Mexico's hidden Cold War: How a state turned its own security forces against citizens
Between the 1960s and 1980s, Mexico waged an internal conflict against its own people. Under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the state utilized systematic torture, extrajudicial executions, and clandestine detention centers to suppress political dissent. This era of state-sponsored violence remains a haunting, often overlooked chapter of the global Cold War.
The Mexican Dirty War, or Guerra sucia, was an internal conflict spanning from the 1960s to the 1980s. During this period, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) government, supported by the United States, targeted student movements, rural guerrillas, and political dissidents. As the state shifted toward a police state, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) expanded its reach, with its agent count rising from 120 in 1965 to 1,008 by 1982. The government employed brutal tactics, including death flights and sexual violence, to maintain control and silence opposition.
Resistance emerged from various fronts, including student rallies and rural insurgencies led by former schoolteachers like Lucio Cabañas and Genaro Vázquez Rojas. These groups, such as the Party of the Poor and the September 23 Communist League, engaged in kidnappings and armed clashes. In response, the state escalated its repression, culminating in infamous events like the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre. Estimates suggest that between 1964 and 1982, approximately 7,000 individuals were tortured, while around 3,000 were killed or disappeared.
For decades, the true scale of the violence remained obscured. It was not until the 2000 election of Vicente Fox—the first non-PRI president in 71 years—that the government began to confront this history. A 2002 report commissioned by Fox accused the state of genocide, a finding that, while contested by some officials, is widely accepted as an accurate assessment of government culpability. In 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador released previously undisclosed archives and issued an official apology, signaling a long-delayed attempt to reckon with the state's role in the suffering of its citizens.
Source: Mexican Dirty War
