UC Press Blog

By Gladys I. McCormick, author of The Last Door: A History of Torture in Mexico's War against Subversives

Why do I study the history of contemporary political violence in Mexico? My answer has evolved across time. At first, I wanted to offer a basic accounting of what had happened: the who, what, where, when type of analysis because few scholars had done so. My motivation then expanded to include highlighting the experience of the victims and their families to ensure that their suffering had a chapter in the official canon of Mexican history. I also aimed to understand the moral calculus underpinning complicity in sanctioning state terror. Why did the perpetrators of radical evil in the Mexican case get away with it and, in fact, go on to have long careers in public service? 

I originally started looking into repression as part of my dissertation on rural economic development and corruption in mid-twentieth century Mexico. Violence proved to be a resounding feature of the archival evidence. I arrived at the National Archive in Mexico City during the summer of 2002, the same week that the government opened up access to declassified documents from the secret police – the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate, DFS) – covering the period from the 1950s to the early 1980s. I started working with these files because of the volume of financial data they contained on the inner-workings of the sugar industry and economic development strategies. My research for this initial project stopped in 1965, but it was clear that there was much material in these declassified collections that revealed how state power worked in Mexico. 

I returned to Mexico to study political prisoners and the practice of torture in the post-1965 period. I began with political prisoners because mentions of them proliferated in the historical records, both earlier and later than Mexico’s infamous 1968 massacre. Even more viscerally, the National Archive of Mexico is located in what was, until 1990, the principal federal penitentiary housing political prisoners. I conducted research here on tables located in the hallways between former prison cells, which now housed boxes of documents. The intense monitoring I endured while researching declassified military and secret police files added to the oppressive sense of surveillance prisoners must have endured while there just a few decades earlier. Not only was the list of restrictions daunting (pencils, gloves, no cameras, space between researchers, no talking, limited access to files, delays because the policies redacting information on the documents changed from day-to-day), but officers wandered the aisles carrying machine guns.

As I researched the project, the present kept intruding in my analysis of the recent past. I wanted to understand impunity to figure out ways of counteracting its noxious influence, which is undermining Mexico and prolonging its security crisis. I have lived in Mexico off and on since the mid-1990s, and over those three decades, I have witnessed Mexico become more dangerous than ever before. I keep thinking that there is going to be a teleological historical arc bringing progress and improvement in peoples’ lives. History must be about change, even though there may be some continuities. I was not prepared for a backwards arc, where the security situation is now considerably worse today than ten or twenty years ago. The explanation for this lies at the intersection of the failure of the rule of law and impunity. Mexico is a country where less than 10% of crimes get reported and, of those reported, less than 3% reach some form of conclusion in investigation and prosecution. These statistics are damning. Yet, they are part of a dysfunctional normal that political figures unquestionably condemn, while simultaneously benefitting from alliances with organized crime and other forms of illicit activity. This status quo is endemic throughout Mexican society, where folks protest against their victimization, trying to call attention to the realities of ubiquitous extortion and kidnapping, but are unable to arrive at any solution beyond mere political platitudes. 

I use the analogy of living with shades of grey to explain how political violence is nested in a space of discomfort and ambiguity. Civil society and politicians alike suspend disbelief and argue that there is little we can do to make change happen. In the same way that impunity reigns today, it reigned supreme in the 1970s. Civil society turned a blind eye to state-sponsored terror then and chose to believe the official version that the armed forces looked out for national security. That type of social complacency, which veers towards complicity, comes from the lack of viable options and from the extreme costs faced by those who condemned the status quo. 

My new book unpacks how everyday Mexicans as well as those in law enforcement believed government officials acted in the name of the common good when killing (or ordering the killing of) their fellow citizens without due process. This was not a top-down imposition of an agreed-upon truth. This was very much a mutually constitutive reality that gradually chipped away at the institutions intended to protect Mexicans: the police and the military. For this reason, I include a chapter attempting to understand the role of torturers and another on what I refer to as the making of the subversive. I also propose that the so-called enemy in this dirty war was not an individual per se as it was in other cases in the region, rather it was entire family units. As I researched the book, I kept coming across the fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters of alleged subversives getting detained, tortured, and imprisoned solely because of their blood connection to an enemy of the state. The depth of impunity in Mexico allowed for unimaginable forms of terror that implicated vast swaths of the population. I conclude that state-sponsored torture in Mexico was not about extracting information, but rather about nurturing a brotherhood among those carrying out the acts of violence and punishing the family unit for allowing their brethren to commit acts of treason. In this state of perpetual siege, there was no place for the rule of law, let alone accountability.