Twenty years ago, thousands of pages of intelligence reports from Mexico’s Ministry of the Interior passed into the public domain. The opening of the secret police archives has had a major impact on the post-Revolutionary historiography, with historians using the reports – produced by two agencies, the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) and the Federal Directorate of Political and Social Investigations (DFIPS)—to write about the post-revolutionary period. Dating mostly from 1947 to 1985 these documents have constituted central sources for a wide array of studies, from student, worker, campesino and indigenous protest; to the inner workings of institutions such as the military and the official party; to the role of key population sectors such as the middle class.

This panel reflects on the effects of this vast collection in shaping twentieth-century historiography by discussing, on the one hand, their use by historians of post-revolutionary Mexico, and on the other, proposing new methods for combining these intelligence sources with other recently available source-bodies. The case studies will examine rural normales (teacher-training schools); the relationship between the radical left and indigenous movements; everyday economic crimes and financialization; and the connections between counter-insurgency and the war on drugs.

Louise Walker presents a history of quotidian economic crime, examining the prison files of people jailed for writing uncovered cheques from the 1940s to the 1970s. Reading these documents against-the-grain, and alongside cultural and newspaper sources, she shows how customary economic practices were criminalized to advance financial capitalism and financialization. Tony Wood looks at the changing meanings of the concept of self-determination (autodeterminación) in mid-century Mexico. He tracks the shifting usage of the term by diplomats, indigenous movements, and the radical left, drawing on sources produced within these different milieux as well as Mexican intelligence files, and asks how these realms were both connected and distanced from each other within the Cold War international context. Tanalís Padilla compares the narratives of subversion produced by intelligence sources about the rural normales to the stories that emerge from documents housed at the school archives themselves in addition to student memoirs. Alexander Aviña explores the convergence of counterinsurgent and counter-narcotic logics and campaigns in rural southern Mexico during the 1970s. Based on police and military intelligence files, he suggests that drug interdiction formed a key component of a broader “dirty war” waged against rural communities.

This twenty-year anniversary strikes us as a particularly propitious time to appraise the way in which intelligence reports have shaped the historiography. After two decades of research, much of which uses the Ministry of the Interior reports as central sources, there is a robust post-revolutionary historiography upon which to reflect. Moreover, in these two decades the collection itself has been subject to closures, first for political reasons, and then due to the pandemic. Both dynamics forced historians to reappraise and, in some instances, retool. This panel hopes to strike a stimulating discussion in the wake of such processes.