“Do not plunder in the archives, for nothing is recorded”: Reading Cold War Mexican Peasant Rebellions in an Archive of Counter-Insurgency

Until recently, historians of Mexico left the post-1940 epoch to the domain of economists, political scientists, and sociologists. Citing a perceived lack of primary sources, while maintaining their focus on the 1910 revolution, such inattention on the part of historians tended to feed the myth of Pax Priísta propagated by the post-revolutionary Mexican state; that is, a portrayal of post-1940 history as a “Golden Age” characterized by economic miracles, political stability, and the inexistence of popular protest.  Yet, the “Golden Age” fundamentally depended upon a dark underbelly.

During the 1960s and 70s two peasant guerrilla insurgencies erupted in the southwestern state of Guerrero. Led by rural schoolteachers, these rebellions protested the ruling PRI party's dual project of political authoritarianism and capitalist modernization. Subsequent military counter-insurgency campaigns waged by the PRI both brutally defeated the guerrillas and ensured that the historical episode remain restricted to clandestinity: to the memories of terrorized peasants and the angry whispers of left-wing university students in Mexico City. By the mid-1970s, the PRI could publically announce that they had successfully defeated organized groups of “criminals and bandits” in Guerrero—not popularly supported guerrilla insurgencies.

Yet, the recent declassification of millions of documents produced by the Mexican military and intelligence agencies (after the 2000 PRI electoral defeat) offer new opportunities for excavating the post-1940 period. My paper will explore the methodological and historiographical challenges of piecing together the clandestine history of Guerrero's peasant guerrilla movements using documents produced by state's repressive apparatuses. Such documents, I argue, collectively constitute a problematic archive of counter-insurgency tensely populated by state anxieties, the collection of knowledge for counter-insurgent efforts, and fragmented peasant memories and demands. I will focus on documents that erased and subsumed peasant political demands within a discourse of criminality and deviance.