Spies, Assassins, and Statesmen in Mexico's Cold

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe No. 103 (2017): January-June, pp. 143-156 www.erlacs.org Spies, Assassins, and Statesmen in Mexico’s Cold War Book Review Essay by Wil G. Pansters – Eclipse of the Assassins. The CIA, Imperial Politics, and the Slaying of Mex- ican Journalist Manuel Buendía, by Russell H. Bartley and Sylvia Erickson Bartley. University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. – Mexico’s Cold War. Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution, by Renata Keller. Cambridge University Press, 2015. – The Logic of Compromise in Mexico. How the Countryside Was Key to the Emergence of Authoritarianism, by Gladys I. McCormick. The University of North Carolina Press, 2016. We all know they exist: the connections between formal (elected) government and state authorities (police chiefs, ministers, presidents, statesmen), who move in the public sphere with decorum and pomp and according to prescribed ritu- als of power, and figures who mainly move in the shadowy world beyond the rule of law to carry out tasks deemed necessary to defend state and economic interests. This is the world where spies, security agents, and professional hit- men meet and mash with criminals and drug traffickers. These connections are often facilitated and organized by formal state agencies such as the secret ser- vice, special sections of the police or the army, bridging legality and illegality. Even though everybody remotely interested in the inner workings of U.S. em- pire and Latin American states will acknowledge them, the books reviewed here reveal, in different degrees, the networks between statesmen, spies and assassins so strikingly that it obliges the reader to rethink previous understand- ings of particular historical processes or episodes. While the books have different immediate subject matters, they share an interest in the construction and workings of an, over time, increasingly coer- cive and violent authoritarian regime in Mexico and its relationships to the international (Cold War) environment. Their primary attention goes out to different time periods (McCormick, 1930s to 1960s; Keller, 1950s to 1970s; the DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/erlacs.10245 © Wil G. Pansters. Open Access review essay dis- tributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) Li- cense https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. WWW.ERLACS.ORG is published by CEDLA – Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation / Centro de Estudios y Documentación Latinoamericanos, Amsterdam; www.cedla.uva.nl; ISSN 0924-0608, eISSN 1879-4750. 144 | ERLACS No. 103 (2017): January-June Bartleys, 1980s), but their narratives often intertwine through certain key play- ers and events. Information previously gathered by or directly obtained from (Mexican and American) secret agents constitutes a key source of all books. There are also important differences: in the specific interpretations of historical processes and their periodization, but above all in their narrative and writing styles. I believe the authors of all three books would subscribe to the, admitted- ly very, general conclusion that Cold War Mexico was less characterized by a so-called pax PRIísta than previously assumed; if Mexican authoritarianism provided a form of peace, it was, as Mauricio Tenorio (2014) once said, ‘una paz con muchas cochinadas’, with violence perpetrated and often initiated by state actors. Especially McCormick has strong opinions on the weight of coer- cion and violence for understanding post-World War II Mexico, but Keller does her bit. In the scholarship of the Cold War in Latin America, much attention has traditionally been given to South American countries under military rule, and to civil wars and conflicts in Central America, while Mexico was presented as an outlier in this framework. In general terms, the books reviewed here make an important contribution to the scholarship about the Cold War by placing Mexico, with all its specificities, squarely within the overall Cold War framework, and therefore enhancing a broad comparative understanding of Latin America.1 I will use a temporal criterium to order this review essay. I start with McCormick’s book, which goes back to the 1930s, then Keller’s that really starts its historical analysis in the 1950s, and end with the Bartleys book, which overwhelmingly deals with the last decade of the Cold War. Cradle of revolution, laboratory of authoritarianism In a particularly interesting part of McCormick’s The Logic of Compromise about the rural roots of authoritarianism in the Zapatista heartland during the mid-twentieth century, she examines a number of reports written by spies of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), founded in 1947 to carry out the surveillance of organizations and individuals and to develop strategies to co- opt and subvert dissent against the regime. As such, the DFS gradually became a key player in Mexico’s Cold War. The reports from the mid-1950s dug up by McCormick – one written by Juan A. Zorilla, the infamous later director general of the DFS in the 1980s and a key actor in the Bartleys book – provide valuable insights into the backgrounds of the discontent in the sugar cane cooperatives of Morelos and Puebla. They largely confirm popular complaints and talk about the inefficiency, the corruption, and fraud (e.g. by systematically under weighing sugarcane loads), the abuse, and the threat of violence by the cooperative and sugar mill managers and other government institutions. DFS agents acknowledged the poverty and exploitation of the peasants as well as their political and organizational marginalization (pp. 150-152, 158). In fact, when these poor peasants visited the national headquarters of the Confeder- Wil G. Pansters: Spies, Assassins, and Statesmen in Mexico’s Cold War | 145 ación Nacional Campesina (CNC) to voice their concerns and seek political support, there was a chance they would directly speak to DFS agents infiltrated in the national peasant organization founded by Lárazo Cárdenas in the late 1930s. But the DFS reports also explain why these peasants might eventually seek extra-legal paths to achieve their goals of a more just society and economy. After all, they stood with their backs against the wall. The activities and networks of Rubén Jaramillo, who had taken up arms previously against the regime, certainly provided the option of considering this. Finally, and for the same reason, the agents actively designed strategies to intervene against and repress (potentially) radicalizing peasants, sometimes in coordination with the army or the judicial police. This episode brings together key arguments developed in McCormick’s book. First, it bridges the period under analysis, the mid-1930s to the mid- 1960s: from the years in which Mexico experienced social and political re- forms during the Cárdenas presidency (1934-1940) with, most importantly, a vast land reform and collective agro-industrial projects, to the years in which social, political and ideological contradictions led to popular discontent across the country, and to government strategies to reign it in, with state violence if needed. The author’s analysis of the changing social and political world of the sugar cane cooperatives provides convincing insight into how revolutionary promises (or dreams) of redistribution, justice and autonomy, either in their original Zapatista or later Cardenista versions, gradually gave way to disen- chantment and anger about enduring poverty, exploitation, rampant corruption and violence. Second, the study claims that ‘the secret police used the countryside and, specifically, responses to peasant and worker mobilizations in sugar-production cooperatives … to test strategies they would later employ to quell dissent in urban sectors’ (p. 134). The countryside was thus a laboratory for forms of social control and repression applied on a national scale a decade later. When the government still operated more carefully in the cities, it responded to rural rad- icalization by tolerating violence used by local and regional authorities, and politically protected business elites, or by exerting repression itself. Fanned by Cold War rhetoric, it cultivated the fear of internal threats. McCormick speaks of the ‘establishment of a repressive surveillance apparatus’ in the countryside (p. 134). She argues strongly against the view that the DFS was rather weak and unprofessional. This interpretation also leads to her not entirely convincing new periodization of Mexico’s authoritarianism: the country’s ‘dirty war’ did not start in the second half of the 1960s with the emergence of guerrilla groups in the north and elsewhere or with the large student conflict in 1968, but ‘almost two decades earlier, in those places far away from the public eye of the national and international media’ (p. 160).2 Most importantly, ‘political violence was key to understanding the governing regime’s longevity.…’ (p. 210). No wonder that the concept of ‘culture of fear’ is consistently used in the book. 146 | ERLACS No. 103 (2017): January-June Third, it is precisely because of this experience that social groups and individuals in strategic zones of the Mexican countryside (for economic or political reasons, or both, as in Morelos) were forced to make choices about how to con- front changing circumstances. The heart of McCormick’s book is structured around the stories of three Jaramillo brothers (Rubén, Porfirio, and Antonio), who in the author’s view represent different paths to deal with marginalization, domination and the incursion of state-formation into their communities. By far the most well-known, Rubén, challenged local and federal elites, worked with the regime, ‘allowed himself to be co-opted’ occasionally, but also mobilized radicalized peasants and organized several armed uprisings (p. 213). He was brutally assassinated in 1962 together with almost his entire family.3 His younger brother Porfirio was particularly active in the sugar-producing com- plex in Atencingo, in nearby southern Puebla.

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