EDITED BY JAIME M.

P E N S A D O
AND ENRIQUE C. OCH OA

MÉXICO
BEYOND 1968

Revolutionaries, Radicals, and Repression During

the Global Sixties and Subversive Seventies
The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu

© 2018 by The Arizona Board of Regents

All rights reserved. Published 2018

ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3842-3 (paper)

Cover design by Leigh McDonald

Cover illustration: Libertad de expresión by Adolfo Mexiac, 1968

This book is made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts,
College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pensado, Jaime M., 1972– editor. | Ochoa, Enrique, editor.
Title: México beyond 1968 : revolutionaries, radicals, and repression during the global sixties and
subversive seventies / edited by Jaime M. Pensado and Enrique C. Ochoa.
Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008709 | ISBN 9780816538423 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Mexico—Politics and government—20th century. | Mexico—Social conditions—
20th century. | Social movements—Mexico—History—20th century. | Protest movements—
Mexico—History—20th century. | Political culture—Mexico—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC F1236 M47166 2018 | DDC 972.08/2—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008709

Printed in the United States of America

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
 CONTENTS

Preface: Mexico Today ix

J ai m e M . Pe n sad o an d En r iq ue C . O c hoa

Acknowledgments xvii

Introduction: México Beyond 1968: Revolutionaries,

Radicals, and Repression 3
J ai m e M . Pe n sad o an d En r iq ue C . O c hoa

PART I. INTRODUCTORY ESSAYS

1. Integrating Mexico into the Global Sixties 19

E r ic Z ol ov

2. Zones and Languages of State-Making:

From Pax Priísta to Dirty War 33
W i l G . Panst er s

PART II. REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZING AND STATE RESPONSE

3. “Latent Sites of Agitation”: Normalistas Rurales

and Chihuahua’s Agrarian Struggle in the 1960s 53
T anal í s Padil l a
 VI CONTENTS

4. “For the Liberation of Exploited Youth”:

Campesino-Students, the FECSM, and Mexican
Student Politics in the 1960s 73
C ar l a I r i na V il l an ue va

5. The 23rd of September Communist League’s Foco

Experiment in the Sierra Baja Tarahumara (1973–1975) 92
A de l a C e di l l o

6. Mexico’s Turn Toward the Third World:

Rural Development Under President Luis Echeverría 113
A . S . Di l l i ng h a m

7. A War Against Poor People: Dirty Wars and

Drug Wars in 1970s Mexico 134
A l e xande r A v iñ a

PART III. YOUTH RADICALISMS AND STATE VIOLENCE

8. Working-Class Heroes: Barrio Consciousness,

Student Power, and the Mexican Dirty War 155
F e r nand o H er r era C al der ón

9. The Various Lives of Mexican Maoism:

Política Popular, a Mexican Social Maoist Praxis 175
M ic h ae l S ol dat en ko

10. The Other “New Man”: Conservative Nationalism

and Right-Wing Youth in 1970s Monterrey 195
Lui s H e r rán A v il a

11. “The Darkest and Most Shameful Page in

the University’s History”: Mobs, Riots, and
Student Violence in 1960s–1970s Puebla 215
G e m a S antam ar ía

12. Student Organizing in Post-1968 Mexico City:

The Coordinating Commission of the Committees
of Struggle and State Violence 236
V e r ónic a O ik ión Sol ano
 CONTENTS VII

13. Torture and the Making of a Subversive

During Mexico’s Dirty War 254
G l ady s I . M c C or m ic k

Final Remarks: Toward a Provincialization of 1968 273

J ai m e M . Pe n sad o an d En r iq ue C . O c hoa

Chronology of Selected Events: Revolutionaries,

Radicals, and Repression (c. 1946– c. 1980) 297
List of Abbreviations 321
Contributors 327
Index 331
 7
A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE
Dirty Wars and Drug Wars in 1970s Mexico

Alexander Av iña

The war on drugs is no less than continuing to use military force to contain
noncomformist, disruptive movements, groups in resistance, and collectives who
raise their voices.
A B E L B A R R E R A , D I R E C TO R O F T L A C H I N O L L A N

For the first time in modern Mexican history there is the total military occu-
pation of an entire region of the country. . . . We can say that we are fighting
against a bunch of students, or Indians, or communists, but the truth is that
we are controlling and managing entire communities, municipalities, cities,
mountains, communication systems, everything.
G E N E R A L E S C Á C E G A , G U E R R A E N E L PA R A Í S O ,
C A R LO S M O N T E M AYO R

AYOTZINAPA FORETOLD

If the 1994 guerrilla uprising in Chiapas helped crack open a longer history of
armed struggle and resistance against the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI), then perhaps the recent
2014 forced disappearance of forty-three Ayotzinapa normalista students in the
northern region of Guerrero could aid in the uncovering of a longer history
of state-sponsored (or at the very least, state-enabled) terror in southwestern
Mexico. An earlier moment, the 2000 electoral defeat of the PRI and subse-
quent efforts to investigate its sordid histories of state terror via the declassi-
fication of government documents and an official “truth commission” report,
provided valuable resources and narratives while ultimately failing to obtain
justice for the victims of state terror. But the Ayotzinapa case and the social
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 135

protest mobilizations it inspired, as with the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación

Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army, EZLN) uprising in Chiapas,
both contributed to the critical questioning of state-produced narratives that
stressed progress, the restoration of order, salvation, and neoliberal utopias. The
neoliberal “status quo,” to borrow a quote from Walter Benjamin, “threaten[ed]
to be preserved” until these two interruptions forced an “arrest of happening.”1
Additionally, the disappearance of the students (and the killing of six additional
students and innocent bystanders on the night of September 24, 2014) involved
at some level different but enmeshed networks of people with an outsized
political and social presence in Guerrero since the 1960s: narco-traffickers and
the Mexican military. In the midst of a current decade-long War on Drugs or
“War Against the Cartels,” Ayotzinapa forcefully suggests a rethinking of how
such groups—narcos (drug traffickers), militares (military men), policías (police-
men), and collaborating políticos (politicians)— possess intimate, shared histo-
ries linked to broader processes of state formation, economic dispossession, and
authoritarian political rule in Mexico’s recent past.
This chapter situates the structural transformation of Mexico’s narcotics
economy beginning in the 1960s and government responses that took the form
of militarized interdiction as interlinked to the campaigns of violent politi-
cal repression concomitantly unleashed by the PRI against “internal enemies.”
During the 1960s and ’70s, such repression— termed the Dirty War, or Guerra
Sucia— encompassed the state application of terror, violence, and surveillance
against individuals, communities, and organizations deemed threats to domestic
political and social stability by the PRI. It took its most extreme, violent form
in Guerrero, where soldiers, state police officers, government spies, and caciques
(local bosses) terrorized dissident political activity and economic justice efforts
beginning in the late 1950s, culminating with counterinsurgency campaigns
in the early 1970s in response to two peasant guerrilla organizations. At the
same time, key changes in the global economy of narcotics spurred the pro-
liferation of marijuana and opium poppy production in the mountains of the
southern state. A boom in marijuana and heroin demand from the United
States beginning in the mid-1960s, combined with the closing down of key
transnational heroin networks, expanded Mexico’s role as the key supplier of
drugs to its northern neighbor.2 By 1975, Mexican heroin and marijuana con-
trolled roughly 90 percent of the U.S. market.3 Facing pressure from the U.S.
government and a domestic moral panic over alleged increased drug addiction
rates played out in the national press, the PRI ordered a national interdiction
 136 ALEXANDER AVIÑA

campaign with the military as the spearhead. These militarized counternarcotics

programs— including the novel use of dangerous defoliant herbicides sprayed
from helicopters and airplanes4— resembled, in practice, what counterinsurgent
military units had practiced in Guerrero since at least 1963 after a contentious
electoral campaign: brutal attacks on rural highland peasant communities that
left behind a trail of tortures, razed homes, disappeared campesinos, destroyed
agricultural harvests, and environmental damage.
Two Mexican “wars,” one “dirty” and the other against drugs, and the multi-
ple ways in which they intimately intersect historically during the 1970s, reveal
the central premise of this chapter: they were wars directed against poor people
intended to reassert state control. For the PRI, the boundary between drug
control and political control, between popular political protest and drug crim-
inality, became usefully permeable. Indeed, government and military officials
publicly described counterinsurgency efforts in Guerrero as counternarcotic,
anticrime campaigns.5 They accused guerrillas of working with narcos, the for-
mer protecting the latter in exchange for weapons and supplies.6 A maximalist
version of this narrative asserted that guerrillas simply did not exist; rather,
“it was people who cultivated opium poppies and marijuana.”7 At the same
time, covertly, military units in Guerrero (and in Sinaloa) collaborated with
known local narco-traffickers to attack leftist movements and guerrilla groups.8
Having killed or disappeared the most influential guerrilla leaders in Guerrero
by early 1975, some of the military counterinsurgent officers who led those
campaigns— like General Mario Acosta Chaparro— would allegedly become
narco-traffickers themselves, as they remained in the region to work as politi-
cally appointed police agents given broad policing powers by state politicians.
Guerrero prefigured the sort of Mexican narco “deep state,” to use historian
Adela Cedillo’s terminology from her contribution to this volume, that exists
today. Other counterinsurgent officers, like the Fort Benning–trained Gen-
eral Roberto Heine Rangel, would apply their anti-guerrilla lessons learned in
Guerrero to antidrug campaigns launched in northern Mexico during the late
1970s and early 1980s.9 There, too, poor people— peasant drug farmers in the
highlands of Sinaloa— would suffer the brunt of state violence.
After a discussion that historicizes the links between counterinsurgency and
counternarcotics in 1960s and ’70s Guerrero, a section will follow that describes
one particularly heinous event during the Dirty War: the April 24, 1973, massa-
cre of six campesinos in the highland community of Los Piloncillos by members
of the Mexican military. Los Piloncillos encapsulates the biopolitical core of
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 137

the Dirty War, of the military counterinsurgency waged against the campesino
communities that supported (or were perceived as supporting) armed struggle,
subsequently applied to drug-producing peasant farmers: selective “killing and
collective welfare.”10 What can Los Piloncillos teach us about the Dirty War
at large? Can this historical constellation of dirty wars and drug wars teach us
something about sovereignty and power in a contemporary Mexico undone by
mass violence?
A final section focuses on the tumultuous governorship of Rubén Figueroa
Figueroa (1975– 81), an influential cacique and PRI politician tied into national
elite circles, who took power after the military defeat of the guerrillas. A man
described as a “cruel, sanguine assassin” by the first state attorney general he
appointed in 1975, Figueroa oversaw a ruling tenure characterized by intense
social conflict, political violence, and continued state terror.11 At the same time,
this moment also witnessed the configuration of military, police, politician, and
narco-trafficking networks at the local/regional level as Guerrero transformed
into a prime producer of narcotics. Even as national interdiction campaigns
targeted drug production throughout different parts of the country during the
late 1970s and early ’80s, certain state agents at the local level helped form the
foundations for the gradual emergence of a “narco-state.”

“BEHAVE AND GO TO WORK”

They [the military] released me . . . gave me twenty pesos and told

me, “Behave and go to work.”
DON ASCENCIÓN ROSAS, CAMPESINO
G U E R R E R E N S E , V I C T I M O F TO R T U R E , FAT H E R
OF DISAPPEARED GUERRILLA

Since the emergence of a statewide civil disobedience movement in 1959 and

1960 that sought the removal of a corrupt and violent governor, Guerrero has
served as a theater of popular political radicalization in the face of constant state
and cacique terror and, alternately, a laboratory of counterinsurgency.12 Campes-
ino movements that sought to undermine caciques and acaparadores (loan sharks
and market monopolists) by demanding social justice and economic democracy
fused with electoral opposition groups that organized for “effective suffrage” and
students and rural schoolteachers who kept alive the most radical legacies of
 138 ALEXANDER AVIÑA

1910. The rural teacher training school in Ayotzinapa produced a large number
of key social activists and future guerrillas, including Lucio Cabañas. “We were
born [politically] in Ayotzinapa,” Cabañas once remarked.13
After a military massacre of anti-governor activists in the capital city of
Chilpancingo in December 1960 and a contentious state-level electoral season
in 1962 that also ended with the killing of protestors, thousands of military sol-
diers entered the state in 1963 violently targeting political dissidents and social
movements. A report published by the leftist independent journal Política in
mid-1963 revealed practices and tactics of repression that later became system-
atic during the Dirty War in the 1970s: An estimated twenty thousand deployed
soldiers targeted political opposition zones along the coasts and razed hundreds
of homes belonging to dissident campesinos, tortured and killed campesino
leaders, and illegally detained hundreds. Working with cacique allies, military
units terrorized coastal highland campesino communities that defended legal
ejido (communal land) control over forestry resources.14 The assassination of
campesino activists included the horrific murder of a coffee-producer leader
nicknamed “El Tabaco”; after troops cut out his tongue and castrated him, they
slit his body open.15
The use of the Mexican military to maintain and reassert state control over
rural Guerrero represented the political rule, not the exception, throughout the
Mexican countryside after 1940. Military policing, the “maintenance of internal
order,” to quote historian Thomas Rath, gradually became the primary func-
tion of the armed forces by the 1950s.16 Indeed, the professionalization of the
military (training, logistics, weaponry, counterinsurgency doctrine) occurred in
reaction to the sort of popular political protests and social movements that took
place in Guerrero— a process accelerated by the national labor strikes of the late
1950s, regional civic protests in the early 1960s, and the emergence of the first
modern socialist guerrilla struggle in Chihuahua in 1965.17 Conterminously,
the military also began to participate in drug interdiction and eradication on
a national scale, but the drug trade flourished due to the protection granted at
local levels by certain military officials, police, and politicians. Beginning with
“The Great Campaign” in 1948, a national “permanent” program that involved
federal police and military units in the physical eradication of marijuana and
opium poppy plants, such programs became more urgent as Mexico emerged
as a key supplier of narcotics in the late 1960s and early 1970s.18 In large part
pushed by Operation Intercept, Richard Nixon’s unilateral decision in Sep-
tember 1969 to essentially close the U.S.-Mexico border as a War on Drugs
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 139

initiative, the militarized drug interdiction campaigns of the 1970s occurred in

dialogue with counterinsurgency operations in the state of Guerrero that had
“formally” begun in 1968 and 1969.19 Operation Condor and the sending of
thousands of troops and police to the Sinaloa, Chihuahua, and Durango high-
lands in the late 1970s to attack peasant drug cultivators displayed a counter-
insurgent edge. Counternarcotics drew its practices, epistemic rationale, and
practitioners from counterinsurgency.
Drug control thus functioned as a project of social control and political
repression on both sides of the border. By the time the guerrilla Asociación
Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria (National Revolutionary Civic Association,
ACNR) and the Partido de los Pobres (Party of the Poor, PDLP), respectively
led by Genaro Vázquez and Cabañas, emerged in the late 1960s, backed by
dozens of rural communities radicalized after a decade of state terror, the Mex-
ican military simultaneously conducted counterinsurgency and counternarcotics
operations in the state. Government officials publicly lambasted the guerrillas
as criminal, narco-trafficking bandits while the military launched violent, at
times disparate, counterinsurgency campaigns that targeted suspected civilian
supporters of the armed movements.20 Available evidence, derived from state
documents and oral testimonies, indicates at that least six hundred to seven
hundred guerrerenses remain disappeared, with hundreds, perhaps thousands,
more tortured and illegally detained by military forces from 1969 to 1980 in this
Dirty War à la guerrerense. Other estimates range as high as fifteen hundred
disappeared persons.21
Many guerrerenses like Ascención Rosas remain haunted by memories of
the Dirty War. Tita Radilla, a courageous, indefatigable human rights activist,
recounted to me how tortured, lifeless bodies appeared almost daily on the out-
skirts of Atoyac de Alvarez as we conversed in the town’s former army base (now
a city services center called, ironically, The City of Hope). For decades Tita has
worked to uncover the whereabouts of her father, Rosendo Radilla, detained and
disappeared by the military at a checkpoint in August 1974 after being pulled off
a bus. A noted corridista (folk singer), campesino leader, and former municipal
president in Atoyac, he loved composing corridos about the guerrillas and rev-
olution. The military officials at the checkpoint told him his crime: composing
corridos. “It’s a crime?” queried Radilla. “No, but for now you’re fucked [ya te
chingaste] anyway,” responded a soldier.22 Working as a university professor in
the state capital of Chilpancingo while also a member of the guerrilla PDLP,
Alejandra Cárdenas recalled living in a militarized city never knowing when
 140 ALEXANDER AVIÑA

soldiers would arrive to disappear her.23 Campesino leader Hilario Mesino will
never forget that day in 1974 when soldiers brutally beat his father and detained
his nineteen-year-old brother, Alberto. Alberto never returned.24
The personal anecdotes briefly described above provide a glimpse of tactics
used en masse by the military, on orders from PRI officials, as early as 1969
when it became apparent that two separate armed campesino organizations
operated in the state. A massacre of five campesinos in the sierra community
of Los Piloncillos (Atoyac de Alvarez municipality) in April 1973 marked the
beginning of the most violent phase of the counterinsurgency in the Costa
Grande region of Guerrero. Yet the use of extreme violence by members of the
Mexican military certainly occurred prior to 1973. PDLP communiqués and
declassified spy reports denounced the military’s use of gasoline during the
torture of campesinos suspected of supporting the guerrillas as early as 1970.
After forcing their captives to drink gasoline, soldiers then lit the campesinos on
fire and threw their charred corpses into the streets of Acapulco. Other bodies
dumped on the outskirts of rural communities bore the marks of torture and
gunshots.25
The application of collective punishment on entire campesino communi-
ties also occurred prior to Los Piloncillos. From August 28 to September 5,
1972, soldiers entered the small town of El Quemado and detained over ninety
inhabitants, sending them first to the 27th Military Zone base in Atoyac and
subsequently to Acapulco. The community’s crime? Its geographical location
near the site of a guerrilla ambush of military forces that occurred on August 23,
1972. Accused of supporting and participating in the ambush, the detained
suffered torture and faced thirty-year prison sentences. Unable to withstand
the beatings and electrical shocks, seven died while imprisoned, including a
seventy-year-old man named Ignacio Sánchez Gutiérrez.26 In mid-September
1972, PDLP communiqués once again decried the military’s practice of mass
detentions, torture, disappearances, and even the use of napalm during aerial
bombings. On September 24, soldiers razed the small village of Llanos de San-
tiago de la Unión— fifty houses and an evangelical church. The violence not
only physically destroyed families and communities but was also economically
devastating, because military repression disrupted the regional agricultural
season. Coffee harvests in the Atoyac region were supposed to begin in late
September.27 Just four days after the scorching of Llanos de Santiago, President
Luis Echeverría (1970– 76) announced the aperture of Plan Guerrero, a massive
public investment designed to ameliorate socioeconomic inequality and poverty
and to improve the state’s transportation infrastructure.28
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 141

Despite such public declarations and stated intentions, counterinsurgent and

counternarcotic campaigns launched by the Mexican state during the 1960s
and 70s systematically targeted and brutalized rural campesino communities.
And while different security apparatuses— primarily the Mexican military, the
Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate, DFS), and dif-
ferent federal and local police forces— did achieve some publicly stated goals
like the violent extermination of Guerrero guerrillas (officially called “cattle
thieves and bandits”) and urban guerrillas (“terrorists”) as well as the alleged
physical destruction of tons of narcotics, such achieved goals fundamentally
required the targeting of highland campesino communities in states like Guer-
rero and Sinaloa, communities that supported armed struggle or engaged in the
cultivation of illicit drugs (or were perceived to do so).
As such, both the Dirty War and the War on Drugs represented state-
sanctioned violence and terror against poor people whose political or economic
decisions and/or actions symptomatically reflected deeper structural and his-
torical maladies. Functionally, these wars proved one and the same despite dif-
ferently stated targets and goals. They shared practices and an epistemology
expressed most “colorfully” by Rubén Figueroa: “muerto el perro se acaba la
rabia” (dead dogs don’t bite).29 The state agents involved in carrying out the
Dirty War and the War on Drugs in Guerrero proved capable of identifying
symptoms but offered no “cures.” Indeed, that was not their charge; the cure was
the practice of terror. Both wars killed and disappeared, but they also generated
new relations between citizen and state. Counterinsurgent and counternarcotic
operations demonstrated a core biopolitical component that involved the mil-
itary’s control and management of Guerrero’s civilian population. The intro-
duction of limited socioeconomic modernization programs, alongside violence,
targeted for extermination both chronic underdevelopment and lives deemed
subversive— for the sake of Guerrero’s broader population and regime secu-
rity.30 The winning of hearts and minds necessitated the torture, disappearance,
and/or extralegal killings of bodies to “save” the rest. Hence, the central concern
of counterinsurgency and counternarcotics operations: the targeted population
that was “made to live” and be productive, that was coercively made to “behave
and go to work”— as military officials told Ascención Rosas in 1974 upon releas-
ing him after a week of imprisonment and torture— amid a disciplining state
terror.31 In Foucauldian terms, counterinsurgency “is therefore the manifestation
of both positive and negative types of power simultaneously,” destructive and
generative, with lasting consequences for contemporary Guerrero and the sys-
tem of domination that afflicts Mexico today.32
 142 ALEXANDER AVIÑA

Indeed, the war against the guerrilla groups led by Vázquez and Cabañas
made limited rural modernization possible in Guerrero. Counterinsurgency, as
a militarized reactive response to two separate guerrilla movements that incar-
nated decades of unredeemed peasant demands, provided some of the very
hallmarks of modernity that the highland countryside had long demanded:
(some) yearlong passable roads, potable water, electrification, communications
infrastructure, schools, and medical care. These achieved demands constituted
part of a broader reform program ordered by President Echeverría that intended
to sap popular support from the Cabañas-led PDLP. This program, along with
the guerrilla penchant for kidnapping and/or executing locally hated caciques,
expelled a series of regional agricultural bosses who dominated the coffee and
copra markets (and access to credit). An equitable and democratic campesino
economy seemed possible. Such instances of collective well-being though, tied
intimately to military efforts to rid the region of guerrillas and their socialist
dreams, occurred within the context of an unconstitutional state of exception.
As the epigraph quote from the fictionalized General Escáceaga suggests, the
military occupied an entire region and managed civilian populations. The events
that occurred in Los Piloncillos revealed the naked power of military sover-
eignty in 1970s Guerrero.

“AFTER KILLING US, THE MILITARY ARRIVED IN

HELICOPTERS TO GIVE US PLASTIC SANDALS”

The smell of coffee must have filled the air of Los Piloncillos on April 24, 1973.
Nestled in the slopes of the Sierra Madre del Sur on the road that leads to
El Paraíso, the small village contained some fifteen dwellings. Don Cutberto
Calderón got up early that morning. The hard-working caficultor (coffee grower)
arrived at his coffee plot with his brother around 6 a.m. After working for a cou-
ple of hours, Don Cutberto waited for the arrival of his wife knowing she was
on the way with his midmorning meal. She arrived around 8 a.m. carrying his
food and their two-year-old daughter. A half-hour later, they heard automatic
gunfire coming from the direction of their home:

At first, we thought it was chickens because we knew that guachos liked to shoot
and kill our animals when they entered towns like ours. But when we heard a long
series of gunshots, my wife went ahead of me to find out what was happening . . .
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 143

she returned to tell me that she saw people on the ground, riddled with bullets in
front of a wall. We waited some time before descending from our coffee plot down
to Los Piloncillos but we saw the government [soldiers] and took another route.
When we reached the town, we witnessed the scene . . . the image that remained
with me the longest was that of some women picking up the bodies and others
shooing away approaching dogs.33

The military had arrived looking for the village’s men. Moving from house
to house yelling at the inhabitants to come out, the soldiers— a small num-
ber dressed in civilian clothes with red handkerchiefs wrapped around their
hands— ordered the few men who had not yet gone to work to congregate on
the school’s patio. The husband and father of young Herminia Reyes Gutiérrez
joined three other campesinos on the patio. She painfully remembered hearing
the sickening sounds made by the impact of bullets. On the patio floor, torn
apart and dismembered, lay the bodies of five men including her sixty-year-old
father, Crescencio Reyes, and Toribo Peralta, her nineteen-year-old husband.
A pregnant mother of a one-year-old daughter, Gutiérrez lost her second baby
in a miscarriage two days after the massacre.34
Doña Francisca Sánchez and Doña Tranquilina Álvarez Sánchez remem-
bered seeing an estimated four hundred troops enter the small coffee-producing
village while four tanks surrounded the outskirts. The troops dragged entire
families from their homes and forced them to the village center where the
school was located. A pregnant Susana Bernal had the temerity to ask the sol-
diers why they entered her home without permission or judicial orders. They
promptly responded by striking her with the butt of a rifle. Five men stood on
the school patio with their backs to the soldiers, their frightened faces facing
the school wall. Doña Tranquilina’s two young nephews stood among the five
with their arms on their heads: Santos (twenty years old) and Eleazar Álvarez
Ocampo (sixteen). The sudden volleys of automatic gunfire dismembered the
campesino men. A single man, Margarito Valdez (sixty years old), somehow
survived the initial volley. With several bullets lodged in his body, he tried to
escape only to fall dead into a gulley. For the witnesses and family members
of the murdered, they still cannot forget “the pieces of flesh— arms, legs, and
innards— spread all over in front the wall where the men were executed.”35
Saturnino Sánchez could not leave his home. A seventy-year-old man who
nursed a recent bullet wound on his leg, he could not convince interrogating
military officers that he did not support or know the location of PDLP guerrilla
 144 ALEXANDER AVIÑA

camps. He showed them the humble coffee plot that he worked with his sons
along with his identification papers to no avail. Doña Francisca recalled that her
father refused to die without a struggle. He ran throughout his home avoiding
the gunshots, until several destroyed his elderly body. “The only things that
remained of my father were pieces of flesh stuck to the walls of the home, his
guts on the ground.”36
Despite an overwhelming fear, the surviving campesinos from Los Piloncillos
refused to remain silent in the face of murderous injustice. Don Cutberto made his
way back down to the village after he saw the military retreat. Watching various
women recovering the massacred pieces of human flesh as they prevented dogs
from coming close produced an indelible memory for the now elderly campesino.
After helping bury the bodies, Don Cutberto led a village commission down the
sierra, traveling sixty kilometers to the municipal capital of Atoyac. After some
initial doubts, the municipal president called Governor Israel Nogueda Otero,
who met the village commission in Acapulco. Both the municipal president and
the governor believed the campesinos actively supported Cabañas and the PDLP.
They repeatedly asked Don Cutberto and the rest of the commission if they
belonged to the PDLP. Nogueda refused to believe their story.37
Following Governor Nogueda’s almost predictable refusal to help, the com-
mission traveled to the Ministry of the Interior in Mexico City with the recently
widowed women. At the same time, the military initiated an investigation. Don
Cutberto recalled various ensuing meetings with military officers in Los Pillon-
cillos during which the latter attempted to convince residents that the PDLP
had carried out the massacre. “But we did not fear Lucio [Cabañas],” Doña
Francisca reminisced, “the people sympathized with him because he told them
it was just to defend the poorest.” The military concluded their investigation
by promising to provide compensation for a massacre they denied occurred at
the hands of army soldiers.38
Don Cutberto still possesses the document. Signed by regional military com-
mander General Salvador Rangel Medina, document number 06206 guaran-
teed the safety of Los Piloncillos’s residents as soldiers subsequently contin-
ued to pass through the village in search of PDLP insurgents. The letter also
promised to respect any necessities the village had, along with giving a vague
pledge of “moral support.” As the military tightened its hold around the civilian
population of the Costa Grande by restricting foodstuffs and medicines, they
allowed Los Piloncillos to obtain more than the standard ration of “one kilo-
gram of sugar and one kilogram of dough [flour].” Don Cutberto asserted that
“we were the only community that left Atoyac with a truck full of provisions . . .
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 145

of course bought with the money we managed to collect.”39 He also mentioned

that the Mexican military arrived in helicopters to provide one other compen-
sation for the murder of six campesinos: “After killing us, the military arrived
in helicopters to give us plastic sandals.”40
Spy reports from the Ministry of the Interior and Secretaría de la Defensa
Nacional (Secretariat of National Defense, SDN) military records documented
the veracity of assertions expressed by the Los Piloncillos survivors. The scale
and method of the massacre warranted attention from General Cuenca Díaz
who sent a letter to President Echeverría to personally inform him. Yet the gen-
eral presented a version of events in dark contrast to the testimonies produced by
the survivors who possessed the courage to denounce the massacre to municipal
and state authorities. According to this letter, General Cuenca Díaz asserted
that military forces stationed near Los Piloncillos engaged an armed “gang” led
by Saturnino Sánchez— the seventy-year-old man with a bullet wound in his
leg— that actively collaborated with PDLP guerrillas. Subsequent military tele-
grams continued to refer to the massacre as an encounter between soldiers and
armed gangsters. A report that listed the quantity of military munitions spent
during the supposed encounter even mentioned that Cabañas himself had led
the so-called gang.41 A memorandum from the Ministry of the Interior written
three days after the massacre explained that the military killed the six men
after allegedly receiving hostile gunfire— a jumpy military response attributed
by the report to military fears of another PDLP ambush. National newspapers
uncritically repeated “the prose of counterinsurgency” emitted by the Mexican
state that discursively transformed campesino victims into criminal aggressors.
An Acapulco newspaper posted the following headline: “Cuenca Díaz flew over
Atoyac: The army did not fire; it was the bandits.”42

A REVANCHIST IN THE GOVERNOR’S PALACE

The repression failed to end after the death of guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas
on December 2, 1974; rather, it became more localized. Rubén Figueroa, the
influential PRI cacique and descendent of 1910 Constitutionalist revolutionaries
kidnapped and held by PDLP guerrillas during the summer of 1974, assumed
the governorship in 1975 promising honest, transparent rule. His prior expe-
rience with political rivals and guerrillas, he stated, would not shape his rul-
ing style: “I enter this office without resentment or anger, with no thirst for
revenge . . . my government will always be open to dialogue.”43 The promises of
 146 ALEXANDER AVIÑA

dialogue, though, existed only as rhetoric, for the governor ruled despotically
and violently, exacting revenge on surviving guerrillas and guerrilla supporters
and attacking a bourgeoning human rights social movement anchored in the
state university. The torture and disappearance of activists, university students,
professors, Acapulco taxi drivers, common delinquents, and even some small-
scale narco-traffickers and drug pushers continued throughout Figueroa’s gov-
ernorship.44 “Death flights,” the use of military aircraft to dump prisoners into
the Pacific Ocean, likely increased in frequency after the death of Cabañas
in late 1974. Fishing communities located north of Acapulco told journalist
Simón Hipólito in the early 1980s that the sea “vomited” human remains,
clothes, sandals, and brassieres from the end of 1973 to 1975. Acapulco itself
was, as reported by local journalists, “a place of terror.”45 Despite the limited
democratic opening legislated by President José Luis Portillo (1976– 82), with
the 1977 legalization of leftist political parties and the 1978 amnesty for political
prisoners, Guerrero continued to suffer the Dirty War.46
To rule, Figueroa fundamentally depended upon a nexus of key military
officers and state police agents who had participated previously in the Dirty War
against the ACNR and PDLP, led by Major Mario Acosta Chaparro and Lieu-
tenant Colonel Francisco Quirós Hermosillo. Wilfrido Castro, police ( judicial )
commander in Acapulco, also played a key leadership role. The PDLP kid-
napping of a wealthy cacique’s son in March 1972— and the state response—
reveals the foundation of this military and police collaboration. Acosta Chap-
arro served as the counterinsurgent specialist link between the military and
DFS while also authoring many of the strategies used against PDLP guerrillas
that brutally targeted civilian supporters. “In the case of any detentions,” a
DFS document directed in reference to the kidnapping, “the detained should
be INTERROGATED [original emphasis] by Acosta Chaparro and Castro,” a
charge they continued under Figueroa.47 At the behest of the governor, all three
men remained in state and occupied important police positions. By 1977, after
serving as head of police in Acapulco and the coastal regions, Acosta Chaparro
became chief of all state police forces and personally counted on four police
groups, fifty agents in total and many from his native state of Chihuahua, to do
his bidding. Quirós Hermosillo served a more covert role as head of “Group
Blood,” a sanctioned death squad integrated by military and police personnel
originally created during the anti-PDLP struggle.48 “A repressive group,” as
described in a DFS report, it served “to avenge criticism voiced against the
Governor, or target individuals who have had problems with the Army or narco-
traffickers (in order to come to an agreement) . . . the majority of the detained
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 147

are disappeared.”49 Quirós Hermosillo gave the operating orders while Cap-
tain Francisco Javier Barquín50 personally commanded the thirty army soldiers
and state police officers that comprised the death squad. Barquín Alonso had
an additional duty: he allegedly coordinated the shipment of narcotics to the
northern frontier using Mexican Air Force planes.51
Declassified spy reports testify to the brutality of this military police nexus
that sustained Figueroa’s political rule— and its corruption. Indeed, members of
the governor’s cabinet along the repressive apparatuses he employed allegedly
worked with noted local narco-traffickers as early as 1976. An extensive DFS
analysis dated May 14, 1976, reports on rumors that both the head of the Aca-
pulco police, Lieutenant Colonel Luis Aguirre Ramírez, and the state attorney
general, Carlos Ulises Acosta Víquez, collaborated with known narco-traffickers
like Enrique Villalva. Aguirre Ramírez allegedly provided Villalva with an offi-
cial police (Policía Judicial) badge. The same report describes how local muck-
raking journalists targeted Acosta Chaparro for “his shady operations that yield
large sums of money.”52 Though more research is needed, it seems that the
Figueroa administration helped cement the political, military, and police rela-
tionships that historically and currently form the foundation of the Mexican
drug trade. Acosta Chaparro, Quirós Hermosillo, and Barquín Alonso were
later arrested and charged in military court in 2002 for narco-trafficking charges
related to their involvement with the Ciudad Juárez cartel.53 Police agents who
worked for these officers— Juventino Sánchez Gaytán, José Agustín Montiel
López, and Isidoro Galeana Abarca— would occupy important state police
commander posts during the 1980s as they collaborated with narco-traffickers
and the first national drug cartels fueled by Colombian cocaine money.54 Under
the cover of the Dirty War in Guerrero, its practitioners helped create important
segments of the Mexican narco-state.

CONCLUSION: “MUCH POLICE, LITTLE POLITICS”

There is, admittedly, a presentist impulse and urgency in this chapter, as the
opening paragraph on the Ayotzinapa students reveals. In the attempt to
formulate some sort of “diagnostic of the present,”55 a contemporary War on
Drugs that has claimed more than 150,000 lives and 30,000 disappearances
since 2006, we must look back to rebellious, intransigent highland regions in
states like Guerrero during the 1960s and ’70s. The Dirty War involved not just
the attempted physical and ideological elimination of two peasant guerrilla
 148 ALEXANDER AVIÑA

movements by terrorizing their base of popular support. It also generated a

new form of militarized governance in which the military— allied with key
cacique networks, politicians, some narco-traffickers, and police— served as a
sort of shadow sovereign working to identify and eliminate potential “insur-
gent” threats: rural teachers and professors, university students, poor peasant
communities, indigenous movements, and guerrilla cells that managed to grad-
ually regenerate after the killing of guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas in late 1974.
Counterinsurgency became a method of political rule with an outsized role
for military officials and police in Guerrero. The case of the disappeared Ayo-
tzinapa students revealed what many guerrerenses have known since at least
the mid-1960s: “The Mexican Army, according to many journalists and other
commentators is the real government authority in Guerrero state. ‘The army
knows the state millimeter by millimeter,’ a Mexican legislator pointed out in a
recent speech, ‘and they know minute by minute what’s happening there.’”56 This
is, to quote journalist Juan Angulo, the land of “much police, little politics.”57

NOTES
1. Benjamin, “On the Theory of Knowledge”; and Benjamin, “On the Concept of
History,” 396.
2. “White Paper on Drug Abuse, 1975: A Report to the President from the Domes-
tic Council Drug Abuse Task Force,” in Archivo General de la Nación [hereaf-
ter AGN], Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales [hereafter
DGIPS], c. 1675, ex. 3, 14.
3. Smith, “The Rise and Fall of Narcopopulism.”
4. Weimer, Seeing Drugs, 172– 214.
5. For a similar argument that helped clarify my thinking on these connections, see
Carey, Women Drug Traffickers, 158– 93.
6. “Lucio Cabañas Trafica con Drogas Para Adquirir Armas afirma Cuenca Díaz,”
Sol de México, October 24, 1974, in AGN, DGIPS, c. 1747B, ex. 7, 93.
7. Ruben Figueroa, quoted in Alberto Cañas G., “Declaró un senador: No son guer-
rilleros,” Ovaciones, July 15, 1972, in AGN, DGIPS, c. 1003, ex. 3.
8. Smith, “The Rise and Fall of Narcopopulism,” 147– 55.
9. Camp, Generals in the Palacio, 91– 93. Both Acosta Chaparro and Heine Rangel
wrote influential texts (for internal circulation within military circles and acade-
mies) on counterinsurgency and guerrilla warfare.
10. Williams, The Mexican Exception, 178.
11. Eduardo López Betancourt, quoted in Misael Habana de los Santos, “López
Betancourt: Personas vivas fueron tiradas desde aviones en la guerra sucia,” La
Jornada, November 30, 2003.
12. The epigraph at the beginning of this section is from Ascención Rosas Mesino’s
interview with the author, Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, May 16, 2007.
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 149

13. Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 53.

14. Aviña, Specters of Revolution, 93.
15. “Terror en Guerrero,” Política 74, May 15, 1963, 28, quoted in Bartra, Guerrero
bronco, 99– 100.
16. Rath, Myths of Demilitarization, 116.
17. Sierra Guzmán, “Armed Forces and Counterinsurgency,” 183– 88.
18. Toro, Mexico’s War on Drugs, 11– 18.
19. For Operation Intercept, see Timmons, “Trump’s Wall at Nixon’s Border.”
20. See, for instance, AGN, Secretaría de Defensa Nacional [hereafter SDN], box 101,
file 301, 9– 14, 37– 39.
21. In 2002, government witness (and participant in the Dirty War) Gustavo Tarín
Chávez testified and provided the number of fifteen hundred disappeared persons.
Gustavo Castillo García, “Acosta y Quirós ordenaron matar a más de mil 500,” La
Jornada, November 18, 2002.
22. Radilla’s eldest son was with him on the bus and witnessed the exchange. Tita Radilla
Martínez, interview with the author; and Rosendo Radilla Betancourt, quoted in
“Publica la Secretaría de Gobernación la semblanza de Rosendo Radilla, el campes-
ino desaparecido por el Ejército en 1974,” El Sur de Acapulco, February 24, 2013.
23. That day arrived on July 18, 1978, when DFS agents abducted and disappeared
Cárdenas and her partner (and PDLP militant) Antonio Hernández in Mexico
City. They spent several months in clandestine prisons, tortured and interrogated,
only being released after students and colleagues from the Universidad Autónoma
de Guerrero mobilized to demand their “re-appearance.” Cárdenas, interview with
the author.
24. Rosas Mesino, interview with the author; Radilla Martínez, interview with the
author; Cárdenas, interview with the author; Mesino Acosta, interview with the
author; and Bartra, “Sur Profundo,” 67.
25. Radilla Martínez, interview with the author; AGN, DGIPS box 1067, file 3, 18–
19; and “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” Special Prosecutor for Social and Political
Movements of the Past (leaked version) [hereafter FEMOSPP Filtrado], 86– 87.
26. AGN, Dirección Federal de Seguridad [hereafter DFS], 100-10-16-4, legajo
6, 153, 176, 188– 89; and “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado,
56– 59.
27. AGN, DFS, 11– 4, legajo 190, 166– 67; and “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEM-
OSPP Filtrado, 59.
28. AGN, DGIPS, box 674, folder 1; and Bartra, Guerrero Bronco, 117.
29. “Rubén Figueroa.”
30. Aviña, “‘We have Returned to Porfirian Times.’”
31. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 239– 54; Rosas Mesino, author’s interview.
32. Lazau-Ratz, “Foucauldian Counterinsurgency,” 51.
33. Don Cutberto Calderón, interview with journalist Gloria Leticia Díaz, in Díaz,
“A 27 años de una masacre, el recuerdo huele a pólvora.” Proceso, September 30,
2000.
34. Fierro Santiago, El último disparo, 105– 6.
 150 ALEXANDER AVIÑA

35. Ibid., 105– 7; Diaz, “A 27 años de una massacre.”

36. Díaz, “A 27 años de una massacre.”
37. AGN, DGIPS box 2610, folder 1, 40, 226.
38. Diaz, “A 27 años de una massacre.”
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid.; and Fierro Santiago, El último disparo, 112– 15.
41. AGN, SDN box 92, folder 277, 178; AGN, SDN box 97, folder 289, 59, 63– 68; and
AGN, DGIPS box 2610, folder 1, 40, 226.
42. AGN, DGIPS box 2610, folder 1, 226.
43. AGN, DFS, Versión Pública [hereafter VP], “Rubén Figueroa Figueroa,” Legajo
2, 166 (100– 10– 1, L. 51).
44. Even local police officers could be kidnapped, as occurred in early November 1976.
AGN, DFS, VP, “Mario Acosta Chaparro Escapite,” Legajo 1, 4 (100-10-1, 306),
12, 13; AGN, DFS, VP, “Francisco Barquín Alonso,” Legajo 1, 11, 13– 14.
45. Hipólito, Guerrero, Amnistía y Represión, 161– 63; “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,”
FEMOSPP Filtrado, 130– 31; “Chiro Galeana, de los poco policías guerrerenses de
la contrainsurgencia,” El Sur, January 5, 2004.
46. Covertly, Portillo López authorized the paramilitary “White Brigade” to act, in
effect, as an anti-urban guerrilla death squad that destroyed the 23rd of September
Communist League.
47. AGN, DFS, VP, “Acosta Chaparro,” Legajo 1, 1– 3. Human rights officials in
Mexico attribute at least 143 murders to Figueroa’s main enforcer, General Mario
Acosta Chaparro (then a major) and his pistol that he dubbed the “Avenging
Sword.” Juan Veledíaz, “Acosta Chaparro: Las deudas de una boina verde,” Animal
Político, April 21, 2012.
48. AGN, DGIPS box 1067, file 3, 18– 19 (dated January 9, 1974); and “La Guerra Sucia
en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 86– 87 (FEMOSSP investigators obtained this
information from DFS records).
49. AGN, DFS, VP, “Rubén Figueroa Figueroa,” Legajo 2, 137 (100-10-1-76, L.63).
50. For a specific accusation against Barquín Alonso, see AGN, SDN box 41, file
116, 2.
51. Gustavo Tarín Chávez testified against all three officers. Jorge Alejandro Medellín,
“Muere militar implicado en la guerra sucia,” El Universal, July 8, 2005.
52. AGN, DFS, VP, “Acosta Chaparro,” Legajo 1, 5– 10.
53. Francisco Gómez and Jorge Ramos, “Desde los 70, Quirós y Acosta en el narco,”
El Universal, October 24, 2002.
54. Jesús Aranda, “Desde los 70s, la carrera delictiva de Montiel López,” La Jornada,
June 15, 2004; Padgett, “Guerrero, red de narcos, policías y politicos”; “Montiel,
según el ex procurador de Morelos,” El Sur, April 16, 2004; “Del expediente de
Carrera Fuentes,” Proceso, July 18, 1998.
55. Dean and Villadsen, “Introduction,” 5.
56. Goldman, “Crisis in Mexico.”
57. Juan Angulo, quoted in Preston and Dillon, Opening Mexico, 281.
 A WAR AGAINST POOR PEOPLE 151

BIBLIOGRAPHY
ARCHIVES
Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City
Ramo Dirección Federal de Seguridad
Ramo Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales
Ramo Secretaría de Defensa Nacional
Versiones Públicas, Archivo General de la Nación
“Mario Acosta Chaparro Escapite,” Dirección Federal de Seguridad
“Francisco Barquín Alonso,” Dirección Federal de Seguridad
“Rubén Figueroa Figueroa,” Dirección Federal de Seguridad

INTERVIEWS
Cárdenas, Alejandra. Author’s interview. Chilpancingo, Guerrero, April 23, 2007.
Mesino Acosta, Hilario. Author’s interview. Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero, May 17, 2007.
Mesino (Don Chon), Ascención Rosas. Author’s interview. Atoyac de Álvarez, Guer-
rero, May 16, 2007.
Radilla Martínez, Tita. Author’s interview. Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero, May 16,
2007.

NEWSPAPERS
Animal Político
El Sur de Acapulco
El Universal
La Jornada

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