"The Government is the Delinquent": Terror and Counterinsurgency in Guerrero, Mexico, 1960–80

With few important exceptions scholars tend to conceptualize violence as an extraneous agent in civil societies, targeted for elimination by modern states meant to maintain social order.  Until recently, such representations of violence permeated Cold War histories of.  An interdisciplinary assortment of scholars described post-1940 as a “Golden Age” characterized by economic miracles and political stability.  When violence “erupted” in a variety of guises—political, social, and economic—it was explained away as an aberration, successfully controlled by a one-party state, and insignificant on the nation’s teleological path to democracy.  Within a contemporary Latin America marked by violent coups and terroristic military dictatorships, Cold War thus appeared exceptional:  a national island of stability surrounded by turbulent continental seas that served as Cold War battlegrounds.

            Yet, dissecting the “Golden Age” myth at the regional level reveals that violence served as a constitutive facet of the Cold War Mexican state.  The regime exercised both spectacular and everyday forms of terror to maintain its dual project of political centralization and exclusionary capitalist modernization.  During the 1960s and 70s, the state transformed the southwestern state of Guerrero into a battleground, wielding violence and terror as counterinsurgency weapons against democracy-minded civic movements, independent rural unions, and radicalized peasants-turned-guerrillas.  My paper chronicles how acts such as torture, rape, and the “disappearing” of persons functioned as means through which to control and discipline populations demanding a more just existence.   Using oral interviews and recently declassified government archives, my paper demonstrates how state terror worked as a mediator of hegemony in Cold War Guerrero, violently re-inscribing state rule on the bodies of thousands of Guerrero’s population.  This corporeal history thus fully inserts into a continental Cold War history.