Counterinsurgency by Another Name: Reading 1970s Drug Wars in Mexico’s Secret Police Archives

What histories of political violence and state terror can declassified Mexican secret police archives help uncover? In tracing the links between counterinsurgent “dirty wars” and the political economy of narcotics in southwestern Mexico during the 1960s and early 70s, my paper argues that, in logic and practice, the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) violent campaigns against social movements and drugs constituted a singular “war:” a war against poor people. Declassified police and military documents shed light on how high-ranking PRI and military leaders publicly described counterinsurgency operations in the state of Guerrero as “wars against narco-traffickers” while key military and police officials on the ground waged state terror against civilian populations suspected of supporting revolutionary guerrilla movements. At least 700 guerrerenses remain disappeared. These same officials, after militarily defeating the guerrillas in the mid-1970s, would play a key role in cementing Guerrero’s place as a major producer and exporter of marijuana and opium poppies. By showing the historically permeable, if non-existent, boundary between dirty wars and drug wars, I suggest the urgent need to rethink the origins of today’s horrific levels of violence in Mexico that began in 2006 with yet another drug war iteration.