In their 2007 detective novel collaboration The Uncomfortable Dead, Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Subcomandante Marcos (as was) conceive a character—Morales—who stands for the many and various evils of Mexico over the last fifty or so years. An agent of state and private repression—whether of 1970s activists, or indigenous campesinos in 1990s Chiapas—it emerges that Morales was, by necessity, a many-headed hydra. Taibo’s private investigator asks, “Is there one Morales or are there several?” Marcos’ Zapatista detective replies, “The Evil is really big, so there have to be several Bad guys.”
Gladys McCormick’s new book, The Last Door, is an invaluable contribution to our understanding of this “really big Evil”. It claims to be a history of state torture in Mexico, specifically during the height of counterinsurgency operations from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In fact, its scope is much broader. McCormick’s previous research examines the mechanisms of authoritarian rule in rural Mexico. The Last Door offers crucial insights into how the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) maintained power in the period following the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Torture is the focus, but themes of violence, fear, impunity, democracy, and human rights bubble throughout.
Nobody today disputes that Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, or Brazil experienced a so-called “dirty war” two generations ago. However, the public sphere has seen a lively and useful debate over the use of the term “dirty war” and what is conceded or implied by its use. Uki Goñi has perhaps most prominently argued for its discontinuation, both because it legitimates state terror—and even genocide—and also because it constructs a false narrative suggesting an ongoing symmetrical conflict. Note that the idea of a war was explicitly rejected by the courts trying the Argentine Junta members; as Goñi himself said, “there was no war… it was a rabbit hunt”. In addition, distressingly, the past decade has seen the rise of a well-funded and noisy Latin American far right, which makes the case—sometimes directly, sometimes leaning heavily on euphemism or allusion—that such “cleansing” of “subversives” was both necessary and justified. Argentina’s Vice-President Victoria Villaruel has campaigned to have those convicted of state terrorism recognised as “political prisoners”, as well as attempting to undermine the accepted numbers of victims.
What McCormick shows beyond doubt is that plenty of Mexicans did see and understand what was happening.
Mexico, as is often the case, stands apart from its southern neighbors. It took perhaps thirty years longer for discussions of torture, kidnapping, extrajudicial murder, and widespread harassment to evolve into a systemic critique of authoritarian abuse. There are, I think, three reasons for this notable lag. Firstly, many scholars—both in Mexico and abroad—were actively hostile to the idea that the country had experienced anything like what occurred in Argentina or Chile. The idea was “unthinkable” partly because “Mexico was different” and partly because “nobody saw it.” Of course, there is a vast gulf between “nobody saw it” and “it didn’t happen,” but what McCormick shows beyond doubt is that plenty of Mexicans did see and understand what was happening. This is noteworthy and troubling, as it rather definitively opens up a discussion of the relationship between experience and denial. The second reason is that Mexico has avoided the wave of far-right resurgence that has consumed much of South America—and to a lesser extent, Central America. As such, arguments over Cold War legacies seem to have somewhat less urgency than in, say, Brazil or Chile.
The third reason acknowledgement of Mexico’s own appalling campaign of violence and intimidation took so long is also amply demonstrated by McCormick’s in The Last Door—in short, it worked. Mexico’s programme of detention, torture, and murder was, argues McCormick, designed to eradicate the individual. Sometimes this eradication was physical, sometimes social, and sometimes psychological. Over the course of six chapters, the reader is given a gruellingly detailed schematic of the process from arrest through detention—very often accompanied by torture—to personal and familial harassment or secondary detention. I was initially skeptical about the value of breaking down the process in such a mechanical way, but it works superbly, establishing continuities between the government of Díaz Ordaz in the 1960s and those of Echeverría and López Mateos in the 1970s. The torture was carried out at arm’s length, by state agencies including the White Brigade (from 1976), Mexico’s own Operation Condor (from 1977), and the Grupo Jaguar (from 1981), but in what was effectively a one-party state, the PRI and its leaders bore ultimate responsibility.
As Mexico continues its partial, halting engagement with this chapter of its history, McCormick’s book provides a timely and pointed impetus for both recognition of culpability and victimhood, and for—perhaps, at last—accountability.
In the first chapter, the methodologies of torture are established with excruciating clarity: torture extended beyond the physical, of course, and while water and electricity were used as tools of pain, psychological violence was a constant. We are launched fairly abruptly into the crux of McCormick’s book, but in chapter two, the lens is withdrawn, concentrating on the means by which prisoners were politicized. This step back feels almost filmic—the opening scene of torture, the next showing the backstory—but not overly contrived. The filmic approach continues as chapter three shifts focus to the torturers; the incalculable crimes of Miguel Nazar Haro, Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, and Francisco Quirós Hermosillo, among others, are set in biographical and institutional contexts. Chapter four is a bleak overview of how detainees became political prisoners and the traumas left by this transition. These traumas reached far beyond the prisoners themselves, however, and chapter five offers a heartrending portrait of the multifarious ways that prisoners’ families were harassed, ostracised, and—often—broken. The sixth and final substantive chapter looks closely at three lesser-known case studies, offering fascinating, nuanced, and surprising details.
Throughout the book, the reader gets a clear sense of both continuities in the personnel enacting torture and of diffused networks of organization. While these networks—parts of the repressive apparatuses of the state—overlap in places, they have their own identities and jurisdictions. This had the double effect of obscuring the precise hierarchical position of perpetrators while cultivating a sense that one or more of these entities was always watching. Here, both of McCormick’s recurring analytical tropes—institutionalization and impunity—are crucial. Another important theme that emerges from the book is continuity over time. While the nominal focus runs from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, McCormick finds earlier precedents while making abundantly clear both the traumatic after-effects of state violence as well as its continued deployment by various state or state-adjacent agents.
As Mexico continues its partial, halting engagement with this chapter of its history, McCormick’s book provides a timely and pointed impetus for both recognition of culpability and victimhood, and for—perhaps, at last—accountability. Thus far, Mexicans have been rightly skeptical about the possibility of the latter, but widespread exasperation with impunity has never been more powerful. It has contributed to the seismic political shift in the country over the last decade, but has not been completely co-opted or blunted by the incumbent government. Whether and how Morena effectively addresses sixty years of state violence will be a crucial part of its legacy.
Dr. William A. Booth is a Lecturer in Latin American History at University College London. He is currently finishing a book on the left in Latin America during the early Cold War.