . .] exceeded the objectives of the Commission. The report investigated human rights violations that were not necessarily related to State violence within the context of counterinsurgency, as well as episodes of violence that took place after 1990, even spanning circumstances from recent years. [. . .] The concern that led the [Mechanism’s] commissioners to delve into these subjects in their report is understandable, but the mandate of the Commission is clear, as were the demands of the victims’ families, survivors, and collectives with respect to knowing the truth and achieving justice for the atrocities committed through State violence in 1965 to 1990. Important sections of the [Mechanism’s] final report did not address these historic demands.[7]

That said, the two separate reports do have much in common; both excoriate the Mexican State’s silence and persistent impunity around Dirty War human rights crimes. As It was the State (1965-1990) put it, “The problem is that these violations have been denied or justified by the perpetrators and by the State that has sheltered them. The point is not so much a lack of knowledge as a refusal by those involved to acknowledge the existence of these atrocities, their unjustifiable nature, and their own role in them. This is a political question.”[8] And both reports agreed that it was the victims themselves and their families who brought about Mexico’s first real transitional justice effort. Undeniable Truths contains an entire section devoted to highlighting “the importance of the struggle for memory, truth and justice that has been sustained for decades by relatives, survivors, groups, and companions of survivors of this period of violence. Throughout these years of struggle, they have not only encountered the State’s response of denial, silencing, impunity for those responsible, and inaction in the face of their demands, but also persecution, surveillance, harassment, repression, continuous insult and revictimization. In this sense, this Report recognizes them as the principal guardians of memory, who with their struggle and resistance have sustained their demand for justice and prevented the erasure of the crimes committed by the Mexican State during this period.”[9]

Both reports also address the vital role that archives played in shaping their understanding of the Dirty War. As part of the government’s mandate for the Commission, investigators were supposed to have full and unfettered access to state records from the era, and certain agencies complied without a problem.[10] But the issue quickly became a source of conflict when the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) and the Center for National Intelligence (CNI) refused to turn over relevant files. The Mechanism denounced this publicly and eventually released six separate “technical reports” detailing the missing documentation and the nature of the government’s secrecy. The Mechanism’s objections led to growing anger on the part of President López Obrador, who slammed the investigators as liars, declaring that Sedena had turned over all records and that the government was committed to “clarify everything, to hide absolutely nothing, to make everything transparent….”

The government’s hostility towards the Commission was even more evident when the Washington Post revealed that historian and CoVEH coordinator, Camilo Vicente Ovalle, had been targeted by the Israeli spyware Pegasus since at least December 2022. Pegasus contracts were controlled by the Mexican Armed Forces, which meant that the same Army denying access to critical files for Mexico’s first national truth commission was secretly spying on the man leading the investigations. Alejandro Encinas, former undersecretary for human rights and president of the CoVEH, was also targeted by Pegasus. When the Commission concluded its work in September of this year, outgoing President López Obrador held no public reception or unifying presentation, but left the Mechanism for Truth and Historical Clarification to deliver its two reports to the public on its own.

Despite López Obrador’s abandonment of the truth commission, the CoVEH remains an unprecedented achievement for transitional justice in Mexico. The reports the Mechanism produced – more than 5,000 pages together – reveal a trove of new information about how State agencies planned, implemented, and covered up the atrocities of the Dirty War. They build on decades of work from family members, human rights advocates, and scholars, and will be central to future studies about the era for years to come. The Mechanism’s investigations help explain how the legacy of past impunity has grown into the monstrous injustice that Mexico lives with today. They take accountability seriously and acknowledge the power that memory, truth-telling, and transparency have to vindicate the lives lost and damaged by the State’s cruelty.

The National Security Archive will continue to mine these two massive reports for future postings and commentary about the Dirty War.

The National Security Archive’s Mexico Project curated a special collection of 240 declassified U.S. documents and provided expert analysis to support the Mechanism’s investigations. While we continue to push for further declassification, records related to key events in the history of the Dirty War reveal a wide variability in the quality of U.S. government reporting on Mexico.

Some documents contain detailed and critical analysis from political officers at the U.S. Embassy. For example, a confidential cable from 1965 assessed a surprise attack by a band of guerrillas from the Ejército Popular Revolucionario Mexicano (EPRM) on the Mexican Army garrison in Ciudad Madera, Chihuahua. The Embassy determined the violence would likely worsen as the government had given “no evidence to date” that it was addressing the legitimate concerns of small farmers in the area. (Document 1)

Other records exhibit a remarkable degree of trust in the Mexican security forces to maintain order, even after significant episodes of state violence such as the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi student massacres. The National Security Archive has posted extensively on Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi and published hundreds of declassified government documents related to the violence against student protestors.

Documents from U.S. consulates provided invaluable granular reporting for the truth commission’s investigations. A confidential cable from the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey reported on the visit of three top Nuevo León security officials in 1967 to the AID International Police Academy in the United States. This document was reproduced in the It was the State (1965-1990) report as evidence of U.S. assistance for the “professionalization” of state security forces in counterinsurgency tactics. (Document 4)[11]

The United States closely followed Mexico’s growing armed guerrilla movement, as they considered the country a frontline in the Cold War and the hemispheric battle against communism. While U.S. officials maintained a watchful eye over the activities of groups like the Party of the Poor in Guerrero, a top secret National Intelligence Daily article from the CIA concluded in 1974 that the insurgency was a “nuisance” and not a substantial threat to the stability of the Mexican regime, despite the “massive application of military manpower” deployed to combat the guerrillas. (Document 7)[12]

The U.S. also monitored developments within the military, including key personnel changes and appointments. A secret Intelligence Information cable from the CIA established that General Francisco Quirós Hermosillo, who moved to third in command of Mexico's Secretariat of National Defense in 1980, was the former head of the Brigada Blanca, the “extra legal anti-terrorist organization,”. The Brigada Blanca was a brutal intelligence and operational unit responsible for forced disappearances, torture, and assassinations of suspected subversives. Quirós Hermosillo has been named an intellectual author in the military’s “death flights” in Guerrero. (Document 13)

The records published today provide a sense of the concerns and priorities of U.S. foreign policy during Mexico’s Dirty War. The documents make clear the United States government valued the Mexican regime’s stability over all else, and U.S. reporting justified human rights violations as a necessary evil to contain the threat of communism.