The possibility of reckoning with security sectors that appear to be responsible for the repression in the authoritarian PRI period 1951-2000 has left in the air the investigation of the superior reasons that caused armed social explosions, attempts to overthrow the constitutional State and a true internal civil war; the socialist revolution.
The argument that the repression served to prevent democratizing concessions by the authoritarian sector of the PRI is valid, but limited. The confrontation of pro-Cuban revolutionary sectors against the authoritarian institutions of the Mexican State had as an ideological scenario the capitalism-socialism cold war that the United States imposed in Latin America from the 1947 national security act that founded the CIA and led to the creation of the Directorate Mexican Federal Security as political police of the State that defended the US model against the Soviet Union-Cuba regional alliance.
The repression against urban and rural social dissidence in Mexico was an extension of the US model of preventing democratic expressions of protest for local reasons; and although there are no direct communicating vessels between the guerrillas of Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez with the revolutionary expansion of Cuba, the model was imposed from Havana as part of the revolutionary export of Fidel Castro, despite the fact that Mexico would have disobeyed the orders of the White House, had not broken diplomatic relations with Cuba and was the only political passageway from Havana to the American continent.
In this context, the repression of the PRI State had two tracks: on the one hand, to avoid social organization outside the PRI and to dismantle the possibilities of protests in the streets, above all to deactivate the capacity of different anti-system social networks; and on the other hand, to combat the anti-American and socialist political organization via guerrilla groups that sought the defeat of the State and that responded to the ideological interests of Havana.
The Mexican repressive tactic was a local expression of the counterinsurgency approach of the US national security strategy to prevent the organization of national socialist liberation cadres. It was an approach that the White House put into operation throughout Latin America and that naturally led to the establishment of South American military dictatorships to contain the advance of socialist organizations.
Hence the importance of understanding that the true files of the dirty war are not found in the Mexican security offices, except for the daily record of arrests, interrogations and dark trails to disappear dissidents. The authentic information about the dirty war in Mexico is found in the files of the CIA and the counterinsurgency offices of the US Department of Defense, especially those in charge of training repressive cadres in the US classrooms of the School of the Americas in Panama.
What remains to be clarified is the part of the repression of dissidence by Mexican security that had to do with the authoritarian and police containment of the protest and the part that responded to US counterinsurgent interests who fearfully saw that Mexico had become an irregular territory of the revolutionary expansion of Cuba. Without going into paranoid approaches, there is evidence of militants of the old Mexican Communist Party who had guerrilla training –that is, armed to overthrow governments– in Cuba, the Soviet Union, North Korea and revolutionary countries in Africa.
This part of the dirty war has not been investigated in Mexico, but there is sufficient evidence that a good part of the ideological repression was applied by the clandestine counterinsurgency advisory offices of the United States to Mexican security offices, among them, in the 1960s. and 1970s, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), one of whose emblematic cases was the kidnapping and murder of coach Dan Mitrione in Uruguay in 1970 because he was giving torture classes to soldiers and policemen from That country.
In the context of reconciliation, the secret archives of the CIA, the US embassy in Mexico and the Pentagon have yet to be opened in order to be clear about the decisive role of the United States in the dirty war in Mexico.
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policy for dummies: Politics is behind politics.
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