Portillo’s Dirty War

Regarding López Portillo in particular, the power elite have generally downplayed his campaign against political dissent, when in fact the former president was a hawkish, iron-hearted Cold War warrior and a major human rights offender. Instead, the former president is mostly recognized for presiding over runaway inflation and ballooning foreign debt.

López Portillo belonged to a triumvirate of former presidents — all of whom also had connections to the CIA — who waged a “dirty war” against leftist political dissenters and armed revolutionary organizations between 1964 and 1982. Under these three presidents, the Mexican Armed Forces, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (or DFS, the notorious secret police), and paramilitary groups committed egregious human rights violations. Agents and soldiers were left to their own devices to track down, torture, rape, and kidnap peasants and students, terrorize rural communities and wreak havoc on their crops, and perform extrajudicial executions and disappearances. Today many victims’ whereabouts remain unknown, though it’s likely that security forces dumped many bodies into mass graves or cast them into the Pacific Ocean from military aircraft in what were known as vuelos de la muerte (death flights).

Echeverría and Díaz Ordaz’s reign of terror on political dissent and their human rights violations are common knowledge, but they have eclipsed López Portillo’s contributions to the dirty war, for which he mostly avoided public castigation and legal consequences during his lifetime. Like his predecessors, López Portillo expressed guttural hatred toward radical militants and leftists. He also made the dirty war his own, contributing to the further professionalization of the national security apparatus and amplifying state repression out of personal spite.

The chance revelation of the recently declassified memo offers a propitious opportunity to reexamine López Portillo’s legacy and expose his role in the counterinsurgency against revolutionaries whose true cost of life we’ll likely never know.

Origins of a Cold Warrior

José Guillermo Abel López Portillo was born in 1920 to a family with an impressive political and intellectual pedigree dating back to the Spanish colonial era. Reportedly, López Portillo loved telling people he was “raised in the nobility.” In 1945, López Portillo joined the PRI but didn’t formally engage in politics. Instead, he practiced law for several years, landed a billet at his alma mater, and taught at the ​​National Polytechnic Institute. Allegedly inspired by then president Adolfo López Mateo’s rise to power, he stopped practicing law in 1960 to initially hold minor positions in government offices.

From then on, López Portillo enjoyed an active political life and secured high-ranking positions in the government, such as under secretary of the presidency under President Díaz Ordaz. Of course, none of these milestones would have been possible without his childhood friend, Luis Echeverría, who facilitated his entrance into the power elite club and whose leverage came in handy throughout his political career. Under Echeverría’s administration, he served as the director of the Federal Electricity Commission (1972–73) and then secretary of finance and public credit (1973–75).

Like other priístas (members of the PRI), López Portillo subscribed to a double standard that characterized Mexico’s Cold War politics. State functionaries and presidents at the height of the Cold War loved to boast about Mexico’s democratic institutions and condemn military regimes in the Southern Cone. President Echeverría — famous for his role in the dirty war — proclaimed Mexico a champion of the Third World and a supporter of all oppressed people. The country maintained an open-door policy toward political exiles escaping persecution, mainly from Chile and Argentina.

However, this outward depiction of Mexico as a champion of social justice hid a sinister reality. At home, the Mexican government employed counterinsurgency methods that mirrored those of military regimes in South America against homegrown movements that threatened the existing social order and aspired to transform society from the ground up. Between 1940 and 1982, the PRI government repressed rural resistance in the state of Morelos, a railroad workers’ strike, two guerrilla movements in Guerrero, a student movement in 1968, and urban guerrilla movements.

In 1976, López Portillo ran for president unopposed, even as a small handful of other political parties were also allowed to run candidates, to succeed his childhood friend. Upon taking office, he had to grapple with a flagging economy, an unhappy industrial class, continual calls for political reform, and urban guerrilla resistance that, despite waning, kept the counterinsurgency in the cities busy.

The Dirty War as Personal Vendetta

In Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, author Jefferson Morley chronicles the agency’s heyday in Mexico under the tutelage of Station Chief Winston “Win” Scott, speaking to the centrality of Mexico in the United States’ anti-communist crusade. With the onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s, the Soviet Union and the United States vied to establish a foothold in Mexico — an objective that became ever more crucial after the Cuban Revolution. Against this backdrop, the US government transformed the CIA station in Mexico City into one of its most important offices and Mexico into a Cold War battleground. According to Morley, Mexico City “became a labyrinth of espionage, a city of intrigue like Vienna or Casablanca with the spies of at least four powers angling for advantage: the United States, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Mexico.”

Amid the political convulsions in Latin America, the Mexican government enjoyed flaunting its democratic system. So when guerrilla movements began to emerge in force in the 1970s, it refused to admit they existed. US intelligence memos and cables, however, tell a different story, one of a state worried about the growth of armed revolutionary groups threatening its democratic facade. Given their history and familiarity with US intelligence, Echeverría and López Portillo knew that it mattered that Mexico could show it could handle the problem.

The counterinsurgency that fought rural and urban guerrilla movements during the 1970s involved all branches of Mexico’s national security machine. In the mountains of Guerrero, the Mexican Army viciously wrestled against two guerrilla movements — the Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria and the Partido de los Pobres — laying waste to poor peasant communities. Soldiers torched villages, kidnapped alleged guerrilla conspirators, and committed sexual violence.

Law enforcement and the unit known as the White Brigade, an elite squad of about two hundred agents, supervised by the ruthless Miguel Nazar Haro (aka “El Turco”), operated primarily in the cities. Created in the summer of 1976, the brigade hunted down and neutralized guerrillas, particularly members of the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, Mexico’s most prominent urban guerrilla organization at the time. With the DFS deeming “the death of police officers and soldiers as terrorism,” agents became obsessed with exterminating ligistas by any means.

Of course, López Portillo didn’t need additional motivation to prolong the dirty war — at least not until August 11, 1976, when members of the Liga’s Red Brigade tried to abduct his sister, Margarita, just over a month after he won the presidential election. According to reports, a car driven by revolutionaries intercepted Margarita’s small escort in the Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City. David Jiménez Sarmiento “Chano,” the prominent urban guerrilla figure and leader, emerged from the car wielding a machine gun and began spraying the Rambler Classic of the president-elect’s sister with bullets. In the end, Margarita López Portillo survived, but one bodyguard died, and two others were wounded. For the Liga, the action proved costly. Chano didn’t survive the gunfight, inflicting a devastating blow on the organization and exacerbating its already fragile situation.

The attempted kidnapping of a member of the elite would have compelled López Portillo to respond swiftly. But the fact that the target had been his sister made it personal. López Portillo unleashed the White Brigade against the Liga. From then on, the urban counterinsurgency started to measure its success less on apprehending revolutionaries and more on eliminating them.

López Portillo’s Rightful Legacy

Yet López Portillo, like his predecessors, had to maintain Mexico’s democratic facade unspoiled. He espoused a mellower foreign policy compared to Echeverría, even denouncing President Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua and expressing support for the Sandinista revolutionaries fighting to overthrow him. He also enacted the 1977 Electoral Political Reform and the 1978 Amnesty Law.

The former was purportedly meant to democratize elections, opening the door to opposition parties, namely the revolutionary left, to participate in elections, while the latter granted amnesty to many guerrilla fighters, who generally didn’t rejoin the revolutionary underground for legal and personal reasons. Still, the Liga remained active for another few years. Reportedly, López Portillo was up in arms that the remaining organizations didn’t disintegrate soon after his reforms, and he vowed to do away with them once and for all.

In the long term, these reforms at least succeeded in concealing the gravity of López Portillo’s human rights violations. Indeed, Echeverría and Díaz Ordaz have borne the brunt of criticism from human rights groups, victims, former revolutionaries, academics, and the ordinary citizens who clamored for justice until their deaths. When Díaz Ordaz died, people lamented that he never faced the music for the 1968 student massacre. When Echeverría passed in mid-2022, at the age of one hundred, people flooded social media with messages attacking him and wishing he had lived to see the inside of an international criminal court for crimes against humanity. Ultimately, a court did place Echeverría under house arrest in 2006 for his part in the 1968 student massacre, but, in 2009, a Mexican federal court cleared him of any responsibility.

López Portillo’s death in 2004, on the other hand, didn’t generate much public outcry. Instead, newspapers made López Portillo’s deplorable economic policies the focus of their reporting, especially the $76 billion external debt and the 215 percent inflation rate he left in 1982. The media, for the most part, glossed over his human rights violations.

But the CIA didn’t make López Portillo an asset for no reason: they identified him as a Cold War warrior who would keep radical leftists at bay and take the necessary measures to eliminate subversive threats to the capitalist order in Mexico. As with Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría, CIA agents found their guy in López Portillo.